Great Throughts Treasury

"When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity."

"You're a religious man... You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Another will say, 'I built houses.' But I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'"

"When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Another will say, 'I built houses.' But I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'"

"When history looks back, I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it."

"Anne Frank became a symbol of the million murdered children, and I tell it to the father of Anne Frank, the diary of his daughter had a bigger impact than the Nuremberg trial."

"I found hundreds of people all over Germany who worked there (as) guards or (who) were somehow involved in Auschwitz, that was in 2003 ? people were very old then, and I don?t know how many of them will be alive at the moment."

"That we must never forgive would seem to follow from the same stern logic. For if we forgive, it will be a sign to those in the future that they can act without fear of punishment, and that the world has a moral escape valve labeled 'forgiveness' that permits evil not only to survive but to thrive... Forgiveness becomes a 'weak' virtue, one that Christians seem particularly prone to champion, and one that always carries the possibility of condoning, rather than constricting, the spread of evil."

"The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition."

"There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today...they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters."

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember 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: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way."

"Violence is like a weed--it does not die even in the greatest drought."

"You're a religious man. You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Still another will say, 'I built houses,' but I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'"