Quotes & Sayings About Silence In The Holocaust

When I have suggested to my colleagues that we must take seriously Eichmann's repeated testimony to the effect that he learned from Heydrich in the fall of 1941 of Hitler's order for the physical destruction of the Jews, I have met with either embarrassed silence or open skepticism. How can I be so gullible? Don't I know that Eichmann's testimony is a useless conglomeration of faulty memories on the one hand and calculated lies for legal defense and self-justification on the other? From it we can learn nothing of value about what actually happened during the war, only about Eichmann's state of mind after the war. These are documents that reveal how Eichmann wished to be remembered, not what he did.

-- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 4-5 — Christopher R. Browning

The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed. — Judith Spencer

Luz Castro "And then i explain that the world did know and remained silent. and that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. NEUTRALITY HELPS THE OPPRESSOR, NEVER THE VICTIM. SILENCE ENCOURAGES THE TORMENTOR, NEVER THE TORMENTED. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must- at that moment- become the center of the universe." Elie Wiesel (from his speech when given the Nobel Peace Prize.) — Elie Wiesel

The official keepers of the Holocaust wage an international campaign to silence the disturbing questions. Most people never even hear the revisionist position because Jewish forces dominate the media and block mainstream access to material that questions Holocaust orthodoxy. — David Duke

WITH THE EMBERS STILL BURNING:
The scientific community has done a pronounced amount of hand-wringing about its involvement in the atomic bomb's creation, and a disproportionately absent amount of the soul-searching with respects to its creation of the science of eugenics. The 450,000 deaths due to the bomb are relatively small in the shadow of the many millions dead as a result of National Socialism's eugenic campaign. The casualties of The Holocaust are the casualties of the science of eugenics, which so many scientists had actively campaigned for leading up to World War II. Yet, the scientific community has confronted its complicity with collective silence and sometimes outright censorship. — A.E. Samaan

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn't do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. — Thomas Keneally

Silence is the fence around wisdom — Rabbi Akiva