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[Bill Basch] There is one thing that has puzzled me, and has puzzled the world…
that the Germans dedicated manpower
and trains and trucks and energy
towards the destruction of the Jews to the last day.
Had they stopped six months before the end of the war and dedicated that energy
towards strengthening themselves,
they may have carried on the war a little longer.
But it was more important to them to kill the Jews
than even winning the war.
[somber music playing]
[vocalizing]
[trotting]
[somber music playing]
[Irene Zisblatt] I grew up in a town called Polyana,
in the Carpathian mountains.
It was a small town of two main streets.
This leads all the way up to… There is a church over there…
We had a post office and a town hall and a church and a synagogue.
Everybody knew each other.
It was beautiful.
[Renee Firestone] I lived in a town called Uzhhorod.
It was a small town,
yet it had the feel of a big, cosmopolitan town.
Right here was a little deli, right around… right here, and, uh…
[clicks tongue]
My… We used to come here to have our sandwiches for the afternoon.
[Alice Lok Cahana] We lived in a town called Sárvár.
It's in Hungary, close to the, um, Austrian border.
Every day, the peasants would bring their wares from the neighboring villages
in big baskets, and they would carry it on their head or on their shoulders.
Szaszovo was a very small, little community
consisting of 3,000 people.
No electricity, no utilities at all.
So it was… I lead a very simplistic, boring life. Nothing exciting.
But then Budapest, where I ended up, was an entirely different life.
It was an enormous adjustment.
And I looked at this city just going, "Whoa!"
I mean, it was like… I've never believed anything like this exists!
[Tom Lantos] Budapest was a magnificent, world-class city,
on par with Vienna or Paris or London as a great European capital.
This magnificent Parliament building
saw the best and the worst in Hungarian history.
The bulk of the Jews in Budapest
were utterly assimilated, deeply patriotic,
and enormously proud of their Hungarian cultural heritage.
There were about 800 Jewish families in our town.
And I think the town was 10,000 or 11,000 non-Jews.
I had non-Jewish friends. I dated non-Jewish boys.
My parents had non-Jewish friends.
We also felt quite Hungarian at the same time.
Not just Jewish.
So, Judaism was our religion,
but we were Hungarians.
[reporter 1] On August 2nd, 1934,
officers and men swear the oath of allegiance
not to Germany, but to Hitler personally.
[reporter 2] As Hitler's rule over Germany became absolute,
to his alarmed neighbor Austria,
Hitler promised to keep hands off.
[Tom Lantos] In 1938, when I was 10 years old,
I bought my first newspaper.
And I saw the headlines,
"Hitler marches into Austria."
And I sensed that this historic moment
will have a tremendous impact on the lives of Hungarian Jews, my family, and myself.
[bombing]
[reporter 3] Germany invades Poland and Danzig.
Warsaw is bombed, blasted and shelled.
Poland is in ruins.
[dramatic music playing]
[Renee Firestone] There were refugees coming to Hungary
running away from Poland,
and most of the Jewish families, Friday night the men went to temple
to bring these people home and give them shelter.
They would come and tell stories.
And I remembered very often…
you didn't believe them.
I heard a conversation between my father and another man.
And he was telling my father what the Nazis are doing in Poland.
And one thing that I'll never forget that I heard…
And he said the Nazis are taking our young Jewish infants,
and they're tearing them in half by their legs,
and they're throwing them in the Dniester, a river in the Ukraine.
Then later, of course,
the stories were getting worse,
and we began to hear about mass shootings and mass graves,
But there was a sort of a naive…
I hate to use the word, but I have to use the word…
patriotic feeling that we Hungarians don't do such things.
Hitler was in Germany, so what happened in Germany didn't reflect on us.
I mean, we were far away from it.
[chanting]
[sinister music playing]
[Randolph Braham] There were two wars.
There was a military war,
and hand-in-hand with that war.
There was a second war,
the war of the SS directed against the Jews.
