Elie Wiesel Quotes

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

I have never been a victim of antisemitism - if you put to one side my war-time experience. That said, I am lucky not to have been sent into a concentration camp.

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 made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

In many ways, my life has begun before I was born. It began in the moment my mother Malka walked out of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I will never forget the moment when Peter van Pels and I saw a group of selected men. Among those men was Peter's father. The men were marched away. Two hours later, a lorry came by, loaded with their clothing.

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.

I have a ton of Holocaust stuff, and some of it is really hard core.

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 was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.

'The Lucky One' features a young concentration camp survivor named Peter Rashkin - who's about the age my dad was when he started at CBS - working at the Oyster Bar, trying to acclimate to his new country and outrun the memories of the daily he left behind.

I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

Auschwitz will forever remain the black hole of the entire human history.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

I've been inside the Anne Frank house. You've only read about Anne Frank in grade school. I've been in it. I've seen the diary. Things that teachers couldn't teach you.

I'm the son of two Holocaust survivors. As a child, I heard from one of my parents' best friends about living through Mengele's infamous selection process at Auschwitz. He haunted my nightmares.

In Germany, of course, the Holocaust will always be in our history and a big stain on our lives.

Those years when Poland was occupied by the Nazis was one of the darkest time in Poland's history.

I've been to Dachau.

One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.