So what are we doing with the Holocaust,
we're doing what the biblical Jews did
with the story of the exodus.
There was an Egypt and there was a Pharoah,
there was a Moses and there was the crossing of the sea,
and the struggle to go through the desert to the promised land.
That's the story of freedom.
That is a particular story that happened to a particular people
but has the universal characteristics of saying
we must now work to enhance human dignity,
to enlarge human decency.
To teach people of the importance of human equality,
and the majesty and sacredness of each individual human life.
It's a plea, a plea set on the ashes of millions.
And that's why we're commanded to remember
that we were slaves in Egypt.
Not to enslave other people
but to make sure that other people, what?
Not enslaved.
So that's the task of this generation.
And that's what survivors are bequeathing to us,
as they're beginning to leave this stage of human history.
♪ [Somber Music ] ♪
Survivors tell us their story not because they want to weaken us,
not because they want pity,
but because they want to strengthen us in our commitment
to human dignity and human decency
and our commitment to the sanctity and sacredness of all human life.
♪ [Somber Music ] ♪
After they finish bequeathing to us their testimony,
then the question is what are we to do with it?
Now it’s up to us.
♪ [Somber Music ] ♪
When we moved to Prague from the town
of Olomouc in Czechoslovakia when I was two,
I don’t remember any of that.
But my early memories probably go back
to the time that I was five,
maybe four and a half, five years old in Prague.
We lived in an apartment in Prague,
an apartment house that belonged to my grandparents,
my maternal grandparents.
And I remember the apartment
and I remember the music
that my parents would play on the piano,
and at that point I was about five years old.
So my memories go back to that period
of all the very comfortable life.
The earliest memories.
Well, I have some pictures around here
of me sitting on a bicycle about this high,
and the nurse holding up the bicycle
so it wouldn’t take off on its own.
That must have been what, maybe 1925, 1926.
It seemed pretty normal
growing up in Breslau at that particular time.
I didn’t realize that disaster was looming.
Germany was thoroughly unprepared for the defeat of World War I.
It hadn’t lost a battle.
And Germany was defeated essentially
because it ran out of certain types of essentials.
It ran out of the essentials of rubber,
it ran out of the essentials of gasoline,
it ran very low on food.
And they blamed it on the Jews.
Hitler exploited that, and he used that as a modality of saying
not only are Jews bad, but they’re dangerous.
He had written Mein Kampf in 1924 and ’25,
told us what he was looking for,
told us that he was looking for a world that was racially realigned
and a world that was realigned geographically,
looking for inner conquest and German expansionism
and looking to create the master race.
And in retrospect, what’s clear is that Hitler meant what he said,
and he said what he meant.
The German version in the years of the 1930’s
alleging that the Jews are world conquerors,
would go out to conquer the world if they could,
that the Jews are criminals, that the Jews are parasites,
all these themes can be found in the writings of Martin Luther,
Jüden und iren Lügen published in 1535.
A book like Mein Kampf, any one of those texts,
is going to tap into deep seeded discontent and fears.
In some ways, Mein Kampf could not have been successful
if there weren’t other like deep rooted social problems at that time
that provided the fertile field for this abhorrent anti-Semitism to then take root.
Added to that, of course, are the more famous measures,
marking the Jews with a star, compulsory ghettoization,
all of which have origins in canon law,
Cianites and decisions of the Church.
There is thus a great reservoir of experience to draw upon,
and the remarkable thing about bureaucracy everywhere
is that they invent as little as possible and use as much of the past as they can.
When the Nazi forces took over,
within a few months of that moment
there was heavy anti-Semitism throughout.
We heard roars of people,
our neighbors and friends and people I’ve known my life.
My mother was born in the same home I was born,
and you know, that’s been in the family
I don’t know for how many generations.
And people were shouting,
you know, “Heil Hitler” and “Long live the Fuehrer”
and people were waving flags with swastikas.
There was a feeling of complete betrayal.
Suddenly you were home and you were not home anymore.
I mean, look at the First World War, you know?
I mean, Jewish people ran to volunteer with the hope that
once we are in that mess together we would become brothers.
And then the war was lost, and whose fault was it?
The Jews, of course.
Religious anti-Semitism essentially said,
in the words of, Raul Hilberg once put it very succinctly.
He said the Christian rulers said you have no right
to live among us as Jews, therefore convert.
The political leaders who followed said
you have no right to live among us as Jews, therefore leave.
And the Nazis said you have no right to live among us as Jews,
therefore we will kill you.
The difference between Hitler and Roosevelt
was that both of them came to office
where gross national product had declined by 40 percent.
You had 25 percent unemployment.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned the nation one toward each other,
and Hitler turned the nation one against the other.
And the Jews became the ultimate scapegoat for that.
And he was a charismatic leader who had the ability to persuade,
who had a sense of the power of oratory.
Some people voted for Hitler because he was an anti-Semite.
Other people voted for Hitler
despite the fact that he was an anti-Semite.
They figured that they could accomplish
part of their agenda through Adolph Hitler.
They believed first of all that they were wise enough,
experienced enough, sophisticated enough to control Hitler,
and secondly that the majesty of office
would force Hitler to the sector.
Neither of them proved correct.
No hate-based project that singles out a group for persecution
can succeed full blown in one single step.
There has to be multiple steps,
and those steps have to be incremental.
They banned Jewish from going to,
Jewish kids going to German schools and Jewish businesses
and doctors couldn’t practice, lawyers couldn’t practice,
any of the things that made life a possibility.
All these kinds of movements operate under the assumption
that there is some sort of ethereal white purity that’s out there
that needs to be protected, that cannot be adulterated
by these sort of threatening hordes, the darker others.
And he came and had lunch with my father and said Fritz,
that was my father’s name, this is no place for Jews to be.
He wasn’t Jewish.
You got to get out of here.
That night, while he was in the hospital after the operation,
the Nazis invaded the hospital as well as the homes.
They burned the synagogues, you know,
there was a whole big uprising kind of thing.
And they came into the hospital
and took every one of the patients and lined them up outside.
And one of the bums hit my father over the head
with a rifle butt and that killed him.
So all of the ills that one might encounter in society,
all the dissatisfactions that exist within society and,
you know, you live in a free democratic society,
there are going to be problems.
So hate provides an overly convenient scapegoat,
a way to sort of project all those ills
onto the bodies of a different other.
Even the propaganda could rest upon earlier conceptions and writings,
going back in this case to the 16th century.
Nothing new here.
The newness came with the Final Solution itself,
because all of these measures supported church policy,
which was in the first instance the conversion of the Jews.
To make their life miserable sufficiently
so that they would see the light and become Christians.
But the Church could not go further than that.
The Church would not kill, for then it would lose its basic objective.
And that’s the reason that when it came to the Final Solution,
the Germans had to become inventors and innovators on their own.
For Nazi anti-Semitism, the Jews were defined racially
based on the religion of their grandparents.
Based on the nature of the blood they carried within them,
so you could be a believing Christian,
the Church might define you as a Christian,
the state, the Nazi state would define you as a Jew.
The Nazis regarding Jews as a cancer on society
so they had to be cut out of literally,
by the end of what they were doing, cut out of the world.
And consequently, they felt that they were healing Germany
by getting rid of the Jews.
My youth finished in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland.
The whole building started to shake and rattle.
I thought maybe it was an earthquake or something,
which I never experienced, but it was strange
and I ran to the window and I saw tanks rolling down the street.
After the Half-tracks there were the Wermacht,
the foot soldiers, with their shiny black boots.
Did I know what to expect?