[sirens wailing]
[melancholy music playing]
[firing]
The dark side of the Hungarian national character
was becoming more and more obvious.
The persecution of Jews became more and more obvious.
Jews were losing their jobs, their businesses.
There was a Hungarian Nazi movement, the Arrow Cross,
and this became, of course,
the most hated and the most feared group for Hungarian Jews.
[Renee Firestone] People wonder, "How is it that we didn't do something?"
We didn't run away. We didn't hide.
Well, things didn't happen at once.
Things happened very slowly,
so each time a new law came out, or a restriction,
we said, "Well, just another thing. It'll blow over."
[crowd cheering]
[Tom Lantos] Hitler moved into Hungary on the 19th of March, 1944.
I was 16 years old.
1944, March 19th.
Germans entered, the SS entered, our town.
Two motorcycles was the whole Nazi regime that occupied our town
because they were there with the people that lived there the whole time
and did their dirty.
Most of them were people we thought were our friends all these years,
but they turned overnight on us
and went with the other side.
And the next restriction was
that the Jew cannot walk out on the street without the yellow star.
We heard that in Germany they to wear the yellow star
before they were taken away,
and in Poland, they did that.
So at that point we were worried.
[Tom Lantos] I did not wear a yellow star
and I was caught.
I was put into a forced-labor camp
in a place north of Budapest,
which had an important railroad bridge.
And our job was to repair the railroads,
the lines, the bridges, non-stop,
while the British and the Americans were bombing day and night.
We were obviously worried that we would die.
But we were also hoping
that the American and British bombers will hit all of their targets
and destroy this bridge
because that was the way to defeat Hitler.
I escaped from that labor camp,
and I joined the Hungarian underground.
And the next decree would be that we have to pack up 25 kilos.
And at first, we didn't understand. What do you take?
Think about your home, your own home.
What would you take, 25 kilos?
What is 25 kilos?
How much is 25 kilos?
Do you take the pillows? Your covers?
Do you take your dishes? Do you take…
What do you take?
When we were packing,
um…
I wanted to take something that would remind me of the good times.
I was very depressed and worried.
And so I came across a bathing suit.
A bathing suit that my father brought me.
[smacks lips]
I don't want to do this.
[sniffles]
Uh…
On one of his business trips, about three years earlier,
my father came home.
And, um… he always brought us something,
my sister and myself.
And, uh…
of course, we always asked, "What did you bring?"
And he opened this box,
and out of the box came this most beautiful bathing suit.
It had a shiny satin finish
and a print of multicolored flowers.
And then in the afternoon, when I heard the soldiers' boots coming up the stairs,
I ran back, and I put this bathing suit under my dress.
And that's how I left.
They broke down the front doors. They came in. They gave us a few minutes.
They said a half hour, but it was not a half hour,
to get it all our valuables together,
and they… They marched us out of the house.
I couldn't imagine that they just take out people from their homes…
because they're Jewish.
Our friends, so-called, and neighbors,
they were standing lined up alongside of the road,
and they were yelling,
"It's about time, you go on out of here. And we don't need any Jews in our town."
"We need to get rid of all you Jews."
I stood, and I could not believe my eyes.
[hesitates] The people I went to school with their children. We were friends.
We were sharing things together.
Why are they so hostile? Why do they hate us all of a sudden?
It's like when you read that the Jews went out of Egypt.
We are carrying all our baggage.
The pillows and the covers are tied to them, bundled.
And we children helped to carry. And I'm so ashamed.
[Renee Firestone] We wanted to believe they're gonna take us to Germany.
And we're gonna work. We really wanted to believe it.
And by then, the whole European Jewry was already in camps,
which we didn't know.
The concentration, ghettoization and deportation
took place in a concentrated manner that is within 12 weeks.
And nowhere else was the deportation program carried out
with the barbarity and speed that it was in Hungary.
