Holocaust Concentration Camps Quotes

War was funny like that: one minute you could try and block it and have the most wonderful thoughts, the next you were back in the nightmare.

I'm not talking about YOUR book now, but look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed... Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.

I shook with helplessness and rage, but also with fear. This was what fighting back earned you. More abuse. More death. Half a dozen Jews would be murdered today because one man refused to die without a fight. To fight back was to die quickly and to take others with you. This was why prisoners went meekly to their deaths. I had been so resolved to fight back, but I knew then that I wouldn't. To suffer quietly hurt only you. To suffer loudly, violently, angrily--to fight back--was to bring hurt and pain and death to others.

Brave people are not the ones who aren't afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That's not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk-- whose legs shake, but carry on.

Here. Here I am. You've taken everything from us, but not who we are! We still exist! One day grass will grow here and overgrow the ruins. Or day this will be forgotten. But you... No one will ever forget you! The shame of humanity.

I look around and think: Good God, what kind of hell is this?

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be taken away to their deaths, had avoided Amon Goeth and his dogs, had survived the salt mines of Wieliczka and the sick games of Trzebinia. I had done so much to live, and now, here, the Nazis were going to take all that away with their furnace! I started to cry, the first tears I had shed since Moshe died. Why had I worked so hard to survive if it was always going to end like this? If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have let them kill me back in the ghetto. It would have been easier that way. All that I had done was for nothing.

I wish I could be built so that stupidity and dullness wouldn't bother me as much, but I just can't help it. It may sound paradoxical, but with time one wishes to be a hermit instead of always being around people. - Doctor Doris Maza

While it may have been the exception rather than the rule, the Jewish community did what it could, when it could, to defy Nazi tyranny . . . Contrary to the myth of little or no resistance, there was, indeed, verified, armed resistance to the Holocaust in ghettos and concentration camps.

We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves! .... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children. And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.

All suffering is relative to experience, and life while it is everything is also not much at all.

I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.

People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren’t therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn’t go there to learn. One becomes very clear about these things. What are you asking for? Forgiveness for her? Or do you just want to feel better yourself? My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis, please. Go to literature. Don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.

Auschwitz?! That is a name I had heard before. There is not much time for thinking. It had been raining here not so long ago. The asphalt of the wet, wide platform reflects the light of the high lighting-poles. The row of armed SS men competes in howling with their dogs they hold on leashes

All were expecting to die, and every day of their life was a day of suffering and torment. All had witnessed terrible crimes, and the Germans would have spared none of them; the gas chambers awaited them. Most, in fact, were sent to the gas chambers after only a few days of work, and were replaced by people from new contingents. Only a few dozen people lived for weeks and months, rather than for days and hours; these were skilled workers, carpenters and stonemasons, and the bakers, tailors and barbers who ministered to the Germans' everyday needs. These people created an Organizing Committee for an uprising. It was of course, only the already-condemned, only people possessed by an all-consuming hatred and a fierce thirst for revenge, who could have conceived such an insane plan. They did not want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka. And they destroyed it.

Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the East.

Berta, whose boyfriend had walked so far to see her, went out without her star and was immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

I am as if paralysed: over there in the chamber the gas people and we are supposed to sing!

I have no notion of barbering and no idea what will happen if I cannot do the work. But I tell myself that after all it cannot be worse than dying…

First night in the barracks. Moyshe Ettinger tells us how he saved himself and cannot forgive himself. The evening prayer is recited and Kaddish is set for the dead.

Stories from concentration camps bring nightmares to adults as if they were helpless little children.

Had Beta been French, perhaps he would've been an existentialist, probably though that would not have satisfied him. He smiled contemptuously at mental speculations, for he remembered seeing philosophers fighting over garbage in the concentration camps. Human thought had no significance; subterfuge and self-deception were easy to decipher: all that really counted was the movement of matter.

You are in a concentration camp. In Auschwitz..." A pause. He was observing the effect his words had produced. His face remains in my memory to this day. A tall man, in his thirties, crime written all over his forehead and his gaze. He looked at us as one would a pack of leprous dogs clinging to life. "Remember," he went on. "Remember it always, let it be graven in your memories. You are in Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It is a concentration camp. Here, you must work. If you don't you will go straight to the chimney. Work or crematorium--the choice is yours.