No. You hear this terrible screaming in this neighbor’s apartment,
and everyone screaming, “Our baby! Our baby! Don’t hurt our baby!”
You can see he was enjoying this, with a smirk on his face.
He was sort of smiling.
He smashes the baby’s head into the door post, killing it instantly.
The difficult part of leaving Germany was not leaving Germany,
it was finding a place to go to.
The United States, England, France, Europe,
all these places had cut off visas for people to come.
Ghettos were transitory, a transitional phenomenon.
Neither the German nor the Jew understood that going in.
But ghettos for the Germans was a place to contain the Jews until,
until ultimately became clear until the infrastructure
for their destruction was developed.
They first wanted to gather the Jews in a ghetto
so they should be able to have an easier time to lay hands on them.
Unfortunately, as I said before, my father was so successful in business
that he could not think of abandoning the business and fleeing.
So he sent me and my mother and my sister
back to Krakow under the German occupation.
This was a tragic mistake which cost us our life.
When Jewish apartments were closed,
the furniture was taken over and was distributed
after the bombings began to the bombed out Germans.
The furniture of Jews in Belgium and in Netherlands and in France
was taken hold of by Alfred Rosenberg and which he operated in the West
and were shipped to deserving German families, bombed out, etc.
Incidentally, some portion of this furniture went to railroad employees
in recognition of the services that the railroads were rendering
in transporting the Jews under these difficult conditions.
And interestingly enough, very little furniture was used from Poland,
because it was in such horrible condition
that it wasn’t fit for Germans, quite obviously.
So when we were kicked out of the apartment by the SS,
we had to move to another apartment in Prague.
We were there for, I don’t know, six months,
maybe six to eight months, and then we were transported to,
to the ghetto of Terezin, or in German it was called Terezinstadt.
The conditions at our ghetto were terrible.
We had one little room to live in, all of us.
To eat, to sleep, just one little room in the ghetto.
You could not live a normal life in a ghetto.
There was no schooling, no formal schooling.
Food was highly limited.
You couldn’t buy any clothes, you couldn’t buy shoes,
you couldn’t go out and buy an apple
or a piece of fresh fruit or fresh vegetables.
So Terezin was a walled city, was a ghetto.
Nobody could get out.
We had no contact with the outside world.
We were totally isolated from the rest of the Czech population.
This was really the beginning of my Holocaust,
of the Holocaust for me.
Losing my home, disrupting my family,
not being able to strike any roots anywhere.
If one is going to occupy all Europe,
if one is going to have a world war,
and if one is going to do all of these things
in a single space of time, ten years, twelve years,
what, what are you going to do with the Jewish population?
As one German SS Major said in the Lodz ghetto in the middle of 1941,
we can’t very well spend another winter here
and let them starve to death.
That would not be [German].
We would have to find some device
that would be humane and that would do the job.
And it is in that sense, in the words of this one Major,
that one sees the inevitability of the process reaching that conclusion.
There is a logic, whether people recognize it or not,
that when you pass these laws
and each law being sort of successively more punitive than the one previous,
that there is an inexorable march toward ultimate murder and extermination.
Unlike the orders of Adolph Hitler
with respect to the invasion of the Soviet Union,
directives [German], which were in writing,
what we do not have for the Final Solution
is a written document signed by Hitler himself.
So all of these Fuhrer directives, Fuhrer wishes, Fuhrer orders,
are inferred from things that he must have said.
Perhaps he said them to Goering.
Perhaps he said them to Himmler.
Perhaps he said them to someone else.
Evidently, he said them several times
and in several contexts, but not necessarily clearly.
So here we are in this situation
which is so typical of the Nazi regime
but is not well understood outside the narrow participants
who know it well, and that is that so much of what is assumed
to be a basic directive and a basic structure is rather amorphous,
and that words are spoken and interpreted and used and employed
in accordance with the understanding of these words
by those who listened or even those who are
one step removed from those who have listened to them.
And this is the reason that historians
to this very day are asking everyone,
what was your understanding of this or that other conversation?
And we know that the so-called [German word],
the so-called order under which the Einsatzgruppen moved out,
was, to say the least, vague.
What document, any document, can you point to
that would say alright, the primary objective
of this Einsatzgruppen was the onset of the Final Solution?
We see this from what they did.
We could not infer it from written documents
written before they moved into Russia.
It was a session by the top German leadership,
Reinhard Heydrich, he had the order from Hitler to eliminate the Jews.
And at that time, they had a big meeting there
to devise means and methods how to murder the Jews.
Each knows what the other is talking about.
Each comes to this meeting with great expectation.
The tension is revealed even in the many drafts
that this final summary must have gone through
in that final version of the talks as prepared by Eichmann.
And the tension shows through.
This was a moment of history, and the participants knew it.
They knew it in the field and they knew it in Berlin,
and they knew it whenever they corresponded
or talked to one another about it.
And they moved into it with a certain confusion,
at first, with even chaos in the field.
But soon enough, with the goal very clearly outlined in their minds,
and now everything dovetailed and everything produced
a well-oiled process on the assembly line.
Hitler betrayed their 1939 pact in June, 1941.
He saw it as a racial war, and he suspended all rules of normal warfare
and essentially allowed them to go after the Soviet troops
and Soviet civilians in a deeply vicious way.
And the very nature of Barbarossa, an open-ended assault.
Not only is there no ultimatum to the Soviets,
no warning, no condition, but there isn’t any definite plan
as to where the German army was going to stop.
There’s no envisaging of any peace treaty.
There’s no clear-cut view of what is to be done
with that population once it is conquered.
Along with that came the decision of the sending in
of three thousand Einsatzgruppen, special mobile killers.
And their assignment was to kill without pity or remorse,
they never used the word kill.
Eliminate without pity or remorse every single Jewish man,
woman or child they could lay their hands on.
Bullet by bullet by bullet.
They murdered Jews, they murdered Soviet commissars, former Soviet officials,
and they murdered what we call Roman Sinti who were gypsies.
So these people ended up engaging in a strategy of annihilation,
which they called extermination.
Extermination is what we do to what,
to rats and vermin, to mice and to bugs.
They called it extermination.
I would call it annihilation.
And they ultimately killed almost two million people this way as part of the plan.
So Barbarossa was the general invasion,
and the final solution to the Jewish problem
began with sending mobile killers to stationary victims.
In Ukraine, in Russia, in Belarus, most just were not deported to the death camps.
They were killed exactly on the sites.
So there are just mass graves everywhere.
And some people have no idea that there are these mass graves,
and there are no signs, nothing.
The secret of understanding the Holocaust
is to understand that we went from mobile killers to stationary victims.
And when that became too difficult for the killers,
killers needed to drink afterwards
and then they started to drink before and during.
You had mental breakdowns, you also had a lack of discipline.
They reversed the process.
They sent, they made the victims mobile
and they sent them to stationary killing centers.
People arrived in Chelmno,
they arrived in a place called the manor.
They were forced to undress.
They walked downstairs and marched on to a furniture truck
that was then sealed and it was driven about 20 minutes, very slowly.
And that’s the moment at which the gas,
the gas from the exhaust was piped into the rear,
and in essence when the gas was piped into the rear, the Jews died.
They were brought to a forest and ultimately
in the forest they were buried, burnt, primarily burnt.
♪ [singing] ♪
Well, first of all,
how could you characterize the diary of Czerniakow?
It is certainly the most unique
and I would say the most important document
coming from the Jewish side about the Holocaust,
because it was written by a man
who began keeping a diary the very first week of the war,
before the Germans entered Warsaw
and before he took over the responsibility
of leading the Jewish community,
and who kept his diary in daily entries
until the afternoon of the day that he ended his life.
