And you wanted to escape,’ a man near me whispered to another man. ‘You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them...

Trivializing the Holocaust is the last thing I want to do.

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest...

The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a...

I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.

In the mid-1980s, world Jewry still has the need to recall its “holocaust” even by trying to prevent the election of the former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORAJosef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not...

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...

I made a painting that has holes in it. Why is there holes? Because God says to us, I cannot do all. I can create you, but I cannot do it all. You have to...

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God’s victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God’s...

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn’t do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives....

And with every cry that escapes a childs lips.. With every piercing scream that leaves a womans mouth, and with every tear that stains a mans face, a small part of me dies each time.....

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched...

He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within.

Children are being killed, because some “adults” think life is a game.Something is amiss.When children shoot up other children in school, it’s a national tragedy, and a week of mourning.When grown men are killing unarmed...

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: “The church may not mix in politics.” he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess...

Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.

Summer came.For the book thief, everything was going nicely.For me, the sky was the color of Jews.When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had...

The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers...

That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That there was not the slightest hope not even a glimmer of hope, of justice...

Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don’t want to part from it. He had given me a pill of...

…Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel’s hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.

My DNA is not negotiable.. I will not sacrifice my dignity nor the dignity of my nation and succumb to such psychopathic dictatorship!!.. The blood in my veins spans back 7000 years.. You cannot alter...

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men...

It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he’d made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise...

It’s true that the hatred is still there. But it doesn’t change anything. Our obligations are the same—to live and sanctify all life with our own. To participate in the world the best we know...

I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust...

(Thinking while being interrogated by the Germans) You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can’t touch a hair on my head without the will of...

My little hobby. Book Collecting. And yet, old friends, books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books...

DÖDENS DAGBOK: PARISARNA Sommaren kom.För boktjuven var allt frid och fröjd. Dör mig – var himlen judefärgad. När deras kroppar hade slutat söka efter springor i dörren steg deras själar upp. När deras naglar hade...

…But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic...

If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.

Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest...

Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the ‘last days’ before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they...

The fatigue I’ve gathered year after year and stored inside now heaves a muted cry of helplessness. Nothing but fatigue, rounding my shoulders, heavier than ever on this late autumn day with a useless sun,...

We fought back with our music; it was the only weapon we had.

I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five....

I am sitting here at thirty-six feeling like I am responsible for the holocaust for all that is toxic and wrong. Maybe it’s because I eat meat, and I stepped on three ants last Tuesday.

Yesterday the paper had a “short” summary of the places where Jews are not allowed! I can better mention where they are still aloud: “in their houses and in the streets!” God, punish those who...

Here again, it occurred to me, was the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren...

They departed in the form of white smoke, rose easily upward, waved their hands in parting, and viewed with pity all those who remained behind. Then they danced gaily in celebration of their new freedom,...

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning.

Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as...

Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the...

In wartime, everyone’s birthday turns into a commemoration of something so sad.

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to...

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the...