Quotes About The Holocaust Survivors

“Survival requires a dose of madness-what cynics call "hoping against hope"-just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. "Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us," observed one Holocaust expert. "Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst.”

— Mark Matousek

“Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough.
*Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust”

— Elie Wiesel

“Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.”

— Sam Harris

“My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.”

— Jenna Blum

“I do a lot of research. For 'I Am Legend', I did a lot of research about survivors. If everybody is dead around you, how you can keep surviving. I went to the bookstore and found psychiatry books about survivors from the Holocaust.”

— Alice Braga

“I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.”

— Kai Bird

“One can't live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors.”

— Kai Bird

“I grew up in Brooklyn, and my parents were Holocaust survivors, so they never taught me anything about nature, but they taught me a lot about gratitude.”

— Louie Schwartzberg

“The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.”

— Jonathan Sacks

“From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.”

— Alex Berenson

“The building in the Bronx where I grew up was filled with mostly Holocaust survivors. My two best friends' parents both survived the camps. Everyone in my grandparents' building had tattoos. I'd go shopping with my grandparents, and the butcher, the baker, everybody in the whole neighborhood had tattoos.”

— Amy Heckerling

“Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.”

— Francesca Lia Block

“Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer.”

— Abraham Foxman

“Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget.”

— Steven Pinker

“So many times after a catastrophe like 9/11, Estonia in Sweden, the Holocaust or whatever, we are so fond of lifting up the hero examples, but actually 99 percent of survivors have done something that they feel very guilty about.”

— Ruben Ostlund

“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

“My grandparents are holocaust survivors so I was really aware at a young age how horrible human beings can be to one another.”

— Max Bemis

“Jews, Germans, and Allies is an important historical document, especially in light of those revisionists who would impose a universal amnesia about the suffering and losses incurred during the Holocaust. The grim statistics that Ms. Grossmann presents in her carefully researched and well-organized book carry evidence of the terrible truth. But the testimony of the survivors she quotes contains the final, ineradicable facts of history.”

— Hilma Wolitzer

“I believe that at the beginning of the life of every artist there is some kind of trauma. We have a problem and all of our life we try to speak about this problem. My trauma was historical. When I was three or four, all the friends of my parents were survivors of the Holocaust; they spoke a lot about that. My father was hiding during the war, it was something totally present when I was a boy. It is sure that it has made me.”

— Christian Boltanski

“When I was four or five years old, I heard a lot of stories about the Holocaust because both my parents were survivors. I'm sure that was very important in my life. My father snuck out from under the floorboards to make love to my mother. I can't imagine why they kept me.”

— Christian Boltanski

“As the generation of Holocaust survivors and liberators dwindles, the torch of remembrance, of bearing witness, and of education must continue forward.”

— Dan Gillerman

“I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don't like life, don't trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.”

— Etgar Keret

“As the son of Holocaust survivors, this is life - you're put in a corner, and you have to get out. I believe that you can always get out.”

— Etgar Keret

“I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.”

— Daniel Barenboim