And it is an important document
because Czerniakow occupied a post at the interface
between the German and Jewish communities,
in daily contact with both,
receiving the requests and appeals and entreaties
from the Jewish population and in turn appealing
to the Germans every week, several times a week.
And it is a unique document
because a man holding that possession
set down in very matter of fact language,
without embellishment, in an almost laconic style,
everything that was transpiring, every meeting he had,
every subject that was discussed in these meetings.
Thus the diary is just full of names
and incidents and occurrences of various kinds,
and covers the waterfront when it comes to subjects.
Food, space, labor, hostages, children, shootings,
violence, deportations, ghettoization in general, all of it is there.
There is simply nothing that compares
in sheer content and coverage what this diary contains.
But it is above all remarkable
because the farther away we are from the event itself,
it seems that the diary transcends the man.
It seems that keeping the diary under the circumstances
was one of the most important things he did.
For he left us a window through which
we can observe a Jewish community in the terminal hours of its life.
As you know, in Warsaw there were post offices,
and the ghetto had one such post office,
but delivery of all mail and parcels was carried on by Jews,
not by the regular post office employees.
And once, a 15-year-old was substituting
for his mail carrying father with very vital parcels.
As you know, parcels kept people alive.
He was shot and he collapsed,
and with intestines coming out of his abdomen
and a spinal cord that was apparently severed,
he crawled to the nearest house and asked that another policeman
deliver the packages that he was carrying.
Czerniakow says no more.
For him, that story tells all.
The boy was fifteen.
The constant dilemma of every Jewish council,
and particularly of Czerniakow as the head of the largest of them,
was that one could not stay at ones post without serving the Germans,
and one could not leave the post without apparently hurting the Jews.
This was a paradox and a contradiction
with which they all had to live.
It was impossible to separate the two elements of the job.
It was a fatal combination, and it killed him.
That motorcycle came down the surface,
an incredible roar came down the street.
It was two German military in them.
And the thing which I remember most vividly,
my brother had this wristwatch in his pocket
and he was just removing it from his pocket.
And so his hand must have trembled
because his watch fell to the floor,
and I remember seeing it was 9:10 in the morning.
And I always take it as something that that was the moment when,
when my world was gone.
Every apartment and every house had the hiding place.
They called it the bunker.
Now if you’re found hiding, they shot you immediately.
When they’d come in the trucks and they were on a loudspeaker,
everyone has to come out and get into those trucks,
and supposedly they’re going to take us to labor camps, if you believe it.
One of the boys that was in my dormitory in the school that we were in,
I was about eleven and a half then,
he came in one day all upset telling everybody that his,
that his grandmother just must have taken an overdose
of sleeping pills and that she’s in a coma.
And when I asked him what he thinks triggered her taking the sleeping pills,
he said she was apparently told that she was going to be shipped east.
My rabbi, Sholom, when he conducted a shish, he was crying.
He was crying with great tears because he couldn’t explicate,
he could not share the terrible feelings that he had about the fate of the Jews.
The worst day of my life, the 28th of June, ’42.
That is when I saw my father for the last time.
The following day my mother.
I heard my parents, of course we all lived in one room,
and I heard my parents talk through that night,
and I still cannot comprehend their incredible bravery.
They spoke only of their lives together, of their love,
the good times, their children, of their parents.
And with that they faced the morning.
And I know it sort of became, perhaps my own defense,
I always felt, you know, and things were very tough in the following years.
But I had to emulate my parents.
If they could do it, I can do it.
One wish and one prayer and one thought: to survive.
We felt it.
Although the Germans were very adept in hiding their intentions and hiding their deeds,
there was a certain feeling that something terrible is happening to the Jews.
I just heard my mother’s voice over that entire, over crying and everything,
and it came like an echo and she was saying, you know, be strong.
Sich Stark in German.
And then the trucks rolled out of there,
and ironically the sun came out, sort of, I still see it,
the rooftops of wet, illuminated by the sun
and the church bells were ringing.
And that was the last view.
They took us in a train in Krakow, Poland.
Cattle cars.
We stayed there for several hours.
It was very hot.
A day, a full day in the hot summer,
and everybody was crying, yelling, water! Water! Water!
People were dying in a cattle, in a train.
And these cattle cars was absolute hell on earth.
You can’t imagine how tight it was and how squeezed in we were.
And didn’t have any sanitary facilities.
There were no toilets.
The Germans came into the ghetto.
Those who worked for them, and I was one of them,
were transferred on foot to Plaszow.
Those who did not work,
who did not have a job through the Germans,
were put in cattle cars and transported
to either to Auschwitz or to Belzec.
They took us, went to Plaszow camp.
It was very bad. We had to work.
I was one of the carpenters there.
I was the carpenter group.
And we build the barracks.
My barrack happened to be situated right as I showed you the plan,
where there was the killing, was a killing spot.
They called it Hajowa Gorka.
It was a little mountain.
And we could see, I could actually see the Nazis
lining up people and shooting them with machine guns.
This is the map of the concentration camp Plaszow.
This is the place where all the killings,
the killings were all over, but this was an execution place.
My barrack was right there.
This was a carpenter section here.
Thousands upon thousands of Jews were murdered
by the Germans when they came into Russia.
In the ghetto of Poland, the process of murdering was slower
because they had to transport the Jews in cattle cars to different extermination camps.
What made the victims mobile were the railroad cars.
And the death camps were situated almost inevitably along the railroad lines,
the most famous of which is Auschwitz at 44 parallel railroad tracks.
Treblinka was situated on the Warsaw to Bialystok line.
1944 Germany was fighting the advancing Soviet armies from the east,
the advancing American and Allied armies from the west,
and even then they deported, and this is Hilberg,
approximately 437,402 Jews on 147 trains
between the 15th of May and the 8th of July.
The most amazing thing about it
is that notwithstanding the fact that Jews were shipped in freight cars,
the railroads still billed the SS as though the shipment
had been taking place in regular passenger cars third class.
In other words, there was no difference in the payment.
Indeed, there was no difference in the various offices.
The offices that shipped the Jews were civilian traffic.
So the key, the principal was,
that if people were being shipped, by whatever means,
then passenger traffic sections of the railroad were responsible
for the shipment and they billed the SS accordingly.
The substitution of freight cars was done
only because of the shortage of passenger cars,
and because quite obviously, no one would insist that Jews,
of all people, should be shipped in passenger cars
when on arrival they would be gassed anyway.
Cars were scarce and time was scarce.
I thus thought, for many, many years, that there must have been
a priority system into which these particular trains would fit.
And I was looking for such a priority system.
But whenever I saw one,
I didn’t see any designation of Jewish trains anywhere.
And of course that was my failing.
How would a German administration place these particular death trains
into a category of trains without admitting on paper
that this is what they were doing?
Thus, we find the most paradoxical situation of all.
Jewish trains, that is to say, death trains, were leaving for their destinations
without priority for the most part, without priority.
There are certain exceptions, especially at the end of the war.
And yet, this does not mean that these trains were left behind.
The one conclusion that I drew,
and this is perhaps the most significant of them all,
no Jew was left alive for lack of transport.
Somehow or other, these people managed to find time,
special time, or to find cars wherever they could get them,
to get the job done.
And no one in this system failed in that task.
Now who knew about the trains?
You had schedulers.
You had also train conductors, the locomotive engineers.
And what did the locomotive engineers see?
They saw trains arriving full and going back empty.
