Holocaust Inspirational Quotes

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...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.
John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas)
Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
Yehuda Bauer
If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.
Anne Frank
If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?
Jodi Picoult (The Storyteller)
The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
Philip Gourevitch (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families)
Work, love, courage and hope, Make me good and help me cope!
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.
Irene Gut Opdyke (In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer)
Do not be a perpetrator. Do not be a bystander. Do not be a victim.
Yehuda Bauer
Es bueno ser simpatico si quieres vivir.
Art Spiegelman (The Complete Maus)
The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Other Mythos Tales (Lovecraft Library Volume 2))
What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life—that is what is abnormal.
Elie Wiesel
Being able to imagine and understand their point of view does not mean I have to adopt it. It does, however open the possibility that, eventually, adding another's point of view may challenge my opinions or perhaps reveal misconceptions, but I don't have to change or replace it in the moment. Listening to another's story is not a declaration of defeat.
Noa Baum (A Land Twice Promised: An Israeli Woman's Quest for Peace)
Sin embargo, conocí a muchos internados que supieron ser fieles a su dignidad humana hasta el mismo fin. Los nazis lograron degradarlos físicamente, pero no fueron capaces de rebajarlos moralmente. Gracias a estos pocos, no he perdido totalmente mi fe en la humanidad. Si en la misma jungla de Birkenau no todos fueron necesariamente inhumanos con sus hermanos hombres, indudablemente hay todavía esperanzas. Esta esperanza es la que me hace vivir.
Olga Lengyel
There comes a time for us not to just be survivors, but to be warriors. Yara, you have your life, and the chance to make the most of it. Don't run or hide from that challenge or let your guilt keep you from living your life. This gift is such a beautiful opportunity. Embrace it. Seize every opportunity from here on out. Live.
Becca Vry (Musings: An Argyle Empire Anthology)
Life doesn't get good until you learn to be grateful.
Gregor Collins (The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann)
High above us, the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
Hailey Hudson (Hope Is The Thing With Feathers)
I'll have to become a good person on my own, without anyone to serve as a model or advise me, but it'll make me stronger in the end.
Anne Frank (Readings on the Diary of a Young Girl (Greenhaven Press Literary Companion to World Literature))
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.
Andrea Warren (Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps)
Nevertheless, disorderly violence within the Reich itself was revealed to be a dead end. Most of German public opinion was opposed to the chaos. Visible despair led to expressions of sympathy with Jews, rather than the spiritual distancing that Nazis expected. Of course, it was possible for Germans not to wish to see violence inflicted upon Jews while at the same time not wishing to see Jews at all. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich immediately drew the conclusion that inspiring pogroms inside Germany had been a mistake. Not long after they would organize pogroms in much the same way as Goebbels had, but beyond the borders of Germany, in time of war, in places where German force had destroyed the state.
Timothy Snyder (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)
If in answer to your inner voice screaming 'don't do it', you shake your head and do it anyway, I can guarantee your days will be more likely filled with respect and success.
Gregor Collins (The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann)
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.
Gerald Green (Holocaust)
Here is what I learned. Happiness does not fall from the sky; it is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people you love. And if you're healthy and happy you are a millionaire.
Eddie Jaku (The Happiest Man on Earth)
We weren’t taught to think critically about Hitler and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. We weren’t taught, for instance, that the architects of apartheid were big fans of Hitler, that the racist policies they put in place were inspired, in part, by the racist policies of the Third Reich. We weren’t taught how to think about how Hitler related to the world we lived in. We weren’t being taught to think, period.
Trevor Noah
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.
Monica Hesse (They Went Left)
Could it possible for humans to breath under water? A fetus in its mother's womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air. Are Drexians water-breathing, aquatically-mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by god to teach us or terrorize us? Their stories took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression and the founding of a utopia civilization.
Rivers Solomon (The Deep)
Each year, Flore and I celebrate our wedding anniversary on 20 April - Hitler's birthday. We are still here; Hitler is down there. Sometimes, when we are sitting in the evening in front of the television with a cup of tea and a biscuit, I think, aren't we lucky? In my mind, this is really the best revenge, and it is the only revenge I'm interested in - to be the happiest man on earth.
Eddie Jaku (The Happiest Man on Earth)
Each year, Flore entice celebrate our wedding anniversary on 20 April - Hitler's birthday. We are still here; Hitler is down there. Sometimes, when we are sitting in the evening in front of the television with a cup of tea and a biscuit, I think, aren't we lucky? In my mind, this is really the best revenge, and it is the only revenge I'm interested in - to be the happiest man on earth.
Eddie Jaku (The Happiest Man on Earth)
We had seen France in flames. We had seen the sun shining on the sea. We had grown old in the upper altitudes. We had bent our glance upon a distant earth as over the cases of a museum. We had sported in the sunlight with the dust of enemy fighter planes. Thereafter we had dropped earthward again and flung ourselves into the holocaust. What we could offer up, we had sacrificed. And in that sacrifice we had learnt even more about ourselves than we should have done after ten years in a monastery. We had come forth again after ten years in a monastery.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Flight To Arras)
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.
