Holocaust Remembrance Quotes

Live," he whispered. "For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.

He’d wait me out if his parents let him. A promise is a promise, but is he ready for such a tale? I’ve only shared this story with a select few, and only for Holocaust remembrance.

Regardless of where many of us believe we land - in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much - we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events - love, shopping, and so forth - but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us?

Africans find it hard to forgive us slavery, don't they?" He took my hand and said, "I thought you would have known that. My dear, they can't forgive us, and even more terrible, they can't forgive themselves. They're like the young here in this tragic country [Germany]. They will never forgive their parents for what they did to the Jews, and they can't forgive the Jews for surviving and being a living testament to human bestiality.

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed,

now I want something better than vengeance, and something almost as hard to get.” He told it to the young woman in the second row: “I want remembrance.” He told it to all of them: “Remembrance. It’s hard to get because life goes on; every year we have new horrors—a Vietnam, terrorist activities in the Middle East and Ireland, assassinations”—(ninety-four sixty-five-year-old men?)—“and every year,” he drove himself on, “the horror of horrors, the Holocaust, becomes farther away, a little less horrible. But philosophers have warned us: if we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat it.

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.

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 ...

In 1979, Stefania and Helena Podgórska were named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, which is the leading institution for Holocaust education, documentation, commemoration, and research. Stefania and Helena’s heroism during the Holocaust has been recognized with numerous other awards, articles, film documentaries, television interviews, and a 1996 television movie called Hidden in Silence. Stefania

Adorno once remarked that “every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated,

Brecht wrote, “Nothing I do gives me the right to eat my fill.” The playwright, who had tossed his editions of Lenin’s collected works into Los Angeles harbor before arrival, vented in his diary about the rampant commercialism. “Here,” he wrote, “you are constantly either a buyer or a seller. You sell your piss, as it were, to the urinal.

For Schoenberg, equally discordant were the social expectations of his adoptive home, with all its backslapping optimism and compulsory cheerfulness. “It is difficult for us to smile incessantly,” he explained to one old friend, “when we would like to spit, to spit fire….[O]n no account may one speak the truth here—even when one knows it; even when the other does not know it; even when the other wants to know it: for that is the game.

les livres sont faits pour ça, nous empêcher d'oublier.

Art remembers what society would like to forget.

the composer Murray Schafer reminds us, “The eye points outward; the ear draws inward.” Sound not only surrounds us but enters our bodies, vibrates within us. When music floods a room, there is nowhere to hide.

Walter Benjamin’s phrase, time itself has been “filled with the presence of the now.

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.

truths about corruption, domination, repression, and moral rot. In this telling, then, Schoenberg’s own atonal revolution, as well as music’s turn toward harsh modern dissonance, was a kind of course correction, from an art that manufactured deceptive beauty to an art that conveyed existential truths—about life, about the suffering of humanity, about history, and about the possibility of a still-darker future. “Dissonance,” Adorno wrote, “is the truth about harmony.

unleash the pent-up dissonance latent beneath the surfaces of two hundred years of European art?

one century before Schoenberg’s birth when Moses Mendelssohn first entered the gates of Berlin—from the emancipation of the Jews, to the emancipation of dissonance, to the emancipation of memory.

There is a way of pleasing most people and still not hurting one’s aesthetic standards,” he wrote, “and that, I feel, should be the aim of a composer.” Britten’s way of having his cake and eating it too often involved a kind of radical thinning out of textures, the use of imaginative instrumentations, and employing common tonal chords that have been defamiliarized or spiked with a “wrong” note, such that the harmonies often feel at once modern and antique. But paired with this commitment to public legibility was also an integrated social vision for music, a keen desire to bring his art form down from the mountaintops.

deeply shaken composer himself. “Songs connect, collect and bring together,” the critic John Berger has written, providing “a shelter from the flow of linear time: a shelter in which future, present and past can console, provoke, ironize and inspire one another.

Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”—“I am lost to the world”—a beautiful song that forms its own shelter from the flow of linear time, closing with words that bespeak the radical loneliness of attachment to a celestial ideal: “I live alone, in my heaven of love, devotion, and song.

Adorno has here articulated the central contradiction—he calls it an “aporia”—inherent in all Holocaust memorials: legitimate art after Auschwitz must represent, translate, or in some way evoke the violence done to victims in a form that is legible to posterity. But to instrumentalize or aestheticize the victims’ memory is necessarily to violate it. In these terms a “true” memorial must accomplish the impossible: communicate the event while preserving its utter inscrutability, honor the victims while rejecting any and all ascriptions of meaning.

Indeed, experiencing Survivor or any other kindred musical memorial—in the fullness of what they have to offer—requires a different modality of listening. We are there not to be entertained but to bear witness to the music’s own testimony,

works of art are, in Adorno’s words, “the hidden essence of society, summoned into appearance.

Adorno was approaching music “not merely as an organization of sounds but as an embodiment of the truths perceived by human consciousness;

Beethoven could imagine the interests of the individual (freedom) as potentially reconcilable with those of society (form). This moment of promise, however, would be short-lived.

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

the insufficiency of the Enlightenment, its darkening of that which is full of light enough.

silence. — “It does not seem to me,” says Sebald’s Austerlitz, “that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.

fire….[O]n no account may one speak the truth here—even when one knows it; even when the other does not know it; even when the other wants to know it: for that is the game.

Speech itself has been superseded by song just as memory “dilates” itself, as if leaping from the domain of history (a narrated sequence of events) to the transcendent register of faith.

Even now,” says the title character in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, “when I try to remember…the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

The room in fact quickly began to feel less like a museum than a refuge from time’s passage altogether, a place where the past is still present and can be safely protected.

the sense of a past that had not passed.

Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind him all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.

Time measures Nothing but itself —W. G. Sebald

Modernity had no one prescribed sound for Strauss; it was about living with multiplicity and contradiction. He

Benjamin’s vision of the true purpose of history: to sort through the rubble of earlier eras in order to recover these buried shards of unrealized hope, to reclaim them, to redeem them.

The poet Friedrich Schlegel once famously noted that “the historian is a prophet facing backwards.” In

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.  

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.

After the war ended, Captain Schroder was honored in the Hall of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Museum,

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s descriptor, which has now been adopted by the European Parliament, identifies it as: A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

With the return of Yanukovych, first as prime minister in 2007 and then as president in 2010, the Holodomor began to fall back again in terms of public remembrance. Because of this political shift and because this was a taboo topic in Soviet times, the Holodomor has not entered into the DNA or soul of Ukrainian politics, or worldview, as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide have in Israel and Armenia.