Elie Wiesel

"Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!" the Hungarian police were screaming.
That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic. And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.

SAM: Isn’t this a circus...of sorts?
MENDEL: No. It’s theater. There is a difference.
SAM: Really? What is it?
MENDEL: A circus employs only clowns.
SAM: So does the theater.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides.

Most people thought we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.

BERISH: I distrust miracles. They exist only in books, and books say anything.

When I woke up, it was daylight. That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet had abandoned him.
I went to look for him.
Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn't find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival, to take care of myself...Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded:
"Men to the left! Women to the right!"
Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father's hand press against mine: we were alone.