Holocaust Hope Quotes

And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live.

My hope is that learning about past evils will help us to avoid them in the future.

We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That's all we know for sure. We can't create a new species or a new world. That's been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries . What are our choices? We can despair and curse, and change nothing. We can choose evil like our enemies have done and create a world based on hate. Or we can try to make things better.

Part of her revolted against the insanity of the rules. Part of her was grateful. In a world of chaos, any guidelines helped. And she knew that each day she remained alive, she remained alive. One plus one plus one. The Devil's arithmetic...

Work, love, courage and hope, Make me good and help me cope!

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

Did I tell you about Cilka?" "No, Lale, you didn't. Who was Cilka?" "She was the bravest person I ever met. Not the bravest girl, the bravest person.

My stories are of gas chambers, shootings, electrified fences, torture, scorching sun, mental abuse, and constant threat of death. But they are also stories of faith, hope, triumph, and love. They are stories of perseverance, loyalty, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, and of never giving up!

Never give up hope, and look for the rainbows and happiness!

Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable . . . Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it and this is called in the one instance: hope.

Like King Midas, I am left with nothing but this unreasonable hope that, somehow, my strange life and my lost family will return to normal.

We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.

If there had been a Jewish state in the first half of the century, there would have been no Holocaust. And if there had not been a Jewish state after the Holocaust, there would have been no Jewish future. The State of Israel is not only the repository of the millennial Jewish hopes for redemption; it is also the one practical instrument for assuring Jewish survival.

That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That there was not the slightest hope not even a glimmer of hope, of justice being done. It would never happen. No one would ever do it. The world was just one big Babi Yar. And there two great forces had come up against each other and were striking against each other like hammer and anvil, and the wretched people were in between, with no way out; each individual wanted only to live and not be maltreated, to have something to eat, and yet they howled and screamed and in their fear they were grabbing at each other’s throats, while I, little blob of watery jelly, was sitting in the midst of this dark world. Why? What for? Who had done it all? There was nothing, after all, to hope for! Winter. Night.

I feel like... the boy lost somewhere between the torment of memory and a few fragile shards of hope.

High above us, the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

I have known many survivors for whom the Holocaust is the central theme of their lives. They have no other. I have tried to live with tolerance and forgiveness as the themes of my life. “God gave us the power to be good or evil. This is our choice. Because some pick evil, we must work together to recognize and stop it. But while we survivors may lead the charge, we cannot do this alone. It must be the goal of all people. “If we will join in this goal, then there is hope for humanity.

One of the most often asked questions posed after America was attacked on 9/11 was, ‘What has the United States done to arouse so much Muslim hatred?’ The question, however, is on the same moral level as asking what German and other European Jews did to cause the Holocaust, or what blacks did to arouse the hatred among the American whites who lynched them.

We all said...that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered. We were not hoping for happiness ‒ it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness.

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

It takes solidarity and generosity of spirit to build a society in which anyone can feel safe. Empathy can be hard to find, especially for people who look or sound different, or believe different things to us. But when we allow ourselves to be pitted against each other, and to be ruled by the meaner emotions, we dig our own graves alongside those of the people we abandon. It's only when we understand our essential commonality that we can protect ourselves: not as individual humans, but as members of an indivisible whole.

He will perhaps be killed, but the star attached to his hat will remain forever.

In February of 1942, President Roosevelt signed the most damning of Executive Orders: number 9066, the internment of the Japanese.

Oskar is the fruit of those fantasies -- the idea that what needed to be saved was not just lives but hope.

May his memory be a blessing to all of us.

My mother had that talent for endowing any place she was with dignity and charm. She behaved elegantly and politely, and thus hoped to change the world.

Oskar's particular blessings are blessings that only a major cosmopolitan city can bestow on a refugee. They represent all our potential to survive and even thrive in the face of great loss.

Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future. That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.

