The Holocaust
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~ Elie Wiesel
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Known to the Nazis as the Final Solution, it had been preceded by worsening conditions for Jews in Germany since the Nazis seized power in 1933 and events such as Kristallnacht, the Third Reich's multiple pogroms against Jews in November 1938. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; via the Einsatzgruppen death squads using gas vanss; by a policy of extermination through work in concentration camps; and in gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.
Quotes
[edit]- The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations. Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.
- Israeli Declaration of Independence (proclaimed 14 May 1948)
- Like it or not, the [Holocaust] must and will dominate future events. Its centrality in the creative endeavors of our contemporaries remains undisputed. Philosophers and social scientists, psychologists and moralists, theologians and artists: all have termed it a watershed in the annals of mankind. What was comprehensible before Treblinka is comprehensible no longer. After Treblinka, man's ability to cope with his condition was shattered; he was pushed to his limits and beyond. Whatever has happened since must therefore be judged in the light of Treblinka. Forgetfulness is no solution.
- U.S. President's Commission on the Holocaust, Report to the President (1979), pp. i-ii.
- Complain, complain, that's all you've done ever since we lost,
If it's not the crucifixion then it's the holocaust.- Leonard Cohen, "The Captain", Various Positions (1984 album)
- They will never forgive us for the evil they've done us.
- Welcome in Vienna (1986 film), written by Axel Corti and Georg Stefan Troller, as quoted in Marceline Loridan-Ivens, But You Did Not Come Back (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), p. 98 [1]
- The Nazi death machine worked economically, scientifically and euphemistically. In a word, it was very, very modern.
- Niall Ferguson, The War of the Worlds (Penguin, 2006), p. 510
- [I]n spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
- Anne Frank, diary entry (15 July 1944), published in Dutch (1947), translated by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (1952)
- As for the Jews, well, I can tell you quite frankly that one way or another we have to put an end to them... In January, there is going to be an important meeting in Berlin to discuss this question...Whatever its outcome, a great Jewish emigration will commence. But what is going to happen to these Jews? Do you imagine there will be settlement villages for them in the Ostland? In Berlin we were told: Why are you making all this trouble for us? There is nothing we can do with them here in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat. Liquidate them yourselves!
- Hans Frank, the Governor-General of the General Government of Nazi-occupied Poland (16 December 1941), as quoted in Christian Gerlach, "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews", The Journal of Modern History, vol. 70, no. 4 (December 1998), p. 790. Reprinted in Omer Bartov (ed.) The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 106–140
- If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.
- Mahatma Gandhi, Harijan, 26 November 1938. Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation
- Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question)
- Reinhard Heydrich, follow-up letter to the German diplomat Martin Luther asking for administrative assistance in the implementation of the "Final Solution", i.e. the Holocaust (26 February 1942); Heydrich had used similar language in a speech at the Wannsee Conference, Berlin (20 January 1942), as quoted in Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1990), p. 304
- The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.
- Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–45 (Oxford UP, 1983), p. 277
- Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people.
- Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
- What is abnormal is that I am normal. 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.
- Elie Wiesel, after being asked "What does it take to be normal again, after having your humanity stripped away by the Nazis?" in an interview in O: The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)
- The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened... You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.
- Elie Wiesel, as quoted in "Will Hatred Ever End?", The Watchtower (15 June 1995)
