439 Quotes About Holocaust

The death camps seem easier to comprehend if we put them all into the basket of one vast generalization, which the term "death camps" implies, but in the process we mythologize or trivialize them.

Two hundred generations of European Jews. All gone, just as if they'd never been. It was the first time it was really real for me--just as if I were standing at the top of a ladder and somebody yanked the ladder away--and I was still standing there, only now it was *possible* to fall, because all my connections had been cut away, and there I was looking down into empty space, thinking about how I'd come this close to just not existing at all.

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

The the Shoah involved millions of people, it was a unique experience for each of them.

I could be proud to have survived what some have called the asshole of creation, proud that it held me and couldn't keep me. But it is dangerous nonsense to believe that anyone contributed much to her own survival.

In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered.

Урядові екскурсоводи слушно зауважують: їхати в Бабин Яр немає потреби, там нема на що дивитися. Али ви можете побачити його в центрі міста, на кожній площі і на кожній вулиці: одночасно все і нічого.

When trivial matters arising from the subconscious normality of life become matters to which we devote more time than not we must cherish the benefits and fortune of that normality and thank our gods we are not the helpless victims of a holocaust.

I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.