They say that they will take us to a ghetto,
and we'd never heard that word.
It is not a Hungarian word, "ghetto."
[Renee Firestone] We had no idea where we were.
In the morning, when we woke up,
I realized that we are in a brickyard.
Brick factory yard.
And in April, it was rainy. It was a lot of rain.
And we were always…
We had to change the sheet because the roof was the sheet,
and we were always wet.
There were thousands of people there because they came from the whole county.
And there were guards everywhere, with dogs,
walking around all the time, big German Shepherd dogs,
on very, very tight leashes.
…because this was all these huts, with people, people all over the place.
[Robin] Do you know where your hut was?
[Irene Zisblatt] Yes. My hut was right here, where these piles of bricks are.
[sniffles] And then one day they announced
that everybody that wants to go to work to Tokay
on the vineyard to make wine should come here,
and everybody voluntary, gladly went on the train
because this was hell.
And going to work in a vineyard was like going to heaven from this.
We were taken to the railroad station by the Hungarian soldiers.
My mother said to me,
"I rolled up diamonds in your skirt, in the hem of your skirt."
"And if you don't have enough to eat, those are to buy bread."
When we arrived at the railroad station,
we realized that we're not going on passenger trains.
The cattle cars were waiting for us.
[Irene Zisblatt] My father said, "They ran out of other trains because it's wartime."
"They don't have the other train. So, they have to use what they have."
[Alice Lok Cahana] Anybody who didn't go and didn't go fast was beaten.
When they closed the doors, then I heard that knock on the outside
like a bolt closing us in there.
It wasn't normal anymore. It wasn't…
I didn't accept that they were running out of the other trains.
[Bill Basch] In Budapest, this time started getting worse.
I really had to acquire Gentile papers.
I did not exist as a Jew.
I would have been shot. I would have been killed.
You were a hunted animal, 24 hours, every day,
and you didn't know if anybody you encountered
was really on your side.
Had it not been for Wallenberg,
neither I nor the other tens of thousands would have ever survived.
Raoul Wallenberg arrived when all of Hungary,
with the exception of Budapest, was already free of Jews.
He went to Budapest at a time when, in the countryside,
the Jews had already been put into cattle cars
and shipped away from Hungary.
And he decided to join the Swedish embassy there
for the sole purpose of trying to save Jewish lives.
By issuing so-called Swedish protective passports,
he declared that the individual who had this document
at the end of the war planned to go to Sweden.
This was pure fiction, but in the chaos and the confusion of the war,
this miraculous, worthless piece of paper worked.
[Bill Basch] Several of us acted as distributors or runners
to deliver this fake passport
to the people that were waiting in those protected houses.
[Tom Lantos] Wallenberg leased large apartment houses,
put up a Swedish sign indicating that all the residents
were under the protection of the royal Swedish government.
I stayed at St. Stephen Park, number 25.
[speaking foreign language]
Most of these houses were upper-middle-class apartment houses,
and a three-bedroom apartment,
that may have had four, five, six people living there before this crisis,
suddenly became a hovel
with 60, 70 people jammed into a three-bedroom apartment.
[girl 1] Very uncomfortable.
It was very uncomfortable, honey,
but more importantly, it was unbelievably dangerous.
The word "protected house" obviously is a misnomer,
uh, because many of the people living in these quote-unquote "protected houses"
were rounded up, taken to the bank of the Danube, and killed.
[somber music playing]
Now, to get into the protected houses was not difficult.
Soldiers didn't care.
They were out in the front. "Go in there."
However, to come out
that was the very, very difficult thing.
If German soldiers or Hungarian Nazi soldiers were suspicious,
they ordered us to take down our pants
because we were the only people who were circumcised.
One day, I had on my body, strapped around, the fake passports,
which I was delivering to these people so they could get out of the building,
and I miscalculated.
I went through the sewer line, and I knew when to get out.
