Quotes & Sayings About Auschwitz

It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz. — Nell Zink

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

The question shouldn't be "Why are you, a Christian, here in a death camp, condemned for trying to save Jews?' The real question is "Why aren't all the Christians here? — Joel C. Rosenberg

Jealousy - the Auschwitz of emotions. — Christopher Titus

You'll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz. — Helen Fielding

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

Toward the evening the sky took on the same color as the fires. Everything took on that color, the sky, the buildings, even the ground. Just before the sunset the red in the sky would deepen to the color of blood. I imagined the sky bleeding. I imagined the heavens suffering with us. To this day a red sunset reminds me of the bleeding sky of Auschwitz. — Louis Brandsdorfer

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity. — Billy Graham

Workers of lungless labs- when dying
Will you be proud you were midwife
To implements exemplifying
Assaults against the heart of life?
You knew their purpose, yet you made them.
If you had scruples, you betrayed them.
What pastoral response acquits
Those who made ovens for Auschwitz?
Indeed it is said that the banality
Of evil is its greatest shock.
It jokes. It punches its time clock,
Plays with its kids. The triviality
Of slaughtering millions can't impinge
Upon its peace, or make it cringe. — Vikram Seth

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity. — Primo Levi

Ka-Be is the Lager without the physical discomforts. So that, whoever still has some seeds of conscience, feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long empty days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to consider what they have made us become, how much they have taken away from us, what this life is. In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace, we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us 'remember that you must die', would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here. — Primo Levi

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

And yet it may happen in these most desperate trials of our human existence that beyond any rational explanation, we may feel a nail-scarred Hand clutching ours. We are able, as Etty Hillesun, the Dutch Jewess who died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943, wrote, "to safeguard that little piece of God in ourselves" and not give way to despair. We make it through the night and darkness gives way to the light of morning. The tragedy radically alters the direction of our lives, but in our vulnerability and defenselessness we experience the power of Jesus in His present risenness. - Abba's Child — Brennan Manning

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

He had read von Lambert's book on terrorism, there were two pages devoted to the Arab resistance movement, von Lambert refused to call them terrorists, which didn't preclude, and he had emphasized this, that nonterrorists were also capable of atrocities, Auschwitz, for instance, was not the work of terrorists but of state employees ... — Friedrich Durrenmatt

Auschwitz exists because of politicized science. — Michael Crichton

If you are a denier, get on the right side of history and stop being so gullible. Remember, it has been historically and scientifically proven, in a court of law no less, that more than 1.2 million Jews, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were killed at Auschwitz alone. Beyond that, Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names has collected 4.5 million Jewish victims' names (and counting) from various archival sources. How much more evidence could you possibly want? — James Morcan

Why you choose happiness, so you think that the sad moments like somebody dieing - it's equal to happiness?
!?!?!?!??!
So you think that time crimes like this in auschwitz which don't have proof so far from what they say in the reports from Mr.Death (Documentary film!)... so this is equal to (How to say it???!?!) to happiness??
WTF, crime equal to happiness, sadness also so what's left?
Oh, oh I know the Joker (Note: He is a nice character isn't he?) — Deyth Banger

Genocide is like a dessert. It is made of the flesh and bones of woman and children, it is sweetened with the blood of the innocent, and it is baked in the ovens of Auschwitz. There were truths to be learnt and there was wisdom to be gained ... but there was a price to to be paid as well. You could not brush up against the future and escape unscathed. You could not see into the forbidden and avoid damage to your sight. — Terry Brooks

I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic. — Sacha Baron Cohen

The world must never know the things we do here,colonel. Never. Do i make myself clear? — Joel C. Rosenberg

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

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number. — Jean Amery

When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over. — Imre Kertesz

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. — Primo Levi

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

Lord Russell of Liverpool, for example, in his Scourge of the Swastika (London, 1954, p. 250) claimed "the murder by the Germans of over five million European Jews," having satisfied himself that he was somewhere between those who estimated six million and those who preferred four million. But, he wrote of Auschwitz, "were everything to be written it would not be read. If read, it would not be believed. — Richard E. Harwood

Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay. — Tom Lantos

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

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair. — Edward Bond

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"
And the answer: "Where was man? — William Styron

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

In 1982, Raphael Nachman, visiting lecturer in mathematics at the university in Cracow, declined the tour of Auschwitz, where his grandparents had died, and asked instead to visit the ghetto where they had lived. — Leonard Michaels

If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in places that the Soviet Union had just conquered. Everyone in the western Soviet Union knew about the mass murder of the Jews, for the same reason that the Germans did: In the East the method of mass murder required tens of thousands of participants and it was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people. The Germans left, but their death pits remained. If the Holocaust is identified only with Auschwitz, this experience, too, can be excluded from history and commemoration. — Timothy Snyder

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

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

My great lesson from Auschwitz is: whoever wants to dehumanize any other must first be dehumanized himself.
The oppressors are no longer really human, whatever uniform they wear. — Hajo Meyer

Halina tries to picture the American president seated triumphantly behind his desk some 6,000 kilometers west of them. V-E Day, Truman called it: Victory in Europe. But to Halina, the word victory feels hollow. False, even. here's hardly anything victorious about the ruined Warsaw they left, or about the fact that so much of the family is still missing, or about how all around them in what was once Lodz's massive ghetto, they can feel the ghosts of 200,000 Jews - most of whom, it's rumored, met their deaths in the gas vans and chambers of Chelmno and Auschwitz. — David Foenkinos

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany. — Gunter Grass

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

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

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz. — Art Spiegelman

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

If all men are good, there can be no Auschwitz. — Miklos Nyiszli

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

All the bargaining-transactions outlined above are based on the smuggling of materials belonging to the Lager. This is why the SS are so eager to suppress them: the very gold of our teeth is their property, as sooner or later, torn from the mouths of the living or the dead, it ends up in their hands. So it is natural that they should take care that the gold does not leave the camp. — Primo Levi

Those of us directed towards the right were lined up in threes with much shooting and beating. I was in the first row, at the platform's edge. Suddenly, we see a group of older women and women with children nearing the road, under the platform. In the first row I see my mother supported on both sides by two friends. She too becomes aware of me. And out of the throat of this reticent, soft-spoken woman who I don't remember ever raising her voice, breaks out a terrible, desperate, piercingly loud, howling shout: 'GYURIKA!!! — Azriel Feuerstein

He was a bricklayer; for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses. He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care, acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed the curse that would not come. — Primo Levi

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out her very fingertips onto the strings, playing her heart's cry for every single lost soul, for the loss of innocence every generation to come would possess as a result of what happened at the killing fields of Auschwitz. — Kristy Cambron

Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it. — Primo Levi

In the words of Pope John Paul II at the canonization of St. Edith Stein - a Catholic Carmelite nun who died in Auschwitz because of her Catholic faith and her Jewish descent - "Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie. — Chris Stefanick

These qualities are beautifully encapsulated in the famous statement of Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." MBSR, — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped. — Gunter Grass

My definition of a good book is one that you would read for pleasure despite having no prior interest in the subject. The ostensible subject may be whale hunting, or survival in Auschwitz, or waking up as a cockroach - but you don't read it because you're into fisheries or Nazis or entomology: you read it because your life was poorer before you started it, and because now you can't stop. — Philip Gourevitch

You don't seduce in the same way at my age. You seduce with brains, with talent. Yesterday for lunch I met the most incredible 90-year-old woman. She survived Auschwitz, she was beautiful, she didn't have white hair, she didn't wear glasses. She was totally seductive. I just thought, Oh, my God, I still have time ahead of me. — Diane Von Furstenberg

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

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

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

After Auschwitz"

Anger,
as black as a hook,
overtakes me.
Each day,
each Nazi
took, at 8: 00 A.M., a baby
and sauteed him for breakfast
in his frying pan.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and picks at the dirt under his fingernail.