Within a decade or two, all Holocaust survivors will likely have passed away so a ticking clock is in effect in this battle between the truth and lies. Keep in mind even those survivors born in a concentration camp during WW2 would be at least 71 years-of-age when this book (the one you are reading now) was released. Those survivors old enough to clearly recall the events of that nightmare will, of course, be older and have much less time left. As the memory of the Holocaust begins to fade away, it will become easier to deny the genocide even occurred unless those of us who are truthseekers are able to embrace the memory of the genocide and educate others do the same. What’s needed in this propaganda war is for the true stories of Holocaust survivors – as well as those of the Nazi perpetrators, their associates and others who witnessed the genocide – to be told loudly and clearly so that there will never, ever be room for doubt in generations to come. After all, nothing is more powerful, credible or damning than eyewitness accounts.

An older woman begs me to tell her if all the men are kept alive as labourers. She knows that she is going to her death. Still, she will be happy if her son, who came with her, remains alive. I calm her with my answer and she thanks me.

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. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.

All of them, before their imprisonment in concentration camps, had been decent people in private life, many indeed highly respected citizens, who had never come up against the law, but were set apart only by their homosexual feelings. Al of these otherwise decent people had been assembled here, in this melting pot of disgrace and torment, for extermination through back-breaking labor, hunger, and torture. None of them were child molesters or had had sex with children or adolescents, as all of these had a green triangle. Were we with our pink triangle really outrageous criminals and "degenerates", a menace to society?

But what constitutes humiliation? This is a slippery question. During World War II, guards in concentration camps would order prisoners to make and remake their beds until they were perfect, Holocaust survivors told psychologist Nico Frijda. Male Holocaust survivors said they felt humiliated by this experience. But the female survivors did not feel humiliated.

No matter how much we longed for the destruction of the Nazi regime, we could not remain undisturbed by the bombing raids, and none of us enjoyed them, out of fear for our nearest and dearest. The attacks would fall on towns where thousands of innocent people would lose their lives, people who had as much repulsion for the war as us concentration-camp victims.

We are at once put to work sorting. My friend Leybl stands next to me. We inspect every garment as carefully as possible. On the other side of me stands a worker who has already been here for several days. I want to find out from him what happened here, since, despite the fact that I can see the clothes left behind by the victims, I still cannot grasp what is going on.

To deny the reported six million (approximately) Jews who died, or the 11 million people in total, is to ignore all the eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, the non-Jewish witnesses of the millions who died the open-air massacres around Europe, the concentration camp guards, Nazi officers who admitted to gassings and other related crimes immediately after WW2, and the universal agreement of all mainstream historians who have studied this historical event inside out – not to mention every single scientist who has ever analyzed forensic evidence retrieved from the Nazi genocide. Not even the most corrupt courtroom on Earth could ignore this much evidence – for collectively these confirmations of the Holocaust equate to irrefutable proof that the reported death toll is indeed correct. It is possibly the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century, but remember for religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them. They would always deny the Holocaust because to admit the event occurred would be to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them. It would also require such bigots to admit the very uncomfortable truth to themselves: that their ‘own kind’ did these despicable things to the Jewish people.

The East is also where the Nazis had most vigorously pursued the Holocaust, where they set up the vast majority of ghettoes, concentration camps, and killing fields. Snyder notes that Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many of those managed to flee. Hitler’s vision of a “Jew-free” Europe could only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic States, and eventually Hungary and the Balkans, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe. Most of the rest were taken to the region to be murdered. The scorn the Nazis held for all Eastern Europeans was closely related to their decision to take the Jews from all over Europe to the East for execution. There, in a land of subhumans, it was possible to do inhuman things.16

I’d been liberated from the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Today, more than seventy years have passed. What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed. But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful—I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.

The web of secrecy that made the Holocaust possible is the same web of secrecy that allowed innocent children in the United States to become victims of their government’s fear of Communism. If we allow that web of secrecy to continue because it is too painful and horrifying to read about and believe, nothing will prevent it from happening again. Too many children, including myself were systematically brainwashed. Our minds became our concentration camp. Only now by healing and speaking out, have we become liberated.

Those of us directed towards the right were lined up in threes with much shooting and beating. I was in the first row, at the platform’s edge. Suddenly, we see a group of older women and women with children nearing the road, under the platform. In the first row I see my mother supported on both sides by two friends. She too becomes aware of me. And out of the throat of this reticent, soft-spoken woman who I don’t remember ever raising her voice, breaks out a terrible, desperate, piercingly loud, howling shout: ‘GYURIKA!!!

[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!

Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg was the second foreigner to be given honorary American citizenship. The first was Winston Churchill. The reason for this honor? Wallenberg helped to rescue many Jews from the horrors of concentration camps. The exact number of Hungarian Jews rescued directly by Wallenberg or as a result of his efforts is unknown. Low estimates are in the few thousands, but they go as high as 100,000. Either way, Wallenberg was responsible for the rescue of thousands of people when the Holocaust began in full in Hungary in 1944. Wallenberg was born into a life of privilege. His family had been at or near the center of Swedish politics and business since the mid-1800s. Today, the Wallenberg family owns significant parts of or controls many famous Swedish companies, including telecommunications

From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease.  Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered.  The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials.  As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch'.

Without in any way diminishing the horror on the Holocaust, to a certain extent we can understand Nazism as European colonialism and imperialism brought home. The decimation of the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia, the tens of millions who died of famine in India under British rule, the ten million killed by Belgian king Leopold's Congo Free State, and the horrors of transatlantic slavery are but a sliver of the mass death and societal decimation wrought by European powers prior to the rise of Hitler. Early concentration camps (known as "reservations") were set up by the American government to imprison indigenous populations, by the Spanish monarchy to contain Cuban revolutionaries in the 1890s, and by the British during the Boer War at the turn of the century. Well before the Holocaust, the German government had committed genocide against Herero and Nama people of southwest Africa through the use of concentration camps and other methods between 1904 and 1907.

On May 21, 1941, Camp de Schirmeck, Natzweiler-Struthof, located 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg in the Vosges Mountains, was opened as the only Nazi Concentration Camp established on present day French territory. Intended to be a transit labor camp it held about 52,000 detainees during the three and a half years of its existence. It is estimated that about 22,000 people died of malnutrition and exertion while at the concentration camp during those years. Natzweiler-Struthof was the location of the infamous Jewish skeleton collection used in the documentary movie “Le nom des 86” made from data provided by the notorious Hauptsturmführer August Hirt. On November 23, 1944, the camp was liberated by the French First Army under the command of the U.S. Sixth Army Group. It is presently preserved as a museum. Boris Pahor, the noted author was interned in Natzweiler-Struthof for having been a Slovene Partisan, and wrote his novel “Necropolis,” named for a large, ancient Greek cemetery. His story is based on his Holocaust experiences while incarcerated at Camp de Schirmeck.

It is of more than historical interest to reflect that Henry Ford modeled his assembly line car production after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse in the early 1900s. He watched the suspended animals, legs shackled and heads downward, on a moving conveyor as they traveled from worker to worker, each of whom performed a step in the slaughtering process. Ford immediately saw that it was a perfect model for the automobile industry, creating an assembly method of building cars. More than efficient, the slaughtering assembly line offered workers a newly found detachment in the whole messy business of killing animals. Animals were reduced to factory products and the emotionally deadened workers could see themselves as line workers rather than animal killers. Later, the Nazis used the same slaughterhouse model for their mass murders in the concentration camps. The factory-style assembly line became a way for Nazi soldiers to detach from the killing--seeing the victims as "animals," and themselves as workers. Henry Ford, a rampant anti-Semite, not only developed the assembly line method later used in the Holocaust, he openly admired the Nazis' efficiency. Hitler returned the admiration. The German leader considered "Heinrich Ford" a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of the automobile mogul in his office at the Nazi Party headquarters.

