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00:00:39,248 --> 00:00:40,874
So what are we
doing with the Holocaust,

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00:00:40,874 --> 00:00:43,293
we're doing what
the biblical Jews did

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00:00:43,293 --> 00:00:45,003
with the story of the exodus.

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00:00:46,171 --> 00:00:48,966
There was an Egypt
and there was a Pharoah,

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00:00:48,966 --> 00:00:53,136
there was a Moses and
there was the crossing of the sea,

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00:00:53,136 --> 00:00:56,265
and the struggle to go through
the desert to the promised land.

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00:00:56,265 --> 00:00:58,267
That's the story of freedom.

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00:00:58,267 --> 00:01:01,770
That is a particular story that
happened to a particular people

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00:01:01,770 --> 00:01:05,482
but has the universal
characteristics of saying

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we must now work
to enhance human dignity,

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to enlarge human decency.

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To teach people of the
importance of human equality,

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and the majesty and sacredness
of each individual human life.

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It's a plea, a plea set on
the ashes of millions.

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And that's why we're
commanded to remember

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that we were slaves in Egypt.

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Not to enslave other people

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but to make sure
that other people, what?

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Not enslaved.

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So that's the
task of this generation.

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And that's what survivors
are bequeathing to us,

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as they're beginning to leave
this stage of human history.

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00:02:05,125 --> 00:02:14,134
♪ [Somber Music ] ♪

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00:02:15,969 --> 00:02:19,097
Survivors tell us their story
not because they want to weaken us,

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not because they want pity,

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but because they want to
strengthen us in our commitment

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to human dignity
and human decency

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and our commitment to the sanctity
and sacredness of all human life.

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♪ [Somber Music ] ♪

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After they finish bequeathing
to us their testimony,

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then the question is
what are we to do with it?

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Now it’s up to us.

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♪ [Somber Music ] ♪

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When we moved to
Prague from the town

35
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of Olomouc in Czechoslovakia
when I was two,

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I don’t remember any of that.

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But my early memories
probably go back

38
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to the time that I was five,

39
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maybe four and a half,
five years old in Prague.

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We lived in an
apartment in Prague,

41
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an apartment house that
belonged to my grandparents,

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my maternal grandparents.

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And I remember the apartment

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and I remember the music

45
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that my parents would
play on the piano,

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and at that point
I was about five years old.

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So my memories go
back to that period

48
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of all the very
comfortable life.

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The earliest memories.

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Well, I have some
pictures around here

51
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of me sitting on
a bicycle about this high,

52
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and the nurse
holding up the bicycle

53
00:06:09,578 --> 00:06:12,914
so it wouldn’t take
off on its own.

54
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That must have been
what, maybe 1925, 1926.

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It seemed pretty normal

56
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growing up in Breslau
at that particular time.

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I didn’t realize
that disaster was looming.

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Germany was thoroughly unprepared
for the defeat of World War I.

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It hadn’t lost a battle.

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And Germany was defeated essentially

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because it ran out
of certain types of essentials.

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It ran out of the
essentials of rubber,

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it ran out of the
essentials of gasoline,

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it ran very low on food.

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And they blamed it on the Jews.

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Hitler exploited that, and he
used that as a modality of saying

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not only are Jews bad,
but they’re dangerous.

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He had written Mein Kampf
in 1924 and ’25,

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told us what he was looking for,

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told us that he was looking for
a world that was racially realigned

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and a world that
was realigned geographically,

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looking for inner conquest
and German expansionism

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and looking to
create the master race.

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And in retrospect, what’s clear
is that Hitler meant what he said,

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and he said what he meant.

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The German version
in the years of the 1930’s

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alleging that the
Jews are world conquerors,

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would go out to conquer
the world if they could,

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that the Jews are criminals,
that the Jews are parasites,

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all these themes can be found in
the writings of Martin Luther,

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Jüden und iren Lügen
published in 1535.

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A book like Mein Kampf,
any one of those texts,

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is going to tap into deep
seeded discontent and fears.

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In some ways, Mein Kampf
could not have been successful

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if there weren’t other like deep
rooted social problems at that time

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that provided the fertile field for this
abhorrent anti-Semitism to then take root.

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Added to that, of course, are
the more famous measures,

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marking the Jews with a star,
compulsory ghettoization,

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all of which have
origins in canon law,

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Cianites and decisions of the Church.

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There is thus a great reservoir
of experience to draw upon,

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and the remarkable thing about
bureaucracy everywhere

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is that they invent as little as possible
and use as much of the past as they can.

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When the Nazi forces took over,

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within a few
months of that moment

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there was heavy
anti-Semitism throughout.

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We heard roars of people,

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our neighbors and friends
and people I’ve known my life.

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My mother was born
in the same home I was born,

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and you know,
that’s been in the family

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I don’t know for
how many generations.

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And people were shouting,

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you know, “Heil Hitler” and
“Long live the Fuehrer”

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and people were
waving flags with swastikas.

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There was a
feeling of complete betrayal.

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Suddenly you were home
and you were not home anymore.

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I mean, look at the
First World War, you know?

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I mean, Jewish people ran to
volunteer with the hope that

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once we are in that mess
together we would become brothers.

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And then the war was lost,
and whose fault was it?

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The Jews, of course.

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Religious anti-Semitism
essentially said,

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in the words of, Raul Hilberg
once put it very succinctly.

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He said the Christian rulers
said you have no right

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to live among us as Jews,
therefore convert.

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The political leaders
who followed said

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you have no right to live among
us as Jews, therefore leave.

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And the Nazis said you have no
right to live among us as Jews,

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therefore we will kill you.

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The difference between
Hitler and Roosevelt

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was that both
of them came to office

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where gross national product
had declined by 40 percent.

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You had 25 percent unemployment.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned
the nation one toward each other,

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and Hitler turned the nation
one against the other.

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And the Jews became
the ultimate scapegoat for that.

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And he was a charismatic leader
who had the ability to persuade,

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who had a sense
of the power of oratory.

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Some people voted for Hitler
because he was an anti-Semite.

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Other people voted for Hitler

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despite the fact that
he was an anti-Semite.

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They figured that
they could accomplish

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part of their agenda
through Adolph Hitler.

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They believed first of all
that they were wise enough,

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experienced enough, sophisticated
enough to control Hitler,

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and secondly that
the majesty of office

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would force Hitler
to the sector.

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Neither of them proved correct.

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No hate-based project that
singles out a group for persecution

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can succeed full blown
in one single step.

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There has to be multiple steps,

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and those steps
have to be incremental.

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They banned Jewish
from going to,

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00:12:54,065 --> 00:12:58,653
Jewish kids going to German
schools and Jewish businesses

145
00:12:58,653 --> 00:13:02,281
and doctors couldn’t practice,
lawyers couldn’t practice,

146
00:13:02,281 --> 00:13:05,952
any of the things that
made life a possibility.

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00:13:05,952 --> 00:13:09,372
All these kinds of movements
operate under the assumption

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00:13:09,372 --> 00:13:16,004
that there is some sort of
ethereal white purity that’s out there

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that needs to be protected,
that cannot be adulterated

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00:13:19,632 --> 00:13:27,098
by these sort of threatening
hordes, the darker others.

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And he came and had lunch
with my father and said Fritz,

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that was my father’s name,
this is no place for Jews to be.

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He wasn’t Jewish.

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You got to get out of here.

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00:14:01,132 --> 00:14:05,845
That night, while he was in the
hospital after the operation,

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00:14:05,845 --> 00:14:10,558
the Nazis invaded
the hospital as well as the homes.

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00:14:10,558 --> 00:14:12,810
They burned the
synagogues, you know,

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00:14:12,810 --> 00:14:16,105
there was a whole
big uprising kind of thing.

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00:14:16,105 --> 00:14:18,316
And they came into the hospital

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00:14:18,316 --> 00:14:22,528
and took every one of the
patients and lined them up outside.

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00:14:22,528 --> 00:14:25,907
And one of the bums hit
my father over the head

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00:14:25,907 --> 00:14:28,034
with a rifle butt
and that killed him.

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00:14:28,034 --> 00:14:32,121
So all of the ills that one
might encounter in society,

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00:14:32,121 --> 00:14:35,792
all the dissatisfactions that
exist within society and,

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00:14:35,792 --> 00:14:38,711
you know, you live
in a free democratic society,

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00:14:38,711 --> 00:14:40,254
there are going to be problems.

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00:14:40,254 --> 00:14:45,885
So hate provides an overly
convenient scapegoat,

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00:14:45,885 --> 00:14:49,263
a way to sort of
project all those ills

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00:14:49,263 --> 00:14:53,476
onto the bodies
of a different other.

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00:14:53,476 --> 00:14:58,022
Even the propaganda could rest
upon earlier conceptions and writings,

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going back in this
case to the 16th century.

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Nothing new here.

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00:15:04,654 --> 00:15:07,406
The newness came with
the Final Solution itself,

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00:15:07,406 --> 00:15:14,163
because all of these measures
supported church policy,

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which was in the first instance
the conversion of the Jews.

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To make their
life miserable sufficiently

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00:15:22,380 --> 00:15:25,466
so that they would see
the light and become Christians.

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00:15:26,342 --> 00:15:30,304
But the Church could not
go further than that.

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00:15:30,555 --> 00:15:34,642
The Church would not kill, for
then it would lose its basic objective.

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00:15:35,643 --> 00:15:39,105
And that’s the reason that when
it came to the Final Solution,

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00:15:39,105 --> 00:15:43,901
the Germans had to become
inventors and innovators on their own.

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For Nazi anti-Semitism,
the Jews were defined racially

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00:15:47,321 --> 00:15:49,699
based on the
religion of their grandparents.

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00:15:49,699 --> 00:15:53,578
Based on the nature of
the blood they carried within them,

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00:15:53,578 --> 00:15:55,371
so you could
be a believing Christian,

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00:15:55,371 --> 00:15:57,665
the Church might define
you as a Christian,

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00:15:57,665 --> 00:16:00,960
the state, the Nazi state
would define you as a Jew.

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00:16:00,960 --> 00:16:03,629
The Nazis regarding Jews
as a cancer on society

189
00:16:03,629 --> 00:16:06,799
so they had to be
cut out of literally,

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00:16:06,799 --> 00:16:10,094
by the end of what they were
doing, cut out of the world.

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00:16:10,094 --> 00:16:13,306
And consequently, they felt that
they were healing Germany

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00:16:13,306 --> 00:16:15,683
by getting rid of the Jews.

193
00:16:55,389 --> 00:17:05,691
My youth finished in 1939 when
the Germans invaded Poland.

194
00:17:05,691 --> 00:17:08,444
The whole building started
to shake and rattle.

195
00:17:08,444 --> 00:17:11,739
I thought maybe it was an
earthquake or something,

196
00:17:11,739 --> 00:17:15,076
which I never experienced,
but it was strange

197
00:17:15,076 --> 00:17:20,206
and I ran to the window and I
saw tanks rolling down the street.

198
00:17:20,206 --> 00:17:23,376
After the Half-tracks
there were the Wermacht,

199
00:17:23,376 --> 00:17:27,255
the foot soldiers,
with their shiny black boots.

200
00:17:27,255 --> 00:17:29,131
Did I know what to expect?

201
00:17:29,131 --> 00:17:35,137
No. You hear this terrible
screaming in this neighbor’s apartment,

202
00:17:35,137 --> 00:17:40,226
and everyone screaming,
“Our baby! Our baby!
Don’t hurt our baby!”

203
00:17:40,226 --> 00:17:45,690
You can see he was enjoying
this, with a smirk on his face.

204
00:17:45,690 --> 00:17:48,025
He was sort of smiling.

205
00:17:48,025 --> 00:17:54,365
He smashes the baby’s head into
the door post, killing it instantly.

206
00:17:54,365 --> 00:18:01,289
The difficult part of leaving
Germany was not leaving Germany,

207
00:18:01,289 --> 00:18:03,874
it was finding a place to go to.

208
00:18:03,874 --> 00:18:07,044
The United States,
England, France, Europe,

209
00:18:07,044 --> 00:18:11,382
all these places had cut off
visas for people to come.

210
00:18:11,382 --> 00:18:16,012
Ghettos were transitory,
a transitional phenomenon.

211
00:18:16,012 --> 00:18:19,140
Neither the German nor
the Jew understood that going in.

212
00:18:19,140 --> 00:18:24,478
But ghettos for the Germans was
a place to contain the Jews until,

213
00:18:24,478 --> 00:18:28,274
until ultimately became
clear until the infrastructure

214
00:18:28,274 --> 00:18:31,110
for their destruction was developed.

215
00:18:31,110 --> 00:18:37,116
They first wanted to
gather the Jews in a ghetto

216
00:18:37,116 --> 00:18:43,706
so they should be able to have
an easier time to lay hands on them.

217
00:18:43,706 --> 00:18:49,420
Unfortunately, as I said before,
my father was so successful in business

218
00:18:49,420 --> 00:18:57,636
that he could not think of
abandoning the business and fleeing.

219
00:18:57,636 --> 00:19:02,683
So he sent me
and my mother and my sister

220
00:19:02,683 --> 00:19:07,605
back to Krakow
under the German occupation.

221
00:19:07,605 --> 00:19:15,863
This was a tragic mistake
which cost us our life.

222
00:19:15,863 --> 00:19:18,616
When Jewish apartments were closed,

223
00:19:18,616 --> 00:19:21,786
the furniture was taken
over and was distributed

224
00:19:21,786 --> 00:19:25,623
after the bombings began
to the bombed out Germans.

225
00:19:25,623 --> 00:19:31,003
The furniture of Jews in Belgium
and in Netherlands and in France

226
00:19:31,003 --> 00:19:35,966
was taken hold of by Alfred Rosenberg
and which he operated in the West

227
00:19:35,966 --> 00:19:41,806
and were shipped to deserving
German families, bombed out, etc.

228
00:19:41,806 --> 00:19:45,726
Incidentally, some portion of
this furniture went to railroad employees

229
00:19:45,726 --> 00:19:48,687
in recognition of the services
that the railroads were rendering

230
00:19:48,687 --> 00:19:51,690
in transporting the Jews
under these difficult conditions.

231
00:19:51,690 --> 00:19:56,987
And interestingly enough, very
little furniture was used from Poland,

232
00:19:56,987 --> 00:20:00,032
because it was
in such horrible condition

233
00:20:00,032 --> 00:20:02,910
that it wasn’t fit
for Germans, quite obviously.

234
00:20:06,330 --> 00:20:09,583
So when we were kicked
out of the apartment by the SS,

235
00:20:09,583 --> 00:20:13,087
we had to move to
another apartment in Prague.

236
00:20:13,087 --> 00:20:15,923
We were there for,
I don’t know, six months,

237
00:20:15,923 --> 00:20:19,260
maybe six to eight months,
and then we were transported to,

238
00:20:19,260 --> 00:20:25,641
to the ghetto of Terezin, or
in German it was called Terezinstadt.

239
00:20:25,641 --> 00:20:28,853
The conditions at
our ghetto were terrible.

240
00:20:28,853 --> 00:20:33,399
We had one little room
to live in, all of us.

241
00:20:33,399 --> 00:20:39,864
To eat, to sleep, just one
little room in the ghetto.

242
00:20:39,864 --> 00:20:43,033
You could not live
a normal life in a ghetto.

243
00:20:43,033 --> 00:20:45,786
There was no schooling,
no formal schooling.

244
00:20:45,786 --> 00:20:48,164
Food was highly limited.

245
00:20:48,164 --> 00:20:51,876
You couldn’t buy any clothes,
you couldn’t buy shoes,

246
00:20:51,876 --> 00:20:54,044
you couldn’t go out
and buy an apple

247
00:20:54,044 --> 00:20:57,756
or a piece of fresh
fruit or fresh vegetables.

248
00:20:57,756 --> 00:21:01,260
So Terezin was
a walled city, was a ghetto.

249
00:21:01,260 --> 00:21:03,053
Nobody could get out.

250
00:21:03,053 --> 00:21:05,723
We had no contact
with the outside world.

251
00:21:05,723 --> 00:21:10,436
We were totally isolated from
the rest of the Czech population.

252
00:21:10,436 --> 00:21:14,398
This was really
the beginning of my Holocaust,

253
00:21:14,398 --> 00:21:17,109
of the Holocaust for me.

254
00:21:17,610 --> 00:21:22,698
Losing my home,
disrupting my family,

255
00:21:22,698 --> 00:21:27,536
not being able to
strike any roots anywhere.

256
00:21:31,373 --> 00:21:34,251
If one is going
to occupy all Europe,

257
00:21:34,251 --> 00:21:36,420
if one is going
to have a world war,

258
00:21:36,420 --> 00:21:38,797
and if one is going to
do all of these things

259
00:21:38,797 --> 00:21:43,302
in a single space of time,
ten years, twelve years,

260
00:21:43,302 --> 00:21:46,931
what, what are you going to do
with the Jewish population?

261
00:21:46,931 --> 00:21:52,770
As one German SS Major said in
the Lodz ghetto in the middle of 1941,

262
00:21:52,770 --> 00:21:56,065
we can’t very well
spend another winter here

263
00:21:56,065 --> 00:21:58,734
and let them starve to death.

264
00:21:58,734 --> 00:22:00,486
That would not be [German].

265
00:22:00,486 --> 00:22:04,031
We would have
to find some device

266
00:22:04,031 --> 00:22:07,952
that would be humane
and that would do the job.

267
00:22:08,702 --> 00:22:12,998
And it is in that sense,
in the words of this one Major,

268
00:22:12,998 --> 00:22:18,462
that one sees the inevitability
of the process reaching that conclusion.

269
00:22:41,443 --> 00:22:45,823
There is a logic,
whether people recognize it or not,

270
00:22:45,823 --> 00:22:47,741
that when you pass these laws

271
00:22:47,741 --> 00:22:54,665
and each law being sort of successively
more punitive than the one previous,

272
00:22:54,665 --> 00:23:01,005
that there is an inexorable march
toward ultimate murder and extermination.

273
00:23:01,005 --> 00:23:03,465
Unlike the orders
of Adolph Hitler

274
00:23:03,465 --> 00:23:06,385
with respect to the invasion
of the Soviet Union,

275
00:23:06,385 --> 00:23:09,013
directives [German],
which were in writing,

276
00:23:09,013 --> 00:23:11,974
what we do not have
for the Final Solution

277
00:23:11,974 --> 00:23:15,394
is a written document
signed by Hitler himself.

278
00:23:15,394 --> 00:23:20,691
So all of these Fuhrer directives,
Fuhrer wishes, Fuhrer orders,

279
00:23:20,691 --> 00:23:23,944
are inferred from things
that he must have said.

280
00:23:23,944 --> 00:23:26,530
Perhaps he said them to Goering.

281
00:23:26,530 --> 00:23:28,699
Perhaps he said them to Himmler.

282
00:23:28,699 --> 00:23:30,993
Perhaps he said
them to someone else.

283
00:23:30,993 --> 00:23:33,329
Evidently, he said
them several times

284
00:23:33,329 --> 00:23:37,207
and in several contexts,
but not necessarily clearly.

285
00:23:38,208 --> 00:23:41,879
So here we are in this situation

286
00:23:41,879 --> 00:23:44,089
which is so typical
of the Nazi regime

287
00:23:44,089 --> 00:23:48,427
but is not well understood
outside the narrow participants

288
00:23:48,427 --> 00:23:53,098
who know it well, and that is
that so much of what is assumed

289
00:23:53,098 --> 00:23:58,270
to be a basic directive and a
basic structure is rather amorphous,

290
00:23:58,270 --> 00:24:02,733
and that words are spoken and
interpreted and used and employed

291
00:24:02,733 --> 00:24:05,694
in accordance with the
understanding of these words

292
00:24:05,694 --> 00:24:08,614
by those who listened
or even those who are

293
00:24:08,614 --> 00:24:11,992
one step removed from those
who have listened to them.

294
00:24:11,992 --> 00:24:14,119
And this is the
reason that historians

295
00:24:14,119 --> 00:24:16,914
to this very day
are asking everyone,

296
00:24:16,914 --> 00:24:22,378
what was your understanding of
this or that other conversation?

297
00:24:22,378 --> 00:24:26,507
And we know that
the so-called [German word],

298
00:24:26,507 --> 00:24:31,220
the so-called order under which
the Einsatzgruppen moved out,

299
00:24:31,220 --> 00:24:33,722
was, to say the least, vague.

300
00:24:34,264 --> 00:24:36,934
What document, any document,
can you point to

301
00:24:36,934 --> 00:24:40,562
that would say alright,
the primary objective

302
00:24:40,562 --> 00:24:44,149
of this Einsatzgruppen was
the onset of the Final Solution?

303
00:24:44,149 --> 00:24:47,277
We see this from what they did.

304
00:24:47,277 --> 00:24:50,030
We could not infer
it from written documents

305
00:24:50,030 --> 00:24:53,158
written before they
moved into Russia.

306
00:24:53,492 --> 00:25:03,293
It was a session by
the top German leadership,

307
00:25:03,293 --> 00:25:12,469
Reinhard Heydrich, he had the order
from Hitler to eliminate the Jews.

308
00:25:13,679 --> 00:25:16,932
And at that time,
they had a big meeting there

309
00:25:16,932 --> 00:25:29,987
to devise means and methods
how to murder the Jews.

310
00:25:32,448 --> 00:25:35,492
Each knows what
the other is talking about.

311
00:25:35,492 --> 00:25:39,788
Each comes to this
meeting with great expectation.

312
00:25:39,788 --> 00:25:44,418
The tension is revealed
even in the many drafts

313
00:25:44,418 --> 00:25:47,004
that this final summary
must have gone through

314
00:25:47,004 --> 00:25:53,302
in that final version of the
talks as prepared by Eichmann.

315
00:25:53,302 --> 00:25:56,889
And the tension shows through.

316
00:25:56,889 --> 00:26:03,479
This was a moment of history,
and the participants knew it.

317
00:26:03,854 --> 00:26:06,982
They knew it in the field
and they knew it in Berlin,

318
00:26:06,982 --> 00:26:10,277
and they knew it
whenever they corresponded

319
00:26:10,277 --> 00:26:12,529
or talked to
one another about it.

320
00:26:13,572 --> 00:26:18,869
And they moved into it
with a certain confusion,

321
00:26:18,869 --> 00:26:23,165
at first, with even
chaos in the field.

322
00:26:23,540 --> 00:26:28,879
But soon enough, with the goal
very clearly outlined in their minds,

323
00:26:28,879 --> 00:26:34,134
and now everything dovetailed
and everything produced

324
00:26:34,134 --> 00:26:40,682
a well-oiled process
on the assembly line.

325
00:26:50,776 --> 00:26:55,322
Hitler betrayed their
1939 pact in June, 1941.

326
00:26:55,322 --> 00:27:01,995
He saw it as a racial war, and
he suspended all rules of normal warfare

327
00:27:02,538 --> 00:27:07,167
and essentially allowed them to
go after the Soviet troops

328
00:27:07,167 --> 00:27:10,254
and Soviet civilians
in a deeply vicious way.

329
00:27:10,254 --> 00:27:14,258
And the very nature of
Barbarossa, an open-ended assault.

330
00:27:14,258 --> 00:27:17,135
Not only is there
no ultimatum to the Soviets,

331
00:27:17,135 --> 00:27:21,473
no warning, no condition, but
there isn’t any definite plan

332
00:27:21,473 --> 00:27:24,434
as to where the German
army was going to stop.

333
00:27:24,434 --> 00:27:27,187
There’s no envisaging
of any peace treaty.

334
00:27:27,187 --> 00:27:29,898
There’s no clear-cut view
of what is to be done

335
00:27:29,898 --> 00:27:31,984
with that population
once it is conquered.

336
00:27:31,984 --> 00:27:37,239
Along with that came the
decision of the sending in

337
00:27:37,239 --> 00:27:41,493
of three thousand Einsatzgruppen,
special mobile killers.

338
00:27:41,493 --> 00:27:46,331
And their assignment was
to kill without pity or remorse,

339
00:27:46,331 --> 00:27:47,916
they never used the word kill.

340
00:27:47,916 --> 00:27:52,212
Eliminate without pity or
remorse every single Jewish man,

341
00:27:52,212 --> 00:27:55,340
woman or child they
could lay their hands on.

342
00:28:04,391 --> 00:28:07,436
Bullet by bullet by bullet.

343
00:28:07,436 --> 00:28:12,482
They murdered Jews, they
murdered Soviet commissars,
former Soviet officials,

344
00:28:12,482 --> 00:28:17,154
and they murdered what we call
Roman Sinti who were gypsies.

345
00:28:17,154 --> 00:28:24,870
So these people ended up engaging
in a strategy of annihilation,

346
00:28:24,870 --> 00:28:27,122
which they called extermination.

347
00:28:27,122 --> 00:28:29,333
Extermination is what
we do to what,

348
00:28:29,333 --> 00:28:35,380
to rats and vermin,
to mice and to bugs.

349
00:28:35,380 --> 00:28:37,799
They called it extermination.

350
00:28:37,799 --> 00:28:39,635
I would call it annihilation.

351
00:28:39,968 --> 00:28:45,933
And they ultimately killed almost two
million people this way as part of the plan.

352
00:28:45,933 --> 00:28:49,061
So Barbarossa was
the general invasion,

353
00:28:49,061 --> 00:28:52,272
and the final solution
to the Jewish problem

354
00:28:52,272 --> 00:28:56,902
began with sending mobile
killers to stationary victims.

355
00:28:56,902 --> 00:29:02,282
In Ukraine, in Russia, in Belarus, most just
were not deported to the death camps.

356
00:29:02,282 --> 00:29:04,326
They were killed
exactly on the sites.

357
00:29:04,326 --> 00:29:07,663
So there are just
mass graves everywhere.

358
00:29:07,663 --> 00:29:10,707
And some people have no idea
that there are these mass graves,

359
00:29:10,707 --> 00:29:12,709
and there are no signs, nothing.

360
00:29:13,210 --> 00:29:15,754
The secret of
understanding the Holocaust

361
00:29:15,754 --> 00:29:21,218
is to understand that we went from
mobile killers to stationary victims.

362
00:29:21,218 --> 00:29:24,596
And when that became
too difficult for the killers,

363
00:29:24,596 --> 00:29:27,099
killers needed to drink afterwards

364
00:29:27,099 --> 00:29:29,518
and then they started
to drink before and during.

365
00:29:29,518 --> 00:29:33,355
You had mental breakdowns,
you also had a lack of discipline.

366
00:29:33,355 --> 00:29:35,816
They reversed the process.

367
00:29:35,816 --> 00:29:39,486
They sent, they made
the victims mobile

368
00:29:39,486 --> 00:29:43,281
and they sent them
to stationary killing centers.

369
00:30:15,731 --> 00:30:17,149
People arrived in Chelmno,

370
00:30:17,149 --> 00:30:19,276
they arrived in
a place called the manor.

371
00:30:19,735 --> 00:30:21,570
They were forced to undress.

372
00:30:21,570 --> 00:30:25,282
They walked downstairs and
marched on to a furniture truck

373
00:30:25,282 --> 00:30:31,413
that was then sealed and it was
driven about 20 minutes, very slowly.

374
00:30:31,413 --> 00:30:33,582
And that’s the
moment at which the gas,

375
00:30:33,582 --> 00:30:38,086
the gas from the exhaust
was piped into the rear,

376
00:30:38,086 --> 00:30:43,633
and in essence when the gas was
piped into the rear, the Jews died.

377
00:30:43,633 --> 00:30:46,887
They were brought
to a forest and ultimately

378
00:30:46,887 --> 00:30:51,308
in the forest they were
buried, burnt, primarily burnt.

379
00:31:16,958 --> 00:31:30,722
♪ [singing] ♪

380
00:36:03,870 --> 00:36:05,497
Well, first of all,

381
00:36:05,497 --> 00:36:11,169
how could you characterize
the diary of Czerniakow?

382
00:36:12,087 --> 00:36:15,882
It is certainly the most unique

383
00:36:15,882 --> 00:36:19,719
and I would say the
most important document

384
00:36:19,719 --> 00:36:23,306
coming from the Jewish
side about the Holocaust,

385
00:36:23,306 --> 00:36:25,683
because it was written by a man

386
00:36:25,683 --> 00:36:32,732
who began keeping a diary
the very first week of the war,

387
00:36:33,149 --> 00:36:35,985
before the Germans
entered Warsaw

388
00:36:35,985 --> 00:36:38,530
and before he took
over the responsibility

389
00:36:38,530 --> 00:36:40,532
of leading the Jewish community,

390
00:36:41,282 --> 00:36:46,496
and who kept his
diary in daily entries

391
00:36:46,496 --> 00:36:52,460
until the afternoon of the
day that he ended his life.

392
00:36:55,338 --> 00:36:58,216
And it is an important document

393
00:36:58,216 --> 00:37:02,595
because Czerniakow occupied
a post at the interface

394
00:37:02,595 --> 00:37:05,390
between the German
and Jewish communities,

395
00:37:05,390 --> 00:37:07,934
in daily contact with both,

396
00:37:07,934 --> 00:37:10,812
receiving the requests
and appeals and entreaties

397
00:37:10,812 --> 00:37:13,565
from the Jewish population
and in turn appealing

398
00:37:13,565 --> 00:37:18,736
to the Germans every week,
several times a week.

399
00:37:19,696 --> 00:37:21,322
And it is a unique document

400
00:37:21,322 --> 00:37:24,576
because a man
holding that possession

401
00:37:24,576 --> 00:37:28,538
set down in very
matter of fact language,

402
00:37:29,289 --> 00:37:34,878
without embellishment,
in an almost laconic style,

403
00:37:34,878 --> 00:37:39,507
everything that was transpiring,
every meeting he had,

404
00:37:39,507 --> 00:37:43,219
every subject that was
discussed in these meetings.

405
00:37:43,219 --> 00:37:46,431
Thus the diary
is just full of names

406
00:37:46,431 --> 00:37:49,517
and incidents and
occurrences of various kinds,

407
00:37:49,517 --> 00:37:52,687
and covers the waterfront
when it comes to subjects.

408
00:37:52,687 --> 00:38:00,445
Food, space, labor,
hostages, children, shootings,

409
00:38:00,445 --> 00:38:07,076
violence, deportations, ghettoization
in general, all of it is there.

410
00:38:08,161 --> 00:38:12,290
There is simply
nothing that compares

411
00:38:12,290 --> 00:38:18,171
in sheer content and coverage
what this diary contains.

412
00:38:18,630 --> 00:38:21,132
But it is above all remarkable

413
00:38:21,132 --> 00:38:27,305
because the farther away
we are from the event itself,

414
00:38:27,305 --> 00:38:31,100
it seems that the diary
transcends the man.

415
00:38:32,644 --> 00:38:37,524
It seems that keeping the
diary under the circumstances

416
00:38:37,524 --> 00:38:41,319
was one of the most
important things he did.

417
00:38:43,655 --> 00:38:48,618
For he left us a
window through which

418
00:38:48,618 --> 00:38:54,791
we can observe a Jewish community
in the terminal hours of its life.

419
00:38:56,584 --> 00:39:00,839
As you know, in Warsaw
there were post offices,

420
00:39:00,839 --> 00:39:02,465
and the ghetto had
one such post office,

421
00:39:02,465 --> 00:39:06,928
but delivery of all mail and
parcels was carried on by Jews,

422
00:39:06,928 --> 00:39:09,764
not by the regular
post office employees.

423
00:39:09,764 --> 00:39:13,017
And once, a
15-year-old was substituting

424
00:39:13,017 --> 00:39:16,646
for his mail carrying father
with very vital parcels.

425
00:39:16,646 --> 00:39:18,898
As you know,
parcels kept people alive.

426
00:39:18,898 --> 00:39:24,362
He was shot and he collapsed,

427
00:39:24,362 --> 00:39:29,450
and with intestines coming
out of his abdomen

428
00:39:29,450 --> 00:39:32,787
and a spinal cord that
was apparently severed,

429
00:39:32,787 --> 00:39:40,628
he crawled to the nearest house
and asked that another policeman

430
00:39:40,628 --> 00:39:44,340
deliver the packages
that he was carrying.

431
00:39:45,842 --> 00:39:48,052
Czerniakow says no more.

432
00:39:48,720 --> 00:39:52,056
For him, that story tells all.

433
00:39:53,308 --> 00:39:55,810
The boy was fifteen.

434
00:39:56,144 --> 00:39:59,063
The constant dilemma
of every Jewish council,

435
00:39:59,063 --> 00:40:02,317
and particularly of Czerniakow
as the head of the largest of them,

436
00:40:02,317 --> 00:40:10,950
was that one could not stay at ones
post without serving the Germans,

437
00:40:10,950 --> 00:40:16,748
and one could not leave the post
without apparently hurting the Jews.

438
00:40:16,748 --> 00:40:19,083
This was a paradox
and a contradiction

439
00:40:19,083 --> 00:40:21,044
with which they all had to live.

440
00:40:21,586 --> 00:40:25,381
It was impossible to separate
the two elements of the job.

441
00:40:25,381 --> 00:40:30,011
It was a fatal combination,
and it killed him.

442
00:40:31,971 --> 00:40:34,974
That motorcycle
came down the surface,

443
00:40:34,974 --> 00:40:38,019
an incredible roar
came down the street.

444
00:40:38,019 --> 00:40:43,024
It was two
German military in them.

445
00:40:43,399 --> 00:40:46,861
And the thing which
I remember most vividly,

446
00:40:46,861 --> 00:40:50,573
my brother had this
wristwatch in his pocket

447
00:40:50,573 --> 00:40:53,076
and he was just
removing it from his pocket.

448
00:40:53,076 --> 00:40:56,913
And so his hand
must have trembled

449
00:40:56,913 --> 00:40:59,165
because his watch
fell to the floor,

450
00:40:59,165 --> 00:41:03,795
and I remember seeing
it was 9:10 in the morning.

451
00:41:03,795 --> 00:41:07,674
And I always take it as something
that that was the moment when,

452
00:41:07,674 --> 00:41:10,385
when my world was gone.

453
00:41:13,846 --> 00:41:17,892
Every apartment and every
house had the hiding place.

454
00:41:17,892 --> 00:41:20,478
They called it the bunker.

455
00:41:20,478 --> 00:41:25,608
Now if you’re found hiding,
they shot you immediately.

456
00:41:25,608 --> 00:41:30,822
When they’d come in the trucks
and they were on a loudspeaker,

457
00:41:30,822 --> 00:41:34,534
everyone has to come out
and get into those trucks,

458
00:41:34,534 --> 00:41:40,540
and supposedly they’re going to
take us to labor camps, if you believe it.

459
00:41:40,540 --> 00:41:45,920
One of the boys that was in my
dormitory in the school that we were in,

460
00:41:45,920 --> 00:41:48,881
I was about eleven
and a half then,

461
00:41:48,881 --> 00:41:55,012
he came in one day all upset
telling everybody that his,

462
00:41:55,012 --> 00:42:00,810
that his grandmother just
must have taken an overdose

463
00:42:00,810 --> 00:42:04,063
of sleeping pills and
that she’s in a coma.

464
00:42:04,063 --> 00:42:11,070
And when I asked him what he thinks
triggered her taking the sleeping pills,

465
00:42:11,070 --> 00:42:17,243
he said she was apparently told
that she was going to be shipped east.

466
00:42:17,660 --> 00:42:29,464
My rabbi, Sholom, when
he conducted a shish, he was crying.

467
00:42:29,464 --> 00:42:37,805
He was crying with great tears
because he couldn’t explicate,

468
00:42:37,805 --> 00:42:46,230
he could not share the terrible feelings
that he had about the fate of the Jews.

469
00:42:46,230 --> 00:42:55,615
The worst day of my life,
the 28th of June, ’42.

470
00:42:55,615 --> 00:43:00,328
That is when I saw
my father for the last time.

471
00:43:00,328 --> 00:43:03,790
The following day my mother.

472
00:43:04,665 --> 00:43:07,418
I heard my parents, of course
we all lived in one room,

473
00:43:07,418 --> 00:43:09,879
and I heard my parents
talk through that night,

474
00:43:09,879 --> 00:43:15,635
and I still cannot comprehend
their incredible bravery.

475
00:43:16,427 --> 00:43:20,723
They spoke only of their lives
together, of their love,

476
00:43:20,723 --> 00:43:24,227
the good times,
their children, of their parents.

477
00:43:24,227 --> 00:43:28,064
And with that
they faced the morning.

478
00:43:29,565 --> 00:43:35,404
And I know it sort of became,
perhaps my own defense,

479
00:43:35,404 --> 00:43:39,867
I always felt, you know, and things
were very tough in the following years.

480
00:43:39,867 --> 00:43:42,036
But I had to emulate my parents.

481
00:43:42,036 --> 00:43:44,997
If they could do it, I can do it.

482
00:43:45,331 --> 00:43:53,756
One wish and one prayer
and one thought: to survive.

483
00:43:53,756 --> 00:43:55,258
We felt it.

484
00:43:55,258 --> 00:44:04,976
Although the Germans were very adept in
hiding their intentions and hiding their deeds,

485
00:44:04,976 --> 00:44:14,193
there was a certain feeling that something
terrible is happening to the Jews.

486
00:44:15,319 --> 00:44:19,699
I just heard my mother’s voice over
that entire, over crying and everything,

487
00:44:19,699 --> 00:44:24,120
and it came like an echo and she
was saying, you know, be strong.

488
00:44:25,079 --> 00:44:27,582
Sich Stark in German.

489
00:44:33,421 --> 00:44:35,756
And then the trucks
rolled out of there,

490
00:44:35,756 --> 00:44:45,224
and ironically the sun
came out, sort of, I still see it,

491
00:44:45,224 --> 00:44:48,102
the rooftops of wet,
illuminated by the sun

492
00:44:48,102 --> 00:44:50,187
and the church
bells were ringing.

493
00:44:50,187 --> 00:44:53,441
And that was the last view.

494
00:44:53,858 --> 00:44:57,028
They took us in
a train in Krakow, Poland.

495
00:44:57,028 --> 00:44:58,404
Cattle cars.

496
00:44:58,404 --> 00:45:02,199
We stayed there for several hours.

497
00:45:02,199 --> 00:45:03,701
It was very hot.

498
00:45:03,701 --> 00:45:07,371
A day, a full
day in the hot summer,

499
00:45:07,371 --> 00:45:14,170
and everybody was crying,
yelling, water! Water! Water!

500
00:45:14,170 --> 00:45:17,965
People were dying
in a cattle, in a train.

501
00:45:17,965 --> 00:45:23,429
And these cattle cars
was absolute hell on earth.

502
00:45:23,429 --> 00:45:29,560
You can’t imagine how tight it
was and how squeezed in we were.

503
00:45:29,560 --> 00:45:35,399
And didn’t have any sanitary facilities.

504
00:45:35,399 --> 00:45:36,734
There were no toilets.

505
00:45:36,734 --> 00:45:39,695
The Germans came
into the ghetto.

506
00:45:39,695 --> 00:45:43,366
Those who worked for them,
and I was one of them,

507
00:45:43,366 --> 00:45:49,413
were transferred
on foot to Plaszow.

508
00:45:49,413 --> 00:45:51,374
Those who did not work,

509
00:45:51,374 --> 00:45:53,960
who did not have
a job through the Germans,

510
00:45:53,960 --> 00:45:59,090
were put in cattle
cars and transported

511
00:45:59,090 --> 00:46:01,592
to either to Auschwitz
or to Belzec.

512
00:46:01,884 --> 00:46:07,306
They took us,
went to Plaszow camp.

513
00:46:07,306 --> 00:46:10,935
It was very bad.
We had to work.

514
00:46:10,935 --> 00:46:13,729
I was one of
the carpenters there.

515
00:46:13,729 --> 00:46:16,357
I was the carpenter group.

516
00:46:16,357 --> 00:46:18,567
And we build the barracks.

517
00:46:18,567 --> 00:46:25,700
My barrack happened to be situated
right as I showed you the plan,

518
00:46:25,700 --> 00:46:29,870
where there was the killing,
was a killing spot.

519
00:46:29,870 --> 00:46:32,832
They called it Hajowa Gorka.

520
00:46:32,832 --> 00:46:35,418
It was a little mountain.

521
00:46:35,418 --> 00:46:42,341
And we could see, I could
actually see the Nazis

522
00:46:42,341 --> 00:46:46,303
lining up people and shooting
them with machine guns.

523
00:46:46,303 --> 00:46:50,975
This is the map of the
concentration camp Plaszow.

524
00:46:50,975 --> 00:46:53,978
This is the place
where all the killings,

525
00:46:53,978 --> 00:46:58,774
the killings were all over, but
this was an execution place.

526
00:46:58,774 --> 00:47:02,278
My barrack was right there.

527
00:47:02,278 --> 00:47:08,659
This was a
carpenter section here.

528
00:47:09,326 --> 00:47:13,289
Thousands upon thousands
of Jews were murdered

529
00:47:13,289 --> 00:47:16,751
by the Germans
when they came into Russia.

530
00:47:16,751 --> 00:47:25,551
In the ghetto of Poland, the
process of murdering was slower

531
00:47:25,551 --> 00:47:34,977
because they had to transport
the Jews in cattle cars to
different extermination camps.

532
00:47:34,977 --> 00:47:37,772
What made the victims
mobile were the railroad cars.

533
00:47:37,772 --> 00:47:45,112
And the death camps were situated
almost inevitably along the railroad lines,

534
00:47:45,112 --> 00:47:49,867
the most famous of which is
Auschwitz at 44 parallel railroad tracks.

535
00:47:49,867 --> 00:47:54,997
Treblinka was situated on the
Warsaw to Bialystok line.

536
00:48:07,510 --> 00:48:12,890
1944 Germany was fighting the
advancing Soviet armies from the east,

537
00:48:12,890 --> 00:48:16,435
the advancing American and
Allied armies from the west,

538
00:48:16,435 --> 00:48:19,814
and even then they
deported, and this is Hilberg,

539
00:48:19,814 --> 00:48:27,071
approximately 437,402 Jews
on 147 trains

540
00:48:27,071 --> 00:48:30,783
between the 15th of May
and the 8th of July.

541
00:48:35,371 --> 00:48:36,914
The most amazing thing about it

542
00:48:36,914 --> 00:48:41,043
is that notwithstanding the fact that
Jews were shipped in freight cars,

543
00:48:41,043 --> 00:48:45,965
the railroads still billed the
SS as though the shipment

544
00:48:45,965 --> 00:48:50,636
had been taking place in regular
passenger cars third class.

545
00:48:51,846 --> 00:48:55,391
In other words, there was no
difference in the payment.

546
00:48:55,391 --> 00:48:59,186
Indeed, there was no difference
in the various offices.

547
00:48:59,186 --> 00:49:02,731
The offices that shipped
the Jews were civilian traffic.

548
00:49:02,731 --> 00:49:05,484
So the key, the principal was,

549
00:49:05,484 --> 00:49:08,821
that if people were being
shipped, by whatever means,

550
00:49:08,821 --> 00:49:12,366
then passenger traffic sections
of the railroad were responsible

551
00:49:12,366 --> 00:49:16,078
for the shipment and they
billed the SS accordingly.

552
00:49:16,078 --> 00:49:19,331
The substitution of
freight cars was done

553
00:49:19,331 --> 00:49:21,417
only because of the
shortage of passenger cars,

554
00:49:21,417 --> 00:49:24,670
and because quite obviously,
no one would insist that Jews,

555
00:49:24,670 --> 00:49:26,922
of all people, should be
shipped in passenger cars

556
00:49:26,922 --> 00:49:29,341
when on arrival they
would be gassed anyway.

557
00:49:48,027 --> 00:49:50,905
Cars were scarce
and time was scarce.

558
00:49:51,655 --> 00:49:56,827
I thus thought, for many, many
years, that there must have been

559
00:49:56,827 --> 00:50:01,248
a priority system into which
these particular trains would fit.

560
00:50:01,248 --> 00:50:04,710
And I was looking
for such a priority system.

561
00:50:04,710 --> 00:50:06,670
But whenever I saw one,

562
00:50:06,670 --> 00:50:11,050
I didn’t see any designation
of Jewish trains anywhere.

563
00:50:11,050 --> 00:50:13,552
And of course
that was my failing.

564
00:50:13,552 --> 00:50:19,058
How would a German administration
place these particular death trains

565
00:50:19,058 --> 00:50:25,064
into a category of trains
without admitting on paper

566
00:50:25,064 --> 00:50:27,066
that this is
what they were doing?

567
00:50:27,066 --> 00:50:31,362
Thus, we find the most
paradoxical situation of all.

568
00:50:31,362 --> 00:50:37,618
Jewish trains, that is to say, death trains,
were leaving for their destinations

569
00:50:37,618 --> 00:50:42,331
without priority for the
most part, without priority.

570
00:50:42,331 --> 00:50:45,292
There are certain exceptions,
especially at the end of the war.

571
00:50:45,292 --> 00:50:50,673
And yet, this does not mean that
these trains were left behind.

572
00:50:50,673 --> 00:50:52,883
The one conclusion that I drew,

573
00:50:52,883 --> 00:50:56,220
and this is perhaps the
most significant of them all,

574
00:50:56,220 --> 00:51:00,349
no Jew was left alive
for lack of transport.

575
00:51:01,225 --> 00:51:07,189
Somehow or other,
these people managed to find time,

576
00:51:07,189 --> 00:51:12,361
special time, or to find cars
wherever they could get them,

577
00:51:12,361 --> 00:51:14,154
to get the job done.

578
00:51:14,154 --> 00:51:17,741
And no one in this
system failed in that task.

579
00:51:17,741 --> 00:51:20,077
Now who knew about the trains?

580
00:51:20,077 --> 00:51:23,038
You had schedulers.

581
00:51:23,038 --> 00:51:29,545
You had also train conductors,
the locomotive engineers.

582
00:51:29,545 --> 00:51:31,922
And what did the
locomotive engineers see?

583
00:51:31,922 --> 00:51:35,259
They saw trains arriving full
and going back empty.

584
00:51:35,259 --> 00:51:38,721
They understood that food was
not being delivered to the camps

585
00:51:38,721 --> 00:51:42,641
in sufficient quantities to
feed this type of population.

586
00:51:42,641 --> 00:51:46,645
And they understood that there
was death and destruction.

587
00:51:46,645 --> 00:51:50,357
They also used the trains to
transport all of this clothing

588
00:51:50,357 --> 00:51:54,945
and all of this human hair and all of the
confiscated property back to the Reich.

589
00:52:01,660 --> 00:52:05,581
Now of course, once the Jews
arrive in the death camps,

590
00:52:05,581 --> 00:52:09,460
they just come with their few
kilograms of personal belongings.

591
00:52:09,460 --> 00:52:13,380
But they may have gold,
they may have foreign currency,

592
00:52:13,380 --> 00:52:18,177
they may have other
things in that last search.

593
00:52:18,177 --> 00:52:22,097
Those things are taken,
and they’re funneled through elaborately,

594
00:52:22,097 --> 00:52:29,646
through the mechanism of banks
and various other institutions for final utilization.

595
00:52:29,646 --> 00:52:32,858
And it gets so that the long
hair of women is cut off

596
00:52:32,858 --> 00:52:39,948
for purposes of making the crosshairs necessary
in submarines you see, for firing torpedoes.

597
00:52:39,948 --> 00:52:42,284
And it gets so that
gold teeth are pulled

598
00:52:42,284 --> 00:52:48,248
because gold is very valuable
and it’s still a foreign exchange earner.

599
00:52:48,248 --> 00:52:51,543
You see, in this regard
they are totally rational.

600
00:52:51,543 --> 00:52:55,839
They are rational
to the point of bizarreness.

601
00:52:55,839 --> 00:52:59,093
You are taking what
ordinarily would not be taken.

602
00:52:59,093 --> 00:53:05,682
You regard even what is in the body
as the property of the German Reich,

603
00:53:05,682 --> 00:53:10,145
in accordance with the eleventh
or the thirteenth ordinance of
the Reich citizenship law.

604
00:53:10,145 --> 00:53:14,525
There was a transport of
clothes coming from Auschwitz,

605
00:53:14,525 --> 00:53:19,238
from the killed
Jews in Auschwitz,

606
00:53:19,238 --> 00:53:24,284
children, grown up,
shoes, jackets.

607
00:53:24,284 --> 00:53:26,870
Everything was in
Plaszow in a center.

608
00:53:26,870 --> 00:53:30,833
I don’t know what
made me walk over to it.

609
00:53:30,833 --> 00:53:38,549
One of the sleeves was sticking
out in the pile of clothes.

610
00:53:38,549 --> 00:53:40,426
I don’t know what made me go,

611
00:53:40,426 --> 00:53:42,761
I went over there
and I was crying.

612
00:53:42,761 --> 00:53:45,722
I was still young,
I was crying like a baby.

613
00:53:45,722 --> 00:53:48,142
I said that’s my father’s,
my father’s jacket.

614
00:53:48,142 --> 00:53:49,560
How could it be?

615
00:53:49,560 --> 00:53:51,228
How could you know that this,

616
00:53:51,228 --> 00:53:53,730
you go in there,
they wouldn’t believe me.

617
00:53:53,730 --> 00:53:56,024
Then I reached in
my father’s pocket.

618
00:53:56,024 --> 00:54:00,863
Believe it or not, I found passports,
pictures of my father, my mother,

619
00:54:00,863 --> 00:54:06,076
my whole family pictures in
the pockets in this jacket.

620
00:54:06,076 --> 00:54:07,744
That happened to me,
which I try to

621
00:54:07,744 --> 00:54:10,330
explain it to myself,
I cannot understand.

622
00:54:10,330 --> 00:54:14,668
Why would I go, and out of
hundreds of pieces of clothes,

623
00:54:14,668 --> 00:54:18,380
go right to this spot
and pick up the jacket?

624
00:54:18,380 --> 00:54:19,923
Well, I did it.

625
00:54:20,674 --> 00:54:23,635
And then they used
an assembly line process.

626
00:54:23,635 --> 00:54:27,347
It’s a combination of Charles
Darwin and Henry Ford.

627
00:54:27,347 --> 00:54:31,393
Charles Darwin’s survival
of the fittest, total domination,

628
00:54:31,393 --> 00:54:33,812
and Henry Ford
the assembly line.

629
00:54:33,812 --> 00:54:42,488
So what happened in three camps,
in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka,

630
00:54:42,488 --> 00:54:47,034
which are Action Reinhard camps,
everybody, there was no selection.

631
00:54:47,034 --> 00:54:49,786
Everybody who arrived
was sent directly to their death.

632
00:54:49,786 --> 00:54:55,834
And the process took several hours
and thousands of people were murdered.

633
00:55:01,465 --> 00:55:07,137
My mother and my sister were
murdered, the locality was Belzec.

634
00:55:07,137 --> 00:55:11,850
Belzec in Poland, not far from Lublin.

635
00:55:11,850 --> 00:55:17,105
This was an extermination camp where
half a million Jews were put to death.

636
00:55:17,105 --> 00:55:22,152
This included my mother,
my sister, and my entire family,

637
00:55:22,152 --> 00:55:28,200
my entire family on my mother’s
side and my father’s side.

638
00:55:44,049 --> 00:55:47,094
Belzec, you were sent directly to the
gas chamber unless you were a woman,

639
00:55:47,094 --> 00:55:50,097
you were sent into
a barracks to have your hair cut

640
00:55:50,097 --> 00:55:53,100
and then you were
sent to the gas chamber.

641
00:55:53,100 --> 00:55:55,686
Then the bodies
were buried in fields.

642
00:55:55,686 --> 00:56:01,775
And essentially it was primitive because
it again was the first of the camp,

643
00:56:01,775 --> 00:56:05,946
and the Germans learned from
each camp how to do it better.

644
00:56:06,697 --> 00:56:09,157
And therefore Belzec was primitive.

645
00:56:26,550 --> 00:56:29,761
While the women were
rounded up naked and shaved,

646
00:56:29,761 --> 00:56:32,639
whipped like cattle
into a slaughterhouse,

647
00:56:32,639 --> 00:56:35,934
the men were already
dying in the gas chambers.

648
00:56:35,934 --> 00:56:42,107
It took two hours to shave the
women and two hours to murder them.

649
00:56:42,608 --> 00:56:45,444
Many SS men
using whips and sharp bayonets

650
00:56:45,444 --> 00:56:48,488
pushed the women toward the
building with the chambers.

651
00:56:48,822 --> 00:56:53,744
I heard the noise of sliding
doors, moaning and screaming,

652
00:56:53,744 --> 00:56:59,333
desperate calls in Polish,
Yiddish, bloodcurdling screams.

653
00:56:59,791 --> 00:57:02,794
All that lasted fifteen minutes.

654
00:57:03,170 --> 00:57:11,303
Screams of children, women, and finally
one common, continuous horrible scream.

655
00:57:12,137 --> 00:57:15,432
All that lasted fifteen minutes.

656
00:57:16,224 --> 00:57:19,102
The machine ran
for twenty minutes,

657
00:57:19,603 --> 00:57:22,648
and after twenty
minutes there was silence.

658
00:57:22,648 --> 00:57:26,193
We dragged bodies of people
who minutes ago were alive.

659
00:57:26,193 --> 00:57:31,782
We dragged them using leather
straps to huge, prepared mass graves,

660
00:57:31,782 --> 00:57:38,038
and the orchestra played,
played from morning til night.

661
00:57:38,038 --> 00:57:44,294
Every day we died a little bit,
together with the transports of people.

662
00:57:46,338 --> 00:57:51,468
Belzec had 500,000 dead,
and two known survivors:

663
00:57:51,468 --> 00:57:53,929
Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman.

664
00:57:54,680 --> 00:57:56,181
Chaim Hirszman was killed

665
00:57:56,181 --> 00:57:59,101
the day he was
about to give testimony.

666
00:57:59,976 --> 00:58:01,728
And his wife said:

667
00:58:01,728 --> 00:58:04,731
“I’m not an eyewitness
but let me give testimony,

668
00:58:04,731 --> 00:58:06,441
because all my husband did

669
00:58:06,441 --> 00:58:08,151
in the time we’ve been married

670
00:58:08,151 --> 00:58:12,572
was to talk about
what went on a Belzec.”

671
00:58:13,031 --> 00:58:15,492
Rudolf Reder gave
testimony, and he said....

672
00:58:18,078 --> 00:58:20,622
in one of the most painful
quotes I’ve ever read.

673
00:58:20,622 --> 00:58:27,546
He said: “Only when
I heard a child say

674
00:58:27,546 --> 00:58:36,263
‘Mommy, it’s dark, I’m scared,
haven’t I been good?”

675
00:58:36,847 --> 00:58:39,558
Only then did I begin to cry,

676
00:58:40,183 --> 00:58:44,104
and later... I had no feelings.

677
01:01:54,961 --> 01:01:57,589
Now the camp was divided in,

678
01:01:57,589 --> 01:02:02,218
it was a part
where the Germans lived,

679
01:02:02,218 --> 01:02:04,346
and there was a part where we lived,

680
01:02:04,346 --> 01:02:08,308
and there was the
working group where we worked,

681
01:02:08,308 --> 01:02:11,061
and there was the what we called it,

682
01:02:11,061 --> 01:02:14,773
the camp tree where
the people got gassed and burned,

683
01:02:14,773 --> 01:02:16,983
where the final station was.

684
01:02:16,983 --> 01:02:20,487
So the death camp was about
five or six and what there was,

685
01:02:20,487 --> 01:02:25,659
just for transport and
direct to the gas chamber.

686
01:02:25,659 --> 01:02:31,665
No matter they’re young, old,
strong, weak, child, woman,
child, man, doesn’t matter.

687
01:02:31,665 --> 01:02:36,503
So they took me
to clean up the quarters,

688
01:02:36,503 --> 01:02:39,881
the living quarters
of some of the SS people,

689
01:02:39,881 --> 01:02:43,510
which the windows
faced the railroad track.

690
01:02:44,094 --> 01:02:48,682
And while I was there
cleaning with another girl,

691
01:02:48,682 --> 01:02:52,143
the whistle was there
that the train comes in,

692
01:02:52,143 --> 01:02:56,272
so we knew we have to remain
there, we cannot go out.

693
01:02:56,272 --> 01:03:03,405
And the transport came in,
everything very fast, their
unloading of the people.

694
01:03:03,405 --> 01:03:05,782
And a mother left a baby,

695
01:03:05,782 --> 01:03:09,411
I don’t know for what
reason, in the box car.

696
01:03:09,411 --> 01:03:15,166
And Frenzel, who was at that
time in charge of the transport,

697
01:03:15,166 --> 01:03:19,087
grabbed that little baby
and smashed the head,

698
01:03:19,087 --> 01:03:24,426
the skull against the box car
and he just threw it in like a dead rat.

699
01:03:24,426 --> 01:03:27,721
And that just I cannot forget.

700
01:03:27,721 --> 01:03:31,599
Although we heard a lot talking
about they killed the people,

701
01:03:31,599 --> 01:03:36,187
but it was so incomprehensive we
never believed it really happened.

702
01:03:36,187 --> 01:03:38,481
And on the way
the farmers allowed that.

703
01:03:38,481 --> 01:03:40,525
And they said you
know where you’re going,

704
01:03:40,525 --> 01:03:43,111
they’re going to kill you and
they’re going to burn you.

705
01:03:43,111 --> 01:03:52,495
As much as we knew before, and
as much we heard, we didn’t believe it.

706
01:03:52,495 --> 01:04:00,336
We couldn’t even figure
that this was a death trip.

707
01:04:00,336 --> 01:04:05,341
I’m sure they felt something,

708
01:04:05,341 --> 01:04:19,814
but they couldn’t
imagine that a nation

709
01:04:19,814 --> 01:04:24,861
that produced Beethoven,
Brahms, Goethe,

710
01:04:24,861 --> 01:04:36,289
would stoop so low and stoop so
tragically into an abyss of murder.

711
01:04:36,289 --> 01:04:39,667
By the time they got to the
third of the action Reinhard camps,

712
01:04:39,667 --> 01:04:42,337
the second was Sobibor,
the third was Treblinka.

713
01:04:42,337 --> 01:04:44,672
At Treblinka they were
able to do it far better,

714
01:04:44,672 --> 01:04:48,259
far more quickly,
far more cost effectively.

715
01:06:46,127 --> 01:06:49,380
The minute they opened
up the door I was facing right,

716
01:06:49,380 --> 01:06:54,010
there were two story dead
peoples right in front of it laying there.

717
01:06:54,010 --> 01:06:58,139
This was the people that came
before, dead riding the trains.

718
01:06:58,139 --> 01:07:01,726
Here were the transport
where the rail track came in

719
01:07:01,726 --> 01:07:03,937
right here and
right in the middle,

720
01:07:03,937 --> 01:07:08,399
and they opened up the doors and
they make them walk straight here

721
01:07:08,399 --> 01:07:11,861
where it says women left, men right.

722
01:07:12,820 --> 01:07:15,406
And over there they
had to take off the clothes,

723
01:07:15,406 --> 01:07:17,825
and they pushed
them right into the gate,

724
01:07:17,825 --> 01:07:19,953
and when they
come into the gate,

725
01:07:19,953 --> 01:07:21,996
they come this way and
this way and they join together.

726
01:07:21,996 --> 01:07:27,085
And they just went, they just went,
at that time I didn’t know where they go,

727
01:07:27,085 --> 01:07:29,420
but then they went to the gas chambers.

728
01:07:29,420 --> 01:07:32,006
The gas chambers
was about fourteen meters.

729
01:07:32,006 --> 01:07:34,092
They were the size
of a single garage,

730
01:07:34,092 --> 01:07:36,261
something like that,
a garage and a half.

731
01:07:36,261 --> 01:07:39,055
And they pushed them in there.

732
01:07:39,055 --> 01:07:45,603
The Gestapo and the Ukrainians,
people didn’t want to go in, they saw it.

733
01:07:45,603 --> 01:07:48,648
You know, they hit them, they
pushed each other right in,

734
01:07:48,648 --> 01:07:53,319
and they were standing up against,
packed, and then they gassed them.

735
01:07:53,319 --> 01:07:55,321
And from the other
side there’s a sliding door,

736
01:07:55,321 --> 01:07:59,534
they just slide it off and
another group was taken into the graves.

737
01:07:59,534 --> 01:08:01,911
And this was the mass grave.

738
01:08:01,911 --> 01:08:06,666
Then came some kind of a law,
they had to take out from the mass grave here

739
01:08:06,666 --> 01:08:10,378
and made a big grave here
and burned all the bodies.

740
01:08:10,378 --> 01:08:14,007
Took out those bodies before,
and the new arrivals,

741
01:08:14,007 --> 01:08:18,761
they dragged them in right through
the big grave where they were burning.

742
01:09:20,406 --> 01:09:23,534
People, the minute they got into
Treblinka and they saw what’s going on,

743
01:09:23,534 --> 01:09:26,079
the dead bodies, they
were screaming, that’s all.

744
01:09:26,079 --> 01:09:30,458
Everybody was screaming,
screaming, crying.

745
01:09:58,277 --> 01:10:00,738
I still have nightmares.

746
01:10:03,783 --> 01:10:05,701
Still nightmares.

747
01:10:08,871 --> 01:10:11,207
And look, they even
provided at Treblinka,

748
01:10:11,207 --> 01:10:14,836
I was just at
Treblinka last, last week.

749
01:10:14,836 --> 01:10:16,379
They even had a zoo,

750
01:10:16,379 --> 01:10:22,468
because apparently people
spent all day killing people

751
01:10:22,468 --> 01:10:25,471
needed to relax
a little bit, and well,

752
01:10:25,471 --> 01:10:30,768
you relax by petting animals and
by looking at animals in cages in zoos.

753
01:10:30,768 --> 01:10:32,812
So they were very mindful

754
01:10:32,812 --> 01:10:34,605
of how they had
to treat their people

755
01:10:34,605 --> 01:10:37,400
who were doing
this unpleasant work.

756
01:13:26,986 --> 01:13:30,156
Treblinka killed 925,000 people,

757
01:13:30,156 --> 01:13:39,874
perhaps as many as 925,000 people
between July 23, 1942 and August 2, 1943.

758
01:13:40,291 --> 01:13:45,212
Staff was 120,
30 Germans, 90 Ukrainians.

759
01:13:45,212 --> 01:13:48,507
Belzec killed 500,000 people

760
01:13:48,507 --> 01:13:54,138
between March, February and
March, 1942 and December 1942.

761
01:13:54,138 --> 01:13:58,100
Its staff was 104 people, of
whom fourteen were Germans.

762
01:13:58,684 --> 01:14:02,605
So you can look at that
and you can say oh my God,

763
01:14:03,689 --> 01:14:09,737
44 Germans were able
to kill by the process of killing,

764
01:14:09,737 --> 01:14:16,827
were able to kill essentially
one million four hundred and
twenty-five thousand Jews.

765
01:14:23,793 --> 01:14:32,051
March of ’44, the Nazis just
marched right into Hungary like it was,

766
01:14:32,051 --> 01:14:35,137
like they were invited guests.

767
01:14:35,137 --> 01:14:40,351
Why would he siphon off soldiers from
the front to occupy a friendly country?

768
01:14:40,351 --> 01:14:42,520
It didn’t make any sense,

769
01:14:42,520 --> 01:14:51,112
except there were 750,000
Jewish inhabitants in Hungary.

770
01:14:51,112 --> 01:14:56,325
To Hitler, killing Jews at that
point and pilfer their wealth

771
01:14:56,325 --> 01:15:03,749
was more important than
winning the war, obviously.

772
01:15:18,973 --> 01:15:20,850
Auschwitz was more complex

773
01:15:20,850 --> 01:15:24,270
because Auschwitz was
actually three camps in one.

774
01:15:24,270 --> 01:15:29,025
We know it as Auschwitz 1, as
Auschwitz 2, which is Birkenau,
the killing center,

775
01:15:29,025 --> 01:15:34,822
and Auschwitz 3, which is Buna
Monowitz, which is an industrial center.

776
01:15:39,160 --> 01:15:43,998
In 1942 I was arrested,
was imprisoned for a year,

777
01:15:43,998 --> 01:15:50,171
sent to Auschwitz for also nearly
a year, and then to Bergen-Belsen.

778
01:15:50,171 --> 01:15:52,590
And I ended up,
when I arrived in Auschwitz

779
01:15:52,590 --> 01:15:54,592
I already knew what
was going on in Auschwitz,

780
01:15:54,592 --> 01:15:58,637
so I arrived there,
you know, thinking that I would,

781
01:15:58,637 --> 01:16:00,681
next step is the gas chamber.

782
01:16:00,681 --> 01:16:02,933
The world was full
of rumors in those days.

783
01:16:02,933 --> 01:16:05,936
Everyone heard that there was
gas chambers in Auschwitz.

784
01:16:05,936 --> 01:16:08,397
One didn’t want to believe it,

785
01:16:08,397 --> 01:16:11,650
but by the time I arrived
there I knew it was a fact.

786
01:16:16,071 --> 01:16:21,660
So if you arrived in Auschwitz,
you came off the train.

787
01:16:21,660 --> 01:16:25,080
The people were divided into five.

788
01:16:25,080 --> 01:16:27,583
They then faced selection.

789
01:16:27,583 --> 01:16:33,088
And selection meant that somebody
looked at you, a German doctor,

790
01:16:33,088 --> 01:16:35,758
decided whether you
were capable of work or not.

791
01:16:38,219 --> 01:16:39,887
And the system was the same.

792
01:16:39,887 --> 01:16:42,348
Any person, no matter
how old or young you are,

793
01:16:42,348 --> 01:16:46,769
you carried a young child, you
went automatically to the gas chamber.

794
01:16:47,895 --> 01:16:51,357
Didn’t matter, they didn’t tell you,

795
01:16:51,357 --> 01:16:53,400
give this child to somebody else.

796
01:16:53,400 --> 01:16:56,529
You could have been nineteen
years old or twenty or sixty.

797
01:16:56,529 --> 01:17:00,950
Whoever had a child carrying or
a little child on their hand,

798
01:17:00,950 --> 01:17:03,702
automatically went to the gas chamber.

799
01:17:03,702 --> 01:17:12,461
I literally had no time or a
chance to reflect yet on the separation,

800
01:17:12,461 --> 01:17:18,717
because everything was done with such
brutality, with such screaming and yelling.

801
01:17:18,717 --> 01:17:24,890
They opened up the doors and
they screamed, all different languages.

802
01:17:24,890 --> 01:17:30,312
They had people in striped
clothes who worked in the camp,

803
01:17:30,312 --> 01:17:35,860
and they were yelling Hungarian,
Yiddish, Polish, German.

