Quotes by Holocaust Survivors

The old idea, or rather the old prejudice, that women are protected by men was so deeply ingrained in that society that they overlooked what was the most obvious, that is, that the weakest and the disadvantaged are the most exposed.
Ruth Klüger
If there's fighting to be done, you just to have to stand and fight. That has always been true. It was that way throughout the war. You have to be true to yourself- you can never be something you are not, and you can't fool yourself.
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper
The past is gone. My life is a miracle! With gratitude to God, I am still here to remember and to tell what happened to me during the Holocaust of WWII.
Leah Cik Roth
Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.
Jack Werber
The West in general should stand up more for its own values. It is not always worthwhile to compromise.
Imre Kertész
All discrimination - whatever form it takes - is evil and that the world can go to pieces because of it.
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper
There are people who are simply gifts to everyone they meet.
Clara Kramer
How are we ever going to understand what happens when a civilization comes apart at the seams, as it did in Germany, if we fail to see the most glaring distinctions, such as the gender gap?
Ruth Klüger
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.
Ruth Klüger
In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it.
Ruth Klüger
Kurti had believed in politics, and politics had deceived him, the way politics deceives everyone.
Imre Kertész
Enemies are people who's story you haven't heard, or who's face you haven't seen.
Irene Butter
I fell on my feet and found my bearings because of these. I could talk to them. They listened and answered, for or against, but always weighing what they had heard, unlike my mother, who used language for manipulation, not to express an opinion or state a fact. What sounded like a fact might be a lie, and every opinion was tailored for the moment.
Ruth Klüger
You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.
Imre Kertész
Myslím, že na místa, kde se odvíjely rozhodující události našich životů, stojí za to občas zavítat, abychom zjistili: nemáme sami se sebou nic společného.
Imre Kertész