Victims The Holocaust Quotes & Sayings

In fact, this figure [five million "murdered" Gentiles] is too high if one is counting victims who were targeted exclusively for racial reasons, but too low if one counts the total number of victims the Nazi regime killed outside military operations.
(...)
Wiesenthal's aggrandizement of his role in the Eichmann capture is far less disturbing and historiographically significant than another of his inventions. In an attempt to elicit non-Jewish interest in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to broaden the population of victims - even though it meant falsifying history. He began to speak of eleven million victims: six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer immediately recognized that this number made no historical sense. Who, Bauer wondered, constituted Wiesenthal's five million.

--The Eichmann Trial, page 8 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

When I began writing, I did not realize that the Holocaust would become a critical part of the story. During and after WWII, neither the survivors of the Holocaust nor the combat solders were diagnosed or treated for what is now known as PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder). Many of the characters in this book were victims of this now well-known disorder. — Helene Uhlfelder

Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, you have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

Viewing Israelis and Palestinians from a psychological perspective, they would both be seen as victims of abuse; that is how they both understandably feel, and it's how they both understandably behave. The Jewish psyche is in victimized reaction to the Holocaust, and the Palestinian psyche is in victimized reaction to the Israelis. — Marianne Williamson

Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet. — Michael Crichton

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims. — Maureen Dowd

The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent. — Iris Chang

I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims. — Peter Singer

At the first Holocaust memorial commemoration in the Capitol Rotunda, both President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Mondale referred to the 'eleven million victims.' Carter also used Wiesenthal's figures of 'six million Jews and five million others' in his Executive Order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. I have attended Holocaust memorial commemorations in places as diverse as synagogues and army forts where eleven candles were lit. More significant is that strangers have repeatedly taken me and other colleagues to task for ignoring the five million non-Jews. When I explain that this is an invented concept, they become convinced of my ethnocentrism. — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind. — Douglas A. Blackmon

A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. — G.K. Chesterton

I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book. — Jeffery Deaver

There is a psychological dimension to the deniers' and minimizers' objectives: The general public tends to accord victims of genocide a certain moral authority. If you devictimize a people you strip them of their moral authority, and if you can in turn claim to be a victim, as the Poles and Austrians often try to do, that moral authority is conferred on or restored to you.

-- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, pages 7-8 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Past is Prologue
This book was written observing the premise that the seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims justice, or rob the living of a future. Generations of historians have enthusiastically gone about their craft knowing full well that 'he who owns the past, owns the future'. Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices. — A.E. Samaan

I remember a Buddhist teachers reflections on the Holocaust ... What terrible karma those Jews mustve had ... This kind of fundamentalism, which blames the victims and rationalizes their horrific fate, is something no longer to be tolerated quietly. It is time for ... modern Buddhism to outgrow it by accepting social responsibility and finding ways to address such injustices. — David Loy

Jewish people have been victims of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world, and in Europe they were the target of the Holocaust, the ultimate abomination. Yet, we cannot expect Palestinians to accept this as a reason why the wrongs done to them — Kofi Annan

Stalin's mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved toward reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a "counterfactual": if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust. — Martin Amis

There are now little brass plaques on the ground outside this address.
These are Stolpersteine.
Tributes to the victims of the Holocaust.
There are many of them in Berlin, especially in Charlottenburg.
They are not easy to spot.
You must walk with your head down, seeking memories between the cobblestones.
In front of 15 Wielandstrasse, three names can be read.
Paula, Albert, and Charlotte.
But on the wall, there is only one commemorative plaque.
The one for Charlotte Salomon. — David Foenkinos

It seemed as though Theodore's passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders. — Yehuda Bauer

I love when guys are funny. I love guys that are funny and goofy and over the top. And you know, I really like personality. I do. — Kaley Cuoco

It was only in Palo Alto that I searched "Rachav Binder" and "Rach Binder," got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church's databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions — Joshua Cohen

Night of the Broken Glass
dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust
Dark is the night
I hear your heartbeat
In the room there is no light
Fire in the night
I hear them marching
Your boots are brown
Glass in my thoughts
Hear the fear in this night
Shrill screams shattered
I do not hear your heartbeat
Why is the light so bright in the room — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

It is true that not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims — Elie Wiesel

Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for example, I was struck by its marginalization of any other victims apart from the Jews, to the extent that it presented photographs of dead bodies in camps such as Buchenwald or Dauchau as dead Jewish bodies, when in fact relatively few Jewish prisoners were held there. — Richard J. Evans

Pamela Anderson: 'He called and called, leaving about twenty messages, just drunk dialing. One of them was him singing his version of the Oscar Mayer theme song:
"My baloney has a first name, it's L-A-R-G-E. My baloney has a second name, it's P-E-N-I-S. I like to use it every day and if you ask me why, I'll saaay, 'Cuz my Large Penis has a way with P-U-S-S-Y today!"
Actually that was the message that got me interested. — Tommy Lee

What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes? — Douglas A. Blackmon

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever. — Mark Twain

One of these days when you are spreading your web of lies and deceit. Your tongue shall turn to ashes in your mouth and after the falling out of your teeth. — Crystal Evans

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation. — Lawrence N. Powell

There is a lot of interest among the descendants of Holocaust victims in getting back artworks that were looted by the Nazis, for getting at least some form of compensation and closure for the horrors visited upon their families. — Alex Shoumatoff

I appreciate all my fans. I appreciate anybody who has asked me for an autograph, or has complimented me as a fighter. When I go to the Hall of Fame events, I'm always well received and respected. — George Chuvalo

A jellyfish, if you watch it long enough, begins to look like a heart beating. It doesn't matter what kind: the blooded Atolla with its flashing siren lights, the frilly flower hat variety, or the near-transparent moon jelly, Aurelia aurita. It's their pulse, the way they contract swiftly, than release. Like a ghost heart-- a heart you can see right through, right into some other world where everything you ever lost as gone to hide.
Jellyfish don't even have hearts, of course-- no heart, no brain, no bone, no blood. But watch them for a while. You will see them beating. — Ali Benjamin