Related quotes: From Gehinnom to the middle...

From Gehinnom

From Gehinnom to the middle class
they moved, and they became
a memory collectively of mass
destruction, living flame,
the Holocaust that some of us now call
the Shoah and, like divers,
plumb depths to find their traces and to haul
wrecked hulls that lack survivors.

Leon Wieseltier, addressing The Jewish Center in Los Angeles on Yom Ha'Shoah,5758, asks: 'Who are the survivors? They are the ones who may dispense with collective memory, because they rely on personal memory.' He says of the survivors: 'They went from Gehenna to the middle class...and we must bow our head to their normalcy. For it is a spiritual achievement, one of the greatest spiritual achievements in the history of our people.'

11/7/98

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Related quotes

Irving and Ahmadinejad make the case

I'm glad David Irving is free
He should never have been on trial
Nor jailed on charges in Austria
Of Holocaust denial

I am glad of Ahmadinejad
And his conference on how many
Of my people were murdered
In gas chambers. If any.

Our Shoah should never cease to be
The ground of fierce debate
Its meaning for humanity
Its horror and its weight

They serve us, these provocateurs
To confirm we're hated well
To keep our vigilance, or be
Dispatched again to hell.

Reminding us to speak and witness
Not just for ourselves
But for all the persecuted
Peoples of this earth. (*)

Those who live among survivors
Know each Shoah is unique:
The depths of human cruelty
Are familiar and antique.

And concerning all the History
They would steal and then erase:
Their hatred and our evidence
Will forever make the case.

poem by Frank Bana
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People say we are survivors but I don't see us as survivors of anything. We are still here, there's nothing that's come and tried to dislodge us. We just go about our business.

quote by Dave Mason
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Survivors

...i never meant to break your heart, please forgive me.
No I never meant to hold you back
I never meant to turn away
Please forgive me
I never meant to break your heart
Id give my last breath before I do
Please forgive me
No I never meant to hold you down
I never meant to break your heart
Somehow, somehow
We are survivors
No I never meant to hold you back
I never meant to turn away
Here we are standing here
Survivors in the night
No I never meant to break your heart
Ill always be here for you
Heres my word, take my hand
Survivors in the night
No I never meant to let you down
Id give my last breath before I do
All I ever wanted was to be right here
Survivors in the night
When all is said and done
Well find a way
To put all this behind us
Well find some way
cos you know that I wont be leaving
Yes Im here and I wont be leaving
No I never meant to cause you pain
No I never meant to hurt you
All I want to do now, is to try my best
Survivors in the night
When all is said and done
Well find someday
We can forget all this
Somehow, some way
And as long as Im here
Therell be no worries any more
And all these promises Im making now
Ill hold each day
So dont ever. dont ever, dont forget
That I never, never meant to break your heart
All I ever wanted was to stand beside you
Survivors in the night
We are survivors in the night

song performed by by Phil Collins
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Making Love With Memories

You poked my blurring eye,
Let me lift your mushy breast.

We aged onwards
While you stroked flaccidity –
Recalling decades of
Blood-gorged coming, shuddering to boot.

I kissed a venerable mouth
Crammed with falsities –
Once brilliant keys
Guarded by crimson lips
Washed by a sensual tongue.

And so we writhed in wrinkles,
Tiring effort, and
Memories.

Memory memory memory memory memory
Memory memory memory memory memory
Memory memory memory memory memory
Memory memory memory memory memory

poem by Mark R Slaughter
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There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

quote by Judith Martin
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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We were fortunate enough to have several good books detailing the camps and the women. Some were by the survivors. I also got to talk to some of the women who had been in the camp, survivors.

quote by Glenn Close
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Memory and Oblivion

When all is lost, there is still a memory
From which a new city can be built in a new world.
Those with memory will be wealthy.

Oblivion cures the old wounds, and you must agree,
There is only the past and the future on the path;
When all is lost, there is still a memory.

Memory will save oblivion from a bad reverie;
When the new city is built, it will be an abode,
Bestowed by those with memory to make others wealthy.

Before the temple, in the middle of the city,
Keepers of the fire all abided.
When all is lost, there is still a memory.

Fire will be born from night to be
New light when all knowledge is swallowed
And those with memory will be wealthy.

A new rose will bloom from the dark sea,
A city revived from memory and abroad;
When all is but a memory, there is still memory.
Those with memory will be wealthy.

poem by Dejan Stojanovic
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Genesis Of Genocide

GENESIS OF GENOCIDE

Jewish history comes with homily,
the seder shared by all the family
the best example. When men talk about
the Holocaust the homilies they're taught
homogenize the fate that menaced us
the Jews, with that of gentiles. Genesis
of genocide is changed: the hermeneutic
of revision makes it therapeutic
for those who wish to drive Jews from their land.
"The Jews, " they say, "have like the Nazis sinned,
creating victims just as Nazis did,
replacing Hitler with the settlers' God, "
revisionists exclaiming "Out of order! "
when hearing at the end of every seder
the mantra, "Next year in Jerusalem! "
while they as chauvinists condemn
the Jews, in spite of their thousand years
of blood and sweat and toil, and lots of tears,
as then in Jewish wounds rub salt, declaring
that there were other holocausts, comparing
other genocidal horrors to
what happened to the Jews, a point of view
that totally distorts significance of what,
in Wannsee, Hitler's minions chose to plot,
reducing the Solution that was Final
to a competition's quarterfinal.
The greatest homily of Jewish history
is Jews' survival, a great mystery
which it's impossible to overhype,
based on the theme of their great anthem, hope.

The last part of this poem was inspired by an emotional outburst that I had after Gerald Duchovnay told Linda, Florence Zhou and me about how he teaches students in Texas about the Holocaust by using the Shoah to explain to them "the holocaust in Sudan."
Ed Rothstein ("Memories of Holocaust, Fortified, " NYT,4/22/11) writes from Skokie:
Before the $45 million Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened here two years ago, there was some urgency in completing its 65,000-square-foot building, which now stands so incongruously monumental in the midst of Chicago's suburban landscape. At one time,7,000 Jews bearing the scars of the Holocaust had lived in Skokie with their families, and they were aging. Many had contributed artifacts to the museum; some participated when it was just a storefront on Main Street; some had their oral histories recorded for its exhibition and their lives chronicled in the institution's imposing companion book, "Memory and Legacy."…..
If we want to find a lesson in the events, for example, is it that individuals should not be bystanders or that nations should not be appeasers? Is the lesson that everybody should have a social conscience, or that a different kind of political action is needed when such forces emerge? Was the Holocaust a product of intolerance or an expression of more specific archetypal hatreds?
One of the challenges faced by Holocaust museums as survivors die is to understand their experience by seeing it through more than their eyes, to examine the past without homogenizing it with platitudes, to offer history without homily.
This poem echoes one that I wrote on 2/17/09, inspired by a statement by the Lubavitcher Rebbe:
TOMORROW MORNING, EARLY

"Will there be another holocaust? "
they asked the Rebbe of Lubavitch.
For an answer he was never lost.
"Of course there will be. Man is savage."

"When will this happen? " they inquired.
"Morgen in der frih, " he said,
Tomorrow morning, early, has transpired,
and millions are already dead.

It's happened in Rwanda and Sudan,
as in silence we looked on.
It couldn't happen here, we say. It can,
and millions more will soon be gone.

Long ago an interviewer asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, if he believed the Holocaust could ever happen in America. "Morgen in der frih, " was his reply, Yiddish words that mean: "Early tomorrow morning."

11/6/12 #11803

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Come As You Are (LP Version)

Come As You Are"
Come, as you are. As you were.
As I want you to be. As a friend.
As a friend. As an old enemy. Take your time.
Hurry up. The choice is yours. Don't be late.
Take a rest. As a friend. As a old memory, memory, memory, memory.
Come. Dowsed in mud. Soaked in bleach.
As I want you to be. As a trend. As a friend.
As an old memory, memory, memory, memory.
And I swear that I don't have a gun.
No I don't have a gun. No I don't have a gun.
Memory, memory, memory, memory (don't have a gun).
And I swear that I don't have a gun.
No I don't have a gun. No I don't have a gun.
No I don't have a gun. No I don't have a gun. Memory, memory...

song performed by by Nirvana
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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War in America

In this sad country there will be a bitter war,
Not from foreign peoples who would attack us,
But between our very rich and hopeless poor.

There’ll be death and destruction as the war rages,
While wealthy choke the waning middle class.
As history repeats the tragic Dark Middle Ages.

When the middle class has only bitterness and hate,
Opportunities for peace will then be too late.
When they realize that the rich will never yield,
They’ll take their hopes and causes to the battle field.

The rich will have the best arms that money can buy.
The power of the poor will be in their angry numbers
And their desire to effect changes in their lots or die.

Man can go to the moon, create an internet, cure cancer.
But put rich politicians with no conscience in a room;
They’ll languish and war in America will be the answer.

poem by Gregory Huyette
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The issues that matter to me are the social safety nets for people, health care, middle-class concerns. We need to take care of the middle class and the poor in our country.

quote by Tim McGraw
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Memory (Thy Shall)

Thy shall not slumber,
Thy shall not wake,
A memory so fragile,
So delicate it may break.

A memory so lost,
So unwanted it tears apart,
Until it dies,
It shall go back to thy start.