And I made a mistake,
instead of coming out in the middle of the building,
I came out in front of the building,
where two soldiers were guarding the building.
I started running as fast as I could,
crossing the street back and forth.
And they were deporting a group of Jews,
not knowing where they're taking them,
I jumped into that group of Jews thinking,
"As I got in so many times into trouble, I'll get out one more time."
"Just one more escape."
We would up five days later in Buchenwald.
[Irene Zisblatt] We were on the train for about five days.
Sitting on a heap of luggage that we carried there.
The cattle car that I was in, there was about 120 of us.
Mashed together like sardines, and it's very, very hot.
They had one pail, you know, for going to the bathroom.
And suddenly the buckets filled up, and then the odor was unbearable.
They never opened the doors to go to the bathroom.
They never gave us any water. They never gave us any food.
The children were screaming. They wanted to go home.
"Where are they taking us? Where are they taking us?"
Nobody answered.
It was total darkness.
The light seeped only through the cracks of the cattle car.
[Irene Zisblatt] My father found a crack in the cattle train.
He looked out, and he spoke out loud,
"I don't think we're going to the vineyard
because we just crossed the border, and we're heading towards Poland."
When he said Poland,
I remembered the man telling the story about the children,
what they're doing to the children in Poland.
And I was holding my little brother. He was two-and-a-half years old.
I was holding him so tight.
And I said to him, I said to myself,
"I will never let him go. They will never take him from me."
When they opened the door suddenly…
and suddenly the light hit you.
And because you had your eyes for four, five days shut,
or used to this darkness,
you're almost blinded.
We were so happy because we were going to get air.
We were gonna get off, go to the bathroom like normal people,
and have water and maybe some food.
And everybody would ask, "Where are we? What's the name?"
And it was very strange name.
Auschwitz.
[somber music playing]
[Alice Lok Cahana] Here, we had to be stopped.
Here was… A lot of selection happened.
-You're all standing in a line-- -Thousands of people,
close to each other,
and confusion and noise.
And then… Don't move, and don't… [snaps fingers]
Like soldiers standing straight, you see?
And in the middle would the SS go here,
to check all of us.
Walking the dogs and just threatening.
-Single file, or people standing next to… -Five.
[Michael] Five in a row.
[Alice Lok Cahana] So it was easy to count, right.
[Renee Firestone] When I jumped off the cattle car,
I knew right away that whatever they promised us,
whatever they told us, were lies.
And you see a lot of people running in striped clothes and shaved heads.
Surrounded by Nazi soldiers and vicious dogs.
And they were yelling, and they were screaming.
"Hurry up! Leave all your luggage there. Just leave everything."
All of a sudden, there was a separation,
and my mother and my…
[sighs]
my mother and… [exhales]
and my brother and my sister…
She held my little brother in her arms, in one arm,
and my four-and-a-half-year-old sister in her hand. I was holding onto her hand.
This is how we were walking towards…
They were pushing us towards that destination.
[clock ticking]
[in German] When the transports came in,
the people were sorted.
It was a very basic process, a very simple one.
The people had to stand in a long line.
At the front of the line were some medical officers who would say,
"This one’s too old, over 50."
"This one goes to the right. The other goes left."
[Renee Firestone] My mother was selected at the railroad station,
going to the left while my sister and I went to the right.
My mother was taken
straight from the railroad station to the gas chambers.
By the time my sister and I were processed into the camp,
my mother was no longer alive.
[sinister music playing]
[Renee Firestone] We were taken to a dressing room.
We were told we're gonna be taking a shower after this…
after this horrendous journey,
and we are going to refresh ourselves,
and then we will be assigned to our work.
[Irene Zisblatt] They ordered us to take our shoes in one hand
and our clothes in the other.
And I remembered the diamonds.
And I grabbed my blue skirt, and in the crowd, you know,
I just fast took out the diamonds and held them in my hands,
and I had no clothes on my body.
