Elie Wiesel Holocaust Quotations

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

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.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

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

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Today there isn't a university where they don't have special courses [Jewish studies or Holocaust studies], hundreds and hundreds of universities, young people today want to know more than their elders did, much more, and therefore I am very optimistic about young people.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself

It is true that not all the victims were Jews, but all the Jews were victims

The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word.

The impact of the holocaust on believers as well as unbelievers, on Jews as well as Christians, has not yet been evaluated. Not deeply, not enough.

I was there when God was put on trial....At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than 'guilty'. It means 'He owes us something'. Then we went to pray.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -healthy virile hate- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.