As the Christian world is celebrating the Nativity once again, the roar of the guns, the cries of the dying and the wails of innocent people are heard on the battlefields. And an even greater holocaust threatens. Twice before in our time we have seen tyranny and lust for power thwarted by those who believe in the freedom of all mankind, only to see them circumvented in a brief few years. In America, we have only one thought at this Christmastime, to pray that the world again be restored to a sanity that will insure all peoples the right to think and live as they choose, to respect the beliefs of all and to help humanity live a better life in the short span allotted to us on this earth. In this aim we feel we are joined by all peoples who believe in the Divine Spirit. It is my sincere wish, in which I know I am joined by 150,000,000 other Americans, that we will be guided by the Supreme Being in restoring peace to the world, that all may live in hope and happiness.To all peoples of good will, I extend greetings of the Season.

I don't know which is more unfathomable to me: the base evil and cruelty of the Holocaust, or the undying hope that survivors managed to take out of it. I don't know which is more unfathomable, but I do know which we should inspire to.

At some point, I figured that it would be more effective and far funnier to embrace the ugliest, most terrifying things in the world--the Holocaust, racism, rape, et cetera. But for the sake of comedy, and the comedian's personal sanity, this requires a certain emotional distance. It's akin to being a shrink or a social worker. you might think that the most sensitive, empathetic person would make the best social worker, but that person would end up being soup on the floor. It really takes someone strong--someone, dare I say, with a big fat wall up--to work in a pool of heartbreak all day and not want to fucking kill yourself. But adopting a persona at once ignorant and arrogant allowed me to say what I didn't mean, even preach the opposite of what I believed. For me, it was a funny way to be sincere. And like the jokes in a roast, the hope is that the genuine sentiment--maybe even a goodness underneath the joke (however brutal) transcends.

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.

...we all have reason to hope for happiness, but . . . we must earn it for ourselves. And that is never easy. You must work and do good, not be lazy and gamble, if you wish to earn happiness. Laziness my appear attractive, bur work gives satisfaction.

Some books about the Holocaust are more difficult to read than others. Some books about the Holocaust are nearly impossible to read. Not because one does not understand the language and concepts in the books, not because they are gory or graphic, but because such books are confrontational. They compel us to “think again,” or to think for the first time, about issues and questions we might rather avoid. Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust is one book I found difficult, almost impossible to read. Why? Because I had to confront the terrible underside of Christian theology, an underside that contributed in no small part to the beliefs and attitudes too many Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – had imbibed throughout centuries of anti-Jewish preaching and teaching that “paved the road to the Holocaust.” I cannot say that I “liked” Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust. I didn’t, but I can say it was instructive and forced me to think again about that Jew from Nazareth, Jesus, and about his message of universal love and service – “What you do for the least of my brothers [and sisters], you do for me” (Matthew 25: 40). As Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, the Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust began with words. And too many of those hate-filled words had their origin in the Christian Scriptures and were uttered by Christian preachers and teachers, by Christians generally, for nearly two millennia. Is it any wonder so many Christians stood by, even participated in, the destruction of the European Jews during the Nazi era and World War II? I recommend Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust because all of us Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – must think again, or think for the first time, about how to teach and preach the Christian Scriptures – the “New Testament” writings – in such a way that the words we utter, the attitudes we encourage, do not demean, disrespect, or disregard our Jewish brothers and sisters, that our words do not demean, disrespect, or disregard Judaism. I hope the challenge is not an impossible one.

That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously. With hindsight, going on crusade in the hope of reaching Paradise sounds like utter madness. With hindsight, the Cold War seems even madder. How come thirty years ago people were willing to risk nuclear holocaust because of their belief in a communist paradise? A hundred years hence, our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally incomprehensible to our descendants.

Thursday, 6 July, 1944 ... We all live, but we don't know the why or the wherefore. We all live with the object of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. We three have been brought up in good circles, we have the chance to learn, the possibility of attaining something, we have all reason to hope for much happiness, but... we must earn it for ourselves. And that is never easy. You must work and do good, not be lazy and gamble, if you wish to earn happiness. Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

Why do we care more about people who seem like us? In Chapter 10, I wrote that evil does its work from a distance. Distance lets us rant at strangers on the internet. Distance helps soldiers bypass their aversion to violence. And distance has enabled the most horrifying crimes in history, from slavery to the Holocaust. But choose the path of compassion and you realise how little separates you from that stranger. Compassion takes you beyond yourself, until those near and dear are no more or less significant than the rest of the world. Why else did the Buddha abandon his family? Why else would Jesus have instructed his disciples to leave behind their fathers and mothers, their wives and children, their brothers and sisters?

Malthus’s poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India’s sterilisation programme was wrong; China’s one-child policy was wrong. These were sins of commission, not omission. Malthusian misanthropy – the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of the race – was wrong pragmatically as well as morally. The right thing to do about poor, hungry and fecund people always was, and still is, to give them hope, opportunity, freedom, education, food and medicine, including of course contraception, for not only will that make them happier, it will enable them to have smaller families.

And far from conducting any reconsideration of nuclear strategy, in the months ahead the Eisenhower Administration would begin to cut defense spending on conventional weapons while building up its nuclear arsenal. Eisenhower called this his “New Look” defense posture. The Administration had accepted the Air Force’s strategy and would rely almost exclusively on air power for America’s defense. A policy of “massive retaliation” appeared to be a cheap and deadly fix. It was also shortsighted, genocidal and, if initiated, suicidal. Dean Acheson called it a “fraud upon the words and upon the facts.” Adlai Stevenson asked pointedly, “Are we leaving ourselves the grim choice of inaction or thermonuclear holocaust?” The “New Look” was in fact old policy, and precisely the opposite of what Oppenheimer had hoped for from the new Administration.

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were.

In a few weeks almost everyone’s gonna forget about the Beirut bombing, like we forgot about the ever-incoming nuke, like we forgot about the President campaigning on student loan forgiveness, like we forgot about the actor who said not enough Jews died in the Holocaust and that he hoped his wife got gang raped, like how each new President makes the other Presidents look kinder and gentler, like we forget about war crimes, like we forget about the secret police, like we forget about the homeless when we can’t see them, like we forget what it’s like to be poor to be hungry the minute we have food we have money, like we forgot about Three Mile Island, like we forgot that fall and spring used to be as long as winter and summer like we forgot we could do something about this, like we forget about anything we don’t turn into a holiday and remember only the signs and symbols of the horror, like we forget each time we remember that it’s not that we forget, it’s that there are just too many tragedies, every week, forever and ever, and to remember them all would kill you. Your heart would break and stop beating and you'd die. So we forget.

Like the incredulous inspector, many people are not ready to reduce morality to convention or taste. When we say “The Holocaust is bad,” do our powers of reason leave us no way to differentiate that conviction from “I don’t like the Holocaust” or “My culture disapproves of the Holocaust”? Is keeping slaves no more or less rational than wearing a turban or a yarmulke or a veil? If a child is deathly ill and we know of a drug that could save her, is administering the drug no more rational than withholding it? Faced with this intolerable implication, some people hope to vest morality in a higher power. That’s what religion is for, they say—even many scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould. But Plato made short work of this argument 2,400 years ago in Euthyphro. Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command some things because they are moral? If the former is true, and God had no reason for his commandments, why should we take his whims seriously? If God commanded you to torture and kill a child, would that make it right? “He would never do that!” you might object. But that flicks us onto the second horn of the dilemma. If God does have good reasons for his commandments, why don’t we appeal to those reasons directly and skip the middleman? (As it happens, the God of the Old Testament did command people to slaughter children quite often.)

Your Honor, it is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did not for reasons of hate; I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now, I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused. I tried to do the best I could after the arrest to make amends, but no matter what I did, I could not undo the terrible harm I have caused. I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families, and I understand their rightful hate. “I decided to go through with this trial for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was to let the world know that these were not hate crimes. I wanted the world and Milwaukee, which I deeply hurt, to know the truth of what I did. I didn’t want unanswered questions. All the questions have now been answered. I wanted to find out just what it was that caused me to be so bad and evil. But most of all, Mr. Boyle and I decided that maybe there was a way for us to tell the world that if there are people out there with these disorders, maybe they can get some help before they end up being hurt or hurting someone. I think the trial did that. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed, and created a holocaust. Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I take all the blame for what I did. I hurt so many people and I am sorry. In closing, I just want to say that I hope God has forgiven me. I know society will never be able to forgive me. I ask for no consideration.

