Holocaust Quotes for Remembering

These Holocaust quotes take the weight of expressing the horrors of the Holocaust in words. The Holocaust was a devastating event that happened in the twentieth century. During the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler murdered 6 million Jewish People and others simply for existing. It is truly one of the most horrific events to date and is one that should never be forgotten.

What can we learn about humanity from remembering the Holocaust?

Humanity is just that—human, as we all are. When we inflict unnecessary suffering on others, we are rid of our humanity. The suffering that was created during the Holocaust was horrifying and has impacted people for generations. So now, the most human thing we can do is remember.

Holocaust Quotes About Human Beings

1. “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” – Anne Frank

2. “In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.” –Anne Frank

3. “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” – Unknown

4. “Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.” – Primo Levi

5. “We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That’s all we know for sure. We can’t create a new species or a new world. That’s been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries.” – Carol Matas

6. “The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place.” – Unknown

7. “I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.” – Diet Eman

8. “I’m not talking about your book now, but look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What’s the point? People haven’t changed… maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.” – Art Speigelman

9. “By the end of the war, I could pick out Jewish people almost as if I had a sixth sense about it, even if they had blue eyes and blond hair. I would have been a very valuable Gestapo person.” – Diet Eman

10. “Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.” – Fern Shumer Chapman

11. “His eyes seem to see nothing. He is a man whose soul has died and whose body is waiting to catch up with it.” – Heather Morris

Holocaust Quotes About Surviving

12. “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” – Elie Wiesel

13. “Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves.” – Elie Weisel

14. “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always takes sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” – Elie Wiesel

15. “But miracles still happen, even if we don’t think they do.” – Diet Eman

16. “There’s a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don’t lose courage. You’ve already escaped the gravest danger: selection.” – Elie Wiesel

17. “You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can’t touch a hair on my head without the will of God my Father, because He is on my side.” – Diet Eman

18. “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.” – Anne Frank

19. “Our immortality comes through our children and their children. Through our roots and branches. The family is immortality. And Hitler has destroyed not just branches and roots, but entire family trees, forests. All of them, gone.” – Amy Harmon

20. “For me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm, I bear the Auschwitz number.” – Jean Amery

21. “Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don’t want to part from it.” – Isaac Bashevis Singer

22. “Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.” – Nicole Krauss

23. “Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.” – Jack Werber

You might also like this list of The Book Thief quotes for living with purpose.

Holocaust Quotes About Taking Action

24. “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitives become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.” – Unknown

25. “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.” – Simon Wiesenthal

26. “For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered.” – Simon Wiesenthal

27. “Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” – Yehuda Bauer

28. “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

29. “Some people like the Jews and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.” – Winston Churchill

30. “Maybe people had no choice but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice would have made the choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?” – Amy Harmon

31. “What I want you to take away from my life story is just how important it is to defend your freedom, at all costs. Experience has shown me that if you lost your freedom, you are condemned to fail.” – Leon Schgrin

32. “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” – Dan Quayle

33. “Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.” – Tadusz Borowski

34. “The only reason for this treatment was that they were Jews.” – Muriel Knox Doherty

Holocaust Quotes About the Horror of The Event

35. “I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it.” – Elie Wiesel

36. “Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.” – Chuck Palahniuk

37. “Bread, soup—these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.” – Elie Wiesel

38. “We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything—death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.” – Elie Wiesel

39. “The question shouldn’t be, ‘why are you, a Christian, here in a death camp, condemned for trying to save Jews?’ The real questions is ‘why aren’t all the Christians here?’” – Unknown

40. “Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism… neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world’s greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.” – Richard Weikart

41. “Surely there is no more wretched sight than the human body unloved and uncared for.” – Corrie Ten Boom

42. “When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me.” – Markus Zusak

43. “War was funny like that: one minute you could try and block it and have the most wonderful thoughts, the next you were back in the nightmare.” – Mark A Cooper

44. “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” – Elie Weisel

45. “The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria…” – Elie Weisel

46. “I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.” – Jean Amery

47. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small face of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.” – Elie Weisel

More Holocaust quotes and sayings

48. “I felt peace, even though I was still scared to death. I thought that, whatever happened to me—I could still be killed. I didn’t know—and in what I’d already been through, God was in control.” – Diet Eman

49. “At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich.” – William Styron

50. “After the prayer they executed an armed robbery. That sounds very strange this many years later: prayer and then armed robbery.” – Diet Eman

51. “Who would have thought that words could hold so much power, to stir so much hatred that it would eventually lead to genocide? I, for one, had always believed that we, the human race, were better than that.” – Ellie Midwood

52. “I’m not alone, I will never be alone. God is with me.” – Mark A. Cooper

53. “It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.” – A.C. Grayling

54. “You kill yourself when you hate. It’s the worst disease in the world.” – William Schiff

55. “She believes that everyone we meet influences us, that we need to hear their stories to learn more about ourselves.” – Gemma Liviero

56. “The past is gone. My life is a miracle! With gratitude to God, I am still here to remember and to tell what happened to me during the Holocaust of WWII.” – Leah Cik Roth

57. “I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.” – Ralph Webster

58. “I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can’t even imagine what these people went through.” – Daniel Barenboim

59. “As much as the world has an instinct for evil and is a breeding ground for genocide, holocaust, slavery, racism, war, oppression, and injustice, the world has an even greater instinct for goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love.” – Desmond Tutu

60. “The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.” – Israel Horovitz

Holocaust quotes from survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl

61. “What is to give light must endure burning.” — Viktor Frankl

62. “In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl

63. “It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.” — Viktor Frankl

64. “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” — Viktor Frankl

65. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” — Viktor Frankl

66. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” — Viktor Frankl

67. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” — Viktor Frankl

68. “To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber.” — Viktor Frankl

69. “… 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.” — Viktor Frankl

70. “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” — Viktor Frankl

Holocaust quotes about remembering 

71. “The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on a society. It forces us to examine the responsibilities of citizenship and confront the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction.” –Tim Holden

72. “The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.” –David Novak

73. “I believe that the Holocaust is the most significant event in human history.” –James Comey

74. “The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.” –Stephen Ambrose

75. “It is deeply shocking and incomprehensible to me that despite volumes of documentation and living witnesses who can attest to the horrors of the Holocaust, there are still those who would deny it.” -Mark Udall

76. “The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.” –Zygmunt Bauman

77. “Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.” –Jonathan Sacks

78. “My grandparents got out of Poland right before the Holocaust and came here, and the only thing that mattered was surviving.” –Jack Antonoff

79. “Growing up, I heard a lot about strength. My dad – a Holocaust survivor – embodied it, though he would never say that about himself. Not only did he survive one of the most horrific events in history, but he never lost hope along the way, crediting acts of kindness with keeping him alive.” –Daniel Lubezky

80. “We must remember both the sacrifices and service of the Greatest Generation who secured freedom and prosperity for our world, as well as the horrors and lessons of the Holocaust.” –Mikie Sherrill

What did you learn from these Holocaust quotes?

The Holocaust was a devastating event that has affected the lives of millions of people for decades. The Holocaust quotes above encapsulate the true essence of this terrible event, from the prospect of survival to the essence of taking action. They explore what it means to be human in the wake of disaster, and what the people of the event truly experienced.

How can we ensure that the Holocaust never becomes irrelevant? The most important thing we can do is to share the experiences of those who lived through it, and these quotes are a good place to start. Making sure that we talk about it, and that these quotes continue to circulate is the best way to remember.

What’s your biggest takeaway from these Holocaust quotes and sayings? Do you have any other quotes to add? Let us know in the comment section below.