Top 100 Quotes About Auschwitz
#1. ...an when we got there, O my brothers and chiefs, we saw what it said: OSVETIM, Auschwitz, an it was too late for us to turn back, no matter how badly we wanted to...
Jachym Topol
#2. I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.
Art Spiegelman
#3. Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.
Marlon Brando
#4. There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.
Romain Gary
#5. I don't think I could ever go to Auschwitz, because when we took that tour of MGM, I nearly collapsed outside the Thalberg building.
Charles Busch
#6. Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.
Viktor E. Frankl
#7. I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.
Primo Levi
#8. Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
Edward Bond
#9. No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.
Art Spiegelman
#11. The word "Auschwitz" has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time that Auschwitz became a major killing facility. Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.
Timothy Snyder
#12. The dismembering of a human being routinely in 30 minutes on an outpatient bases - or any other way - is barbaric. Four blocks from our church all year long - like churches within smelling distance of Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald.
John Piper
#13. I know that elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz - not with gas, but with knives and hatchets.
Meir Kahane
#14. Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
Theodor Adorno
#15. Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.
Billy Graham
#16. There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
Primo Levi
#17. So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.
Frank Lowy
#18. Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.
Ken Livingstone
#19. I'm not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That's the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn't erase anything, doesn't undo it. I'm not a live. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.
Charlotte Delbo
#20. People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.
Newt Gingrich
#21. The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.
Ian Kershaw
#22. The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.
Elie Wiesel
#23. Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Viktor E. Frankl
#25. There is no answer to Auschwitz ... To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#26. I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.
Elie Wiesel
#27. Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#28. For me, one of the most interesting columns to write was about Dick Cheney when he represented the U.S. at a commemorative ceremony at Auschwitz.
Robin Givhan
#29. I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
David Irving
#30. Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being
whoever he or she may be
is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.
Karen Armstrong
#31. I prefer a powerful and proud Jewish State that is hated by the entire world than an Auschwitz that is loved by one and all
Meir Kahane
#32. Every nuclear bomb is an Auschwitz waiting to happen.
Patricia Marx
#33. The Holocaust may belong to history, but it was the price we paid to become a nation. Auschwitz was like a cradle of death that enabled future generations of Israelis to live.
Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof
#34. Auschwitz?! That is a name I had heard before. There is not much time for thinking. It had been raining here not so long ago. The asphalt of the wet, wide platform reflects the light of the high lighting-poles. The row of armed SS men competes in howling with their dogs they hold on leashes
Azriel Feuerstein
#35. Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.
Erwin Chargaff
#36. I've worked with five Presidents in America, all of them I ask the same question always: Why didn't the American allies bomb the railways going to Auschwitz?
Elie Wiesel
#37. We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'
Gunter Grass
#38. We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright.
Viktor E. Frankl
#39. There is no German identity without Auschwitz,
Joachim Gauck
#40. Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
W. H. Auden
#41. I work all the time; whatever I do, I do it, and I don't necessarily look at it as work. You could say the Auschwitz project was work, or the Lowy Institute is work, or Westfield is work, or the football is work. It is life.
Frank Lowy
#42. I remember those faces of people who were good I saw that. I saw a father who gave his bread to his son and his son gave back the bread to his father. That, to me, was such a defeat of the enemies, will of the enemies, theories of the enemies, aspirations, here [in Auschwitz].
Elie Wiesel
#43. Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.
Tom Lantos
#44. Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
Theodor W. Adorno
#45. Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.
Elie Wiesel
#46. It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz.
Nell Zink
#47. During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years - 3 million.
Witold Pilecki
#48. Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Gunter Grass
#49. I release Josef, who collapses to my feet, and confesses not just to all war crimes at Auschwitz but also for being responsible for the colossal mistakes New Coke and Sex and the City 2.
Jodi Picoult
#50. All women are strong. My mother survived Auschwitz, and fear wasn't an option when we were growing up. If we were afraid of the dark, we were put into the closet until we weren't.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#51. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.
Hannah Arendt
#52. We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
George Steiner
#53. I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.
