These Auschwitz quotes will inspire you. Auschwitz, Polish Oświęcim, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp and extermination camp.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Auschwitz quotes, Auschwitz sayings, and Auschwitz proverbs.
Best Auschwitz Quotes
- “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ George Santayana
- “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.” ~ Billy Graham
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“Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.” ~ Gunter Grass
- “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.” ~ Ian Kershaw
- “Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.” ~ Pope Francis
- “This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.” ~ Jacob Bronowski
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“There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.” ~ Primo Levi
- “My great lesson from Auschwitz is: whoever wants to dehumanize any other must first be dehumanized himself.
The oppressors are no longer really human, whatever uniform they wear.” ~ Hajo Meyer - “Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.” ~ Primo Levi
- “At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” ~ George Steiner
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“Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
- “I remember those faces of people who were good I saw that. I saw a father who gave his bread to his son and his son gave back the bread to his father. That, to me, was such a defeat of the enemies, will of the enemies, theories of the enemies, aspirations, here [in Auschwitz].” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.” ~ Primo Levi
- “Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.” ~ Primo Levi
- “I’m not alive. People believe memories grow vague, are erased by time, since nothing endures against the passage of time. That’s the difference; time does not pass over me, over us. It doesn’t erase anything, doesn’t undo it. I’m not a live. I died in Auschwitz but no one knows it.” ~ Charlotte Delbo
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“Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.” ~ Edward Bond
- “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
- “Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.” ~ Primo Levi
- “Perhaps someday someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.” ~ Philip Gourevitch
- “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.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Humanity’s become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.” ~ Edward Bond
- “Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered… This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us.” ~ Ariel Sharon
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“No matter what I accomplish, it doesn’t seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.” ~ Art Spiegelman
- “I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.” ~ David Irving
- “It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.” ~ W. H. Auden
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“Jealousy – the Auschwitz of emotions.” ~ Christopher Titus
- “My parents came to this country after World War II, Jews from Czechoslovakia who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. They settled with my sister in rural Ohio in the 1950s, where my dad became the town doctor and I was born.” ~ Julie Salamon
- “I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.” ~ R. J. Hollingdale
- “In Germany, people are saying, “George W. Bush is an asshole. Osama Bin Laden is an asshole.” But then I make jokes about Auschwitz, and how the Germans are lederhosen-wearing sausage freaks – and they hate me for this! And I’m like, “You all are sitting there because you want to relax and have a nice evening, and now you’re pissed because I put also a mirror in front of you.”” ~ Uwe Boll
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“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “I know that elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz – not with gas, but with knives and hatchets.” ~ Meir Kahane
- “Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.” ~ Lewis H. Lapham
- “There is no answer to Auschwitz…To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God’s radiance in the jungles of history.” ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
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“What I’ve learned about comedy people is that they’re defined by the harshest level they’ve been to, their personal Auschwitz.” ~ Bob Saget
- “The Holocaust may belong to history, but it was the price we paid to become a nation. Auschwitz was like a cradle of death that enabled future generations of Israelis to live.” ~ Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof
- “I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
- “. . . since being a Jew not only means that I bear within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow, it is-beyond being a duty-also fear. Every morning when I get up I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I am not even sure if this is not my entire existence. Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of the first blow from a policeman’s fist. Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.” ~ Jean Amery
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“I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn’t. The victims died but the haters are still here.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the “punishment” and those who administered it.” ~ Emil Fackenheim
- “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
- “But there’s something about the simplicity of Auschwitz… there’s just nothing. There’s just photographs, there’s a room full of limbs, a room full of hair, and then you go into the place where the gas chambers were. You walk down these halls and the efficiency of it is so inhuman. The place is so powerful, just for its utter bald, bare simplicity.” ~ David Heyman
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“I prefer a powerful and proud Jewish State that is hated by the entire world than an Auschwitz that is loved by one and all” ~ Meir Kahane
- “Genocide is like a dessert. It is made of the flesh and bones of woman and children, it is sweetened with the blood of the innocent, and it is baked in the ovens of Auschwitz. There were truths to be learnt and there was wisdom to be gained… but there was a price to to be paid as well. You could not brush up against the future and escape unscathed. You could not see into the forbidden and avoid damage to your sight.” ~ Terry Brooks
- “Every nuclear bomb is an Auschwitz waiting to happen.” ~ Patricia Marx
- “One day in Auschwitz I became so dispirited that I couldn’t carry on. They had given me a beating, which wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience. It was on a Sunday, and I said: ‘I can’t get up’. Then my comrades said: ‘That’s impossible, you have to get up, otherwise you’re lost’. They went to a Dutch doctor, who worked with the German doctor. He came to me in the barracks and said: ‘Get up and come to the hospital barracks early tomorrow morning. I’ll talk to the German doctor and make sure you are admitted’. Because of that I survived.” ~ Otto Frank
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“The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.” ~ Ken Livingstone
- “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.” ~ Tom Lantos
- “I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it” ~ Charlotte Delbo
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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.” ~ Errol Morris
- “We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz” ~ Primo Levi
- “No sane person wants hell to exist. No sane person wants evil to exist. But hell is just evil eternalized. If there is evil and if there is eternity, there can be hell. If it is intellectually dishonest to disbelieve in evil just because it is shocking and uncomfortable, it is the same with hell. Reality has hard corners, surprises, and terrible dangers in it. We desperately need a true road map, not nice feelings, if we are to get home. It is true, as people often say, that “hell just feels unreal, impossible.” Yes. So does Auschwitz. So does Calvary.” ~ Peter Kreeft
- “I wanted to say sorry, I wanted to tell her I could not forget the roundup, the camp, Michel’s death, and the direct train to Auschwitz that had taken her parents away forever. Sorry for what? he had retaliated, why should I, an American, feel sorry, hadn’t my fellow countrymen freed France in June 1944? I had nothing to be sorry for, he laughed. I had looked at him straight in the eyes. Sorry for not knowing. Sorry for being forty-five years old and not knowing.” ~ Tatiana de Rosnay
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“There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.” ~ Romain Gary
- “After Auschwitz, I no longer cry at funerals.” ~ Charlotte Delbo
- “For Christians, the first priority may be theological self-understanding. For Jews it is, and after Auschwitz must be, simple safety for their children. In pursuit of this goal, Jews seek – are morally required to seek – independence of other people’s charity. They therefore seek safety – are morally required to seek it – through the existence of a Jewish state. Except among the theologically or humanly perverse, Zionism – the commitment to the safety and genuine sovereignty of the State of Israel – is not negotiable.” ~ Emil Fackenheim
- “I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“You’ll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz.” ~ Helen Fielding
- “I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.” ~ Sacha Baron Cohen
- “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” ~ Newt Gingrich