One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood," writes Kathleen Norris, "is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die." I am not so brave. Far more frightening to me than the threat of interrupted plans or endless to-do lists is the thread of loving someone as intensely as a mother loves her child. To invite in to the universe a new life, knowing full well that no one can protect thatl ife from the currents of evil that pulse through our world and through our very bloodstreams, seems a grave and awesome task that is at once unspeakably selfish and miraculously good. I am frightened enough by how fervently I love Dan, by my absolute revolt against the possibility -- no, the inevitable reality -- that he will get hurt, that he will experience loss, and that one day he will die. I'm not sure my heart is big enough to wrap itself around another breakable soul. I was once waiting in an airport next to a woman whose six-year-old daughter suffered from a rare heart defect that could take her life at any moment. In spite of mounting medical bills and the pressures of raising both a child with special needs and another younger daughter, the woman said she and her husband planned to adopt a boy from Ethiopia later that year. "What made you want to grow your family in the midst of all this turmoil?" I asked. "Why did the Jews have children after the Holocaust?" she asked back. "Why do women keep trying after multiple miscarraiges? It's our way of shaking our fists at the future and saying, you know what?--we will be hopeful; things will get better; you can't scare us after all. Having children is, ultimately, an act of faith.

The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.

Kugel wondered if in these days of the Internet you would even need a Miep Gies anymore, if you could make it through a genocide these days with just a smartphone and a credit card, and he was hopeful that in the event of another Holocaust, he would have some sort of broadband Internet access.

On July 2, 1944, for instance, the Times reported that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths and 350,000 more were to be deported in the coming weeks. The story appeared on page 12.

Moderns believed that things would only get better and better. This worldview took many surrogate forms, but in general is what we know as the modern world. It formed all of us deeply, especially in the West. It told us that education, reason and science would make the world a better place. But then the Holocaust happened in the very country that was perhaps the most educated, logical and reason-loving in the world.

If the United States ground forces had not eventually held in Korea, Americans would have been faced with two choices: holocaust or humiliation. General, atomic war, in a last desperate attempt to save the game, would have gained Americans none of the things they seek in this world; humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Korea would have inevitably surrendered Asia to a Communist surge, destroying forever American hopes for a free and ordered society across the world.

Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history . Pogroms are as old as Christendom , but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. (..) Scientific fundamentalism claim that science is the disinterested pursuit of the truth. But to represent science in this way is to disregard the human needs science serves. Among us science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up.

We Americans typically discover foreign lands as a result of our military involvement. Thus we now know some of the geography of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

He gave orders not to photograph the wheelchair. Most photographs show the President from the waist up. The nation never knew the extent of his vulnerabilities; it was such a well kept secret. The same can be said for the international community. “During

Roosevelt liked to laugh. He liked to chitchat. One of his favorite amusements was summoning J. Edgar Hoover to the Oval Office and getting the lowdown on Washington gossip.

the New York Times called the Nazis’ plans for massacre of the Jews “wild rumors.

Walter Lippman, advised his readership not to judge Germany on the basis of Nazi radicals. He argued that people possessed a “dual nature.” He wrote, “To deny that Germany can speak as a civilized power because uncivilized things are being said and done in Germany is in itself a deep form of intolerance.

In 1938, the year of the Anschluss and the merging of the quota and the Evian Conference, America accepted 17,868 refugees. Ten thousand less than the legal limit. One reason for the unfulfilled quota was a fear of saboteurs. Communists, anarchists, Fifth Columnists (defined as any clandestine faction or group attempting to undermine a nation’s solidarity), the list of possible subversive agents was long and, in Congressional perspective, fearsome. That fear ascended to the highest level of government. Roosevelt would make policy and appoint officials with the fear of Fifth Columnists in mind. Breckinridge Long, who would stultify Jewish immigration during the war years, was one of those appointments.

My good friends,” Chamberlain addressed the crowd, “this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor [Disraeli returned from the Congress of Berlin in 1878]. I believe it is peace in our time.” The next day, Hitler’s army marched into the Sudetenland.

