Andrzej Duda Quotes

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

The Nazi gas chambers are but a detail of history

The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important.

So many men have been lost on the Polish front that we need replacements. There are plenty of girls in Germany who will sleep with SS men to provide soldiers for the Fuhrer.

I was allowed for many years of my life to work for the greatest son [Adolf Hitler] that my people produced in their 1,000 year history. I regret nothing.

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

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.

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

I have always had a longing to talk about this Nazi period because my parents' generation wouldn't talk about it after the war at all. From an actor's point of view, it's amazing to play in one year the Nazi Albert Speer and Claus von Stauffenberg.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

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.

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two.

I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

'The Sound of Music' is set in 1938 in Austria at the time of the Anschluss.

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.

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.

My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

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.

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

To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.

I was a student in Germany when Hitler came to power.

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

When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity.