France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose.

After all, you're not exactly a nation like all the other nations. You are unique, if only because you are such an ancient people, and because of the way you are spread all over the world and your obvious success in many fields.

When Joan D' Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved British in their country. In the same way, we do not hate the Turks, we love them, but in their country.

I'm not saying that the gas chambers didn't exist. I couldn't see them myself.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

Everyone sees drama from his own perspective. My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.

France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose.