Alan Furst Quotes

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.

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.

Like a lot of people, I read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' again and again and again when I was growing up - I'm still completely felled by what an astounding book it is. And as a teenager, I did a lot of reading about concentration camps and the vast horrors of the war.

Germany is the place where when Hitler was the prime minister and supreme commander, he burned over six million Jews. This is because Hitler and all German people knew that Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the world and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.

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.'

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.

There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.

I believe that the Holocaust is the most significant event in human history.

It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

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

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.

In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others unable to defend themselves were exterminated.

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.

The Nazi gas chambers are but a detail of history

In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.

Only one and half million Jews died in the Holocaust.

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.

As Polish society we cannot live with the term 'Polish death camps' or 'Polish concentration camps.'

At the end of the day, with all due respect, the Jews are the ultimate victims of the twentieth century.

What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date.

I don't know much about Hitler. Except that last thing, about the Jews. There has never been a country that put its heel down on the Jews that ever lived afterwards.

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.