Time Magazine believed that due to public opinion the President had been given a “mandate” which he could “translate into foreign policy.” Shockingly, nothing changed in foreign policy. No move was made to liberalize the quota system. Nor did the President instigate an intervention-based coalition of nations. And so, without any serious international interference, Hitler’s government continued along its chosen path.

Four days into the St. Louis’s voyage, the British government published the McDonald White Paper on Palestine. The document, named after Colonial Secretary Malcolm McDonald, limited Jewish immigration in Palestine to a total of seventy-five thousand over a five-year period, with the number of Jews in the country not to exceed one-third of the total population. In repudiating the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the White Paper limited immigration to the one place seemingly most logical. “This White Paper,” Rabbi Stephen Wise would later write, “issued shortly before Hitler was to begin his mass annihilation of European Jewry, was in effect a death sentence for scores of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have found life and safety in Palestine rather than death in Maideneck [sic] and Auschwitz.

I felt like someone had taken a mallet and bonked me on the head, knocking me out cold, and when I awoke the details of my life had been radically altered. I felt dislodged.

I cannot be silent,” wrote Szmul Zygielbojm (the Polish Jew who went on the BBC and pleaded with the Allied governments to come to the aid of those in the Warsaw ghetto). “I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish population of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing. My friends in the Warsaw ghetto died with weapons in their hands in the last heroic battle. It was not my destiny to die together with them but I belong to them and in their mass graves. By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little life is worth today, but as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to breaking down the indifference of those who may now at the last moment rescue the few Polish Jews still alive.”10 A few weeks after the Bermuda Conference concluded, and four days before the German commander in Warsaw declared the ghetto no longer in existence, Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide.

Personally, I saw many ships return to the United States during my duties at Gourock and other ports in Scotland. At first, they went back with empty loads. Later, they carried the wounded. Certainly, there was space for refugees.

This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

Fry wrote, none of those who made their way to America “has ever had his loyalty questioned. All of them know, perhaps even better than we, the true value of democracy. For they once lost it, and only after much suffering found it again.

The general public’s response to Pearl Harbor was a desire for revenge. We wanted to attack Japan.

I repeated those immortal words: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. ...

There was a deep commitment for the American cause, an overwhelming belief in the war effort. There was in fact no dispute within the nation. No debate. This would be the last war in which such unanimity existed.

There was no mass public outcry to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. No huge demonstration in Washington. Even the liberal newspapers barely objected. Columnist Walter Lippmann, the voice of progressive policies and individual liberties during the New Deal days, supported the internment, calling the Pacific Coast a “combat zone.”7

In retrospect, the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans (and the others) was one of the gravest travesties of civil rights. The Japanese-Americans were innocent. There is no way today to justify what happened then. No way to excuse the racial intolerance. No way to defend the horrendous conditions within the camps. No way to rationalize the undermining of the Constitution.

The surroundings I saw echoed Winston Churchill’s most stirring words, given in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. “. . . We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, ... we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. ...

Great Britain was populated with an abundance of available women. British men were on the continent fighting the war; American men took advantage. The saying then went like this: “The British were underfed, undersexed, and under Eisenhower. The Americans were overfed, oversexed, and over here.

Sometimes I thought I was living for the dead rather than the living.

I gave them money and advice and tried to give them hope. Those who already had visas I instructed how to cross the frontier [into Spain and eventually on to Portugal]. When they were ready to leave, I shook their hands, and said, ‘I’ll see you in New York.’ Many of them were incredulous, hardly daring to hope. But that short sentence, spoken with conviction, seemed to do more than anything else to restore their faith in the future.

The State Department was egregiously anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. Were it not for State Department “bureaucratic bungling and callousness,” Rabbi Wise wrote, “thousands of lives might have been saved and the Jewish catastrophe partially averted.

Whether Pope Pius was anti-Semitic or not, he clearly found it difficult to comprehend and respond to the enormity of the Final Solution. And in that reaction, Pius was like nearly all the leaders of the day.