Man is evil,
I say aloud.
Man is a flower
that should be burnt,
I say aloud.
Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.

Man with his small pink toes,
with his miraculous fingers
is not a temple
but an outhouse,
I say aloud.
Let man never again raise his teacup.
Let man never again write a book.
Let man never again put on his shoe.
Let man never again raise his eyes,
on a soft July night.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
I say those things aloud.

I beg the Lord not to hear. — Anne Sexton

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

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

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

Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is. — Alasdair MacIntyre

..Well, I did go. To Auschwitz. And the warning was correct. Not because I was not permitted to describe what I had seen, but because I could not describe what I had seen. The piles of glasses. The piles of shoes. The piles of bones. The piles of human hair. I thought that I had never seen the kind of thinking that did this, that I had never seen this kind of reality. Not in movies, not in theater. Yet it was real. — Allan Folsom

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

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

After Auschwitz, I no longer cry at funerals. — Charlotte Delbo

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. — Jacob Bronowski

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. — Dennis Prager

They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their
comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and
hated. When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post.
Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received from above. — Primo Levi

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

We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews. We know very well-known fixed places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, and Beltzec. Instead, war can live in a couple having a spat, when we say, "That was a real war." We very rarely have the Holocaust live in the terms of today. And I think that's a problem, because it becomes ancient history. — Yann Martel

Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples. — Pope Francis

...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

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

You will remember this number. you will memorize it. you will answer when it is called. you have no name any longer. just a number. any prisoner who forgets his number or doesn't respond when his number is called will be shot. do you understand? — Joel C. Rosenberg

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook. — William Styron

He follows a man with a rolled up mattress strapped to his back. When he stepped down from the train into the brutalising glare of the searchlights in the marshalling yard he noticed two SS soldiers pointing at this man and laughing. — Glenn Haybittle

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

Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men. — Thomas Merton

And there we recognize that our frailty is not meant to cause us anxiety and sorrow. Rather, God means it to be a source of confidence, and even, as it was for Etty [the Dutch Jew previously mentioned that died in Auschwitz], a source of joy. For it is exactly that frailty--the strict limits to our powers, their inevitable failure, the certainty of death--that creates the need and the desire to see God's power at work... (pg. 167) — Ellen F. Davis

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

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

Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward. — Michael Hoffman

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

One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante's Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi's despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines You were not made to live like animals But to pursue virtue and know the world which he recited and translated to the man walking with him. — Rebecca Solnit

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, 'of Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. — Viktor E. Frankl

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. — David Irving

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

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

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

The concept of emotional or spiritual survival has an honorable history, but it does invite self-indulgence. In my own case, the worst I ever survived was severe personal and political confusion, the temptation to various sorts of craziness and a couple of bad acid trips. It felt pretty horrendous at the time, and some of it was even dangerous, but Auschwitz it wasn't. — Ellen Willis

At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia ... — Elie Wiesel

At Auschwitz dying was so easy. Surviving was a full time job. — Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri

Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake. — Viktor E. Frankl

The whole thing was set up very cleverly. The people who were torn from their normal lives and put on the trains may have heard that terrible things were happening in Auschwitz, but even up to the end, they kept on thinking: Perhaps it isn't so bad after all. And then they arrived and the SS told them: "The old people and the sick can take the truck. Anyone who is still young can walk." It took us a while to realize that the ones who were being driven were really being taken to the gas chambers. — Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

I want to look darkness in the eye and not be afraid. I want to feel the resonance of history and all the bad things people have done and try to understand why. I want to stand inside the Colosseum, feel the vibrations of so much death and despair. I want to walk the corridors of Columbine High. I want to touch the walls of Auschwitz. — Kathy Charles

When I was a teenager I took freedom for granted until I got through the army and saw what the Nazis had done in Germany. Then I realized that freedom isn't automatic; it has a price.

World War II was a justified and necessary war. Last year I met five survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp. The things that happened to those people should never have happened to any human being.

- Ed Tipper — Marcus Brotherton