A powerful memory it may be,
Or a memory that shall be overlooked,
Thy one shall let it see,
How thy memory is like a book.

But how powerful thy memory is,
It has to be stronger than a good memory,
A memory that has passion and feeling,
A memory that has greatness and becoming myself, I, and me.

Until that kind of memory is shown,
Thy memory shall be looked upon near and far,
Thy memory shall be kept hidden,
Until it shall be who we are.

Thy shall not slumber,
Thy shall not wake,
A memory so fragile,
so delicate it may break.

poem by Alicia Meyers
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My Childhood World Was Once The Only World

My childhood world was once the only world
Years later when it exists only in my memory
It has become one of many worlds the Jewish people have known
In their long journey-

Its idiom and characters its look and its feel
Its small dreams and distinct languages
Are gone-

All I thought once the whole of the real world
Is only a small part of what has gone on far longer than it
And all these worlds together too
Are not the whole of the universe –

Yet my memory of this world makes it larger and larger
And for me still it is in the center of space and time –

One day soon when I am gone
No one will know it as I have-
Some traces of it will remain in the minds of other witnesses
And when they are gone
This world too will have only a remnant of it
Remaining as words.

poem by Shalom Freedman
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There Are Those Who Have Known Daily Horrors

THERE ARE THOSE WHO HAVE KNOWN DAILY HORRORS

I have had a relatively easy life-
There are those who have known daily horrors
Beyond those any human being should ever have to imagine
I think of the last generation of survivors of the Shoah
Slowly dying out now
Taking with them their memories of loved ones murdered before their eyes
Of incredible tortures and cruelty
Of horrible partings and endless humiliations-

I think of these people my fellow Jews
And wonder why God allowed it to happen to them
And what it all means-

I certainly don't know-

I have had a relatively easy life
With of course my own griefs and sorrows and failings
But nothing at all like what they went through -

Oh God what is this whole thing about anyway?
And why did You let the Nazi Germans and their Austrian Polish Lithuanian Slovak Romanian Hungarian Dutch French helpers
Do it to them?

Why families with tens of members murdered
Why the children?
The incredible cruelties and humiliations and horrors
Why?

poem by Shalom Freedman
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For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.

quote by John J. Sweeney
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I live and will die by you

It is my memory of you
That kindles my spirit.
It is the same memory
That swindles my heart.

My head is full with your thought.
My bed is sore from the same thought.

Day by day pain aggravates;
The same way does my plight.

It is my memory of you
That gives me joy.
It is the same memory
That sends me to sorrow.

You throw on me the day and the night.
I enjoy both in different lights.

I cherish you in my memory;
I may perish from the same memory
29.11.2000, Pmdi

poem by Rm. Shanmugam Chettiar
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Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

quote by Arianna Huffington
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.

quote by Warren Buffett
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Memory Lane

People ask me What you doin' son
You're gonna drive yourself insane
You'll never find the sunshine
When you're followin' the rain
Seems like I'd take a new road
After all these years
But I wind up on the same old trail of tears

I'm still walkin' down Memory Lane
'Cuz I know I'll be runnin' into you
Reminiscin' through the pain
Recallin' things that we used to do
I'm lookin' up an old flame
Down on Heartbreak Avenue
I'm still walkin' down Memory Lane
'Cuz I know I'll be runnin'into you

I hate the way I loved you
But my mind keeps goin' back
My train of thought just won't get off
That same old worn out track
It's an every night occasion me and your memory meet
On that endless lonely street of broken dreams

I'm still walkin' down Memory Lane
Cuz I know I'll be runnin' into you
Reminiscin' through the pain
Recallin' things that we used to do
I'm lookin' up an old flame
Down on Heartbreak Avenue
I'm still walkin' down Memory Lane
'Cuz I know I'll be runnin'/Into you

Here she comes now
I'm still walkin'
Down Memory Lane
I'm still walkin'
Down Memory Lane
I'm still walkin'
Down Memory Lane
Lord

song performed by by Tim McGraw from Tim McGraw
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A Boon Of Freedom!

Who has really the boon of freedom in the world?
Plants, animals, men or birds want freedom forever;
Peace and happiness everybody loves to enjoy here.
The joy everyone enjoys is not ready to sacrifice ever;
The strongest dominates to maintain its freedom ever.
Survival depends upon the favourable situation only;
Life goes on for all living beings big or small somehow.
Living on land, swimming on sea and flying in air there’s
Survival of many beings in the world striving for satiation.
Land survivors cannot live in the sea and fly in the air;
Survivors of both on land and sea cannot fly in the sky;
Living on land man can survive on sea but not in the sky;
Of all the creatures only sea gulls and albatross survive
On land, sea and sky as they only have boon of freedom!

poem by Ramesh T A
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