They understood that food was not being delivered to the camps
in sufficient quantities to feed this type of population.
And they understood that there was death and destruction.
They also used the trains to transport all of this clothing
and all of this human hair and all of the confiscated property back to the Reich.
Now of course, once the Jews arrive in the death camps,
they just come with their few kilograms of personal belongings.
But they may have gold, they may have foreign currency,
they may have other things in that last search.
Those things are taken, and they’re funneled through elaborately,
through the mechanism of banks and various other institutions for final utilization.
And it gets so that the long hair of women is cut off
for purposes of making the crosshairs necessary in submarines you see, for firing torpedoes.
And it gets so that gold teeth are pulled
because gold is very valuable and it’s still a foreign exchange earner.
You see, in this regard they are totally rational.
They are rational to the point of bizarreness.
You are taking what ordinarily would not be taken.
You regard even what is in the body as the property of the German Reich,
in accordance with the eleventh or the thirteenth ordinance of the Reich citizenship law.
There was a transport of clothes coming from Auschwitz,
from the killed Jews in Auschwitz,
children, grown up, shoes, jackets.
Everything was in Plaszow in a center.
I don’t know what made me walk over to it.
One of the sleeves was sticking out in the pile of clothes.
I don’t know what made me go,
I went over there and I was crying.
I was still young, I was crying like a baby.
I said that’s my father’s, my father’s jacket.
How could it be?
How could you know that this,
you go in there, they wouldn’t believe me.
Then I reached in my father’s pocket.
Believe it or not, I found passports, pictures of my father, my mother,
my whole family pictures in the pockets in this jacket.
That happened to me, which I try to
explain it to myself, I cannot understand.
Why would I go, and out of hundreds of pieces of clothes,
go right to this spot and pick up the jacket?
Well, I did it.
And then they used an assembly line process.
It’s a combination of Charles Darwin and Henry Ford.
Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest, total domination,
and Henry Ford the assembly line.
So what happened in three camps, in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka,
which are Action Reinhard camps, everybody, there was no selection.
Everybody who arrived was sent directly to their death.
And the process took several hours and thousands of people were murdered.
My mother and my sister were murdered, the locality was Belzec.
Belzec in Poland, not far from Lublin.
This was an extermination camp where half a million Jews were put to death.
This included my mother, my sister, and my entire family,
my entire family on my mother’s side and my father’s side.
Belzec, you were sent directly to the gas chamber unless you were a woman,
you were sent into a barracks to have your hair cut
and then you were sent to the gas chamber.
Then the bodies were buried in fields.
And essentially it was primitive because it again was the first of the camp,
and the Germans learned from each camp how to do it better.
And therefore Belzec was primitive.
While the women were rounded up naked and shaved,
whipped like cattle into a slaughterhouse,
the men were already dying in the gas chambers.
It took two hours to shave the women and two hours to murder them.
Many SS men using whips and sharp bayonets
pushed the women toward the building with the chambers.
I heard the noise of sliding doors, moaning and screaming,
desperate calls in Polish, Yiddish, bloodcurdling screams.
All that lasted fifteen minutes.
Screams of children, women, and finally one common, continuous horrible scream.
All that lasted fifteen minutes.
The machine ran for twenty minutes,
and after twenty minutes there was silence.
We dragged bodies of people who minutes ago were alive.
We dragged them using leather straps to huge, prepared mass graves,
and the orchestra played, played from morning til night.
Every day we died a little bit, together with the transports of people.
Belzec had 500,000 dead, and two known survivors:
Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman.
Chaim Hirszman was killed
the day he was about to give testimony.
And his wife said:
“I’m not an eyewitness but let me give testimony,
because all my husband did
in the time we’ve been married
was to talk about what went on a Belzec.”
Rudolf Reder gave testimony, and he said....
in one of the most painful quotes I’ve ever read.
He said: “Only when I heard a child say
‘Mommy, it’s dark, I’m scared, haven’t I been good?”
Only then did I begin to cry,
and later... I had no feelings.
Now the camp was divided in,
it was a part where the Germans lived,
and there was a part where we lived,
and there was the working group where we worked,
and there was the what we called it,
the camp tree where the people got gassed and burned,
where the final station was.
So the death camp was about five or six and what there was,
just for transport and direct to the gas chamber.
No matter they’re young, old, strong, weak, child, woman, child, man, doesn’t matter.
So they took me to clean up the quarters,
the living quarters of some of the SS people,
which the windows faced the railroad track.
And while I was there cleaning with another girl,
the whistle was there that the train comes in,
so we knew we have to remain there, we cannot go out.
And the transport came in, everything very fast, their unloading of the people.
And a mother left a baby,
I don’t know for what reason, in the box car.
And Frenzel, who was at that time in charge of the transport,
grabbed that little baby and smashed the head,
the skull against the box car and he just threw it in like a dead rat.
And that just I cannot forget.
Although we heard a lot talking about they killed the people,
but it was so incomprehensive we never believed it really happened.
And on the way the farmers allowed that.
And they said you know where you’re going,
they’re going to kill you and they’re going to burn you.
As much as we knew before, and as much we heard, we didn’t believe it.
We couldn’t even figure that this was a death trip.
I’m sure they felt something,
but they couldn’t imagine that a nation
that produced Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe,
would stoop so low and stoop so tragically into an abyss of murder.
By the time they got to the third of the action Reinhard camps,
the second was Sobibor, the third was Treblinka.
At Treblinka they were able to do it far better,
far more quickly, far more cost effectively.
The minute they opened up the door I was facing right,
there were two story dead peoples right in front of it laying there.
This was the people that came before, dead riding the trains.
Here were the transport where the rail track came in
right here and right in the middle,
and they opened up the doors and they make them walk straight here
where it says women left, men right.
And over there they had to take off the clothes,
and they pushed them right into the gate,
and when they come into the gate,
they come this way and this way and they join together.
And they just went, they just went, at that time I didn’t know where they go,
but then they went to the gas chambers.
The gas chambers was about fourteen meters.
They were the size of a single garage,
something like that, a garage and a half.
And they pushed them in there.
The Gestapo and the Ukrainians, people didn’t want to go in, they saw it.
You know, they hit them, they pushed each other right in,
and they were standing up against, packed, and then they gassed them.
And from the other side there’s a sliding door,
they just slide it off and another group was taken into the graves.
And this was the mass grave.
Then came some kind of a law, they had to take out from the mass grave here
and made a big grave here and burned all the bodies.
Took out those bodies before, and the new arrivals,
they dragged them in right through the big grave where they were burning.
People, the minute they got into Treblinka and they saw what’s going on,
the dead bodies, they were screaming, that’s all.
Everybody was screaming, screaming, crying.
I still have nightmares.
Still nightmares.
And look, they even provided at Treblinka,
I was just at Treblinka last, last week.
They even had a zoo,
because apparently people spent all day killing people
needed to relax a little bit, and well,
you relax by petting animals and by looking at animals in cages in zoos.
So they were very mindful
of how they had to treat their people
who were doing this unpleasant work.
Treblinka killed 925,000 people,
perhaps as many as 925,000 people between July 23, 1942 and August 2, 1943.
Staff was 120, 30 Germans, 90 Ukrainians.
Belzec killed 500,000 people
between March, February and March, 1942 and December 1942.
Its staff was 104 people, of whom fourteen were Germans.
So you can look at that and you can say oh my God,
44 Germans were able to kill by the process of killing,
were able to kill essentially one million four hundred and twenty-five thousand Jews.
March of ’44, the Nazis just marched right into Hungary like it was,
like they were invited guests.
