Great Throughts Treasury

"He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer."

"He had so examined his past that he could no longer look at it with enough detachment to tell what was true and what wasn't,"

"Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another."

"His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people."

"How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky."

"I always believed that to listen to a witness is to become a witness."

"How could I forget that concert, given to an audience of dying and dead men!"

"I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow."

"Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere."

"I believe it important to emphasize how strongly I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both."

"I am so in favor of being involved in other people's causes, other people's fights. If a people is oppressed, we must help those people free themselves."

"I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how"

"I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead, and anyone who does not remember betrays them again."

"I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it. One doesn't study calculus before studying arithmetic. In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism."

"I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table."

"I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted His absolute justice."

"I don't want my past to become anyone else's future."

"I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents."

"I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both."

"I had a teacher that always told me, 'Don't promise, because if you promise, you must keep it.' I promised, so here I am."

"I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself."

"I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason."

"I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings."

"I have to wonder about people who compare Israelis to Nazis."

"I have one request: May I never use my reason against truth."

"I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

"I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position. The shadows on the walls, on the faces, are not the same."

"I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory."

"I remember he asked his father: Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?"

"I probably brought him more satisfaction than I had done during my whole childhood."

"I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree."

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

"I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . ."

"I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed."

"I shall always remember that smile. From which world did it come?"

"I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the story of my death. So that you could prepare yourselves while there was still time. To live? I don't attach any importance to my life any more. I'm alone. No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me."

"If it could only have lasted ten times ten hours!"

"If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be dying of starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism and fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not have believed it."

"I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time."

"I write to understand as much as to be understood."

"If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope."

"I was thinking of my father. He must have suffered more than I did."

"If there is a crisis in the world, the U.N. should send a task force immediately, within 24 hours,"

"If the only prayer you say throughout your life is Thank You, then that will be enough."

"If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching."

"In Jewish history there are no coincidences."

"In any case, he had bungled his life. Bad husband, bad father, bad lover: failure all along the line . . . All the springs were broken. No more light anywhere . . . Everything he had tried to build had fallen apart. The little good he had done had resulted in fiasco. Whose fault could it be other than his own? . . . And anyone will tell you that if God Himself cannot undo what happened, still less can man."

"In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous."

"Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other."

"Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil."