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...

I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.

Sin embargo, conocí a muchos internados que supieron ser fieles a su dignidad humana hasta el mismo fin. Los nazis lograron degradarlos físicamente, pero no fueron capaces de rebajarlos moralmente.Gracias a estos pocos, no he...

Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That’s all we know for sure. We can’t create a new species or a new world. That’s been done. Now we have to...

After the prayer they executed an armed robbery. That sounds very strange this many years later: prayer and then armed robbery.

Our nation is owed an apology for our state’s role in starting the abortion holocaust.

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....

Work, love, courage and hope,Make me good and help me cope!

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

​”One could have mistakenly assumed that each train could choose its own destination. But there was no choice. The Nazi operator sat in the station booth, his hands on levers and switches, forcing each train...

…British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

Yo no soy entendida en política ni economista. Soy simplemente una mujer que padeció, que perdió a su marido, a sus padres, a sus hijos y a sus amigos. Yo sé que el mundo tendrá...

I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It’s a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of...

I have known many survivors for whom the holocaust is the central them of their lives. They have no other. I have tried to live with tolerance and forgiveness as the theme of my life....

By the end of the war, I could pick out Jewish people almost as if I had a sixth sense about it, even if they had blue eyes and blond hair. I would have been...

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”—Jules Finn