Why would he siphon off soldiers from the front to occupy a friendly country?
It didn’t make any sense,
except there were 750,000 Jewish inhabitants in Hungary.
To Hitler, killing Jews at that point and pilfer their wealth
was more important than winning the war, obviously.
Auschwitz was more complex
because Auschwitz was actually three camps in one.
We know it as Auschwitz 1, as Auschwitz 2, which is Birkenau, the killing center,
and Auschwitz 3, which is Buna Monowitz, which is an industrial center.
In 1942 I was arrested, was imprisoned for a year,
sent to Auschwitz for also nearly a year, and then to Bergen-Belsen.
And I ended up, when I arrived in Auschwitz
I already knew what was going on in Auschwitz,
so I arrived there, you know, thinking that I would,
next step is the gas chamber.
The world was full of rumors in those days.
Everyone heard that there was gas chambers in Auschwitz.
One didn’t want to believe it,
but by the time I arrived there I knew it was a fact.
So if you arrived in Auschwitz, you came off the train.
The people were divided into five.
They then faced selection.
And selection meant that somebody looked at you, a German doctor,
decided whether you were capable of work or not.
And the system was the same.
Any person, no matter how old or young you are,
you carried a young child, you went automatically to the gas chamber.
Didn’t matter, they didn’t tell you,
give this child to somebody else.
You could have been nineteen years old or twenty or sixty.
Whoever had a child carrying or a little child on their hand,
automatically went to the gas chamber.
I literally had no time or a chance to reflect yet on the separation,
because everything was done with such brutality, with such screaming and yelling.
They opened up the doors and they screamed, all different languages.
They had people in striped clothes who worked in the camp,
and they were yelling Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish, German.
And right away there were the kappos and block elders
who started to lead us into line,
and the SS with their dogs who were barking,
and they were trained to tear anybody to pieces if one did not obey the orders.
Male and female, they were divided with children going with their mothers.
Males on one side, females, women and their children on the other side.
I’m holding onto my sister Goldie, my little brother Tule,
and we’re just being pulled apart, never to see each other again.
The women that looked healthy to Dr. Mengele,
went one way, and one to the ovens,
to gas chambers this way.
So my mother and my littlest baby sister, twelve years old, were on one side
and put my oldest sister, who was fourteen, fifteen, to the other side.
And she wanted to be with her mother and her sister,
so she crossed the line back and she got hit
with a rifle butt to go back there.
And she’s the one that survived.
My mother and my little sister went to the gas chambers.
Those who were selected to work were then
what we call in Texas branded and sheared.
Meaning they had a tattoo which gave them a number
and their hair was sheared, but all of their hair,
even their bodily hair was sheared because they recycled this.
They used the hair to line submarines, to serve as detonators, even to create fabric.
They gave us a bundle of clothes, striped clothes,
and they gave us a tag on a string.
Mine was 41212.
From this moment on I was no longer Ben Lesser.
41212 was my number.
When you are processed to become an inmate of Auschwitz,
you have to pass a person who shaves your head
and tattoos a number on your arm
and takes your clothes off you.
And these are all prisoners.
And obviously, a prisoner in Auschwitz now meets
somebody who’s just arrived in Auschwitz, normal questions.
How long do you think the war is going to last?
And what’s going on?
She thought I’d come from outside, which of course I didn’t.
I had no idea.
And then, what did you do before the war?
And that’s the moment that I said, I used to play the cello.
♪ [music] ♪
Nobody asked me about the cello.
I said I used to be a cellist,
completely crazy thing to say under the circumstances.
There I was naked,
there was a number on arm, I play the cello.
She said, fantastic.
The orchestra played from dawn to night,
with the idea that the Nazis had a macabre sense of humor,
so you had music taking place as all of this was developing.
We were the entertainment.
I mean, we had a job, of course.
Our job was to play marches in the morning and the evening,
because Auschwitz is surrounded by factories
like IG Farben and Buna, etc.
And the prisoners of Auschwitz were marching out
every morning to go to their various workplaces.
And we sat at the gate and played marches for them.
♪ [music] ♪
You know, Auschwitz is not a place
where you give yourself a lot of time for feeling things.
That is for normal people.
What you feel like is that you’re surprised that you’re alive today,
because tomorrow you probably won’t be.
If when you went to sleep you could only sleep on your side because,
and if one turned all of us had to turn
because there was no way that one could turn and the other one,
because there was no room otherwise.
In the wintertime, people were staying in line
for about an hour and a half, two hours,
they used to wake us up when it was still dark.
People were frozen to death.
You couldn’t move, you have to stay just straight with your hands down.
Five in a lane, they used to count us every morning.
And used to go out to work.
When I was in, Mengele was the guy that mostly was selecting people for experiments
or who’s going to be in camp or who’s going to go to the gas chamber.
When I heard stories from my sister, who survived at Auschwitz,
that the women wanted to look good for Mengele so they’ll survive.
Nobody knew which side’s going to live, which would be dead.
They would prick their fingers
and put the blood on their cheeks so they would look healthy.
Those who were selected to die were sent directly to the gas chambers.
Their property was confiscated.
All that they brought was taken from them,
and essentially it was used to recycle.
Even gold teeth were used for the Nazi war economy.
And they had gas chambers and the gas chambers were complete with an undressing room,
a gas chamber, an elevator to raise the bodies to the top.
And at Belzec and at Treblinka they used a Soviet tank engine.
And at Auschwitz they brought it to greater perfection,
they used Zyklon B, which was gas.
And the gas again was, came in pellets.
You opened the pellets, the Germans poured it down the chute,
and then it was able to kill two thousand people in a matter of about 30 minutes.
And then the crematoria, which were ovens,
and the ovens were again even sealed with the mark of the construction group,
Tough & Company, but the ovens were used to burn the bodies
and therefore not to leave evidence of the crime.
And then we asked the ones,
the kappos were escorting us, what is this smell?
So she said these are your fathers, your brothers, your sisters, your children.
And if you don’t behave and do exactly what you’re told,
this is how you’re going to wind up.
Ashes. I couldn’t believe it.
You could see flames and you could smell.
There was a smell of smoke as you would barbecue something.
And we see six chimneys,
huge chimneys and fire shooting about them and ashes flying.
And every time you make a step you leave a footprint in those ashes.
When the wind was coming from the crematoria towards our camp,
which was the Czech family camp and later my,
later when I was in the men’s camp,
when the wind was just in the right direction
we were literally covered by human ash.
Everything, our hair, it was in our hair, it was in our clothing,
it was in our skin, it was on the ground,
everything was covered by human ash because the hundreds of thousands of pounds
of human ash was blown out of the chimneys.
The Sonderkommando were people who worked in the vicinity of the gas chamber.
Let’s remember the Jews did not kill.
The Zyklon B at Auschwitz was brought in Red Cross trucks,
regarded as a medical operation.
It was put down the chute by two SS officers wearing what, gas masks.
The Sonderkommando were with the Jews as they got in,
as they were in the undressing room,
and then they were with the Jews after the gassing took place
to take them out for cremation, or in other camps for burial.
They were, they had the worst job imaginable
because they were seeing death on not a daily basis but an hourly basis.
So my dad was saved and then my mother and brother were gassed on the tenth.
All the people ever left from the December transport,
almost five thousand people, children, grandchildren, grandparents.
My mother knew what her destiny was
and my mother knew what my brother’s destiny was.
When she found out and my brother was doomed to go into the gas chamber,
she decided to stay with him.
A lot of, many parents did that.
Many mothers stayed with their children
when they knew that they children were going to be gassed.