804
01:17:35,860 --> 01:17:40,406
And right away there were
the kappos and block elders

805
01:17:40,406 --> 01:17:44,660
who started to lead us into line,

806
01:17:44,660 --> 01:17:50,749
and the SS with
their dogs who were barking,

807
01:17:50,749 --> 01:17:58,507
and they were trained to tear anybody
to pieces if one did not obey the orders.

808
01:17:58,507 --> 01:18:02,845
Male and female, they were divided
with children going with their mothers.

809
01:18:02,845 --> 01:18:09,685
Males on one side, females, women
and their children on the other side.

810
01:18:09,685 --> 01:18:13,480
I’m holding onto my sister
Goldie, my little brother Tule,

811
01:18:13,480 --> 01:18:18,903
and we’re just being pulled
apart, never to see each other again.

812
01:18:20,195 --> 01:18:25,701
The women that looked
healthy to Dr. Mengele,

813
01:18:25,701 --> 01:18:29,622
went one way,
and one to the ovens,

814
01:18:29,622 --> 01:18:31,999
to gas chambers this way.

815
01:18:32,833 --> 01:18:39,590
So my mother and my littlest baby sister,
twelve years old, were on one side

816
01:18:39,590 --> 01:18:47,598
and put my oldest sister, who was
fourteen, fifteen, to the other side.

817
01:18:47,598 --> 01:18:51,518
And she wanted to be with
her mother and her sister,

818
01:18:51,518 --> 01:18:55,314
so she crossed the line
back and she got hit

819
01:18:55,314 --> 01:19:00,319
with a rifle butt
to go back there.

820
01:19:00,319 --> 01:19:02,655
And she’s the one that survived.

821
01:19:02,655 --> 01:19:08,160
My mother and my little sister
went to the gas chambers.

822
01:19:08,160 --> 01:19:10,746
Those who were
selected to work were then

823
01:19:10,746 --> 01:19:14,541
what we call in
Texas branded and sheared.

824
01:19:14,541 --> 01:19:17,836
Meaning they had a tattoo
which gave them a number

825
01:19:17,836 --> 01:19:20,631
and their hair was
sheared, but all of their hair,

826
01:19:20,631 --> 01:19:24,468
even their bodily hair was
sheared because they recycled this.

827
01:19:24,468 --> 01:19:29,890
They used the hair to line submarines,
to serve as detonators, even to create fabric.

828
01:19:29,890 --> 01:19:33,686
They gave us a bundle of
clothes, striped clothes,

829
01:19:33,686 --> 01:19:39,942
and they gave us a tag on a string.

830
01:19:39,942 --> 01:19:43,112
Mine was 41212.

831
01:19:43,112 --> 01:19:46,907
From this moment on
I was no longer Ben Lesser.

832
01:19:46,907 --> 01:19:49,451
41212 was my number.

833
01:19:49,451 --> 01:19:54,623
When you are processed to
become an inmate of Auschwitz,

834
01:19:54,623 --> 01:20:00,129
you have to pass a person
who shaves your head

835
01:20:00,129 --> 01:20:02,172
and tattoos a number on your arm

836
01:20:02,172 --> 01:20:04,258
and takes your clothes off you.

837
01:20:04,258 --> 01:20:06,218
And these are all prisoners.

838
01:20:06,218 --> 01:20:09,972
And obviously, a prisoner
in Auschwitz now meets

839
01:20:09,972 --> 01:20:13,600
somebody who’s just arrived
in Auschwitz, normal questions.

840
01:20:13,600 --> 01:20:15,769
How long do you think
the war is going to last?

841
01:20:15,769 --> 01:20:17,104
And what’s going on?

842
01:20:17,104 --> 01:20:19,356
She thought I’d come from
outside, which of course I didn’t.

843
01:20:19,356 --> 01:20:20,691
I had no idea.

844
01:20:20,691 --> 01:20:22,776
And then, what did
you do before the war?

845
01:20:22,776 --> 01:20:29,408
And that’s the moment that I
said, I used to play the cello.

846
01:20:29,408 --> 01:20:48,010
♪ [music] ♪

847
01:20:48,594 --> 01:20:50,387
Nobody asked me about the cello.

848
01:20:50,387 --> 01:20:51,930
I said I used to be a cellist,

849
01:20:51,930 --> 01:20:54,892
completely crazy thing to
say under the circumstances.

850
01:20:54,892 --> 01:20:56,060
There I was naked,

851
01:20:56,060 --> 01:20:57,978
there was a number
on arm, I play the cello.

852
01:20:57,978 --> 01:20:59,313
She said, fantastic.

853
01:20:59,313 --> 01:21:02,441
The orchestra played
from dawn to night,

854
01:21:03,859 --> 01:21:08,405
with the idea that the Nazis
had a macabre sense of humor,

855
01:21:08,405 --> 01:21:12,242
so you had music taking place
as all of this was developing.

856
01:21:12,242 --> 01:21:13,786
We were the entertainment.

857
01:21:13,786 --> 01:21:15,204
I mean, we had a job, of course.

858
01:21:15,204 --> 01:21:18,874
Our job was to play marches
in the morning and the evening,

859
01:21:18,874 --> 01:21:22,669
because Auschwitz is
surrounded by factories

860
01:21:22,669 --> 01:21:25,589
like IG Farben and Buna, etc.

861
01:21:25,589 --> 01:21:29,426
And the prisoners of
Auschwitz were marching out

862
01:21:29,426 --> 01:21:32,888
every morning to go
to their various workplaces.

863
01:21:32,888 --> 01:21:36,266
And we sat at the gate and
played marches for them.

864
01:21:36,266 --> 01:21:50,489
♪ [music] ♪

865
01:21:53,659 --> 01:21:55,410
You know, Auschwitz
is not a place

866
01:21:55,410 --> 01:21:57,955
where you give yourself
a lot of time for feeling things.

867
01:21:57,955 --> 01:21:59,581
That is for normal people.

868
01:21:59,581 --> 01:22:03,001
What you feel like is that you’re
surprised that you’re alive today,

869
01:22:03,001 --> 01:22:05,629
because tomorrow you
probably won’t be.

870
01:22:10,259 --> 01:22:16,056
If when you went to sleep you
could only sleep on your side because,

871
01:22:16,056 --> 01:22:19,518
and if one turned
all of us had to turn

872
01:22:19,518 --> 01:22:24,356
because there was no way that
one could turn and the other one,

873
01:22:24,356 --> 01:22:26,650
because there was no room otherwise.

874
01:22:26,650 --> 01:22:28,694
In the wintertime,
people were staying in line

875
01:22:28,694 --> 01:22:30,445
for about an hour
and a half, two hours,

876
01:22:30,445 --> 01:22:33,240
they used to wake
us up when it was still dark.

877
01:22:33,240 --> 01:22:35,701
People were frozen to death.

878
01:22:35,701 --> 01:22:40,706
You couldn’t move, you have to stay
just straight with your hands down.

879
01:22:40,706 --> 01:22:44,293
Five in a lane, they used to
count us every morning.

880
01:22:44,293 --> 01:22:46,920
And used to go out to work.

881
01:22:46,920 --> 01:22:53,302
When I was in, Mengele was the guy that
mostly was selecting people for experiments

882
01:22:53,302 --> 01:22:57,472
or who’s going to be in camp or
who’s going to go to the gas chamber.

883
01:22:57,472 --> 01:23:02,436
When I heard stories from my
sister, who survived at Auschwitz,

884
01:23:02,436 --> 01:23:07,774
that the women wanted to look
good for Mengele so they’ll survive.

885
01:23:07,774 --> 01:23:13,447
Nobody knew which side’s going
to live, which would be dead.

886
01:23:13,447 --> 01:23:15,449
They would prick their fingers

887
01:23:15,449 --> 01:23:21,747
and put the blood on their
cheeks so they would look healthy.

888
01:23:22,414 --> 01:23:27,044
Those who were selected to die
were sent directly to the gas chambers.

889
01:23:27,044 --> 01:23:29,880
Their property was confiscated.

890
01:23:29,880 --> 01:23:33,675
All that they
brought was taken from them,

891
01:23:33,675 --> 01:23:36,386
and essentially it was used to recycle.

892
01:23:36,386 --> 01:23:41,391
Even gold teeth were used
for the Nazi war economy.

893
01:25:53,899 --> 01:25:58,820
And they had gas chambers and
the gas chambers were complete
with an undressing room,

894
01:25:58,820 --> 01:26:01,865
a gas chamber, an elevator to
raise the bodies to the top.

895
01:26:01,865 --> 01:26:06,745
And at Belzec and at Treblinka
they used a Soviet tank engine.

896
01:26:06,745 --> 01:26:09,539
And at Auschwitz they
brought it to greater perfection,

897
01:26:09,539 --> 01:26:12,584
they used Zyklon B, which was gas.

898
01:26:12,584 --> 01:26:17,130
And the gas again was, came in pellets.

899
01:26:17,130 --> 01:26:22,928
You opened the pellets, the
Germans poured it down the chute,

900
01:26:22,928 --> 01:26:29,518
and then it was able to kill two thousand
people in a matter of about 30 minutes.

901
01:26:30,018 --> 01:26:33,480
And then the crematoria,
which were ovens,

902
01:26:33,480 --> 01:26:38,485
and the ovens were again even sealed
with the mark of the construction group,

903
01:26:38,485 --> 01:26:43,323
Tough & Company, but the ovens
were used to burn the bodies

904
01:26:43,323 --> 01:26:45,617
and therefore not to leave
evidence of the crime.

905
01:26:45,617 --> 01:26:49,329
And then we asked the ones,

906
01:26:49,329 --> 01:26:55,669
the kappos were escorting us,
what is this smell?

907
01:26:55,669 --> 01:27:02,592
So she said these are your
fathers, your brothers, your
sisters, your children.

908
01:27:02,592 --> 01:27:06,096
And if you don’t behave
and do exactly what you’re told,

909
01:27:06,096 --> 01:27:08,473
this is how you’re going to wind up.

910
01:27:08,473 --> 01:27:11,810
Ashes. I couldn’t believe it.

911
01:27:11,810 --> 01:27:14,312
You could see flames
and you could smell.

912
01:27:14,312 --> 01:27:21,069
There was a smell of smoke as
you would barbecue something.

913
01:27:21,069 --> 01:27:23,738
And we see six chimneys,

914
01:27:23,738 --> 01:27:30,036
huge chimneys and fire shooting
about them and ashes flying.

915
01:27:30,036 --> 01:27:35,834
And every time you make a step
you leave a footprint in those ashes.

916
01:27:35,834 --> 01:27:41,173
When the wind was coming from
the crematoria towards our camp,

917
01:27:41,173 --> 01:27:43,800
which was the Czech
family camp and later my,

918
01:27:43,800 --> 01:27:46,470
later when I was in the men’s camp,

919
01:27:46,470 --> 01:27:50,390
when the wind was
just in the right direction

920
01:27:50,390 --> 01:27:52,809
we were literally
covered by human ash.

921
01:27:52,809 --> 01:27:56,771
Everything, our hair, it was in
our hair, it was in our clothing,

922
01:27:56,771 --> 01:28:00,442
it was in our skin,
it was on the ground,

923
01:28:00,442 --> 01:28:06,031
everything was covered by human ash
because the hundreds of thousands of pounds

924
01:28:06,031 --> 01:28:09,242
of human ash was
blown out of the chimneys.

925
01:28:09,242 --> 01:28:14,080
The Sonderkommando were people who
worked in the vicinity of the gas chamber.

926
01:28:14,080 --> 01:28:17,667
Let’s remember the Jews did not kill.

927
01:28:17,667 --> 01:28:22,214
The Zyklon B at Auschwitz was
brought in Red Cross trucks,

928
01:28:22,214 --> 01:28:25,133
regarded as a medical operation.

929
01:28:25,133 --> 01:28:31,223
It was put down the chute by two
SS officers wearing what, gas masks.

930
01:28:31,223 --> 01:28:35,268
The Sonderkommando were
with the Jews as they got in,

931
01:28:35,268 --> 01:28:37,604
as they were in the undressing room,

932
01:28:37,604 --> 01:28:41,942
and then they were with the Jews
after the gassing took place

933
01:28:41,942 --> 01:28:47,739
to take them out for cremation,
or in other camps for burial.

934
01:28:47,739 --> 01:28:52,994
They were, they had
the worst job imaginable

935
01:28:52,994 --> 01:28:58,708
because they were seeing death
on not a daily basis but an hourly basis.

936
01:30:05,817 --> 01:30:10,405
So my dad was saved and then my mother
and brother were gassed on the tenth.

937
01:30:10,405 --> 01:30:15,285
All the people ever left from
the December transport,

938
01:30:15,285 --> 01:30:20,540
almost five thousand people,
children, grandchildren, grandparents.

939
01:30:20,540 --> 01:30:24,169
My mother knew what her destiny was

940
01:30:24,169 --> 01:30:27,172
and my mother knew
what my brother’s destiny was.

941
01:30:27,172 --> 01:30:31,843
When she found out and my
brother was doomed to go into
the gas chamber,

942
01:30:31,843 --> 01:30:34,471
she decided to stay with him.

943
01:30:34,471 --> 01:30:36,723
A lot of, many parents did that.

944
01:30:36,723 --> 01:30:38,516
Many mothers stayed with their children

945
01:30:38,516 --> 01:30:41,311
when they knew that they
children were going to be gassed.

946
01:30:41,311 --> 01:30:43,146
So she stayed with him.

947
01:30:43,146 --> 01:30:47,317
She volunteered to stay with
him, and they died in the gas chamber,

948
01:30:47,317 --> 01:30:52,572
either on the tenth or eleventh,
I think it was on tenth of July.

949
01:30:56,951 --> 01:30:59,788
Just before she was
taken into the gas chamber,

950
01:30:59,788 --> 01:31:04,542
she is wishing him and me
a good life, a good healthy life.

951
01:31:04,542 --> 01:31:09,172
She’s asking him in the letter
not to spoil me with his love.

952
01:31:09,172 --> 01:31:12,592
And she just goes
on to say, you know,

953
01:31:12,592 --> 01:31:16,137
have a great life
and into eternity.

954
01:31:16,137 --> 01:31:18,640
So she I guess
picked the right person,

955
01:31:18,640 --> 01:31:20,350
because she gave
it to this guard

956
01:31:20,350 --> 01:31:22,852
and then he gave it
to my dad the next day,

957
01:31:22,852 --> 01:31:25,188
who was already
in the medical camp.

958
01:31:25,188 --> 01:31:28,566
And then my dad
kept it most of his life,

959
01:31:28,566 --> 01:31:32,445
in his bedroom, the letter.

960
01:31:32,445 --> 01:31:35,740
And when my dad
passed away in 1967

961
01:31:35,740 --> 01:31:39,744
I got the letter and
I’ve kept it with me.

962
01:31:48,503 --> 01:31:50,755
The atrocities I witnessed,

963
01:31:50,755 --> 01:31:57,178
I witnessed hanging, I witnessed
shooting, I witnessed terrible beatings.

964
01:31:57,178 --> 01:31:58,847
There was a lot of things.

965
01:31:58,847 --> 01:32:01,558
Sure, you don’t want
to talk about it because it’s,

966
01:32:01,558 --> 01:32:05,437
I choke or I start crying
or something like that.

967
01:32:05,437 --> 01:32:10,483
And besides, I tell you that
except people that have been in there

968
01:32:10,483 --> 01:32:15,488
that saw it and witnessed this,
it’s very hard for people even to imagine

969
01:32:15,488 --> 01:32:19,826
that this was there, that
this happened, you know.

970
01:32:34,090 --> 01:32:37,302
Survivors were not a random
sample of the victims.

971
01:32:37,302 --> 01:32:41,097
They weren’t a random
sample of victims age-wise.

972
01:32:41,097 --> 01:32:45,935
In order to survive, most had to
be between eighteen and forty.

973
01:32:45,935 --> 01:32:48,188
Too young, you
didn’t have resources,

974
01:32:48,188 --> 01:32:50,440
too old, you didn’t
have the endurance.

975
01:32:50,440 --> 01:32:52,484
So what did survivors do?

976
01:32:52,484 --> 01:32:54,235
They survived by luck,

977
01:32:54,235 --> 01:32:56,780
but they also did
not survive without skill.

978
01:32:56,780 --> 01:32:58,782
You couldn’t panic.

979
01:32:58,782 --> 01:33:03,328
You also needed a certain
measure of endurance

980
01:33:03,328 --> 01:33:07,582
and you needed almost
an indomitable will to live.

981
01:33:07,582 --> 01:33:10,585
Because otherwise, death
was all around you.

982
01:33:10,585 --> 01:33:15,673
Death could be running to the wires
and touching the electrified wires.

983
01:33:15,673 --> 01:33:18,176
They were a hundred
yards away from you.

984
01:33:18,176 --> 01:33:19,886
They were fifty feet
away from you.

985
01:33:19,886 --> 01:33:22,222
They sometimes were
two feet away from you.