And I remember I got undressed with the rest of them,
and there I was in the bathing suit, standing in the bathing suit.
[smacks lips]
I had a premonition.
I had this feeling that if I take this bathing suit off,
if I leave this bathing suit behind,
all the wonderful memories that were built in this bathing suit…
I kept remembering how I walked around the swimming pool,
and how the boys were whistling at me, and my friends were so jealous.
And now I'm going to take it off, and I'm going to leave it here.
Everything that meant anything in life to me, I'm going to leave behind.
[Irene] They kept on saying
if anybody has any valuables left, to leave them.
They had a section for that. [sniffles]
I held onto the diamonds for dear life because that was to buy bread.
So I put them in my mouth.
And then when I walked up again,
I saw they were opening people's mouths, and they were looking in,
but I was in the… I was, like, at the at the road of no return.
I couldn't give 'em up any more because I would be shot.
Why didn't I leave 'em back there?
And I had them in my mouth,
and I didn't know what to do, so I swallowed them.
We walked into the shower room,
and the dressing room was locked behind us,
and a commando came in and removed all our belongings right away.
They did give us a shower, a little, trinkly shower, and then they…
Again, there was a door on the other side
leading out to the courtyard on the other side of this building.
And at the door, they had a pile of clothes.
And they ordered everybody to pick one piece of clothing.
We waited till about midnight,
then they permitted us to walk into one of these wooden barracks.
[Alice Lok Cahana] A thousand people in a barrack.
If one person turned, everybody had to turn
because we were so close to each other.
I used to wake up so cold,
and I…
used to have returning dreams
that I'm at home,
that I'm very cold,
but my father will come and comfort me, so…
And then, you wake up.
From a whistle.
It's dark outside.
And this is a madman's hell.
[vocalizing]
[Renee Firestone] We saw this group of about 20 men coming through the camp,
and as they were marching by, I was watching.
Maybe I know somebody.
And suddenly, I recognize my father.
And my first thought was to hide.
It was terribly painful seeing him
with his shaved head and his uniform, like a prisoner.
This man who was helping everybody,
who was the kindest human being.
I just couldn't imagine how would he feel if he saw us
with the shaved heads and this rag.
So I really just wanted to hide so he can't see me.
And at that moment, our eyes locked.
[sniffles]
And I could see his tears rolling down his cheek.
[smacks tongue]
[sniffles]
That was the last time I saw my father.
[sad music playing]
[Irene Zisblatt] I saw trucks coming
and screams in the trucks.
And I saw two children fall out of the truck.
[sniffles]
[Irene] And the truck stopped,
[sobs]
[Irene Zisblatt] And the trucks [hesitates]…
And one SS man came out from the front,
and he picked up the children… [sniffs] …like that.
And he banged him against the truck,
and the blood came running down, and threw him into the truck, so…
[sniffles]
That's when I stopped talking to God.
They told us that we're gonna get a number.
Prisoner's number.
Well, of course, we expected to get a prisoner's number
on our clothing or somewhere.
And they set up these tables.
And at each table sat a few guards
with huge books open in front of them.
And we presumed that they are going to put our name in it,
and the number that they're going to give us.
And then we realized that they are putting this number
on our flesh,
on our arms.
[melancholy music playing]
They took five of us and put drops in our eyes.
We didn't know why. They didn't tell us. And they put us in the dungeon.
They closed us in there,
and we were standing in water up to our ankles, tightly packed,
and it seemed like forever.
It seemed like it was an eternity. They never opened the door.
They never gave us anything to eat or drink.
So, we drank the water we stood in.
We went to the bathroom in the water we stood in.
And then they opened the door, and they took us out.
And they brought us up into the courtyard,
and they examined our eyes.
And some of the people couldn't see for several days after that.
And they took us back to the barrack.
And then we found out later what they were doing.
They were trying to change the color of our eyes.
[in German] For those who wanted to conduct experiments on humans,
this was a useful workplace.