So she stayed with him.
She volunteered to stay with him, and they died in the gas chamber,
either on the tenth or eleventh, I think it was on tenth of July.
Just before she was taken into the gas chamber,
she is wishing him and me a good life, a good healthy life.
She’s asking him in the letter not to spoil me with his love.
And she just goes on to say, you know,
have a great life and into eternity.
So she I guess picked the right person,
because she gave it to this guard
and then he gave it to my dad the next day,
who was already in the medical camp.
And then my dad kept it most of his life,
in his bedroom, the letter.
And when my dad passed away in 1967
I got the letter and I’ve kept it with me.
The atrocities I witnessed,
I witnessed hanging, I witnessed shooting, I witnessed terrible beatings.
There was a lot of things.
Sure, you don’t want to talk about it because it’s,
I choke or I start crying or something like that.
And besides, I tell you that except people that have been in there
that saw it and witnessed this, it’s very hard for people even to imagine
that this was there, that this happened, you know.
Survivors were not a random sample of the victims.
They weren’t a random sample of victims age-wise.
In order to survive, most had to be between eighteen and forty.
Too young, you didn’t have resources,
too old, you didn’t have the endurance.
So what did survivors do?
They survived by luck,
but they also did not survive without skill.
You couldn’t panic.
You also needed a certain measure of endurance
and you needed almost an indomitable will to live.
Because otherwise, death was all around you.
Death could be running to the wires and touching the electrified wires.
They were a hundred yards away from you.
They were fifty feet away from you.
They sometimes were two feet away from you.
You gave up, you could do that.
And consequently, survivors had an indomitable will to live,
and even those who had an indomitable will to live,
they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, they died.
They were killed.
People who go into deep and profound despair sometimes
don’t have the will to live.
But people who go to false optimism also have a problem,
which is they’re not prepared to face the situation
in which they find themselves.
And consequently, they have to somehow understand that hope is a dangerous commodity.
The sort of metaphor of sheep being led to the slaughter is,
that kind of argument fails to recognize the complexity,
it fails to recognize the nuance of different forms of resistance.
Ultimately, the people who did best
were the people who could confront their own vulnerability,
who could look despair straight in the face, not be frightened by that,
not be paralyzed by that, but act in the face of it.
Now, 310,000 were deported in the summer months of 1942,
leaving approximately 70,000.
Now that’s a remnant, which means that perhaps 90,000 had died,
310,000 had been deported and 70,000 were left.
But in January, there was another deportation
in the course of which the entire council was decimated.
And in the course of that deportation,
maybe ten percent of those that remained were deported.
So now we have a little over 60,000.
There is no record of any activity by the Jewish council after January of 1943.
They could not have any hope for survival.
They could not even trust production to save them, the factories, even that.
And Czerniakow was still capable of writing
“a sewing machine can save a life.”
But these people now knew that not even the sewing machine could save a life.
And from that standpoint, they organized themselves for battle.
A distinct goal, purpose, and with quiet resolution,
they got a few weapons, not very many.
The battle that ensued the following April
between the Germans and the Jews,
which has come down as the Warsaw Ghetto battle
and which is symbolic, in a sense,
to the extent that Auschwitz is of the entire destruction process,
as though they were two extremes,
that battle was a very small infantry engagement.
The Germans reported sixteen killed
and eighty-five wounded throughout the battle.
One should not look at this statistic
as though there were extremely few German casualties.
Because under the circumstances, the Jews possessed weapons
that would not have equipped a modern infantry company of that day.
It’s understood and understandable as an evolution,
but it was such a rapid evolution that we may justifiably call it
a revolution in Jewish life, because once again,
Jews were fighting with weapons in hand,
conspicuously, visibly, watched by the entire world.
And they had not done that for quite some time in quite that manner.
Therefore, one justifiably points to the Warsaw Ghetto battle
as a pivotal development of Jewish history.
I used to say that resistance was not a way to live
but a decision as to how you chose to die, by exacting revenge,
by taking what, by taking action, by refusing to go along.
A famous resistance fighter, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
said to me, Berenbaum, you’re a fool.
He said resistance was a way to live until you died.
Once we decided that we were going to resist,
we were the freest people in all of Europe,
because we had nothing left to lose.
We planned, and we saw ourselves outside
and we saw all the Nazis killed, and this kept us going.
So we couldn’t stop any, it was just preserving.
If it’s any chance, we have to go through to the very end with it.
We knew we were going to be dead any time,
so might as well do that, kill whoever we can, and run out.
Whoever got saved, got saved.
The uprising came along and everybody screamed run, run out, and that’s it.
And who has the ammunition used it, and that’s it.
In this aspect I was lucky I didn’t get killed.
I was not a hero to be, to escape, but just happened,
all the bullets was falling right in front of me and didn’t hit me.
People got hit in the legs, I saw it, and fell back and couldn’t go any farther.
No one explained, this was all split seconds.
And I just jumped up that stepladder.
And as I was on top, I noticed a lot of bodies already under mine,
some people went before me.
I got a bullet shot from the tower right here, and I fell down.
I took several over the head,
and I figured if we don’t run here we are dead.
And I grabbed it and we run to the main gate and people after us,
and that is the way we came out.
After I fell down, I was so much aware
and the will to live was so great that there’s no measurements to it,
that I started hopping on dead bodies.
And soon I reached the woods.
Resistance was looking at the circumstances in which you lived,
understanding your acute vulnerability, the fact that you’re going to die,
and then saying okay, I have a choice now to make.
And the choice is not between life and death.
The choice is, in Marek Edelman’s words,
the choice is how am I going to live until I die?
Or the choice is, what statement am I going to make
by the fact that I’m going to die?
And I want to take them down with me.
One of the important things in understanding the Holocaust
is to ask the question, what did people know and when did they know it?
And what did they do with that knowledge?
Some of the bystanders were laughing at what was happening.
Some of them were anxiously wondering what property could they get,
whose apartment could they take over, whose business could they control?
Some said, bye, bye Jews!
And some indicated, you’re going to die.
So if you can do something and you do nothing
and you sit idly or stand idly by and watch,
you know, an atrocity being committed, that’s problematic.
There were others who were merely complicitous.
Complicitous means you go along because you get along.
There were the bystanders who didn’t oppose it
and essentially stood by and watched it all happen.
And then there were the few who were the upstanders
who were people who were prepared to resist the Nazi intentions.
Then in 1944 when the Russians came close to Krakow,
we were transported to the Schindler’s factory.
This is where I was together with my father.
Very gruff man, you know, chain smoking,
and I was told that he was the one who makes sure
that twelve hundred Jews were working for him.
I regarded Oskar Schindler as an emissary from God,
to save twelve hundred Jews, and me and my father among them.
We were saved by Oskar Schindler and by the grace of God.
It just took offering a home or a haven, a meal, a place to hide,
a moment of encouragement, a moment of decency, to people desperately in need.
♪ [music] ♪
We can learn that among all the peoples of the world,
none helped the Jews, none raised their voices,
although they knew what was happening to Jews.
But there were Schindlers, very, very few of them, very few,
insignificant number, who took interest in saving Jews.
Apparently General Eisenhower ordered as many troops to go back,
to be a witness, at any concentration camp that may be nearby.
He was very smart, because he figured some day
they’re going to say it never happened.
And so we got in trucks and we headed for something
we had no idea what we were going to see.
The stench of burning flesh permeated the whole area as we got closer.
Out of the clear blue came hundreds of people I could not recognize as people.
There’s a town of Dachau not too far away,
and they made the people from Dachau come and take a look at what went on at Dachau.