986
01:33:22,222 --> 01:33:24,265
You gave up, you could do that.

987
01:33:24,265 --> 01:33:29,187
And consequently, survivors
had an indomitable will to live,

988
01:33:29,187 --> 01:33:33,817
and even those who had
an indomitable will to live,

989
01:33:33,817 --> 01:33:36,277
they were in the wrong place
at the wrong time, they died.

990
01:33:36,277 --> 01:33:37,445
They were killed.

991
01:34:52,896 --> 01:34:56,566
People who go into deep and
profound despair sometimes

992
01:34:56,566 --> 01:34:58,651
don’t have the will to live.

993
01:34:58,651 --> 01:35:02,697
But people who go to false
optimism also have a problem,

994
01:35:02,697 --> 01:35:07,327
which is they’re not
prepared to face the situation

995
01:35:07,327 --> 01:35:10,246
in which they find themselves.

996
01:35:10,246 --> 01:35:18,630
And consequently, they have to somehow
understand that hope is a dangerous commodity.

997
01:35:18,630 --> 01:35:23,426
The sort of metaphor of sheep
being led to the slaughter is,

998
01:35:23,426 --> 01:35:28,890
that kind of argument fails to
recognize the complexity,

999
01:35:28,890 --> 01:35:33,102
it fails to recognize the nuance
of different forms of resistance.

1000
01:35:33,102 --> 01:35:36,105
Ultimately, the people who did best

1001
01:35:36,105 --> 01:35:41,277
were the people who could
confront their own vulnerability,

1002
01:35:41,277 --> 01:35:46,824
who could look despair straight
in the face, not be frightened by that,

1003
01:35:46,824 --> 01:35:51,037
not be paralyzed by that,
but act in the face of it.

1004
01:36:22,860 --> 01:36:28,866
Now, 310,000 were deported in
the summer months of 1942,

1005
01:36:28,866 --> 01:36:31,869
leaving approximately 70,000.

1006
01:36:33,204 --> 01:36:39,252
Now that’s a remnant, which means
that perhaps 90,000 had died,

1007
01:36:39,252 --> 01:36:44,924
310,000 had been deported
and 70,000 were left.

1008
01:36:47,051 --> 01:36:49,554
But in January, there
was another deportation

1009
01:36:49,554 --> 01:36:53,182
in the course of which the
entire council was decimated.

1010
01:36:53,182 --> 01:36:56,102
And in the course
of that deportation,

1011
01:36:56,102 --> 01:36:59,814
maybe ten percent of those
that remained were deported.

1012
01:36:59,814 --> 01:37:02,984
So now we have
a little over 60,000.

1013
01:37:02,984 --> 01:37:09,198
There is no record of any
activity by the Jewish council
after January of 1943.

1014
01:37:09,198 --> 01:37:12,535
They could not have
any hope for survival.

1015
01:37:12,535 --> 01:37:19,584
They could not even trust
production to save them,
the factories, even that.

1016
01:37:19,584 --> 01:37:21,753
And Czerniakow was
still capable of writing

1017
01:37:21,753 --> 01:37:24,380
“a sewing machine
can save a life.”

1018
01:37:24,380 --> 01:37:29,302
But these people now knew that not even
the sewing machine could save a life.

1019
01:37:29,302 --> 01:37:33,639
And from that standpoint, they
organized themselves for battle.

1020
01:37:33,639 --> 01:37:38,061
A distinct goal, purpose,
and with quiet resolution,

1021
01:37:38,061 --> 01:37:41,230
they got a few weapons,
not very many.

1022
01:37:41,230 --> 01:37:45,651
The battle that ensued
the following April

1023
01:37:45,651 --> 01:37:47,737
between the Germans
and the Jews,

1024
01:37:47,737 --> 01:37:49,906
which has come down
as the Warsaw Ghetto battle

1025
01:37:49,906 --> 01:37:52,241
and which is symbolic,
in a sense,

1026
01:37:52,241 --> 01:37:57,163
to the extent that Auschwitz is
of the entire destruction process,

1027
01:37:57,163 --> 01:38:00,083
as though they
were two extremes,

1028
01:38:00,083 --> 01:38:07,799
that battle was a very
small infantry engagement.

1029
01:38:07,799 --> 01:38:11,636
The Germans
reported sixteen killed

1030
01:38:11,636 --> 01:38:15,223
and eighty-five wounded
throughout the battle.

1031
01:38:16,307 --> 01:38:18,559
One should not
look at this statistic

1032
01:38:18,559 --> 01:38:22,855
as though there were
extremely few German casualties.

1033
01:38:22,855 --> 01:38:28,069
Because under the circumstances,
the Jews possessed weapons

1034
01:38:28,069 --> 01:38:32,281
that would not have equipped
a modern infantry company of that day.

1035
01:38:32,281 --> 01:38:41,958
It’s understood and
understandable as an evolution,

1036
01:38:41,958 --> 01:38:45,378
but it was such a rapid evolution
that we may justifiably call it

1037
01:38:45,378 --> 01:38:48,548
a revolution in Jewish life,
because once again,

1038
01:38:48,548 --> 01:38:51,634
Jews were fighting
with weapons in hand,

1039
01:38:51,634 --> 01:38:55,930
conspicuously, visibly,
watched by the entire world.

1040
01:38:55,930 --> 01:39:00,810
And they had not done that for
quite some time in quite that manner.

1041
01:39:00,810 --> 01:39:05,648
Therefore, one justifiably points
to the Warsaw Ghetto battle

1042
01:39:05,648 --> 01:39:09,068
as a pivotal
development of Jewish history.

1043
01:39:18,119 --> 01:39:22,415
I used to say that resistance
was not a way to live

1044
01:39:22,415 --> 01:39:28,337
but a decision as to how you
chose to die, by exacting revenge,

1045
01:39:28,337 --> 01:39:33,134
by taking what, by taking
action, by refusing to go along.

1046
01:39:33,134 --> 01:39:38,723
A famous resistance fighter, one of the
commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,

1047
01:39:38,723 --> 01:39:41,434
said to me,
Berenbaum, you’re a fool.

1048
01:39:41,434 --> 01:39:46,022
He said resistance was
a way to live until you died.

1049
01:39:46,022 --> 01:39:48,983
Once we decided that
we were going to resist,

1050
01:39:48,983 --> 01:39:51,527
we were the freest
people in all of Europe,

1051
01:39:51,527 --> 01:39:54,155
because we had
nothing left to lose.

1052
01:40:25,811 --> 01:40:29,357
We planned, and
we saw ourselves outside

1053
01:40:29,357 --> 01:40:34,403
and we saw all the Nazis killed,
and this kept us going.

1054
01:40:34,403 --> 01:40:37,240
So we couldn’t stop any,
it was just preserving.

1055
01:40:37,240 --> 01:40:40,952
If it’s any chance, we have to
go through to the very end with it.

1056
01:40:40,952 --> 01:40:43,204
We knew we were
going to be dead any time,

1057
01:40:43,204 --> 01:40:48,000
so might as well do that, kill
whoever we can, and run out.

1058
01:40:48,000 --> 01:40:50,253
Whoever got saved, got saved.

1059
01:40:50,253 --> 01:40:56,092
The uprising came along and everybody
screamed run, run out, and that’s it.

1060
01:40:56,092 --> 01:40:59,679
And who has the
ammunition used it, and that’s it.

1061
01:40:59,679 --> 01:41:02,139
In this aspect I was
lucky I didn’t get killed.

1062
01:41:02,139 --> 01:41:07,645
I was not a hero to be, to
escape, but just happened,

1063
01:41:07,645 --> 01:41:12,733
all the bullets was falling
right in front of me and didn’t hit me.

1064
01:41:12,733 --> 01:41:17,488
People got hit in the legs, I
saw it, and fell back and
couldn’t go any farther.

1065
01:41:17,488 --> 01:41:22,368
No one explained,
this was all split seconds.

1066
01:41:22,368 --> 01:41:26,247
And I just jumped
up that stepladder.

1067
01:41:26,247 --> 01:41:33,379
And as I was on top, I noticed a
lot of bodies already under mine,

1068
01:41:33,379 --> 01:41:35,464
some people went before me.

1069
01:41:35,464 --> 01:41:42,555
I got a bullet shot from the
tower right here, and I fell down.

1070
01:41:42,555 --> 01:41:44,140
I took several over the head,

1071
01:41:44,140 --> 01:41:46,934
and I figured if we
don’t run here we are dead.

1072
01:41:46,934 --> 01:41:50,896
And I grabbed it and we run to
the main gate and people after us,

1073
01:41:50,896 --> 01:41:52,815
and that is the way we came out.

1074
01:41:52,815 --> 01:41:56,360
After I fell down,
I was so much aware

1075
01:41:56,360 --> 01:42:01,782
and the will to live was so great
that there’s no measurements to it,

1076
01:42:01,782 --> 01:42:05,161
that I started
hopping on dead bodies.

1077
01:42:05,161 --> 01:42:08,039
And soon I reached the woods.

1078
01:42:08,039 --> 01:42:14,337
Resistance was looking at the
circumstances in which you lived,

1079
01:42:14,337 --> 01:42:20,426
understanding your acute vulnerability,
the fact that you’re going to die,

1080
01:42:20,426 --> 01:42:24,847
and then saying okay,
I have a choice now to make.

1081
01:42:24,847 --> 01:42:27,391
And the choice is
not between life and death.

1082
01:42:27,391 --> 01:42:29,810
The choice is,
in Marek Edelman’s words,

1083
01:42:29,810 --> 01:42:33,022
the choice is how
am I going to live until I die?

1084
01:42:33,022 --> 01:42:36,025
Or the choice is, what
statement am I going to make

1085
01:42:36,025 --> 01:42:38,652
by the fact that
I’m going to die?

1086
01:42:38,652 --> 01:42:41,322
And I want to
take them down with me.

1087
01:42:44,325 --> 01:42:48,371
One of the important things in
understanding the Holocaust

1088
01:42:48,371 --> 01:42:52,875
is to ask the question, what did
people know and when did they know it?

1089
01:42:52,875 --> 01:42:55,795
And what did they
do with that knowledge?

1090
01:42:55,795 --> 01:42:59,340
Some of the bystanders were
laughing at what was happening.

1091
01:42:59,340 --> 01:43:04,136
Some of them were anxiously
wondering what property could they get,

1092
01:43:04,136 --> 01:43:08,349
whose apartment could they take
over, whose business could they control?

1093
01:43:08,349 --> 01:43:10,434
Some said, bye, bye Jews!

1094
01:43:10,434 --> 01:43:16,941
And some indicated,
you’re going to die.

1095
01:43:16,941 --> 01:43:20,653
So if you can do
something and you do nothing

1096
01:43:20,653 --> 01:43:23,823
and you sit idly
or stand idly by and watch,

1097
01:43:23,823 --> 01:43:28,828
you know, an atrocity being
committed, that’s problematic.

1098
01:46:01,981 --> 01:46:04,692
There were others who
were merely complicitous.

1099
01:46:04,692 --> 01:46:08,946
Complicitous means you go
along because you get along.

1100
01:46:08,946 --> 01:46:13,075
There were the bystanders
who didn’t oppose it

1101
01:46:13,075 --> 01:46:18,622
and essentially stood
by and watched it all happen.

1102
01:46:18,622 --> 01:46:20,791
And then there were
the few who were the upstanders

1103
01:46:20,791 --> 01:46:25,004
who were people who were
prepared to resist the Nazi intentions.

1104
01:46:25,004 --> 01:46:30,467
Then in 1944 when the
Russians came close to Krakow,

1105
01:46:30,467 --> 01:46:35,347
we were transported
to the Schindler’s factory.

1106
01:46:35,347 --> 01:46:38,183
This is where I
was together with my father.

1107
01:46:39,268 --> 01:46:43,522
Very gruff man,
you know, chain smoking,

1108
01:46:43,522 --> 01:46:47,985
and I was told that he
was the one who makes sure

1109
01:46:47,985 --> 01:46:52,239
that twelve hundred Jews
were working for him.

1110
01:47:03,584 --> 01:47:13,969
I regarded Oskar Schindler
as an emissary from God,

1111
01:47:13,969 --> 01:47:19,850
to save twelve hundred Jews, and
me and my father among them.

1112
01:47:20,184 --> 01:47:25,230
We were saved by Oskar Schindler
and by the grace of God.

1113
01:47:33,614 --> 01:47:40,746
It just took offering a home or
a haven, a meal, a place to hide,

1114
01:47:40,746 --> 01:47:45,709
a moment of encouragement, a moment
of decency, to people desperately in need.

1115
01:47:49,129 --> 01:47:59,139
♪ [music] ♪

1116
01:48:14,988 --> 01:48:22,246
We can learn that among
all the peoples of the world,

1117
01:48:22,871 --> 01:48:27,334
none helped the Jews,
none raised their voices,

1118
01:48:27,334 --> 01:48:30,921
although they knew what
was happening to Jews.

1119
01:48:30,921 --> 01:48:36,593
But there were Schindlers,
very, very few of them, very few,

1120
01:48:36,593 --> 01:48:45,519
insignificant number,
who took interest in saving Jews.

1121
01:49:20,304 --> 01:49:24,975
Apparently General Eisenhower
ordered as many troops to go back,

1122
01:49:24,975 --> 01:49:30,606
to be a witness, at any
concentration camp that may be nearby.

1123
01:49:31,231 --> 01:49:33,525
He was very smart,
because he figured some day

1124
01:49:33,525 --> 01:49:36,028
they’re going to
say it never happened.

1125
01:49:36,028 --> 01:49:39,865
And so we got in trucks
and we headed for something

1126
01:49:39,865 --> 01:49:42,785
we had no idea
what we were going to see.

1127
01:50:04,765 --> 01:50:09,311
The stench of burning flesh
permeated the whole area as we got closer.

1128
01:50:09,311 --> 01:50:15,776
Out of the clear blue came hundreds
of people I could not recognize as people.

1129
01:50:25,869 --> 01:50:29,373
There’s a town of
Dachau not too far away,

1130
01:50:29,373 --> 01:50:35,712
and they made the people from
Dachau come and take a look at
what went on at Dachau.

1131
01:50:36,213 --> 01:50:41,468
It’s just mind boggling
and it’s an unforgiveable scene.

1132
01:50:41,468 --> 01:50:45,973
Befreiung! Befreiung!
Liberation! Americans! Americans!

1133
01:50:45,973 --> 01:50:49,768
So I tell my cousin come on,
let’s go see what’s going on.

1134
01:50:49,768 --> 01:50:56,108
And we hop outside and we see
some of the Jewish inmates

1135
01:50:56,108 --> 01:51:03,031
were crawling on their hands and knees
and kissing the boots of the American GIs.

1136
01:51:03,031 --> 01:51:06,910
They were like gods,
they looked like gods to us.

1137
01:51:06,910 --> 01:51:11,164
My cousin, the night after
liberation, dies in my arms.

1138
01:51:11,164 --> 01:51:15,627
The night after
liberation dies in my arms.

1139
01:51:15,627 --> 01:51:18,797
And when they came
take him away, I followed.

1140
01:51:18,797 --> 01:51:22,134
My feet just gave
out and I fell down.

1141
01:51:22,134 --> 01:51:27,514
It was, it was virtually, can
you imagine trying to talk to someone

1142
01:51:27,514 --> 01:51:34,021
that they don’t even have the strength
for their vocal cords to even operate?

1143
01:51:34,479 --> 01:51:40,485
We were warned not to give them
anything like our C-rations and our K-rations.

1144
01:51:40,485 --> 01:51:42,154
Don’t give them that.

1145
01:51:42,154 --> 01:51:46,909
See, these people
had to be fed a broth,

1146
01:51:48,035 --> 01:51:51,204
something that was soupy
that they could swallow

1147
01:51:51,204 --> 01:51:53,081
that would not
choke them to death

1148
01:51:53,081 --> 01:51:56,376
because if you fed them,
they couldn’t swallow it.

1149
01:52:05,719 --> 01:52:08,597
I can, I can still see it.

1150
01:52:09,222 --> 01:52:11,642
The ground was
covered with dead people.

1151
01:52:11,642 --> 01:52:16,229
And they were in
the uniform of the prisoners,

1152
01:52:16,229 --> 01:52:21,443
and they were
all being worked to death.

1153
01:52:21,443 --> 01:52:23,612
The moment they
could no longer work

1154
01:52:23,612 --> 01:52:28,450
they were sent to the
crematorium, and that was that.

1155
01:52:28,450 --> 01:52:36,416
I just couldn’t
believe that an individual

1156
01:52:36,416 --> 01:52:42,881
that is supposed to be fighting
for the preservation of his culture

1157
01:52:42,881 --> 01:52:50,764
and his country could be doing
this to people that had no defense.

1158
01:52:50,764 --> 01:52:52,683
I couldn’t believe this.