Many experiments were done in Auschwitz to find ways to sterilize women,
specifically Jewish women, in order to diminish the race
without going through too much trouble.
These women were then sent back to the camp.
Sometimes they were immediately transferred
because they were so-called "secret bearers."
They performed tests, then sent them back to Birkenau and gassed them.
One day, a prisoner acquaintance came to me and asked me
if I could try to gain some influence…
if anything could be done, not to send them to the gas chamber.
The only way to do that was to make them undergo more tests.
To save them, we had to keep conducting harmless tests on them.
This is what we planned to do, and somehow it worked.
And that is why I was acquitted…
in Auschwitz.
[Randolph] Having survived the first four and a half years of the war,
the Hungarian Jews were killed in the last chapter
of Hitler's war against the Jews when the leaders of the world
were already fully aware of all the details of Auschwitz.
When we came to Auschwitz,
it was during the Final Solution,
when he just was desperate already.
He was losing the war. Hitler was losing the war,
but he was not going to lose the war against the Jews.
The sadism, the cruelty,
the irrationality of the German and Hungarian Nazis,
of killing the remaining Jewish population when the war was all over,
when they could have gained brownie points
by being more civilized vis-à-vis these people,
was really not present because their hatred was so blind.
[Randolph Braham] The Nazis diverted trains and other transportation means
useful to the Germans
for purposes of deporting Jews,
to complete the Final Solution program.
While I was in Auschwitz,
the transports were coming in two, three transports a day,
with thousands of people in it.
[Randolph Braham] Within less than six weeks,
more than 438,000 Hungarian Jews
were deported to Auschwitz.
The gas chambers, the crematoria, could not cope.
The SS had to dig special pits
to burn the bodies,
using the Jews' own fat as fuel.
I saw how they were throwing people into these fire pits.
And I said to myself, "Something is wrong with me. My mind is going."
I couldn't be seeing this.
[in German] The mass graves were
about eight by ten or ten by ten meters wide.
Wood was piled on the bottom and set on fire.
Then the bodies were thrown over the fire. That was it.
If the fat burned, then the grave was working.
Then more and more bodies were thrown into it.
That simple.
[somber music playing]
[Alice Lok Cahana] What vast landscape you are seeing here.
How could people, normal people, go back
after working here,
or planned this, okay?
Somebody had to plan it.
Somebody had to be an engineer.
Somebody had to really put on a map, this kind of efficiency.
But the whole time I was in the camp, through the experiment,
every time I was selected, I swallowed the diamonds.
So, every time I swallowed them, I had to find them again.
We were allowed to go to the latrine once a day,
and I never sat on the hole because I had to go and find my diamonds.
And when the SS woman walked by the door, and she saw me in the corner…
I already had the diamonds in hand. Usually I was waiting until…
On the way back, I would rinse them off, like in the mud,
or if there was no mud,
in the soup that we were going to get next,
but I had no time, and I had to swallow them.
My God, this is the latrine.
Oh my God.
At this place, I was with my sister,
with Edith next to me.
And so Edith whispers to me and says,
"It's almost Shabbat. It's Friday. It's almost Shabbat."
How we used to celebrate Shabbat in our house,
with food and with singing and with praying
and, you know, lighting the candle.
And I told her, "Why don't we celebrate inside, in the latrine?"
We ran back to the end, and we started to make our Shabbat ceremony,
and we started to sing.
[speaking Hebrew]
And as we sang the melody,
other children came around us and started to sing with us.
Somebody was from Holland. Somebody was from Germany.
Somebody was from Hungary, Czechoslovakia. All thrown together.
And suddenly, the Hebrew songs, the prayers, the Shabbat,
united us in the latrine of Auschwitz.
[Irene Zisblatt] People couldn't endure all this pain,
the conditions and the hunger and the lice.
The lice were, like, as big as my pinky nail,
embedded into our bodies.
And we were sore from scratching and infections.
