Quotes

"Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals."
(Quoted in the introduction to The Sunflower)

"The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it."
(Quoted in the introduction to The Sunflower)

"The only value of nearly five decades of my work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest."
(Quoted in an interview in The Jerusalem Post International Edition, February 5, 1994)

"For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, 'I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.' "
(Quoted in an interview in Penthouse Magazine, 1983)

"The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition."
(Baltimore Jewish Times, February 24, 1989)

"Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations."
(from Vienna Documentation Center)

"We need partners. We cannot fight against the neo-Nazis alone. We need friends. We can win them by telling them their history, by talking about the others, the millions of people other than the Jews, that the Nazis killed. The Holocaust began with the Jewish. But it did not end with the Jews."
(from an interview in the Baltimore Jewish Times, April 3, 1981)

"There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today...they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters."
(from a meeting with President Jimmy Carter reported in The Washington Post, August 6, 1980)

"Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived. The answer I have found for myself (and which need not necessarily be the answer for every survivor) is: I want to be their mouthpiece, I want to keep their memory alive, to make sure the dead live on in that memory." (p. 351)

"I don't think there is any other solution than constantly coming to terms with the past, and learning from it. There is no point in minimizing guilt in order to make it easier for sons and daughters to bear the failure of their fathers and grandfathers, their mothers and grandmothers." (p. 357-8)

"Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology the inferno could erupt anew anywhere." (p. 358)

The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind. (p. 358)

"Violence is like a weed--it does not die even in the greatest drought." (p. 359)

(From Justice not Vengeance (London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989)