1159
01:52:58,605 --> 01:53:00,774
The crematoria are going.

1160
01:53:00,774 --> 01:53:02,484
They had bodies in them.

1161
01:53:02,484 --> 01:53:06,321
Outside there were
bodies looked like skeletons,

1162
01:53:06,321 --> 01:53:12,202
only skin and bones,
piled up like cordwood,

1163
01:53:12,202 --> 01:53:16,039
one on top of the other,
ready to be burned.

1164
01:53:16,039 --> 01:53:19,334
People on the ground, you
couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive.

1165
01:53:21,253 --> 01:53:23,672
They were skin and bones.

1166
01:53:23,672 --> 01:53:30,595
You, can you imagine
a skeleton trying to talk to you?

1167
01:53:32,305 --> 01:53:34,725
And holding out his hand?

1168
01:53:34,975 --> 01:53:36,184
Can you imagine that?

1169
01:53:36,184 --> 01:53:39,104
You get any kind
of inkling what it’s like?

1170
01:53:40,188 --> 01:53:42,399
And this is all you saw.

1171
01:53:42,399 --> 01:53:45,652
These people could not get up.

1172
01:53:46,737 --> 01:53:51,033
These people were literally abandoned.

1173
01:53:51,033 --> 01:54:00,292
My very clear view of freedom
and liberation came that morning

1174
01:54:00,292 --> 01:54:05,881
when I stood in this doorway
of that abandoned factory.

1175
01:54:07,132 --> 01:54:09,968
And I saw a car
coming down the hill.

1176
01:54:10,677 --> 01:54:13,597
And the reality of
that came when I saw

1177
01:54:13,597 --> 01:54:17,184
the white star on its
hood and not the swastika.

1178
01:54:17,184 --> 01:54:19,853
There were two men in that car.

1179
01:54:19,853 --> 01:54:24,983
One jumped out, came
running toward me and asked

1180
01:54:24,983 --> 01:54:29,112
if there was anyone
who spoke English or German.

1181
01:54:29,112 --> 01:54:31,531
I told him I spoke German.

1182
01:54:34,034 --> 01:54:39,915
I remember that aura of
oh, the disbelief in daylight,

1183
01:54:39,915 --> 01:54:48,882
to really see someone who fought
for our freedom, for my ideals.

1184
01:54:48,882 --> 01:54:53,053
And he looked like God to me.

1185
01:54:55,180 --> 01:54:58,809
And I knew what I had to say,

1186
01:54:58,809 --> 01:55:02,187
and I said to him,
we are Jewish, you know.

1187
01:55:02,896 --> 01:55:06,525
For a very long time, at least
to me it seemed very long,

1188
01:55:06,525 --> 01:55:09,027
he didn’t answer me.

1189
01:55:09,027 --> 01:55:12,280
And then his own
voice betrayed his emotion.

1190
01:55:12,280 --> 01:55:14,908
He was wearing dark glasses,
I couldn’t see his eyes.

1191
01:55:14,908 --> 01:55:17,661
He said, so am I.

1192
01:55:18,328 --> 01:55:23,083
And the impact of that, to be
liberated not only by an American

1193
01:55:23,083 --> 01:55:26,253
but by a fellow Jew,
and he said to me,

1194
01:55:26,253 --> 01:55:28,296
won’t you come with me?

1195
01:55:28,296 --> 01:55:30,799
I didn’t know what he meant.

1196
01:55:30,799 --> 01:55:37,389
So he held the door open for
me and let me proceed him.

1197
01:55:38,223 --> 01:55:43,520
And that was
the moment of restoration,

1198
01:55:43,520 --> 01:55:50,110
of humanity, of humaneness,
dignity, of freedom.

1199
01:55:51,403 --> 01:55:55,657
And this first young American of
liberation day is now my husband.

1200
01:55:55,657 --> 01:55:57,826
He opened not only
the door for me,

1201
01:55:57,826 --> 01:56:00,787
but the door to
my life and my future.

1202
01:56:06,042 --> 01:56:08,545
And there was something
else which I will recite to you

1203
01:56:08,545 --> 01:56:10,714
which is not generally known.

1204
01:56:10,714 --> 01:56:13,049
In one of the camps,
I don’t know

1205
01:56:13,049 --> 01:56:17,512
if it was Buchenwald or
Flossenburg or Ebensee or
Mauthausen.

1206
01:56:17,512 --> 01:56:20,724
It may have been Flossenburg.

1207
01:56:20,724 --> 01:56:23,143
The camps were
basically the same.

1208
01:56:23,143 --> 01:56:28,273
I come in to the office.

1209
01:56:28,273 --> 01:56:33,653
We got into the camp, and he
said I’ve been waiting for you.

1210
01:56:33,653 --> 01:56:36,323
So he says, come with me.

1211
01:56:36,323 --> 01:56:39,993
So he takes me out
to the electrified fence

1212
01:56:39,993 --> 01:56:42,162
which surrounded
all these camps.

1213
01:56:42,162 --> 01:56:43,455
If anybody touched the fence

1214
01:56:43,455 --> 01:56:45,540
they got an electric
shock would kill them.

1215
01:56:45,540 --> 01:56:51,838
And he had a shovel with him,
and he dug up next to the fence,

1216
01:56:51,838 --> 01:56:55,550
he knew where he was digging,
he dug up a box.

1217
01:56:55,550 --> 01:57:00,388
And in the box
there were little cards.

1218
01:57:00,388 --> 01:57:02,599
I think I’ve got
something like that.

1219
01:57:02,599 --> 01:57:05,477
Almost like a passport.

1220
01:57:05,477 --> 01:57:12,776
And the SS officers,
the storm troopers, had a club.

1221
01:57:12,776 --> 01:57:14,986
And when you came
to the club meeting,

1222
01:57:14,986 --> 01:57:18,031
they put a stamp
in this little book.

1223
01:57:18,031 --> 01:57:20,825
And when the book
was filled with stamps,

1224
01:57:20,825 --> 01:57:24,079
they gave you a new book.

1225
01:57:24,079 --> 01:57:27,249
And the guy in charge
of the deck was an inmate.

1226
01:57:27,249 --> 01:57:31,378
They usually were inmates,
they worked with the inmates.

1227
01:57:31,378 --> 01:57:35,882
Instead of giving them a new book
and throwing away the old one,

1228
01:57:35,882 --> 01:57:38,885
he saved the old one
and he put it away.

1229
01:57:38,885 --> 01:57:42,305
Now every time he did that,
he took his life in his hands,

1230
01:57:42,305 --> 01:57:44,975
because they would have
killed him right on the spot,

1231
01:57:44,975 --> 01:57:47,269
right then, if they ever
saw him hold a book.

1232
01:57:47,269 --> 01:57:50,522
They would have put a gun to his
head and blown his brains out.

1233
01:57:50,522 --> 01:57:54,109
And he had a whole
box of these cards.

1234
01:57:54,109 --> 01:57:59,197
And I knew the names and a
photograph of all the SS guards

1235
01:57:59,197 --> 01:58:02,450
who’d been in that camp
for the last year or two.

1236
01:58:02,450 --> 01:58:06,121
Invaluable piece of
evidence, you know?

1237
01:58:06,121 --> 01:58:09,541
So what impressed me
was here’s a guy

1238
01:58:09,541 --> 01:58:12,043
who is risking his
life a hundred times,

1239
01:58:12,043 --> 01:58:16,006
knowing that one day there’d
be a day of reckoning.

1240
01:58:19,926 --> 01:58:22,554
And I was that day.

1241
01:58:25,473 --> 01:58:31,771
So never give up.
Always have hope.

1242
01:58:31,771 --> 01:58:35,066
He was hoping that one day it
would be a day of reckoning,

1243
01:58:35,066 --> 01:58:37,193
and that was the evidence
I got from that case.

1244
01:58:37,610 --> 01:58:43,575
After May 8, 1945,
myself and my father

1245
01:58:43,575 --> 01:58:50,790
traveled as much as we could by
horse and buggy, by some trains,

1246
01:58:50,790 --> 01:58:57,839
back to Krakow to look
for any remnants of our family.

1247
01:58:58,214 --> 01:58:59,799
We didn’t find any.

1248
01:58:59,799 --> 01:59:03,386
They took us by train,
they took us back to France,

1249
01:59:03,386 --> 01:59:06,348
which was completely
liberated where we had fought,

1250
01:59:06,348 --> 01:59:08,683
and I found the synagogue
still standing there,

1251
01:59:08,683 --> 01:59:13,188
stone building, beautiful
edifice, but the inside was gutted out.

1252
01:59:13,188 --> 01:59:17,817
As I was standing there, a Frenchman
came up to me with three little girls.

1253
01:59:17,817 --> 01:59:22,030
I believe the ages were eight,
ten and twelve at that time.

1254
01:59:22,030 --> 01:59:28,370
He gave me to remember him by,
the actual yellow Star of David,

1255
01:59:28,370 --> 01:59:32,415
the cloth that he had to wear
when the Nazis took over France.

1256
01:59:32,415 --> 01:59:39,214
Every Jewish person, young and
old, had to wear the yellow Star of David,

1257
01:59:39,214 --> 01:59:44,511
piece of cloth sewn
to their, what they wore,

1258
01:59:44,511 --> 01:59:49,891
and it says on it Juif,
which means Jew.

1259
01:59:49,891 --> 01:59:52,268
I treasure this.

1260
01:59:58,608 --> 02:00:14,624
I think that the Holocaust was a
disparity, it was a hiding of God’s face.

1261
02:00:16,543 --> 02:00:20,922
God’s face was turned
away from the Jewish people.

1262
02:00:20,922 --> 02:00:25,385
I asked a young rabbi
here in New York one time,

1263
02:00:25,385 --> 02:00:28,805
why did God allow
to do these things here?

1264
02:00:28,805 --> 02:00:31,391
He couldn’t answer me.

1265
02:00:31,391 --> 02:00:33,810
I can’t answer you,
I don’t know the answer.

1266
02:00:35,562 --> 02:00:43,361
There is no forgiveness for the
enormity of the crime, of this crime.

1267
02:00:43,361 --> 02:00:49,075
There is no forgiveness for this,
there is no forgetfulness for this.

1268
02:00:49,075 --> 02:00:51,202
There are no such thing.

1269
02:00:51,202 --> 02:00:58,460
We can tolerate
but not forgive, never forgive,

1270
02:00:58,460 --> 02:01:02,922
because if we forgive,
I feel we are desecrated,

1271
02:01:02,922 --> 02:01:08,386
we are desecrating
the memories of those victims.

1272
02:01:09,095 --> 02:01:19,105
♪ [music] ♪

1273
02:02:56,369 --> 02:02:58,621
They had surrendered unconditionally,

1274
02:02:58,621 --> 02:03:01,165
which was the requirement at the time.

1275
02:03:01,165 --> 02:03:08,881
The Allied Powers, the British, the French,
the Americans and the Russians,

1276
02:03:08,881 --> 02:03:13,970
got together and they had conferences
on what to do about the Germans,

1277
02:03:13,970 --> 02:03:16,180
and the Americans
said look, we need trials.

1278
02:03:16,180 --> 02:03:19,309
You accuse them of crime,
give them a day in court,

1279
02:03:19,309 --> 02:03:21,477
let them come in and present the evidence.

1280
02:03:21,477 --> 02:03:26,065
You present the counter-evidence,
have judges there who will judge it.

1281
02:03:26,065 --> 02:03:30,862
As we in America do, it says on
the Supreme Court building,

1282
02:03:30,862 --> 02:03:34,532
justice under law, the law
applies equally to everyone.

1283
02:03:34,532 --> 02:03:36,326
Give them a fair trial.

1284
02:03:50,423 --> 02:03:52,383
The British and the French
and the Russians

1285
02:03:52,383 --> 02:03:58,056
sent their best jurists to
appear as judges of the trial.

1286
02:03:58,056 --> 02:04:02,143
The trials were open to the
public, they were filmed.

1287
02:04:02,143 --> 02:04:03,978
The evidence was submitted.

1288
02:04:03,978 --> 02:04:06,189
The guilt was overwhelming.

1289
02:04:39,514 --> 02:04:45,144
In this case, the victims were
killed simply because they didn’t share

1290
02:04:45,144 --> 02:04:50,066
the race, the religion or the
ideology of their executioners.

1291
02:04:50,066 --> 02:04:54,112
And I thought as a young
Harvard graduate, that’s horrible.

1292
02:04:54,112 --> 02:04:57,782
And if we can create
a new rule of law which asserts

1293
02:04:57,782 --> 02:05:01,953
the right of all human beings
to live in peace and dignity,

1294
02:05:01,953 --> 02:05:04,997
regardless of their
race or creed or color,

1295
02:05:04,997 --> 02:05:09,293
then we will have created
something of permanent value.

1296
02:05:09,293 --> 02:05:11,087
And that’s what I asked to do.

1297
02:05:11,087 --> 02:05:14,424
I got on the next plane going
from Berlin to Nuremberg.

1298
02:05:14,424 --> 02:05:16,134
I went to Nuremberg.

1299
02:05:16,134 --> 02:05:18,428
There was Taylor,
who was then the General,

1300
02:05:18,428 --> 02:05:20,304
he had been promoted from Colonel.

1301
02:05:20,304 --> 02:05:23,516
I said General,
we got to put on a new trial.

1302
02:05:23,516 --> 02:05:30,523
So I thereby became the chief
prosecutor of the largest murder
trial in human history.

1303
02:07:04,242 --> 02:07:07,703
I got to the kitchen and I came
out with two cups of coffee,

1304
02:07:07,703 --> 02:07:11,666
and my friend came out of the
kitchen with two cups of coffee,

1305
02:07:11,666 --> 02:07:14,877
and we sat down with
Herr Goering and Popin

1306
02:07:14,877 --> 02:07:20,508
and whoever happened to be
sitting on the terrace, and we talked.

1307
02:07:20,508 --> 02:07:25,721
I mean, their answer to that was,
we did what we were told to do.

1308
02:07:25,721 --> 02:07:30,685
The orders came down from
headquarters, this is what you had to do.

1309
02:07:30,685 --> 02:07:33,271
The military men
did what they had to do.

1310
02:07:33,271 --> 02:07:39,652
I accused 22 defendants selected
by me on the basis of their education.

1311
02:07:39,652 --> 02:07:42,697
Many of them had PhDs,
one had a double doctorate,

1312
02:07:42,697 --> 02:07:46,075
and their rank, generals,
colonels of the SS.

1313
02:07:46,075 --> 02:07:48,536
I rested my case in two days.

1314
02:07:48,536 --> 02:07:50,288
I convicted all of them.

1315
02:07:50,288 --> 02:07:57,545
They were, they feared for their
life, for one thing, justifiably.

1316
02:07:57,545 --> 02:08:06,178
I mean, they knew about the laws
that they would be going on trial for.

1317
02:08:06,804 --> 02:08:12,226
You asked about what people
I didn’t talk to or did talk to.

1318
02:08:12,226 --> 02:08:14,437
There was only one
man I wanted to talk to

1319
02:08:14,437 --> 02:08:16,022
after he was sentenced to death.

1320
02:08:16,022 --> 02:08:19,483
That was Dr. Otto Ohlendorf.
General of the SS.

1321
02:08:19,483 --> 02:08:21,527
He was fairly
honest at the trial.

1322
02:08:21,527 --> 02:08:23,696
I knew he was
the father of five children.

1323
02:08:23,696 --> 02:08:27,241
I thought I’ll go down
and talk to him.

1324
02:08:27,241 --> 02:08:29,994
Maybe he’ll have
some remorse, you know?

1325
02:08:29,994 --> 02:08:31,954
Maybe he wants to tell
me he loves his wife,

1326
02:08:31,954 --> 02:08:34,373
tell a message to
his children that, you know,

1327
02:08:34,373 --> 02:08:36,959
he’s sorry ending this way.

1328
02:08:36,959 --> 02:08:39,045
So I went down and
I spoke to him in German.

1329
02:08:39,045 --> 02:08:43,341
And I said, can I do something
for you, Dr. Ohlendorf?

1330
02:08:43,341 --> 02:08:46,594
And he said well, you’ll see.

1331
02:08:46,594 --> 02:08:48,846
The Russians are
going to take over,

1332
02:08:48,846 --> 02:08:51,307
the Jews in America will suffer,

1333
02:08:51,307 --> 02:08:53,100
you’ll see that I was right.

1334
02:08:53,100 --> 02:08:56,187
And he began to repeat the
argument he had made at trial,

1335
02:08:56,187 --> 02:09:00,066
that he had his right of
self-defense because he knew

1336
02:09:00,066 --> 02:09:02,068
the Russians were
going to attack

1337
02:09:02,068 --> 02:09:05,863
and therefore they could
preempt that by attacking first,

1338
02:09:05,863 --> 02:09:07,573
and that was lawful.

