Concentration Camp Quotes - Page 5

• I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail.

  Jean-Marie Le Pen

  War, Book, Two

  Jean-Marie Le Pen's statement in Munich, December 5, 1997.

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• There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

  Hannah Arendt

  Confusion, Holocaust, Essentials

  Hannah Arendt (1951). “The Burden of Our Time”

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• Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

  Al Alvarez

  Art, Imagination, Police

  Al Alvarez (2013). “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”, p.271, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Only Communists and Social Democrats who acted against the state were incarcerated. Most of the Communists and Social Democrats I had known became Nazis later. Only those who were doing anything against the state were thrown in concentration camps.

  Fritz Sauckel

  Nazi, Communist, Social

  "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately, 2004.

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• When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the middle of hell from Auschwitz, to let the world know what happened. The texts were buried beneath the ground and found after the liberation of the concentration camps.

  Laszlo Nemes

  Writing, Research, World

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.

  Arthur Koestler

  Cutting, Reality, Imagination

  "A Challenge to 'Knights in Rusty Armor". The New York Times, February 14, 1943.

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• The idea of watching an entire film basically from one person's perspective - and not even really from their perspective, but [it's] probably the most intimately shot film that's in any of these categories. If you're not familiar with Son of Saul, basically it's a film about a Jewish guy who's in concentration camp, but he helps dispose of the bodies after they leave the gas chamber. So, you watch the entire movie looking at Saul's face and looking at his interactions with people.

  Bun B

  Son, Ideas, Perspective

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• While public school history courses in the United States stress the horrors of the German Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and Josef Stalin's pogroms against racial minorities and political dissidents in the Soviet Union, the facts that the U.S. Army's solution to the 'Indian Problem' was the prototype for the Nazi 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' and that the North American Indian Reservation was the model for the twentieth century gulag and concentration camp, are conveniently overlooked.

  Jonathan Ott

  Stress, School, Army

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• The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

  Hannah Arendt

  Alive, Facts, Impossible

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.174, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic non-identity in women--that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps--one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp--is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Real, Men, Two

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• N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Boys, Years, Peaceful

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• So I'm not crazy after all! I thought it looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first grader or a concentration camp survivor. What's this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.

  Haruki Murakami

  Girl, Crazy, Mean

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• It's important for celebrities, environmentalists and world leaders to continue to increase education and eco-awareness through the forums provided to them naturally by virtue of being famous. Take inspiration from these words of wisdom from a Nazi-era teenager and concentration camp victim: "how wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

  Anne Frank

  Teenager, Single Mom, Inspiration

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• If that hideousness came here, it wouldn't be any more hideous for the animals — they are all bound for a ghastly death anyway. But it would wake up consumers... I openly hope that it comes here. It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks and giving animals a concentration camp-like existence. It would be good for animals, good for human health and good for the environment.

  Ingrid Newkirk

  Heart, Animal, People

  "PETA: Bring On Foot-and-Mouth Disease" by Alan Elsner, abcnews.go.com. April 2, 2001.

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• If there is Predestination, then God is the devil. by Remy, Ravensbruck concentration camp survivor

  Mary Ann Shaffer

  Devil, Survivor, Concentration

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• Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Men, May, Dignity

  Viktor E. Frankl (2006). “Man's Search for Meaning”, p.72, Beacon Press

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• I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Life, Book, Writing

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.8, Beacon Press

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• We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Determination, Cells

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• This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Believe, Ignorance, Reality

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

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• ...I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.

  Imre Kertész

  Beautiful, Littles, Concentration

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• She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.

  Thrity Umrigar

  War, Evil, Sides

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• [A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?" I notice that I don't hear from them much lately.

  Tracy Hickman

  Couple, Book, Writing

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• When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

  Milan Kundera

  Wine, Mean, Bottles

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