National Socialism nurtured racism. In reality there are only two races, namely the "race" of decent people and the "race" of people who are not decent. And "segregation" runs straight through all nations and within every single nation straight through all parties. Even in the concentration camps one came across halfway decent fellows here and there among the SS men-just as one came across the odd scoundrel or two among the prisoners. not to mention the Capos. That decent people are in the minority, that they have always been a minority and are likely to remain so is something we must come to terms with. Danger only threatens when a political system sends those not-decent people, i.e., the negative element of a nation, to the top. And no nation is immune from doing this, and in this respect every nation is in principle capable of a Holocaust! In support of this we have the sensational results of scientific experiments in the field of social psychology, for which we owe thanks to an American; they are known as the Milgram Experiment. If we want to extract the political consequences from all this, we should assume that there are basically only two styles of politics, or perhaps better said, only two types of politicians: the first are those believe that the end justifies the means, and that could be any means...While the other type of politician knows very well that there are mans that could desecrate the holiest end. And it is this type of politician whom I trust, despite the clamor around the year 1988, and the demands of the day, not to mention of the anniversary, trust to hear the voice of reason and to ensure that all who are of goodwill, stretch out their hands to each other, across all the graves and across all divisions.

As soon as the Rabbi of Bluzhov had finished the ceremony of kindling the lights, Zamietchkowski elbowed his way to the rabbi and said, “Spira, you are a clever and honest person. I can understand your need to light Hanukkah candles in these wretched times. I can even understand the historical note of the second blessing, ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season.’ But the fact that you recited the third blessing is beyond me. How could you thank God and say ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive, and hast preserved us, and enabled us to reach this season’? How could you say it when hundreds of dead Jewish bodies are literally lying within the shadows of the Hanukkah lights, when thousands of living Jewish skeletons are walking around in camp, and millions more are being massacred? For this you are thankful to God? For this you praise the Lord? This you call ‘keeping us alive’?” “Zamietchkowski, you are a hundred percent right,” answered the rabbi. “When I reached the third blessing, I also hesitated and asked myself, what should I do with this blessing? I turned my head in order to ask the Rabbi of Zaner and other distinguished rabbis who were standing near me, if indeed I might recite the blessing. But just as I was turning my head, I noticed that behind me a throng was standing, a large crowd of living Jews, their faces expressing faith, devotion, and concentration as they were listening to the rite of the kindling of the Hanukkah lights. I said to myself, if God, blessed be He, has such a nation that at times like these, when during the lighting of the Hanukkah lights they see in front of them the heaps of bodies of their beloved fathers, brothers, and sons, and death is looking from every corner, if despite all that, they stand in throngs and with devotion listening to the Hanukkah blessing ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season’; if, indeed, I was blessed to see such a people with so much faith and fervor, then I am under a special obligation to recite the third blessing.”2 Some years after liberation, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, now residing in Brooklyn, New York, received regards from Mr. Zamietchkowski. Zamietchkowski asked the son of the Skabiner Rabbi to tell Israel Spira, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, that the answer he gave him that dark Hanukkah night in Bergen Belsen had stayed with him ever since, and was a constant source of inspiration during hard and troubled times. Based

With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.

I don't remember when I first heard the word Konzentrationslager, but I became aware of it long before I learned about the Holocaust. I sensed that concentration camps were sinister places, and I imagined that the people who lived there were forced to concentrate to the point of physical anguish. But I was too afraid to ask, feeling that this was something embarrassing to talk about, something that grown-ups discussed in whispers, something evoking the same unsettling feeling as the man who sometimes gave candy and balloons to my brother and me when we were playing alone in the front yard.

Many people have heard about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but a less well-known phenomenon is post-traumatic growth. This refers to the positive changes that may occur, or that people may choose, after experiencing a crisis or trauma. Although these people have certainly suffered, they are able to grow from crisis rather than get crushed by it.5 Viktor Frankl, a psychologist who survived the holocaust and the loss of his family, wrote many books, including Man’s Search for Meaning. In this seminal reflection on spiritual survival, Frankl described his experiences in concentration camps and how they ultimately led him to develop further meaning in his life. “What is to give light, must also endure burning,” he wrote.

