Top 128 Auschwitz Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

One day in Auschwitz I became so dispirited that I couldn't carry on. They had given me a beating, which wasn't exactly a pleasant experience. It was on a Sunday, and I said: 'I can't get up'. Then my comrades said: 'That's impossible, you have to get up, otherwise you're lost'. They went to a Dutch doctor, who worked with the German doctor. He came to me in the barracks and said: 'Get up and come to the hospital barracks early tomorrow morning. I'll talk to the German doctor and make sure you are admitted'. Because of that I survived.

The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

. . . since being a Jew not only means that I bear within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow, it is-beyond being a duty-also fear. Every morning when I get up I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I am not even sure if this is not my entire existence. Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of the first blow from a policeman's fist. Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.

Auschwitz was one of the wealthiest places in the world. Everyone who was deported there had been in such a hurry that they were only able to take along the things they loved the most. Well, of course, a musician would take along her instrument. But then they would take these precious possessions away from the prisoners once they arrived. All these things were kept in a part of the camp the prisoners called "Canada." It was like a giant warehouse.

No sane person wants hell to exist. No sane person wants evil to exist. But hell is just evil eternalized. If there is evil and if there is eternity, there can be hell. If it is intellectually dishonest to disbelieve in evil just because it is shocking and uncomfortable, it is the same with hell. Reality has hard corners, surprises, and terrible dangers in it. We desperately need a true road map, not nice feelings, if we are to get home. It is true, as people often say, that "hell just feels unreal, impossible." Yes. So does Auschwitz. So does Calvary.

For Christians, the first priority may be theological self-understanding. For Jews it is, and after Auschwitz must be, simple safety for their children. In pursuit of this goal, Jews seek - are morally required to seek - independence of other people's charity. They therefore seek safety - are morally required to seek it - through the existence of a Jewish state. Except among the theologically or humanly perverse, Zionism - the commitment to the safety and genuine sovereignty of the State of Israel - is not negotiable.

The whole thing was set up very cleverly. The people who were torn from their normal lives and put on the trains may have heard that terrible things were happening in Auschwitz, but even up to the end, they kept on thinking: Perhaps it isn't so bad after all. And then they arrived and the SS told them: "The old people and the sick can take the truck. Anyone who is still young can walk." It took us a while to realize that the ones who were being driven were really being taken to the gas chambers.

I wanted to say sorry, I wanted to tell her I could not forget the roundup, the camp, Michel's death, and the direct train to Auschwitz that had taken her parents away forever. Sorry for what? he had retaliated, why should I, an American, feel sorry, hadn't my fellow countrymen freed France in June 1944? I had nothing to be sorry for, he laughed. I had looked at him straight in the eyes. Sorry for not knowing. Sorry for being forty-five years old and not knowing.