Abraham Pais Quotes

Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.

She was a Jew feeder without a question in the world on that man's first night in Molching. She was an arm reacher, deep into a mattress, to deliver a sketchbook to a teenage girl. (84.25)

It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I, who were both Jewish, were going over to identify the remains of a man who was so anti-Semitic.

If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.

The early years of my life were very, very traumatic. It was scary, because any child knew that death was sort of lurking around Europe as far as Jews were concerned.

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.

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.

Hitler aims to destroy all the Jews of Europe. The Jews of Lithuania are fated to be the first in line. Let us not be led as sheep to the slaughter. True, we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murderers is self defense. Brethren, it is better to die fighting like free men than live at the mercy of the murders. Take Courage!

If the Germans want to put the yellow Jewish star in Denmark, I and my whole family will wear it as a sign of the highest distinction.

The persecution of Jews in occupied Poland meant that we could see horror emerging gradually in many ways. In 1939, they were forced to wear Jewish stars, and people were herded and shut up into ghettos. Then, in the years '41 and '42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism. With people behaving like pigs, I felt the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them. There was no choice.

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

I learned a great deal doing Brooklyn Bridge. I was able to take a giant step into the terrible reality that was then. We saw the cattle cars that took folks away. Just knowing it was real, it would be impossible not to feel.

I want to remind people that the Nazis weren't able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn't have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.

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.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

The radio even weren't allowed to say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center in these terrible camps.

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.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

What I'm trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and frankly, I would never want to see that repeated.

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.