Quotes January 27, 2024

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
Primo Levi,
chemist, writer, Jewish Holocaust survivor
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day
 
 
 
 
My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
Primo Levi,
chemist, writer, Jewish Holocaust survivor
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day
 
 
 
 
“They brought us into Auschwitz. I could see the chimneys burning, smell the smoke. I did not think about it. They gave us tattoos: 33076. I did not have a name anymore; just a number.” Sara Polonski Zuchowicki, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“Through the steam, I saw a sign: ‘Auschwitz.’ I didn’t know what it was, but a minute later, I found out.”
Henry Meyer, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“I was a little girl. I had done nothing to nobody, and I had to go there.”
Wellesina McCrary, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“One of our friends we knew from the ghetto, Danka Joskowicz — she ran to the barbed wires. I yelled to her, ‘Don’t go to the barbed wires! You will get electrocuted.’ She said, ‘What should I have to live for?’”
Rozalia Nowak Berke, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“The smell was awful — things like that, you do not want to talk about it. Because the pain and memory of suffering comes back to you. You cannot deal with it.”
Eva Gryka Kohan, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“She was beautiful, my little sister. You cannot imagine how beautiful she was. They mustn’t have looked at her. If they had, they would never have killed her. They couldn’t have.” Charlotte Delbo, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“The Holocaust manifested the veneer of civilization so thin and fragile that repetition was possible.”
Sam Kaltman, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“There were five defining moments in my life and as I look back, each provided a lesson which taught me how to live my life, and hopefully teach others as well. [One of them was the] last week of January 1945. Meeting the first Soviet officer after escaping from the Auschwitz death march. Seeing him made me realize what freedom means.”
Werner Coppel, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“My family was in the Warsaw Ghetto. We wrote to them in code for a while and secretly sent them money. Then, we received a letter saying they were living in a cabin in a camp. And then the letters stopped coming. We never heard from them again. I later found out the camp they were in was Auschwitz. I’ve never forgotten them.”
Stephanie Marks, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“The SS guards pushed people with their [rifles] from both sides, and the crowd surged forward. As I searched for my father with my eyes and tried to catch up with him, I felt the firm grip of my mother’s hand on my arm. I knew she and I had to stay together — that going after my father would only separate me from my mother too.”
Anna Brunn Ornstein, Local Survivor
 
 
 
 
“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Viktor Frankl
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor
 
 
 
 
“Everybody, every human being has the obligation to contribute somehow to this world.”
Edith Carter, Local Survivor