Aleksander Kwasniewski Quotes

I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

This is nothing less than a national tragedy…. It is time to consider these refugees arriving from Poland and elsewhere purely on their merits as migrants and in an unsentimental light. In the last 50 years these people have swarmed all over Europe, coming principally from Armenia, Russia and the Balkans. We should remember that they are European neither by race, standards, nor culture. They are, in fact, an Eastern people. In 2000 years no one but Britain has been successfully able to absorb them, and for the most part they owe loyalty and allegiance to none.

The greatest and the most horrible crime that has ever been committed in the history of the whole world.

The killing of the Jews made the war monstrous.

This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible.

Marched into Russia. Killed the Jews. Strangled the women. Murdered the children. Everyone knows what we bring.

They are shooting Jews in masses. These crimes must not be allowed to continue..

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

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 one calls a detail.

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.

Every show you do, you have to do research, and I love to dig into things. I learned about World War II by doing 'Anne Frank.'

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

I'm of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.

My feeling is that if all Catholics or Reformed Christians had been deported to Germany, the Dutch government in London would have instructed the population in the occupied Netherlands to help them.

I have always lived in Amsterdam. During the war, we inhabited the Rivieren neighborhood where many Jews lived at the time. Our downstairs neighbors were Jews, and there were also Jews a few houses from us. We saw how they were rounded up and taken away. That made a very great impression on me.

I'm obsessed with history, especially WWII and the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.

I was born in Breslau on October 5th, 1930. At that time, Breslau, now called Wroclaw, belonged to Germany, and only German was spoken there. After the Second World War, Breslau became Polish, and the original German population was almost completely replaced by a Polish one. I have never visited Wroclaw after the war.

Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.

The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way... So the Holocaust doesn't interest me, see? They've had a lot of publicity, but they didn't suffer as much.