Voices of Resilience: Inspirational Quotes from Holocaust Survivors

"Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere."

- Elie Wiesel

"For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory."

- Elie Wiesel

"The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance."

- Viktor Frankl

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

- Martin Niemöller

"Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."

- Yehuda Bauer

"Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness."

- Elie Wiesel

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe."

- Elie Wiesel

"Action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all."

- Elie Wiesel

"For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences."

- Elie Wiesel

"For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."

- Elie Wiesel

"[Albert] Camus said, ‘Where there is no hope, one must invent hope.’ It is only pessimistic if you stop with the first half of the sentence and just say, There is no hope. Like Camus, even when it seems hopeless, I invent reasons to hope."

- Elie Wiesel

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

- Viktor Frankl

"Then for the first time, we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains."

- Primo Levi

"When we come together to listen and learn from each other, there is hope. This is where human dignity begins, where peace begins, where dignity begins: in a small gesture of respect, in listening."

- Elie Wiesel

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

- Viktor E. Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

- Viktor Frankl

"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

"Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."

- Primo Levi

"Get it all on record now—get the films, get the witnesses—because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened."

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe."

- Elie Wiesel

"Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

- Elie Wiesel

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim."

- Elie Wiesel

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation."

- Elie Wiesel

"And now, a prayer—or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive."

- Elie Wiesel

"To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."

- Elie Wiesel

"Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."

- Anne Frank

"Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald."

- Jack Werber

"They said separate: children, men, women, and the older people. Me and my sister were separated with the young ones. I had my little sister in my arms, and one of the SS came over and picked up my little sister and gave her to my stepmother. He pushed me to the other side."

- Bella Benozio Ouziel

"They brought us into Auschwitz. I could see the chimneys burning, smell the smoke. I did not think about it. They gave us tattoos: 33076. I did not have a name anymore; just a number."

- Sara Polonski Zuchowicki

"I was a little girl. I had done nothing to nobody, and I had to go there."

- Wellesina McCrary

"One of our friends we knew from the ghetto, Danka Joskowicz — she ran to the barbed wires. I yelled to her, ‘Don’t go to the barbed wires! You will get electrocuted.’ She said, ‘What should I have to live for?’"

- Rozalia Nowak Berke

"The smell was awful — things like that, you do not want to talk about it. Because the pain and memory of suffering comes back to you. You cannot deal with it."

- Eva Gryka Kohan

"She was beautiful, my little sister. You cannot imagine how beautiful she was. They mustn’t have looked at her. If they had, they would never have killed her. They couldn’t have."

- Charlotte Delbo

"The Holocaust manifested the veneer of civilization so thin and fragile that repetition was possible."

- Sam Kaltman

"There were five defining moments in my life and as I look back, each provided a lesson which taught me how to live my life, and hopefully teach others as well. [One of them was the] last week of January 1945. Meeting the first Soviet officer after escaping from the Auschwitz death march. Seeing him made me realize what freedom means."

- Werner Coppel

"My family was in the Warsaw Ghetto. We wrote to them in code for a while and secretly sent them money. Then, we received a letter saying they were living in a cabin in a camp. And then the letters stopped coming. We never heard from them again. I later found out the camp they were in was Auschwitz. I’ve never forgotten them."

- Stephanie Marks

"The SS guards pushed people with their [rifles] from both sides, and the crowd surged forward. As I searched for my father with my eyes and tried to catch up with him, I felt the firm grip of my mother’s hand on my arm. I knew she and I had to stay together — that going after my father would only separate me from my mother too."

- Anna Brunn Ornstein

"Everybody, every human being has the obligation to contribute somehow to this world."

- Edith Carter

"The world can be a better place if there’s love, tolerance, and humility."

- Irena Sendler

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"Today, looking back on the six years of that war, I realize that the worst thing I endured in the Holocaust was not the hunger, the cold, or the beatings; it was the humiliation. It was almost impossible to bear the helplessness of unjustified humiliation. Helplessness becomes linked with that dishonor."

