#holocaust quotes

[quotesfrommyreading]

The line most often quoted from Frank's diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls – and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. The gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank's hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren't. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren't.

  —  People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Dara Horn)

[historicity-was-already-taken]

"In these last few months of war, from January to May 1945, the inmates of the German concentration camps died in very large numbers. Perhaps three hundred thousand people died in German camps during this period, from hunger and neglect. The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler. As the Jews and Poles of Warsaw knew, and as Vasily Grossman and the Red Army soldiers knew, this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar. The Red Army liberated all of these places, and all of the bloodlands. All of the death sites and dead cities fell behind an iron curtain, in a Europe Stalin made his own even while liberating it from Hitler ... The ashes of Warsaw were still warm when the Cold War began."

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, 311-312

[mieczyhale]

you're so caught up in pretending to be a good person you forgot to not do antisemitism

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Liberation of Auschwitz

* * * *

“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.”

From "If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi

[somerabbitholes]

maus, art spiegelman

[disruptiveempathy]

[Ominously,] a high percentage of Jews seeking refuge in the forest were murdered by partisans. A group of Jewish women was killed by a partisan band just after having crossed the Nieman River into the supposed safety of partisan territory. Such actions were commonly tolerated by mid-level Soviet officials, who rationalized that such things happen in wartime. Even when Slavic partisans took a stand against anti-Semitism, some local officials were willing to turn a blind eye toward offenders. For example, in the spring of 1942, the commander of the 2nd Belorussian Partisan Brigade, M. I. D'iachkov, arrested another partisan commander, Astreiko, who before becoming a partisan had been the head of a local police unit that had allegedly executed 300 Jews. When Vitebsk party officials asked D'iachkov why he had arrested an 'honorable person' (as Astreiko was referred to), D'iachkov replied, ‘He shot Jews, this honorable person.’ According to D'iachkov, he was ordered to release Astreiko 'in order to develop the partisan movement,' leading him to wonder 'what kind of partisan movement' this might be. Evidently some officials did not believe the execution of Jews sufficient reason to remove a partisan commander; it is not surprising that other partisans reported to Moscow that 'anti-Semitism [in the movement] is quite developed.' [...] Yet it would be a mistake to evaluate the relationship between Jews and partisans solely on the basis of anti-Semitism. First, not all gentiles were anti-Semitic, and many risked, and paid with, their lives to save Jews. Leonid Smilovitsky has chronicled the operations of Belorussian partisans who saved Jews in 1941 and 1942 by supporting breakouts from ghettos, liberating prisoners from the police, or escorting civilians across the front. Others were willing to help 'their' (local) Jews even while turning strangers away. Even when the gentile population wanted to help, the Nazi occupation regime meant there was little enough for one's own family, let alone for refugees in hiding. It is not surprising that competition for food and other scarce resources aggravated already tense relations.

—Kenneth Slepyan, from "The Soviet Partisan Movement and the Holocaust," published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

[israelisong]

Elie Wiesel quotes .

How relevant is it for today ?

[speakofthedebbie]

whats this? hazbin hotel incorrect quotes from my phone that i specifically added to docs and didnt post? oh the misery indeed

summer school conversations saga (yes @starryeyeddreamer21 i was inspired by your collection of group therapy quotes) [that was very lucifer coded of my math teacher]

lucifer: you all have great taste, but you forgot the best food of all: pancakes

---(they wouldnt really say this but i just need you to see this quote. yes i did specifically choose them cuz they were the closest to that date)

angel: what are your thoughts on the holocaust? alastor: awesome genocide, 10/10

---(them everyday frfr)

lucifer: you must think im stupid alastor: you are

---(vaggie is a man hater frfr) [last ssc quote]

vaggie: testicles are so annoying angel: mine too

---(bros tryna become drake pt 2)

valentino: so when parents touch their kids its "cute" and "comforting" but when i do it its "perverse" and "a crime"? smh, double standards vox: val what the fuck velvette: are you trying to get cancelled

---

angel: you guys fight like more than a married couple. you fight like a married couple that shoulda divorced like a decade ago but are still together for the kids *gestures to charlie* lucifer: that is a... alastor: shockingly accurate assesment

---(i altered the next one cuz that last sentence wasnt really working) [im almost certain i borrowed the why alastor doesnt sleep hc from someone dont remember who tho]

lucifer: why wont you sleep with me :( alastor: its needless downtime that entails a revolting amount of vulnerability! it was harder to avoid in life but now i doubt sleep deprivation will be the metaphorical nail in the coffin that finally puts my soul to rest lucifer: well i want cuddles. so. your opinion is invalid

oki thats all of em (not really but the rest arent really post worthy)

[thetimelordbatgirl]

I mean, last I checked, engaging in holocaust denialism in the name of being a bigot to trans people because for some reason that's J.K's life goal now, is already pretty much rock fucking bottom- but something tells me even she has the brain cells to not call that spectacular.

[magnetic-regent-magneto]

-- small Max Edits. Magneto:Testament & X-Men Red. ||

"Rule Number One. Fight back and they will stomp in your head" they told him.

The fact that Magneto wanted to be romantic and a hero when he was just Max, before Auschwitz. He wanted to impress the girl, he wanted to help his family and do good. He fought the bullies and stood up for others.

Then he learns that the world is no place for heroes and no one will fight for it. Perhaps, you grow up to be the person you needed when you were a child.

Sometimes, I wonder if small Max would be scared of big Max.

I will never forget that Jean felt such terror when meeting small Max that she got third-person trauma.

[lumi-waxes-poetic]

Some Tolkien affirmations to help you along when the darkness seems too much and everything seems lost

"The world may be grim, but there's always hope. Even in the darkest of days, there may be one bright star to guide you."

—Elrond

"It is not despair, but only the handing on of a torch."

—Aragorn

"The greatest good returns at last to those who share it freely."

—Gandalf

"It is not by sorrow and by suffering that we grow. It is by the choice we make when faced with sorrow and suffering."

—Fëanor

"The world is changed because I am in it."

—Bilbo Baggins

bonus round (Tolkien never actually wrote this — Peter Jackson did — but it's a good fucking line and Tolkien would have 100% agreed with it):

“Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love."

— Gandalf

[quotesfrommyreading]

The East is also where the Nazis had most vigorously pursued the Holocaust, where they set up the vast majority of ghettoes, concentration camps, and killing fields. Snyder notes that Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many of those managed to flee. Hitler's vision of a “Jew-free” Europe could only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic States, and eventually Hungary and the Balkans which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe. Most of the rest were taken to the region to be murdered. The scorn the Nazis held for all Eastern Europeans was closely related to their decision to take the Jews from all over Europe to the East for execution. There, in a land of subhumans, it was possible to do inhuman things.

  —  Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum)

[bloghrexach]

🤔 … even criticism of the Israeli government, no matter what they do … makes one an ‘antisemite’!!

“The working definition of antisemitism, also called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism or IHRA definition, is a non-legally binding statement on what antisemitism is, that reads:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."

Accompanying the working definition, but of disputed status, are 11 illustrative examples whose purpose is described as guiding the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) in its work, seven of which relate to criticism of the Israeli government.

As such, pro-Israeli organizations have been advocates for the worldwide legal adoption of the definition.” … cheeky, right? … 🤔

[liberashen]

“Most Jews who know their own history see how relentlessly the Israeli government is attempting to turn Palestinians into the “new Jews,” patterned on Jews of the Holocaust era, as if someone must hold that place in order for Jews to avoid it.”

– Alice Walker

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Let me recall that which was perhaps the deepest experience I had in the concentration camp. The odds of surviving the camp were no more than 1 to 20, as can easily be verified by exact statistics. It did not even seem possible, let alone probable, that the manuscript of my first book which I had hidden in my coat when I arrived at Auschwitz, would ever be rescued. Thus, I had to undergo and to overcome the loss of my spiritual child. And now it seemed as if nothing and no one would survive me; neither a physical nor a spiritual child of my own! So I found myself confronted with the question whether under such circumstances my life was ultimately void of any meaning. Not yet did I notice that an answer to this question with which I was wrestling so passionately was already in store for me, and that soon thereafter this answer would be given to me. This was the case when I had to surrender my clothes and in turn inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript, I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the main Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. How should I have interpreted such a “coincidence” other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper? A bit later, I remember, it seemed to me that I would die in the near future. In this critical situation, however, my concern was different from that of most of my comrades. Their question was, “Will we survive the camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning.” The question which beset me was, “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.”

—Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning (1962)

[Robert Scott Horton]

[snoopylovessoup]