Other than Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish advisers around Roosevelt did not press for rescue. This makes for a bitter legacy. President Roosevelt appointed more Jews to his Administration than any other President, prior or subsequent, and yet those men did not use their faith to agitate for the Jews in Europe. It’s ironic and devastating.

The media kept Holocaust stories off the front pages. The New York Times, for instance, from the years 1939 through 1945, printed 1,186 Holocaust stories, or an average of 17 stories per month.11 And yet only 26 stories mentioning the “discrimination, deportation, and destruction” of the Jews made the front pages. And of those stories, only six identified Jews as the primary victims. Six stories in six years. Six stories while six million died.

I’ve learned a simple though profound truth: Great people are not great all the time.

The Jewish communities of Europe are seen by the public as extensions of and advocates for a regime in Israel that is rapidly losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the intelligentsia, the media, the left, and the anti-globalization crowd,” according to David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee. “So the question really becomes, how do you fight anti-Semitism in France or Belgium if the image of their Jewish citizens is inextricably linked to Israel?”6 Israel, with the only freely elected government in the Middle East, with the only free press, with a citizenry still decidedly in favor of a two-state solution with Palestine, has become a pariah.

Argentina, Newfoundland,

Churchill remarked, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

September 16—The United States Congress approved the Selective Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime conscription in this nation’s history.

There he sat,” Churchill wrote of Hopkins, “slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause [the defeat of Hitler] to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties, or aims.”6 Churchill dubbed Harry Hopkins, “Lord Root of the Matter.

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.

Just recently, Charles Sweeney (the pilot who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki) died. His obituary told the story of his return to Japan, alongside Paul Tibbets (the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima), many years later. Both men expressed great sorrow for the devastation and the lives lost. But when asked if they felt regret, both men said. “No, dropping the bombs ended the war.

This is our world today: divided, contemptuous, hateful, and polarized. More and more, it’s becoming a world of Muslims versus non-Muslims. That is not to say that all Muslims are anti-Semitic, or that anti-Semitism only flourishes in Muslim countries. But from the perspective of this New Yorker, the moderate voices within the Muslim world seem to be shrinking and the radical voices seem to be growing. What happens when the radical voices within the Muslim world reach out and influence those outside the Muslim world? Is this our future?

but the British had knowledge of the mass murders at an early stage. Beginning in 1939 and escalating in 1940 and 1941, British intelligence services decoded the messages of the German police and the SS. For instance, according to a British report in 1941, a German police battalion “liquidated 1,059 Jews at or near Slavuta [Ukraine] on August 19-22.” Another police battalion “participated in killing 367 Jews on August 23 and another 468 Jews the next day around Kowel [Ukraine]. The German police suffered no losses.” On August 25, another police battalion killed 1,342 Jews in a “cleansing action, while the First SS Brigade shot 85 prisoners and 283 Jews.”5 The British reaction was to seal away the reports under the warning “Most Secret” and “Never to Be Removed from This Office.” Some fifty years later, the British government declassified the files.

The record suggests that, at best, Roosevelt was sympathetic to the Jews and, at worst, Roosevelt resorted to political expediency.

David Wyman wrote, “America’s response to the Holocaust was the result of action and inaction on the part of many people. In the forefront was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose steps to aid Europe’s Jews were very limited.

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.

But despite the pressure, Italian authorities refused to cooperate. The Allied invasion of Sicily in July, Mussolini’s subsequent fall from power, and his replacement as head of government by Marshal Pietro Badoglio ended any lingering hopes of the French and German authorities that the Italians would release foreign Jews in their zone and ease the pressure on Vichy officials to arrest Jewish citizens.

At his most prescient, President Roosevelt tried to warn the world, in his Quarantine Speech, of the growing threat to international security. “The peace, the freedom, and the security of ninety percent of the population is being jeopardized by the remaining ten percent who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law,” he announced. The speech caused an uproar. President Roosevelt was accused of trying to circumvent the neutrality laws of America. December—The Japanese Army launched the massacre of Nanking. In a period of six weeks, according to various estimates, over 300,000 people were brutally murdered. Over 20,000 cases of rape were reported.

