Holocaust Remembrance Day Quotes

Deniers have learned to use social media to their advantage. On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017, a survivor was interviewed on a BBC radio program. The producers were “shocked” by the “staggering” number of “brazen” Holocaust denial and antisemitic phone calls and social media posts they received. Though they had previously broadcast programs on the Holocaust and had received some antisemitic and denial comments, this response, one producer told me, was “unprecedented…unlike anything we have seen before.” They were so deeply unsettled that they invited me to appear on a subsequent program that addressed Holocaust denial.7 But denial is not something engaged in only by the Far Right. In many segments of the Muslim community, including among European Muslims, there is also an inclination to deny this historical reality. There are schools in Europe where teachers find it difficult to teach about the Holocaust because the students insist that it never happened, and the material the teachers present is dismissed by the students as false.

I was fascinated by Siegfried's wooden leg, a remembrance of the 1914 Battle of the Sommes, where he had earned the Iron Cross I Class for conspicuous bravery. He was proud of his service for the Fatherland; but as it turned out, the Fatherland wasn't proud of him. Just 13 years after he showed me how to play marbles and sit correctly on a horse, Siegfried and the whole Ermann family were gassed in Auschwitz for being Jewish ...

Under the nose of enlightened humanism, Napoleon had declared himself emperor. Slavery had persisted in America. Belgian colonial rule had ravaged the Congo. Germany had committed genocide against the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia. Beautiful art, in such a world, was like its own kind of opium for the masses, its charms serving to mask uglier

Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought.

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.