- Israel Meir Lau

"Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."

- Viktor Frankl

"But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer."

- Viktor E. Frankl

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true."

- Viktor Frankl

"In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."

- Viktor Frankl

"What is to give light must endure burning."

- Viktor Frankl

"Through the steam, I saw a sign: ‘Auschwitz.’ I didn’t know what it was, but a minute later, I found out."

- Henry Meyer

"We demand that people don’t deny the Holocaust, and we can’t ignore the tragedy of another nation."

- Reuven Rivlin

"We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That's all we know for sure. We can't create a new species or a new world. That's been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries. What are our choices? We can despair and curse, and change nothing. We can choose evil like our enemies have done and create a world based on hate. Or we can try to make things better."

- Carol Matas

"If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example."

- Anne Frank

"In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit."

- Anne Frank

"I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!"

- Anne Frank

"Holocaust Museum Houston is an important educational center to remind people that hatred, apathy and prejudice can lead to disasters, like the Holocaust, and that ALL must learn to live in peace."

- Dr. Anna Steinberger

"It is important to understand that big changes, the kind that transform the way human beings handle being human, start with small changes."

- Naomi Warren, z”l

"The attempt to develop a sense of humour and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living."

- Viktor Frankl

"their eyes that remember. We are their voice that cries out. The dreadful scenes flow from their dead eyes to our open ones. And those scenes will be remembered exactly as they happened."

- Shimon Peres

"Holocaust Museum Houston is the House of Love, because you remove hate from people’s heart and replace it with love through education."

- Bill Morgan

"Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks."

- Jane Yolen

"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior."

- Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

"So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

- Viktor Frankl

"As a survivor I am proud of Holocaust Museum Houston, dedicated to teach and show the devastating results of Hate, Bullying and Discrimination."

- Ben Waserman

"I was able to come forward as a Survivor because of Holocaust Museum Houston. I never talked about it until the Museum gave me the courage."

- Rosine Chappell

"The Museum bears witness that ordinary people were capable of extraordinary deeds that made the survival of a little girl like me possible."

- Chaja Verveer

"Holocaust Museum Houston keeps the memory of the 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children, and other innocent victims alive."

- Bill Orlin

"I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me."

- Diet Eman

"Change isn’t happening fast enough for men. You must make it happen faster. When you see injustice happening, stand up!"

- Walter Kase, z”l

"What I want you to take away from my life story is just how important it is to defend your freedom, at all costs. Experience has shown me that if you lose your freedom, you are condemned to fail."

- Leon Schgrin

"I am not concerned about your liking or disliking me…All I ask is that you respect me as a human being."

- Jackie Robinson

"It is our responsibility to inspire future generations to stand up against hatred, prejudice, and evil."

- Kisha and Jason Itkin

"Holocaust Museum Houston has a sacred task – to ensure that what happened never happens again."

- Joan and Stanford Alexander

"Supporting the Museum is a reminder to all of the dangers that prejudice, hatred and violence brought during the Holocaust."

- Rhona and Bruce Caress

"We share the Museum’s mission to leave a mark of remembrance, in the hope of peace, tolerance and understanding to all who enter its doors."

- Sue and Lester, z”l Smith

"I certainly think that another Holocaust can happen again. It did already occur: think of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia."

- Miep Gies

"Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness."

- Lawrence N. Powell

"[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm, I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number."

- Jean Amery

"The future starts today, not tomorrow."

- Pope John Paul II

"The lessons of the Holocaust are not Jewish, but universal. And unfortunately, the lessons remain relevant today."

- Sunni and Gary Markowitz

"People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren't therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn’t go there to learn. One becomes very clear about these things. What are you asking for? Forgiveness for her? Or do you just want to feel better yourself? My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis, please. Go to literature. Don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing."

- Bernhard Schlink

"Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes."

- Fern Schumer Chapman

"Memory is like throwing a stone into water. There are ripples."

- Marie Doduck