It’s just mind boggling and it’s an unforgiveable scene.
Befreiung! Befreiung! Liberation! Americans! Americans!
So I tell my cousin come on, let’s go see what’s going on.
And we hop outside and we see some of the Jewish inmates
were crawling on their hands and knees and kissing the boots of the American GIs.
They were like gods, they looked like gods to us.
My cousin, the night after liberation, dies in my arms.
The night after liberation dies in my arms.
And when they came take him away, I followed.
My feet just gave out and I fell down.
It was, it was virtually, can you imagine trying to talk to someone
that they don’t even have the strength for their vocal cords to even operate?
We were warned not to give them anything like our C-rations and our K-rations.
Don’t give them that.
See, these people had to be fed a broth,
something that was soupy that they could swallow
that would not choke them to death
because if you fed them, they couldn’t swallow it.
I can, I can still see it.
The ground was covered with dead people.
And they were in the uniform of the prisoners,
and they were all being worked to death.
The moment they could no longer work
they were sent to the crematorium, and that was that.
I just couldn’t believe that an individual
that is supposed to be fighting for the preservation of his culture
and his country could be doing this to people that had no defense.
I couldn’t believe this.
The crematoria are going.
They had bodies in them.
Outside there were bodies looked like skeletons,
only skin and bones, piled up like cordwood,
one on top of the other, ready to be burned.
People on the ground, you couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive.
They were skin and bones.
You, can you imagine a skeleton trying to talk to you?
And holding out his hand?
Can you imagine that?
You get any kind of inkling what it’s like?
And this is all you saw.
These people could not get up.
These people were literally abandoned.
My very clear view of freedom and liberation came that morning
when I stood in this doorway of that abandoned factory.
And I saw a car coming down the hill.
And the reality of that came when I saw
the white star on its hood and not the swastika.
There were two men in that car.
One jumped out, came running toward me and asked
if there was anyone who spoke English or German.
I told him I spoke German.
I remember that aura of oh, the disbelief in daylight,
to really see someone who fought for our freedom, for my ideals.
And he looked like God to me.
And I knew what I had to say,
and I said to him, we are Jewish, you know.
For a very long time, at least to me it seemed very long,
he didn’t answer me.
And then his own voice betrayed his emotion.
He was wearing dark glasses, I couldn’t see his eyes.
He said, so am I.
And the impact of that, to be liberated not only by an American
but by a fellow Jew, and he said to me,
won’t you come with me?
I didn’t know what he meant.
So he held the door open for me and let me proceed him.
And that was the moment of restoration,
of humanity, of humaneness, dignity, of freedom.
And this first young American of liberation day is now my husband.
He opened not only the door for me,
but the door to my life and my future.
And there was something else which I will recite to you
which is not generally known.
In one of the camps, I don’t know
if it was Buchenwald or Flossenburg or Ebensee or Mauthausen.
It may have been Flossenburg.
The camps were basically the same.
I come in to the office.
We got into the camp, and he said I’ve been waiting for you.
So he says, come with me.
So he takes me out to the electrified fence
which surrounded all these camps.
If anybody touched the fence
they got an electric shock would kill them.
And he had a shovel with him, and he dug up next to the fence,
he knew where he was digging, he dug up a box.
And in the box there were little cards.
I think I’ve got something like that.
Almost like a passport.
And the SS officers, the storm troopers, had a club.
And when you came to the club meeting,
they put a stamp in this little book.
And when the book was filled with stamps,
they gave you a new book.
And the guy in charge of the deck was an inmate.
They usually were inmates, they worked with the inmates.
Instead of giving them a new book and throwing away the old one,
he saved the old one and he put it away.
Now every time he did that, he took his life in his hands,
because they would have killed him right on the spot,
right then, if they ever saw him hold a book.
They would have put a gun to his head and blown his brains out.
And he had a whole box of these cards.
And I knew the names and a photograph of all the SS guards
who’d been in that camp for the last year or two.
Invaluable piece of evidence, you know?
So what impressed me was here’s a guy
who is risking his life a hundred times,
knowing that one day there’d be a day of reckoning.
And I was that day.
So never give up. Always have hope.
He was hoping that one day it would be a day of reckoning,
and that was the evidence I got from that case.
After May 8, 1945, myself and my father
traveled as much as we could by horse and buggy, by some trains,
back to Krakow to look for any remnants of our family.
We didn’t find any.
They took us by train, they took us back to France,
which was completely liberated where we had fought,
and I found the synagogue still standing there,
stone building, beautiful edifice, but the inside was gutted out.
As I was standing there, a Frenchman came up to me with three little girls.
I believe the ages were eight, ten and twelve at that time.
He gave me to remember him by, the actual yellow Star of David,
the cloth that he had to wear when the Nazis took over France.
Every Jewish person, young and old, had to wear the yellow Star of David,
piece of cloth sewn to their, what they wore,
and it says on it Juif, which means Jew.
I treasure this.
I think that the Holocaust was a disparity, it was a hiding of God’s face.
God’s face was turned away from the Jewish people.
I asked a young rabbi here in New York one time,
why did God allow to do these things here?
He couldn’t answer me.
I can’t answer you, I don’t know the answer.
There is no forgiveness for the enormity of the crime, of this crime.
There is no forgiveness for this, there is no forgetfulness for this.
There are no such thing.
We can tolerate but not forgive, never forgive,
because if we forgive, I feel we are desecrated,
we are desecrating the memories of those victims.
♪ [music] ♪
They had surrendered unconditionally,
which was the requirement at the time.
The Allied Powers, the British, the French, the Americans and the Russians,
got together and they had conferences on what to do about the Germans,
and the Americans said look, we need trials.
You accuse them of crime, give them a day in court,
let them come in and present the evidence.
You present the counter-evidence, have judges there who will judge it.
As we in America do, it says on the Supreme Court building,
justice under law, the law applies equally to everyone.
Give them a fair trial.
The British and the French and the Russians
sent their best jurists to appear as judges of the trial.
The trials were open to the public, they were filmed.
The evidence was submitted.
The guilt was overwhelming.
In this case, the victims were killed simply because they didn’t share
the race, the religion or the ideology of their executioners.
And I thought as a young Harvard graduate, that’s horrible.
And if we can create a new rule of law which asserts
the right of all human beings to live in peace and dignity,
regardless of their race or creed or color,
then we will have created something of permanent value.
And that’s what I asked to do.
I got on the next plane going from Berlin to Nuremberg.
I went to Nuremberg.
There was Taylor, who was then the General,
he had been promoted from Colonel.
I said General, we got to put on a new trial.
So I thereby became the chief prosecutor of the largest murder trial in human history.
I got to the kitchen and I came out with two cups of coffee,
and my friend came out of the kitchen with two cups of coffee,
and we sat down with Herr Goering and Popin
and whoever happened to be sitting on the terrace, and we talked.
I mean, their answer to that was, we did what we were told to do.
The orders came down from headquarters, this is what you had to do.
The military men did what they had to do.
I accused 22 defendants selected by me on the basis of their education.
Many of them had PhDs, one had a double doctorate,
and their rank, generals, colonels of the SS.
I rested my case in two days.
I convicted all of them.
They were, they feared for their life, for one thing, justifiably.
I mean, they knew about the laws that they would be going on trial for.
You asked about what people I didn’t talk to or did talk to.
There was only one man I wanted to talk to
after he was sentenced to death.
That was Dr. Otto Ohlendorf. General of the SS.
He was fairly honest at the trial.
I knew he was the father of five children.