Harboring hatred towards your offenders is the same thing as twisting the knife in your own stomach and hoping for them to die from the wound. It damages you more and more, not them. It drains you, and leaves you empty and hollow, like a used eggshell. Do you want to remain an empty eggshell for the rest of your life? You’re far too young to hold onto your anger, and your life will be miserable if you don’t let go of it.

Hope dies last! The idea of "me" comes from the hope to know oneself and when this hope disappears the "me" vanishes. Without hope, no "me". Jesus calls this "the dark night of the soul", when all hope disappears, all meaning, all purpose, when you become aware that the world cannot make you happy. Then a holocaust, which is the awareness of this, eradicates this idea of separation. And only this awareness is the Grace, which cannot be reached by anyone.

I am Professor Steinberg,” he said. “What would you like to read?” I mumbled something about historiography. I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected—a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macaulay and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.

The idea has been around for a while. Artificial-life hobbyists all agree on the impossibility of digients ever getting legal protection as a class, citing dogs as an example: human compassion for dogs is both deep and wide, but the euthanasia of dogs in pet shelters amounts to an ongoing canine holocaust, and if the courts haven’t put a stop to that, they certainly aren’t going to grant protection to entities that lack a heartbeat. Given this, some owners believe the most they can hope for is legal protection on an individual basis: by filing articles of incorporation on a specific digient, an owner can take advantage of a substantial body of case law that establishes rights for nonhuman entities. Hecht is the first one to have actually done it.

Although he said more about hell than most other subjects, Jesus had a very short fuse with those who appeared enthusiastic about the idea of people suffering eternally. Once, after being rejected by a village of Samaritans, Jesus’ disciples asked him for permission to call fire down from heaven to destroy the Samaritans. Jesus’ response was to rebuke his disciples for thinking such a harsh thing.[1] His response makes me wonder what to do with a subject like hell. On one hand, Jesus indicated that the fire of hell is an appropriate punishment for sin.[2] On the other, he got very upset with anyone suggesting that someone else should go there...Howard Thurman, a predecessor to Dr. King and an African American scholar and minister, gave a lecture at Harvard in 1947 during the pre–civil rights era. In that lecture he shared these words: “Can you imagine a slave saying, ‘I and all my children and grandchildren are consigned to lives of endless brutality and grinding poverty? There’s no judgment day in which any wrongdoing will ever be put right?’”[15] Volf and Thurman are saying the same thing: if there is no final judgment, then there is really no hope for a slave, a rape victim, a child who has been abused or bullied, or people who have been slandered or robbed or had their dignity taken from them. If nobody is ultimately called to account for violence and oppression, then the victims will not see justice, ever. They will be left to conclude the same thing that Elie Wiesel concluded after the Holocaust stripped him of his mother, his father, his sister, and his faith: “I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God. . . . Without love or mercy.”[16] If we insist on a universe in which there is no final reckoning for evil, this is what we are left with. To accept that God is a lover but not a judge is a luxury that only the privileged and protected can enjoy. What I’m saying here is that we need a God who gets angry. We need a God who will protect his kids, who will once and for all remove the bullies and the perpetrators of evil from his playground. Those who cannot or will not appreciate this have likely enjoyed a very sheltered life and are therefore naive about the emotional impact of oppression, cruelty, and injustice. To accept that God is a lover but not a judge is a luxury that only the privileged and protected can enjoy.

Randy says, “You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is ‘to prevent future Holocausts.’ ” Avi laughs darkly. “I’m glad it’s obvious to you, my friend. I was beginning to think I was the only one.” “What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust all the time.” “Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.” “I take it you do not share this view, Avi?” “Look at Bosnia!” Avi scoffs. “Human nature doesn’t change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “So what hope is there?” “Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts, we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking attention.

In little more than a generation, the Belgian king’s yearning for empire and fortune may have killed ten million people in the territory—half of Congo’s population, or more than the entire death toll in World War I. Even today Japan continues to face international ostracism for its brutal imperial conduct in China, Korea and other parts of Asia in the 1930s, which followed Leopold’s Congo holocaust by a mere two decades. And yet there has never been any remorse in the West over the fallout from Europe’s drive to dominate Africa. Indeed, few have heard these grim facts.