#holocaust

Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. 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. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter; we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too. ↗

— Anne Frank

#holocaust #jewish-identity #religion

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#eastern-european #ernest-gellner #ethnic-cleansing #genocide #germans

We Brits print banknotes out in Debden in Essex, and have contracted it out to the private sector. Here in the U.S. it is a government operation right in the heart of Washington next door to the Holocaust Museum. ↗

— Evan Davis

#contracted #door #government #heart #here

And the Zionists have used the Holocaust as a weapon to deny the rights of the Palestinians and to cover-up the crimes of Israel. ↗

— David Duke

#crimes #deny #holocaust #israel #palestinians

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

#beautiful #beautiful girls #holocaust #i #life

There was a taboo as a result of the Holocaust that people respected that anti-Semitism was an ugly thing and should be avoided. Now that taboo seems to have been broken with impunity. ↗

— Steven T. Katz

#avoided #been #broken #holocaust #impunity

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust. ↗

— Simon Wiesenthal

#during #god #holocaust #leave #must

Do not tell me that it is not God-like to get angry or go into a fit of rage. God himself when enraged will grasp a star and hurl it through the heavens. And at night, you can see bits of the star flashing through the sky, fallen apart merely by the shear force of which it was thrown. Know when He is angry and stay out of His way… And the same holds true for my grandson.” Yervant Yacoubian. ↗

— Keri Topouzian

#armenia #armenian #armenian-genocide #constantinople #genocide

The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image. ↗

— Immaculee Ilibagiza

#language #words #holocaust

When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge. You didn’t do anything wrong, he said, the world did something wrong, terribly wrong. This young man, he went to Budapest in the beginning of it all, and he saved Jews, he gave out passports of Sweden, and because the Hungarians didn’t know how to read Swedish, this was how my father was saved. And thousands of others too, with these pieces of paper. I am here to tell you that one man can make a difference, and that man can be you, any of you… ↗

— Alice Lok Cahana

#heroes #holocaust #humanity #kindness #spirituality