I thought I’ll go down and talk to him.
Maybe he’ll have some remorse, you know?
Maybe he wants to tell me he loves his wife,
tell a message to his children that, you know,
he’s sorry ending this way.
So I went down and I spoke to him in German.
And I said, can I do something for you, Dr. Ohlendorf?
And he said well, you’ll see.
The Russians are going to take over,
the Jews in America will suffer,
you’ll see that I was right.
And he began to repeat the argument he had made at trial,
that he had his right of self-defense because he knew
the Russians were going to attack
and therefore they could preempt that by attacking first,
and that was lawful.
And he presented big legal,
German legal opinions to that, support that argument.
Three American judges say that’s not lawful,
that’s not good law, it’s bad law.
What would the world look like if anybody went out
and he wanted to kill his neighbor because he had a gun,
and he kills his neighbor and his mother
and his grandfather and his neighbor next door?
What kind of a world would we have?
And they sentenced him to death
and I was sure he was going to hang, and he was hanged.
In the world completely infested with this kind of mentality
that you need more power in order to prevail,
but you need more power, you’re going to end up with more people.
You got to treat the people better.
You must recognize the importance of compromise,
the importance of being able to see the other fellow’s point of view.
The requirement of your humanity in everything that you do.
Those are the guides which should be the guides,
not to say who, how many more can we kill?
This is Wakulla Springs Wildlife Sanctuary,
and it is one of the most beautiful spots in the United States.
It is the way Florida, or at least the northern part of Florida,
was before it became as settled as it is now.
I suspect that 150 years ago most of Florida looked like this.
As you see, the kind of wildlife we have here,
the trees and the fauna and also occasionally
you’ll see all kinds of alligators and other wild animals.
And they’ve been kept this way,
where the rest of Florida has changed.
For people like me, it is a great source of tranquillity
to be able to come down here
and to simply come to this spot every so often.
I’m glad that we can talk in this particular area.
So do you think that it fits
to talk about the Holocaust in this place?
Well, if one wants to talk about a polar opposite,
I would say that what the Holocaust represents
is the dialectic extreme opposite of this,
because what we have here is an area
in which nature has been completely unchanged.
And what the Holocaust represents is the most extreme form
of manmade action and manmade project
with a peculiar kind of destructiveness
and with a peculiar kind of calculation,
which was never present in nature
and could never be present in nature.
So that it’s as appropriate a spot
to talk about the Holocaust as any that I know.
If this is the place of nature,
then what the Holocaust represents is the,
the most extreme form of the city of man
and its radical destructiveness.
♪ [singing] ♪
Twelve thousand people were on the march living walking into Birkenau.
And I stood at front of the march and I looked back and I said,
twelve thousand people are marching into Birkenau.
That’s the number that were killed at the busiest day in 1944.
They came to remember.
Twelve thousand people entered Birkenau in 1944,
in the summer of 1944, and were killed in that day.
In 1996, I was at the state capitol in Hartford.
I was still wearing my Eisenhower jacket.
And a gentleman walked up to me and recognized the insignia
that every air infantry officer had a different insignia
and I always called it a Thunderbird.
And I asked him, he says you remember that symbol, huh?
And I said were you in Dachau?
He said yes.
He and his wife were inmates at the time the camp was liberated.
I did not know him at that time, but they live in Avon.
We became very good friends.
And in 2006, I went to my cardiologist and he said Ben, you got a blockage.
He put me in St. Francis Hospital and I had open heart surgery.
The cardiac surgeon that operated on me and saved my life was their son.
What goes around, comes around.
They were heroes in every way.
Because while they lived, they did some wonderful things.
They made this world a wonderful place to live in.
Their loss is a loss for all humanity
and we hope that future generations will never know of our pain,
and that everybody will stand up to any form of persecution.
I taught my children love and not hate.
But I could never forget. I could never forgive.
This is my father and my mother.
They’re young.
And this is my father again,
and this is my father and my little baby sister.
And this is the jacket he was wearing, that I found the jacket,
this is the jacket, before he went to the gas chambers.
Growing up with Jack Betteil, a survivor,
he always told me what happened to him as a child,
and I always knew that there was some kind of anti-Semitism
and perhaps evil in the world.
And after telling me how he lost his family,
his home, and just about everything,
I remember when I was growing up
and if I came home from school, like any kid,
if I had a little problem I would look to him and tell him the story,
and he would look back and me and just go, that’s terrible, Matt.
And I knew that it was nothing compared to what it was like growing up for him.
And so it gave me perspective in terms of what problems really were,
as opposed to what I thought were problems.
He gave me a way to look at the world and see it through his eyes,
which is sometimes very frightening, but also there were lots of good stories
about when he survived, about little kindnesses
that made the difference between life and death.
And it was just something that I learned how to appreciate,
both the good and the bad.
And growing up with someone like Jack,
I can see that he always kept his sense of humor.
He was always wonderful with people.
He did incredible acts of charity for children.
So he was very tough, he was very strong,
and he knew about the bad but he also taught me about the good.
What survivors represent for us is they faced the ultimate defeat.
They lost their entire family, their mothers and fathers,
their sisters and brothers, their husbands and wives,
their children, their grandparents.
And they didn’t allow defeat to define them.
They developed the courage and the ability to rebuild their lives.
You know, people ask me, if you played music in Auschwitz
how can you play music now?
You know, the idea that Hitler could destroy music is ridiculous.
He destroyed a great deal, but music is not destructible by Hitler.
But once you are in this world,
you have a responsibility to be worthy to be called a human being.
That’s all.
I think it’s really important to tell the story and to tell the truth,
to tell what you saw, to tell what you felt.
And when you see things going wrong,
you really need to look at it and not pretend that it’s not happening.
And I feel that that’s why it’s so important,
it shouldn’t be forgot, it shouldn’t be forgotten because it can happen again.
Survivors tell us their story not because they want to weaken us,
not because they want pity, but because they want to strengthen us
in our commitment to human dignity and human decency,
and our commitment to the sanctity and sacredness of all human life.
And after they finish bequeathing to us their testimony,
then the question is, what are we to do with it?
Now it’s up to us.
I have a card that says no act of kindness,
no matter how small, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
If everybody would just practice that and bring respect back to one another
and remember we all, I don’t care what your religion is or what your background is,
we all belong to the same race. The human race.
Let’s appreciate our differences rather than hate them and live side by side in peace.
The hatred must stop, because we can now see what hatred will bring.
Human beings are capable of the most noble acts imaginable
and the most horrific acts imaginable.
And the question becomes for each of us,
is what type of human being do you want to be?
One person at Sachsenhausen said it in the following way.
He used to tell his prisoners,
his arriving prisoners what they were about to face.
And he said "I have told you this story
not to weaken you but to strengthen you.
Many of them believe they survived by accident
but the question is...what do you do with your accident?
And they have decided to bear witness,
to tell their story.
That is a particular story that happened to a particular people.
But has the universal characteristics of saying,
we must now work to enhance human dignity,
to enlarge human decency, to teach people of the importance of human equality
and the majesty and sacredness of each individual human life?
It’s a plea, a plea set on the ashes of millions.
Dear Mother,
This letter I’m writing to you will be placed in a museum.
I was under the impression that only fine art finds its way to museums.
However, this is a special kind of museum.
You and six million like you created this museum.
As for time, Mother dear,
time did not work the magic of healing.
In each phase of my life,
my pain was emphasized as was the realization of motherhood.
And let our suffering cause absolve all the generations to come,
and may they know the inner peace which was never mine.
♪ [Emotive choir music] ♪