Periodically the International Red Cross, or some neutral—the Swedes, for example—will demand an inspection of a concentration camp. They are brought here. And so they are shown the bank, the cinema, the bakery, the shops—and they are asked for their approval. What are those Jews complaining about? The Führer has given them this beautiful city." "And they get away with it? The inspectors believe them?" Karl felt he was losing his mind. "Maybe they want to believe," Felsher said.

Jewish efforts to extract even modest restitution payments for work performed by concentration camp inmates for prominent companies such as Messerschmitt, Ernst Heinkel, and others continue to be rejected by those corporations. The same is true of German construction companies such as Philipp Holzmann, which has repeatedly been identified by survivors as a major beneficiary of forced labor. Holzmann refuses to pay restitution and continues to enjoy contracts all over the world.15 Even those companies that have made some form of welcome restitution—Daimler Benz being the most recent case—go to considerable lengths to deny any culpability whatsoever for the Holocaust, portraying their payments to their former slaves as a form of charity.16

Mourners leave notes here. In this small room of reflection and remembrance, the Queen of England herself paid her first and only visit to a concentration camp, seventy years after the liberation. Here she found a handwritten lament: If I could live my life again, I would find you sooner.  

While this has never been the mainstream view in Germany, there are still political groups there today who refuse to acknowledge the Holocaust on the grounds that what Germans in eastern Europe suffered was 'exactly the same'. This is an extremely dangerous point of view. While it is true that the Polish labour camps contained some repugnant examples of extreme sadism towards Germans, there is absolutely no evidence to show that this was part of an official policy of extermination.

Operation Reinhard's objective was the total annihilation of the three million Jews inhabiting the Generalgouvernement - the part of Poland under Nazi control. How to describe such an undertaking? Any generation that did not experience the Holocaust can learn about it only from words, and the knowledge thus gained is never complete. The right words, however, are difficult to find. People who perished had no voice, and those who survived were pushed into a realm of silence by the singular character of their experiences. The violence they had endured - in concentration camps, in hiding, or in prisons - destroyed for their capacity for making contact with the world. Their experience was and remains in great measure inexpressible, because pain and physical violence destroy language and cause a reversion to a state anterior to language. Still, trauma demands to be expressed. What is horrific remains horrific so long as it is not named. Once a name is attached to it, the horror retreats; it diminishes, since the very act of naming reconnects the victim to the world. Theodor Adorno wrote that what the Nazis did to the Jews was inexpressible. Yet a way of expressing it must be found if we do not want to doom the victims to oblivion. Their number was too great to name them one by one. This is why, Adorno believed, the concept of 'genocide' was invented. That term acknowledges the facts, codified and inscribed what was inexpressible into the international declaration of human rights, normalizing it and rendering it measurable But the codification did not render 'what the Nazis did to the Jews' easier to express.

My whole life has been one big concentration camp.

Isser formed the operational team. All of its twelve members were volunteers. Some were Holocaust survivors, with concentration camp numbers tattooed on their forearms. The core of the team was the operational unit of the security services. At its head were the two top agents of the Shabak. Rafi Eitan was appointed commander. At his side was Zvi Malkin,

Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp but its conditions did not allow for survival either. What do we need to survive? Proper food and good hygiene. Neither was available in Bergen-Belsen or any other concentration camp. Their intention was to wear out people little by little, so they would not have any strength left to live.

IG Farben deserves a special place in hell, a space next to Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. Not only did IG Farben operate a factory with prisoners of a concentration camp, this international chemical company manufactured Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, the poison that killed over a million people in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This nightmare was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a special Hell on Earth created by Nazi Germany.

Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp.

Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.

It is estimated that the Jewish population in the country was about 210,000 immediately before the German occupation, though this figure may be a significant underestimate, not taking into account many unregistered Jewish refugees from Poland and elsewhere. About 8,500 Jews were able to flee east into Soviet Russia before the arrival of the Germans, and between 3,500 and 5,000 either escaped from the ghettos and concentration camps or survived to the end of the war. The rest – at least 196,500, and according to some estimates as many as 254,000 – were killed. The great majority were slaughtered by the Einsatzgruppen and their local paramilitary helpers in the first months that followed the German invasion.

We heard that girls who had left to get married were being deported with their husbands. A girl who had a love affair with a French prisoner was sent to a concentration camp, and the Frenchman was executed.

Eugenics is not just a tool of totalitarianism. Eugenics, as it was conceived, could not be anything but totalitarian as it desired to control all aspects of society. Hitler’s “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialist) form of government was amongst the first to put the full force of its government to conduct compulsory health initiatives. It is by no coincidence that the Dachau concentration camp used its slave-labor to run the largest organic produce farm of the era.

You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained. Von Schuschnigg was in a concentration camp; so was Bruno Bettelheim for a time. The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but they often came back from these places. Not until the 1940s did the words "concentration camp" come to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.

February 19—President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, incarcerating Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent. In all, some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced into squalid concentration camps.

April 19 to May 16—The Germans chose the Jewish holiday of Passover for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The demolition was met by the members of the Jewish resistance, about one thousand in number. Although the fighters held out for almost a month, the heavily armed and well-trained Germans crushed the revolt, capturing 56,000 Jews still in the ghetto, shooting 7,000, and deporting the rest to concentration camps.

So yesterday the high-ranking visitors came after all. . . H[immler} at their head. A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don't stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. (January 30, 1944)

the New England Holocaust Memorial just across from the restaurant. Olivia stood in awe looking up at the six glass towers which Trevor told her represented the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust and the six major death camps. “Each tower is etched with seven-digit numbers in remembrance of the numbers tattooed on the arms of the concentration camp prisoners.” On such a bright day, the shadows of those etched numbers covered both of them. “It’s absolutely breathtaking,” Olivia murmured. He tucked her hand under his elbow as they finished walking along the path. “It’s a sobering memorial but yes, quite a beautiful tribute.

In 1945 Himmler ordered the camps to be evacuated and charged the commanders with ensuring that not one of the prisoners would fall into Allied hands. On January 17, some 60,000 detainees from Auschwitz were evacuated on foot and sent on a death march to the city of Wodzislaw. Those who could not continue or who fell behind were shot by the SS guards. Some 15,000 died during the march and the survivors were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany where they were liberated by British forces in April 1945.

In order to implement the “Final Solution”, the Nazis established ‘killing centers’, which were distinct from ‘concentration camps.’ The camps were essentially detention and forced labor centers where small groups were targeted for elimination. Killing centers, which were also known as ‘death camps’ or ‘extermination camps’ were essentially factories for slaughtering people.

Zulmün zulüm olarak nesnel bir özelliği yoktur. Kitle katliamı, işkence, her türlü sakatlama, nesnel açıdan doğa bilimlerinin biçimsel dili içinde betimlenebilecek fiziksel olaylardan başka bir şey değildir: Bunlar fiziksel bir sistem içinde yer alan olgulardır, ahlaki bir sistem içinde değerlendirilebilecek edimler değil.

Stories from concentration camps bring nightmares to adults as if they were helpless little children. And if adults have trouble processing it all, imagine what it is like for little kids.

Viktor Frankl’s holocaust memoire, Man’s Search For Meaning: We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

In racism, like other human rights, love is an exclusive right of the superior race too. Those imprisoned in concentration camps have no such right: they shall be exterminated along with all of their family members! However, racists cannot love. For them, visual beauty and sexual attraction substitute love. -To be tried as a Jew-

The memories are so strong that they annihilate the present, and that is of grave danger.

The camps have a fascination in their revoltingness.

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.” TRAUMA IS EVERYWHERE It’s not just veterans, crime victims, abused children, and accident survivors who come face-to-face with trauma. About 75% of Americans will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than they are to get breast cancer.