Sasha Fletcher (Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World)
It would be nice if a single swat made the fly think: 'Whoa. I'm not flying THERE again. But it doesn't. He keeps coming back. Take note, Humans.
Gregor Collins (The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann)
Late to bed, late to rise, makes a man unhealthy, poor, and stupid.
Gregor Collins (The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann)
Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.
Susan Pollack
ONE CHOSEN LAMB God is the best. He is our Father. He lives in a mansion. Where the temperature is perfect all day long. And our behavior is orderly and refreshingly spectacular. There are no glaring lights. Jesus is our glow. Abba. Abba. O Abba. God be praised in the name of Afro Jesus, our sacrificial Brother. Yes, it was only one of us that was meant for God's Holy sacrifice, and that was Jesus. The wrong memo went out, apparently, saying that we are all sacrificial lambs. That's why so many of us were brutally martyred in the Holocaust and Slavocaust like lambs for the slaughter. The rampage of emotional martyrdom continues as money worshipers pursue idolatry unrelentlessly, robbing multitudes of homeowners of their homes, lands, equipment and capital investment through despicable, land and home snatching enactments. Just like the detestable actions enacted under Slavocaust and Holocaust, terrifying acts of murder, pimping, abduction, money worshiping, idolatry, trading in stolen abducted properties and chattels were selfishly, bitterly, grudgingly, greedily and violently enacted by pimps who were unable to distinguish persons from four legged creatures. Family units, ordained by God, and in essence form the nucleus of the universe were destroyed. Each and every single nuclear unit requires a home and not a detestable preying enacted home predator like Bank of America. Every nucleus is shattered without a unified home or protection and unity within that structure disintegrates...disintegrates... disintegrates...
Maisie Aletha Smikle
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.
Habib Sadeghi (The Clarity Cleanse: 12 Steps to Finding Renewed Energy, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Emotional Healing)
Integrate Begs the Pharaoh by Maisie Aletha Smikle Nay Nay Nay says the Lord Nay Nay Nay Let my people go Co-mingle not Entwine not Lest you desist from Heaping hot coals of bitterness On my peoples" heads You plundered You stole You slaughtered You enslaved You bombed You bruised You burned You mutilate With distaste and bitter hate You paid not for your crime You paid not even a dime Now you think that all is fine Come one Come all Integrate and merge like we should You will not get an apology You will get no remorse We will continue the course Of your bitter brutal curse We will not let you go We want to be your Pharaoh Integrate preaches the Pharaoh O thou participants of Holocaust integrate O thou participants of Slavocaust integrate We shaln't let you go unless we go through the red sea You see Pharaohs are born And Pharoahs need to rule But Pharaohs won't be Pharaohs Unless they have people To treat as Peasants and slaves Servants in servitude And people to overbearingly dominate Airing their arrogance of hate Whilst continuing the sad perpetual cycle They preach Integrate Integrate Integrate Dedicated to Nations History Month
Maisie Aletha Smikle
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. — Elie Wiesel
Sally Lefton Wolfe (The Survivor’s Legacy: How the Holocaust Shaped Future Generations)
I sustain myself with the love of family. — Maya Angelou
Sally Lefton Wolfe (The Survivor’s Legacy: How the Holocaust Shaped Future Generations)
She is a prisoner on the stage as her eyes dart from her notes to the awaiting guests. She cannot leave. She has to live out each excruciating moment. She can no longer feel why it was important to do this in the first place. Her mind has become a Holocaust survivor, just grasping at life, trying to see it through in the paltry way that it exists right now.
Felicity Chapman (Connected)
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
Yaffa Eliach (Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust: The First Original Hasidic Tales in a Century)
But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant.
Timothy Snyder (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)
The last thing DeMille added to his $13 million film before he delivered the final negative to Paramount was his introduction that ran before the opening credits, filmed with him standing behind a microphone in front of a blue-and-white curtain (the colors of the Israeli flag). His intention was to emphasize the “importance” of what the audience was about to see and how authentic the film really was, and to make the spiritual connection to the Holocaust. DeMille says, in part: “The theme of this picture is whether man ought to be ruled by God’s law, or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today. Our intention was not to create a story, but to be worthy of the divinely inspired story, created three thousand years ago . . .” The introduction was almost always cut after the film’s initial run. That
Marc Eliot (Charlton Heston: Hollywood's Last Icon)
Hitler’s Germany had the whole package – a strong economy and industry, an awe-inspiring war machine, and a clearly identified enemy of the people.
Steven W. Gephart (World War 2: The Most Important Events, Leaders and Battles That Shaped the Second World War (2nd World War, Hitler, Holocaust, Luftwaffe, Barbarossa, Mussolini, UBoats, Hiroshima Book 1))
...le chant des oiseaux avait pratiquement disparu de la surface de la Terre. Des milliers de races d'oiseaux s'étaient éteintes progressivement, couvrant d'un silence mortuaire les aubes enchanteresses, silence aussitôt comblé par le bruit des bétonneuses, des marteaux-piqueurs, des excavateurs, des grues de chantier, dans un tonnerre métallique quotidien au service de la construction, baromètre de la santé économique des nations et de ce qui s'ensuit, la croissance en général, et l'emploi en particulier, cet emploi source de toutes les justifications. Les oiseaux mouraient des tombereaux de produits chimiques déversés sur les prés, dans un vaste holocauste de matières organiques et d'insectes. Les oiseaux aussi s'éteignaient aussi faute de place pour s'ébattre et se reproduire. La Bible, les humanistes avaient consacré l'intangibilité de la primauté de l'homme, de sa vie, de son confort sur toute autre espèce.
Marc Dugain (Transparence)
Mis tíos y tías, los siete enanos, estaban tan apegados entre sí, que parecían una criatura mitológica con un cuerpo y siete cabezas', comenta el sobrino de Perla, Shimshon Ovitz, quien fue bautizado asi en honor de su abuelo
Yehuda Koren y Eilat Negev
The past isn’t long gone; it’s present in our hearts, our actions, and the lessons we teach our children.
Renia Spiegel (Renia's Diary: A Holocaust Journal)
You are never descendants of an event You are not descendants of an era or a renaissance You are not descendants of Holocaust You are not descendants Slavery or Slavocaust You are not descendants of Wars
Maisie Aletha Smikle
You are never descendants of an event You are not descendants of an era or a renaissance You are not descendants of Holocaust You are not descendants of Slavery or Slavocaust You are not descendants of Wars
Maisie Aletha Smikle
The Holocaust was not the result of Christianity; it is important to state this categorically at the outset. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi pointed out, Christianity had an interest in the preservation of Jews, not their destruction.9 The history of Christian–Jewish relations is not one of unrelieved darkness.10 There were bishops who defended Jews at times of persecution, and popes who rejected anti-Jewish myths like the Blood Libel. And though there were massacres, there were also times when Jews flourished under Christian rulers. While the Holocaust was taking place, there were Christians who saved Jews, among them the members of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who, under the inspiration of Lutheran pastor André Trocmé, gave shelter to five thousand Jews. Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses helped Jews to safety. There were Christian opponents of Hitler like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. There were the more than twenty-five thousand individual heroes, memorialised in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, who saved lives. There were collective acts of heroism like the members of the Danish Resistance who saved most of Danish Jewry from death. And it is important to note also that many Jews were saved by Muslims during these years, a story told by Robert Satloff in his book Among the Righteous.11
Jonathan Sacks (Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence)
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.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
As a young adult, Naomi became a teacher to help inspire children; to aid the creativity and channelled passions of their fertile minds. Now, the kids would read these Protocols; that 11yr old boy would be joined by an army of thousands, countless thousands, even millions. How long until the twisted poison of language could scar purity, and forever pervert the children of Britain into a hateful, vengeful, violent clique of racists? *Jewish life was life unworthy of life.* How could she have ever ignored and belittled this work? So maleficient was its content, to perniciously penetrate the conscious fears of all European nations – and presumably the rest of the world – to transcend cultural differences, and encompass all facets of cultural decay and parasitic operation to insidiously affect the thinking of – and thence bind together –all peoples of Britain, America and Europe to the modern form of anti-Semitism and scientific racial loathing. From the medieval beliefs of sacrifice and well-poisoning to this modern resurrection of ancient fears, with its sinister new ambition and devilish upgrade in scale; Naomi realised with trepidation that once more, her people truly had been chosen.
Daniel S. Fletcher
The truly righteous will find deliverance from the ensuing holocaust, but their numbers will be few: those who remain will pray for death to escape the unspeakable horrors, finding only what they truly hold within their hearts.
Nicholas DeAntonio (The Heavens' Inferno)
scholar of the history of race and racism, Pierre L. van den Berghe, places Roosevelt within an unholy triumvirate of the modern world’s leading racist statesmen; the other two, according to van den Berghe, are Adolf Hitler and Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s original architect of apartheid.)147 For the “extirpation” of the “lower races” that Hall and Roosevelt were celebrating drew its justification from the same updated version of the Great Chain of Being that eventually inspired Nazi pseudoscience.
David E. Stannard (American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World)
I have never been a very brave man," Uncle Moses said. "Nor I," Zalmann added. Eva smiled at them. "You are brave enough.
Gerald Green (Holocaust)
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining, I believe in love even when I cannot feel it, I believe in God even when He is silent.
Unknown Holocaust Survivor
The relationship became so close by the mid-1970s that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster to visit, including a tour of Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Vorster had been a Nazi sympathizer and member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War II. In 1942, he proudly expressed his admiration for Nazi Germany. Yet when Vorster arrived in Israel in 1976, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence.” Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” A few months after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same challenge: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”6 The relationship between the nations was broad but also sworn to secrecy. In April 1975, a security agreement was signed that defined the relationship for the next twenty years. A clause within the deal stated that both parties pledged to keep its existence concealed.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)