Holocaust Survivor Quotes

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

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.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

For me the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together - many of them only because they helped Jews.

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

I asked my grandmother how a Hungarian Jewish person can experience being Jewish. My grandmother answered was the only choice was to "keep quiet." I can understand her because she was a Holocaust survivor, and for her survival, she had to keep quiet. But I didn't obey my grandmother when I was a child, and in this case, I don't obey her either.

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.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and the author of Man's Search for Meaning, wrote that human beings create meaning in three ways: thought their work, though their relationships, and by how they choose to meet unavoidable suffering. Every life brings hardship and trial, and every life also offers deep possibilities for meaningful work and love... I've learned that courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin.

With the children of Holocaust survivors, there is always a very close relationship. You grow with the sense that you are parenting your parents and - with this kind of responsibility to protect them. That's what makes the children of Holocaust survivors strange.

Fox [News] is far and away the extreme example. They'll have a known holocaust denier debating a holocaust survivor.

If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?

My grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. Some heroes of mine have long been the Jewish Partisans, these young people who just went into the woods with whatever guns and bombs and what not they could get their hands on, and just would fight Nazis, and try to help people escape.

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

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

Miami Beach - that's where I grew up, in a middle-class Jewish family led by my maternal grandfather. Me, my great-grandmother - a Holocaust survivor, who was my roommate - my grandparents, my mom and her brother all shared a four-bedroom house.

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.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

I did a piece where I was talking about torture at Abu Ghraib, and I embroidered my hand with the image of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners who'd been tortured using a needle and thread. I know that meeting a Holocaust survivor when I was eight and seeing the tattoo on her arm from her time in the camps influenced my piece about Abu Ghraib.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.