“My good friends – we never try to tell the tale to make people weep. It is too easy. We did not want pity. If we decided to tell the tale - it is because we wanted the world to be a better world . “

Taken from speech given by Prof. Elie Wiesel at the inauguration of the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem  15/3/2005.

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Additional testimonies of survivors can be downloaded below:

"When I look back today on those three years in Germany I am amazed. We took children and turned them into human beings, we published a newspaper; we breathed life into those bones. The great reckoning with the Holocaust? Who bothered about that... you knew the reality, you knew you had no family, that you were alone, that you had to do something. You were busy doing things.”

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 “Then I saw the destruction caused by the war perhaps in a much more realistic way than I had before. The destruction was actually all around me day and night, but only on VE Day did I notice it in the very street I was walking in... Then I understood as a child the enormity of the destruction... and truly, that day of victory is engraved in my memory to this very day as a day of... not as a day of celebration!"

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“I went home. I didn’t have anywhere I could stay... The gatekeeper was living in the house and wouldn’t let me go in... I also had aunts and family. I went to see all their apartments. There were goyim [gentiles] living in every one. They wouldn’t let me in. In one place, one of them said, ‘What did you come back for? They took you away to kill you, so why did you have to come back?’ I decided: I’m not staying here, I’m going”.

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“And again the body, the marvel of the body. It heals with unbelievable speed. I weighed 28 kg. I couldn’t stand on my feet, I crawled. A month later I went home on my own! It is beyond words to describe what the human body is, what a human being is.”

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“Thus, we learned that our fate was much worse than we had expected. Although we had seen a lot and experienced the worst, we still had hoped, still had dreamed. All those days we had struggled to survive, hour after hour, day after day, there had been no time to grasp the enormity of our tragedy. Now everything became clear. No longer were our families waiting for us; no homes to go back to. For us, the victory had come too late, much too late.”

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“And we were taken off the train according to the conditions we were. I could not move. I could not descend from the train. Quite frankly, the only thought came to me most probably they would leave me here as dead. The only thing it appeared to my mind which I repeated so often is "Shma Yisrael, hashem elokeinu, hashem echad". Do I say it now or do I have to wait when I won't be able to say it?”

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“More than anything else I wanted someone to look after me and relieve me of the burden of caring for the girls, so that I wouldn't have to be responsible, so that I would be under an adult's protection. It's hard to explain it, but I wanted someone to look after me, I wanted someone to lean on. It turned out that freedom is relative to a very great extent. Worry about the future weighed heavily on me. We had to build our future, but how does one build a future?"

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* These testimonies and many others can be found in the Holocaust Resource Center