Noam Chomsky
#54. Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.
Timothy Snyder
#55. The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.
Nick Cohen
#56. Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
Primo Levi
#57. Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete.
Richard J. Foster
#58. At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.
Elie Wiesel
#59. Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
Antonio Tabucchi
#60. Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward.
Michael Hoffman
#61. Satirists, be careful. In the 1931 film by Rene Clair "Vive la Liberte" a song says, "Work is freedom." In 1940 the sign on the gates to Auschwitz said: "Arbeit macht frei.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#62. The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.
Emil Fackenheim
#63. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.
Primo Levi
#64. The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They're normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz, he told his sister.
Isabel Allende
#65. Almost 20 percent of the people living in Germany today have a foreign background. The problem is that Germany can't really offer foreigners an identity because the Germans hardly have a national identity themselves. That is certainly a result of Auschwitz.
Bassam Tibi
#66. Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
Primo Levi
#67. What I've learned about comedy people is that they're defined by the harshest level they've been to, their personal Auschwitz.
Bob Saget
#68. Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
Edward Bond
#69. The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days - after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.
Viktor E. Frankl
#72. Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.
Pope Francis
#73. Some fifteen percent of the 6,500 staff members working at Auschwitz would eventually be convicted of war crimes, with the government of Poland being among the most active in investigating and prosecuting war criminals.
Larry Berg
#74. It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
Theodor W. Adorno
#75. I come from a very religious background.And actually I remained in it. All my anger I describe in my quarrels with God in Auschwitz, but you know I used to pray every day.
Elie Wiesel
#76. The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered ... This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us.
Ariel Sharon
#77. In the preceding pages, to paraphrase the words of Auschwitz survivor, writer, and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, we share Martin Small's personal journey not so that you will understand but so that you will know you can never understand.
Martin Small
#78. The dead of Auschwitz should have brought upon us a total transformation; nothing should have been allowed to remain as it was, neither among our people nor in our churches. Above all, not in the churches.
Johann Baptist Metz
#79. No" - I could never be another person's father, fate, god,
"No" - it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).
Imre Kertesz
#80. The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States.
Lea Salonga
#81. Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well mannered of people, and yet ... Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English,
Kate Atkinson
#82. I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.
R. J. Hollingdale
#83. Fascism is not [only] squads of the SA or the Blackshirts marching on the streets. Fascism is officials, in uniforms ordering what is capitalist supposed to do with "his" factory, and how he should father "his" children and occasionally - how many Jews (or anti-Semites) should be sent to Auschwitz.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
#85. You'll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz.
Helen Fielding
#86. There had been over four thousand Jewish children penned in the Vel' d'Hiv', aged between two and twelve. Most of the children were French, born in France. None of them came back from Auschwitz.
Tatiana De Rosnay
#87. Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl, stated, ... man is by no means merely a product of heredity and environment. There is a third element: decision. Man ultimately decides for himself!
Alice A. Kemp
#88. Auschwitz was attacked and recovered by the Russian forces on January 27th, 1945. A very short time before that date Buchenwald had been reconquered. Buchenwald was the first concentration camp to be opened and exposed to the public eye.
Javier Gomez Perez
#91. During the Nuremberg trials, Oswald Pohl, an SS Lieutenant General, ... is shown here explaining how Farben operated such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
G. Edward Griffin
#92. So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy.
Witold Pilecki
#93. When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.
Viktor E. Frankl
#94. Michel and Annette Muller's mother, snatched from her children at Beaune-la-Rolande, died at Auschwitz. And while it was the Nazis who wished her dead, it was the French who put her in harm's way.
Laurence Rees
#95. This was brought home to me on my transfer from Auschwitz to a camp affliated with Dachau.
Anonymous
#96. What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.
Imre Kertesz
#97. I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
David Sedaris
#98. When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the middle of hell from Auschwitz, to let the world know what happened. The texts were buried beneath the ground and found after the liberation of the concentration camps.
Laszlo Nemes
#99. I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
Imre Kertesz
#100. Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.
Elie Wiesel