1339
02:09:07,573 --> 02:09:09,408
And he presented big legal,

1340
02:09:09,408 --> 02:09:12,662
German legal opinions to that,
support that argument.

1341
02:09:12,662 --> 02:09:16,999
Three American judges
say that’s not lawful,

1342
02:09:16,999 --> 02:09:19,251
that’s not good law,
it’s bad law.

1343
02:09:19,251 --> 02:09:21,545
What would the world look
like if anybody went out

1344
02:09:21,545 --> 02:09:24,131
and he wanted to kill his
neighbor because he had a gun,

1345
02:09:24,131 --> 02:09:25,967
and he kills his neighbor
and his mother

1346
02:09:25,967 --> 02:09:27,885
and his grandfather and
his neighbor next door?

1347
02:09:27,885 --> 02:09:30,054
What kind of a world
would we have?

1348
02:09:30,054 --> 02:09:31,722
And they sentenced him to death

1349
02:09:31,722 --> 02:09:35,226
and I was sure he was going
to hang, and he was hanged.

1350
02:09:56,288 --> 02:10:01,961
In the world completely
infested with this kind of mentality

1351
02:10:01,961 --> 02:10:04,797
that you need more
power in order to prevail,

1352
02:10:04,797 --> 02:10:07,633
but you need more power, you’re
going to end up with more people.

1353
02:10:07,633 --> 02:10:09,802
You got to treat the people better.

1354
02:10:09,802 --> 02:10:12,930
You must recognize the
importance of compromise,

1355
02:10:12,930 --> 02:10:18,310
the importance of being able to
see the other fellow’s point of view.

1356
02:10:18,310 --> 02:10:21,856
The requirement of your
humanity in everything that you do.

1357
02:10:21,856 --> 02:10:25,526
Those are the guides
which should be the guides,

1358
02:10:25,526 --> 02:10:28,154
not to say who,
how many more can we kill?

1359
02:10:35,661 --> 02:10:40,875
This is Wakulla
Springs Wildlife Sanctuary,

1360
02:10:40,875 --> 02:10:46,422
and it is one of the most
beautiful spots in the United States.

1361
02:10:46,422 --> 02:10:49,884
It is the way Florida, or at
least the northern part of Florida,

1362
02:10:49,884 --> 02:10:54,305
was before it became
as settled as it is now.

1363
02:10:54,305 --> 02:10:58,601
I suspect that 150 years ago
most of Florida looked like this.

1364
02:10:58,601 --> 02:11:02,521
As you see, the kind
of wildlife we have here,

1365
02:11:02,521 --> 02:11:06,108
the trees and the
fauna and also occasionally

1366
02:11:06,108 --> 02:11:10,321
you’ll see all kinds of
alligators and other wild animals.

1367
02:11:10,321 --> 02:11:12,281
And they’ve been kept this way,

1368
02:11:12,281 --> 02:11:15,076
where the rest
of Florida has changed.

1369
02:11:15,076 --> 02:11:19,497
For people like me, it is a
great source of tranquillity

1370
02:11:19,497 --> 02:11:20,956
to be able to come down here

1371
02:11:20,956 --> 02:11:24,877
and to simply come to
this spot every so often.

1372
02:11:24,877 --> 02:11:27,671
I’m glad that we can talk
in this particular area.

1373
02:11:27,671 --> 02:11:30,674
So do you think that it fits

1374
02:11:30,674 --> 02:11:34,512
to talk about the
Holocaust in this place?

1375
02:11:34,512 --> 02:11:38,849
Well, if one wants to talk
about a polar opposite,

1376
02:11:38,849 --> 02:11:44,021
I would say that what the
Holocaust represents

1377
02:11:44,021 --> 02:11:48,901
is the dialectic extreme
opposite of this,

1378
02:11:48,901 --> 02:11:52,696
because what we have
here is an area

1379
02:11:52,696 --> 02:11:55,533
in which nature has been
completely unchanged.

1380
02:11:55,533 --> 02:11:59,995
And what the Holocaust
represents is the most extreme form

1381
02:11:59,995 --> 02:12:02,957
of manmade action
and manmade project

1382
02:12:02,957 --> 02:12:05,751
with a peculiar
kind of destructiveness

1383
02:12:05,751 --> 02:12:07,920
and with a peculiar
kind of calculation,

1384
02:12:07,920 --> 02:12:10,589
which was never
present in nature

1385
02:12:10,589 --> 02:12:12,550
and could never
be present in nature.

1386
02:12:12,550 --> 02:12:16,011
So that it’s as
appropriate a spot

1387
02:12:16,011 --> 02:12:18,597
to talk about the
Holocaust as any that I know.

1388
02:12:18,597 --> 02:12:21,892
If this is the place of nature,

1389
02:12:21,892 --> 02:12:23,936
then what the Holocaust
represents is the,

1390
02:12:23,936 --> 02:12:27,273
the most extreme form
of the city of man

1391
02:12:27,273 --> 02:12:29,441
and its radical destructiveness.

1392
02:12:36,448 --> 02:12:46,458
♪ [singing] ♪

1393
02:13:03,100 --> 02:13:06,687
Twelve thousand people were on
the march living walking into Birkenau.

1394
02:13:06,687 --> 02:13:10,858
And I stood at front of the
march and I looked back and I said,

1395
02:13:10,858 --> 02:13:14,987
twelve thousand people
are marching into Birkenau.

1396
02:13:14,987 --> 02:13:20,868
That’s the number that were
killed at the busiest day in 1944.

1397
02:13:23,746 --> 02:13:26,415
They came to remember.

1398
02:13:26,415 --> 02:13:30,127
Twelve thousand people
entered Birkenau in 1944,

1399
02:13:30,127 --> 02:13:34,381
in the summer of 1944,
and were killed in that day.

1400
02:13:34,381 --> 02:13:40,262
In 1996, I was at
the state capitol in Hartford.

1401
02:13:40,262 --> 02:13:44,516
I was still wearing my
Eisenhower jacket.

1402
02:13:44,516 --> 02:13:49,897
And a gentleman walked up
to me and recognized the insignia

1403
02:13:49,897 --> 02:13:53,567
that every air infantry
officer had a different insignia

1404
02:13:53,567 --> 02:13:55,778
and I always
called it a Thunderbird.

1405
02:13:55,778 --> 02:14:01,575
And I asked him, he says you
remember that symbol, huh?

1406
02:14:01,575 --> 02:14:04,078
And I said were you in Dachau?

1407
02:14:04,078 --> 02:14:05,204
He said yes.

1408
02:14:05,204 --> 02:14:10,626
He and his wife were inmates at
the time the camp was liberated.

1409
02:14:10,626 --> 02:14:16,757
I did not know him at
that time, but they live in Avon.

1410
02:14:16,757 --> 02:14:19,551
We became very good friends.

1411
02:14:19,551 --> 02:14:28,978
And in 2006, I went to my
cardiologist and he said Ben,
you got a blockage.

1412
02:14:28,978 --> 02:14:33,607
He put me in St. Francis
Hospital and I had open heart surgery.

1413
02:14:33,607 --> 02:14:40,614
The cardiac surgeon that operated
on me and saved my life was their son.

1414
02:14:40,614 --> 02:14:44,326
What goes around, comes around.

1415
02:14:46,829 --> 02:14:49,957
They were heroes in every way.

1416
02:14:49,957 --> 02:14:59,675
Because while they lived,
they did some wonderful things.

1417
02:14:59,675 --> 02:15:07,766
They made this world
a wonderful place to live in.

1418
02:15:09,059 --> 02:15:16,025
Their loss is a
loss for all humanity

1419
02:15:16,025 --> 02:15:26,285
and we hope that future generations
will never know of our pain,

1420
02:15:26,285 --> 02:15:34,335
and that everybody will stand
up to any form of persecution.

1421
02:15:35,627 --> 02:15:41,133
I taught my children
love and not hate.

1422
02:15:41,633 --> 02:15:48,932
But I could never forget.
I could never forgive.

1423
02:15:49,725 --> 02:15:52,561
This is my father and my mother.

1424
02:15:52,561 --> 02:15:55,731
They’re young.

1425
02:15:55,731 --> 02:15:58,400
And this is my father again,

1426
02:16:01,862 --> 02:16:06,742
and this is my father
and my little baby sister.

1427
02:16:07,701 --> 02:16:13,082
And this is the jacket he was
wearing, that I found the jacket,

1428
02:16:13,082 --> 02:16:18,379
this is the jacket, before he
went to the gas chambers.

1429
02:16:20,255 --> 02:16:23,175
Growing up with
Jack Betteil, a survivor,

1430
02:16:23,175 --> 02:16:25,886
he always told me
what happened to him as a child,

1431
02:16:25,886 --> 02:16:29,765
and I always knew that there
was some kind of anti-Semitism

1432
02:16:29,765 --> 02:16:32,101
and perhaps evil in the world.

1433
02:16:32,101 --> 02:16:34,269
And after telling me
how he lost his family,

1434
02:16:34,269 --> 02:16:36,397
his home, and just about everything,

1435
02:16:36,397 --> 02:16:38,107
I remember when I was growing up

1436
02:16:38,107 --> 02:16:40,234
and if I came home
from school, like any kid,

1437
02:16:40,234 --> 02:16:44,488
if I had a little problem I would
look to him and tell him the story,

1438
02:16:44,488 --> 02:16:47,741
and he would look back and me
and just go, that’s terrible, Matt.

1439
02:16:47,741 --> 02:16:52,204
And I knew that it was nothing compared
to what it was like growing up for him.

1440
02:16:52,204 --> 02:16:55,958
And so it gave me perspective in
terms of what problems really were,

1441
02:16:55,958 --> 02:16:58,919
as opposed to what
I thought were problems.

1442
02:16:58,919 --> 02:17:02,381
He gave me a way to look at the
world and see it through his eyes,

1443
02:17:02,381 --> 02:17:06,468
which is sometimes very frightening,
but also there were lots of good stories

1444
02:17:06,468 --> 02:17:09,054
about when he survived,
about little kindnesses

1445
02:17:09,054 --> 02:17:11,140
that made the difference
between life and death.

1446
02:17:11,140 --> 02:17:13,809
And it was just something
that I learned how to appreciate,

1447
02:17:13,809 --> 02:17:15,811
both the good and the bad.

1448
02:17:15,811 --> 02:17:17,688
And growing up
with someone like Jack,

1449
02:17:17,688 --> 02:17:20,732
I can see that he always
kept his sense of humor.

1450
02:17:20,732 --> 02:17:22,526
He was always
wonderful with people.

1451
02:17:22,526 --> 02:17:26,280
He did incredible acts
of charity for children.

1452
02:17:26,280 --> 02:17:29,199
So he was very tough,
he was very strong,

1453
02:17:29,199 --> 02:17:32,744
and he knew about the bad but he
also taught me about the good.

1454
02:17:36,498 --> 02:17:41,086
What survivors represent for us
is they faced the ultimate defeat.

1455
02:17:41,086 --> 02:17:45,257
They lost their entire family,
their mothers and fathers,

1456
02:17:45,257 --> 02:17:47,926
their sisters and brothers,
their husbands and wives,

1457
02:17:47,926 --> 02:17:50,804
their children, their grandparents.

1458
02:17:52,139 --> 02:17:57,227
And they didn’t allow
defeat to define them.

1459
02:17:57,227 --> 02:18:01,356
They developed the courage and
the ability to rebuild their lives.

1460
02:18:01,356 --> 02:18:04,485
You know, people ask me,
if you played music in Auschwitz

1461
02:18:04,485 --> 02:18:05,736
how can you play music now?

1462
02:18:05,736 --> 02:18:09,740
You know, the idea that Hitler
could destroy music is ridiculous.

1463
02:18:09,740 --> 02:18:15,954
He destroyed a great deal, but
music is not destructible by Hitler.

1464
02:18:15,954 --> 02:18:17,748
But once you are in this world,

1465
02:18:17,748 --> 02:18:22,586
you have a responsibility to be
worthy to be called a human being.

1466
02:18:22,586 --> 02:18:23,795
That’s all.

1467
02:18:23,795 --> 02:18:27,591
I think it’s really important to
tell the story and to tell the truth,

1468
02:18:27,591 --> 02:18:31,762
to tell what you saw,
to tell what you felt.

1469
02:18:31,762 --> 02:18:34,014
And when you
see things going wrong,

1470
02:18:34,014 --> 02:18:38,310
you really need to look at it
and not pretend that it’s not happening.

1471
02:18:38,310 --> 02:18:43,190
And I feel that
that’s why it’s so important,

1472
02:18:43,190 --> 02:18:48,904
it shouldn’t be forgot, it shouldn’t
be forgotten because it can happen again.

1473
02:18:48,904 --> 02:18:52,699
Survivors tell us their story
not because they want to weaken us,

1474
02:18:52,699 --> 02:18:56,703
not because they want pity, but
because they want to strengthen us

1475
02:18:56,703 --> 02:18:59,748
in our commitment to human
dignity and human decency,

1476
02:18:59,748 --> 02:19:04,670
and our commitment to the sanctity
and sacredness of all human life.

1477
02:19:04,670 --> 02:19:09,550
And after they finish
bequeathing to us their testimony,

1478
02:19:09,550 --> 02:19:12,386
then the question is,
what are we to do with it?

1479
02:19:12,386 --> 02:19:14,096
Now it’s up to us.

1480
02:19:14,096 --> 02:19:17,683
I have a card that
says no act of kindness,

1481
02:19:17,683 --> 02:19:22,896
no matter how small,
no matter how small, is ever wasted.

1482
02:19:22,896 --> 02:19:28,610
If everybody would just practice that
and bring respect back to one another

1483
02:19:28,610 --> 02:19:34,491
and remember we all, I don’t
care what your religion is or
what your background is,

1484
02:19:34,491 --> 02:19:38,996
we all belong to the
same race. The human race.

1485
02:19:38,996 --> 02:19:46,003
Let’s appreciate our differences rather than
hate them and live side by side in peace.

1486
02:19:46,003 --> 02:19:52,593
The hatred must stop, because we
can now see what hatred will bring.

1487
02:19:52,593 --> 02:19:58,515
Human beings are capable
of the most noble acts imaginable

1488
02:19:58,515 --> 02:20:02,060
and the most horrific acts imaginable.

1489
02:20:02,060 --> 02:20:06,148
And the question
becomes for each of us,

1490
02:20:06,148 --> 02:20:09,735
is what type of human
being do you want to be?

1491
02:20:11,111 --> 02:20:14,990
One person at Sachsenhausen
said it in the following way.

1492
02:20:15,991 --> 02:20:17,618
He used to tell his prisoners,

1493
02:20:17,618 --> 02:20:20,579
his arriving prisoners what
they were about to face.

1494
02:20:21,038 --> 02:20:22,831
And he said
"I have told you this story

1495
02:20:22,831 --> 02:20:25,375
not to weaken you
but to strengthen you.

1496
02:20:26,126 --> 02:20:29,087
Many of them believe
they survived by accident

1497
02:20:29,087 --> 02:20:32,549
but the question is...what do
you do with your accident?

1498
02:20:33,008 --> 02:20:35,636
And they have decided to bear witness,

1499
02:20:35,636 --> 02:20:36,803
to tell their story.

1500
02:20:37,638 --> 02:20:42,100
That is a particular story that
happened to a particular people.

1501
02:20:42,100 --> 02:20:46,146
But has the universal
characteristics of saying,

1502
02:20:46,146 --> 02:20:50,734
we must now work
to enhance human dignity,

1503
02:20:50,734 --> 02:20:57,449
to enlarge human decency, to
teach people of the importance
of human equality

1504
02:20:57,449 --> 02:21:01,578
and the majesty and sacredness
of each individual human life?

1505
02:21:01,578 --> 02:21:06,166
It’s a plea, a plea set
on the ashes of millions.

1506
02:21:08,001 --> 02:21:09,920
Dear Mother,

1507
02:21:10,629 --> 02:21:15,717
This letter I’m writing to you
will be placed in a museum.

1508
02:21:15,717 --> 02:21:21,515
I was under the impression that
only fine art finds its way to museums.

1509
02:21:21,515 --> 02:21:25,769
However, this is a
special kind of museum.

1510
02:21:25,769 --> 02:21:30,816
You and six million like
you created this museum.

1511
02:21:30,816 --> 02:21:36,029
As for time, Mother dear,

1512
02:21:36,029 --> 02:21:41,535
time did not work
the magic of healing.

1513
02:21:41,535 --> 02:21:45,247
In each phase of my life,

1514
02:21:45,247 --> 02:21:51,962
my pain was emphasized as
was the realization of motherhood.

1515
02:21:51,962 --> 02:22:03,223
And let our suffering cause
absolve all the generations to come,

1516
02:22:03,223 --> 02:22:11,231
and may they know the inner
peace which was never mine.

1517
02:22:15,444 --> 02:22:22,451
♪ [Emotive choir music] ♪