IG Farben deserves a special place in hell, a space next to Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. Not only did IG Farben operate a factory with prisoners of a concentration camp, this international chemical company manufactured Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, the poison that killed over a

The conventional image of the Holocaust is inextricably bound with the concentration camps, about all Auschwitz. This can have the effect of making the murder of Europe's Jews seem like a rather impersonal, mechanized process. In some histories, it almost becomes a question of logistics, in which German ingenuity -- with a little help from local atavism -- triumphs over problems of men and matériel. But in most of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust was an intimate slaughter. It was conducted up close, often face-to-face, in the presence of scores of witnesses and neighbors. The Holocaust should therefore be thought of as a question not of populations but of individuals. No one lived the whole experience of a nation or a tribe. Instead, they experienced the catastrophe on their own terms, as the death of a pet or a family member, or the disappearance of a community. Schulz's death, and the massacre of the Jews of Drohobycz, stands as a synecdoche of the catastrophe as whole, just as any other act of violence could. And every Jewish family in Eastern Europe, including mine, had a Drohobycz of their own.

The fact that Otto survived the horror of the concentration camps demonstrated his profound will to live.

they were people like any others

Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist, neurologist, and Holocaust survivor whose memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, about his time in a Nazi concentration camp, can serve as inspiration for anyone on a similar quest to find meaning in their own lives.

Boaz’s family was Jewish. His father drove a Mercedes. He had been in a Nazi concentration camp and had the numbers tattooed on his arm. Such a heavy thing that was hard to fathom. At that time we were just thirty years removed from the horrors of the Holocaust. When I met people from Germany, I imagined that they had all heard the screams. Too much.

... e in quell'aria dall'odore acre, da lontano, riconobbi senza alcun dubbio il profumo della zuppa di rape. È stato un peccato, perché quella vista, quel profumo hanno scatenato nel mio petto ormai già sordo un sentimento il cui impeto è riuscito a spillare ai miei occhi aridi un paio di gocce che hanno scaldato la mia faccia fredda e bagnata. E qualunque sforzo di valutare e ragionare, di ricorrere al buonsenso e alla lucidità mentale non sono serviti – dentro di me non ho potuto evitare di sentire la voce furtiva, in un certo senso vergognosa della sua stessa insensatezza, che tuttavia diventava sempre più ostinata, la voce di un desiderio sommesso quanto ardente: poter vivere ancora un pochino in quel bel campo di concentramento.

On a bright day in October 1996, a small, withered woman named Estelle Sapir testified before a US Senate committee investigating Swiss banks and the Holocaust. She had last seen her father through barbed wire in southern France shortly before he went to die in a Polish concentration camp, but before he died he had carefully explained where his assets were. After the war she visited several banks in Britain and France, where they traced the accounts and emptied them for her, without any kerfuffle. She then explained what happened when she went to Switzerland with a Credit Suisse deposit slip from 1938, which she had found among her father’s papers. ‘I saw a young man come out behind,’ she explained, ‘and the first thing he asked me, “Show me the death certificate for your father.” And I answer him, “How can I have a death certificate? I have to go find Himmler, Hitler, Eichmann and Mengele.” And I start to cry. I run out from the bank, into the street. The same day, I go back to the bank, but could not compose myself. Never went back to Switzerland. Never went back to Switzerland. Never.’ Credit Suisse offices around the world turned her away on twenty visits between 1946 and 1957.

Many of the Jewish survey respondents, however, first became aware of the Holocaust when they themselves became caught up in it and had not known about it before they were deported to the concentration camps and ghettos in eastern Europe.

I bend over more deeply and ask him again what happens here. — Don't you see? Here they take the lives of our nearest and dearest. Don't you see that these are the close of the poor wretches who come here?

Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps [2015]; Cesarani, Final Solution; Laurence Rees, The Holocaust: A New History [2017].

Memory, come tell a fairy tale About my girl who's lost and gone. Tell, tell about the golden grail And bid the swallow, bring her back to me. Fly close to her and ask her soft and low If she thinks of me sometimes with love, If she is well? Ask too before you go If I am still her dearest, precious dove. And hurry back, don't lose your way, So I can think of other things. But you were too lovely, perhaps, to stay. I loved you once. Good-bye, my love.

...I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people in the camps – they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones. The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, "I'm free! I'm free!" And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people. - Roy Gates

Of the 762 Jews deported from Norway, all but twenty-three died in German concentration camps.