Holocaust Remembrance Day begins on April 27 and ends in the evening of April 28, each year. The day was designated in 1953, decreed by a law signed by the Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion and the President of Israel Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. The original day of remembrance was April 19 and served as the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which served as the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. However the date was later changed due to scheduling conflicts with the Jewish holiday of Passover, Holocaust Remembrance Day was then moved to April 27, which is a mere 8 days before Israeli Independence Day. The day commemorates the victims of the genocide that resulted in the annihilation of 6 million Jews, 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, 220,000 Roma Gypsies, and nearly 15,000 homosexual men by the Nazi party lead by Adolf Hitler. While no amount of words can ever begin to encompass the horror and despair endured by all the victims of the Holocaust, Latin Times has collected 16 quotes from Holocaust survivors, authors and historians in order to honor the victims and remember their courage and strength.
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” – Elie Wiesel
“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
“...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.” – John Boyne, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”
“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
“Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” – Yehuda Bauer
“As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” – Iris Chang, “The Rape of Nanking”
“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, “Daniel’s Story”
“And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live.” - Władysław Szpilman, “The Pianist”
“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
“Consider why Germany, fighting a war on two fronts, desperate for fuel and materiel of every sort, would bother to load millions of Jews on railroad cars and transport them hundreds, even thousands, of miles to concentration camps. Camps built specifically to house them, where they would be fed, clothed, even tattooed so they could be inventoried...just to kill them.” – Edjar J. Steele, “Defensive Racism”
“Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.” – Corrie Ten Boom, “The Hiding Place”
“I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.” – Diet Eman, “Things We Couldn’t Say”
“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, “Saving Children: Diary Of A Buchenwald Survivor And Rescuer”
“Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love.” - Władysław Szpilman, “The Pianist”
“If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?” – Jodi Picoult, “The Storyteller”
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” – Elie Wiesel
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