And so, when the electricity went on,
they ran to the barbed wire to commit suicide.
Then they punished us. For every man that ran to the wire,
they took 100 inmates,
and they killed them in front of everybody as an example.
They didn't even let us die when we wanted.
And then I thought of something.
They took away my parents.
They took away my identity.
They took away my siblings.
They took away my possessions.
There is something that they want from me.
And then I thought of my soul.
And I said, "They're not gonna take my soul."
And I decided right then and there,
"I'm going to get up from this mud, and I'm going to fight
because I'm not going to become ashes."
[somber music playing]
[Renee Firestone] When we arrived to Auschwitz,
thousands and thousands of people were cremated every day.
The Nazis used Jewish inmates,
a special Sonderkommando,
to remove the bodies from the gas chambers
and take the bodies into the crematoria.
As far as I know, there is only four of us
that worked in the Sonderkommando alive today.
And we are the only eyewitness
that saw the whole thing from A to Z.
How the Final Solution was done.
I'm Jewish, from Greece.
And I lived in Greece until the time they took me to concentration camp.
The first week of April 1944,
I arrived in Auschwitz.
They selected some of the Greeks to go to work in crematorium.
Now is my first day there.
I don't know what was going on.
I saw 2,500 people, all naked,
go into the big chamber, which eventually…
They take only 500 people. They were putting in 2,500 people.
So nobody could do anything but stand by their children.
And 15 minutes later, you know, after they close the chambers,
and the SS threw the gas from these four openings,
you know, they open up.
What did I see? I see the people I saw 15 minutes ago.
I see them all dead, standing up, with their children black and blue.
And I said to myself, "What's going on? What's going on here?"
There was a Polish guy that was there before,
and I said, "Where is God?"
He said, "God, God is where you have your strength."
There were four crematoriums, you know, and they were working 24 hours.
And there were a lot of big shots from Berlin
coming and watching how the Jews were dying.
You know, there was a hole, in the, you know, hermetically closed,
and they were looking there how the Jewish people were dying.
Takes two to four minutes. Depends where you are.
A lot of people think that we, working in the Sonderkommando,
we were guilty of something because we were doing such kind of work.
But ourselves, you know, we couldn't get out of it.
If you don't do whatever they ask you to do, they kill you right away.
One time I had two friends of mine, very close friends of mine.
They came in, you know. Their names were the Venezias.
And… [clear throat] …I told them right away
that they were going to die.
And they asked for food, and whatever I had, I gave them to eat,
and I told them exactly where to keep themselves,
where the openings were, so they can die fast.
And after they were through, I took them out, and I washed them,
and I put them in the oven to be burned.
[melancholy music playing]
[Tom Lantos] We could hear the artillery moving closer and closer.
And Budapest was the battlefield
between the Germans and the Soviet Army.
And although we knew it would be weeks
before the Soviet Army would hopefully liberate the remaining Jews,
we knew that lots of hardships were still ahead.
[Alice Lok Cahana] In Auschwitz, after Christmas,
we heard more and more the bombing came closer and closer.
The Nazis didn't want anybody to get liberated,
so they were herding the people away from the camp.
[Randolph Braham] The death march was in winter.
Those who could not keep pace were simply shot by the wayside.
[wind howling]
If anybody, anybody tries to run away
or do anything that is not permitted, will be shot on the spot.
There were three of us friends that were together up to that point.
But we swore that we would sacrifice each other's life for each other.
We would never let each other down.
Kids. You know, we had this sort of a dream that will be possible.
One of the three had an injury in his knee and had gangrene,
and one of the soldiers noticed him limping.
So, he comes up, and he wants to shoot him.
We step in front of him. He pulls out his Luger and says,
"I'll give you till three seconds. Count to three."
"Either you let him go, or all the three of you die."
Can you imagine, even so young, the decision that we had to make?
Here, we promised that we will die for each other,
but we couldn't keep that promise under threat of death.
We did let him die.
We arrived… About ten days' march or so, we arrived into Dachau.
[squeaking]
[Bill Basch] Oh my God.
After 53 years…
it's as if it were yesterday.
You could find them here on the street, just laying,
and you didn't pay attention. You stepped over bodies.
You didn't pay any attention. It didn't mean anything.
-[Martin] Right here? -Yeah.
I never knew anybody's name.
Never wanted to know anybody.
I never wanted to know, just in case someday
someone will know this person
whose shoes I have taken off when he died.
If you can imagine that every morning, my job was for a while…
I had to go barrack to barrack to barrack
and take those bodies and bring them to the crematorium.
We had one of those push cars.
I remember the Sonderkommandos that worked in the crematorium
came out, and they opened the gate.
They took it over from here and walked it in,
but we were never allowed to cross this.
They never talked about the crematorium, but we knew.
If we walked in here, we never got out.
You never got out from here, from this area.
Because, I mean, if they let him out, and he escapes,
they have witness, they have testimony. So they wouldn't let them out.
[clicks tongue]
[sighs]
Look at that.
The inhumanity of man against man…
is beyond belief.
This is…
the most monstrous thing that man devised.
Burning human beings just, just to get rid of them quicker.
Unbelievable.
[sobbing]
[crying]
Just so emotional. It's so hard.
[sniffs]
Now, why did I survive?
Why did God spare me?
Somebody started to yell, "Americans! Americans!"
And we didn't know what they mean by Americans.
And they were pointing up to the sky.
Planes came out from behind the mountains, from nowhere,
and they just bombed the convoy.
And they they didn't touch us. None of us got hurt.
That's when I found out the first time that the United States was at war.
It was April 29th when I was ordered to go to Dachau.
Actually, the night of the 28th.
And we were ordered to take off as fast as possible to get to Dachau,
not knowing what we were facing.
We thought it was a military camp,
a German military camp that we were going in to take,
and therefore we were gonna capture it and capture the people inside.
We were in the vicinity
of what we found out to be concentration camps.
[Bill Basch] Suddenly, we hear machine guns shooting up.
First thought was that we are being killed.
Then we saw American soldiers climbing, crawling and shooting.
Then we saw German soldiers coming from that direction.
And as they met up here in the center, that Germans gave up.
But visualize 32,000 people coming out of all those barracks.
Outside the camp…
on the railroad tracks was…
40 boxcars, I believe was the count.
Absolutely full of dead bodies.
And not having had any knowledge of what we were facing,
this was…
totally unreal.
Most of them wearing flannel pajamas. That's all what they had.
Blue stripe, white stripe.
Flannel pajamas.
People were weak.
Weak probably isn't even the right term.
But they were emaciated.
Uh…
Some looked very old, but they weren't.
[Katsugo Miho] They were walking dead, is what we called them. Skeletons.
[Paul Parks] A few came out first,
then more came out, and more came out,
and they kept coming toward us
because it was almost as if they realized…
I guess they did. They realized that we were different.
That we were people coming to help them.
And Americans held the gun against the Germans,
but they didn't kill them. They let us have them.
And taking a dozen or so German soldiers that we caught,
literally tore them apart, piece by piece.
We captured a German colonel.
And I went back and told him
that we're going to send you back to the officers to talk to you.
And he spit in my face.
Then I killed him.
It wasn't long before the war was over after that.
But by those last days,
we intended to stop Germany from ever having the opportunity
to stand up again and do this to anybody.
I've seen many a horrible sight
in that two years of… In Italy, France and Germany,
but the worst thing I've ever seen in my life
were the survivors of the Holocaust.
This is something which is…
uh…
To this day, I cannot forget.
[sighs]
I wasn't young anymore.
I was very old.
I was 16, but I was very old.
Returning to freedom was very difficult.
We didn't know how we're going to make peace with the outside world,
which didn't want us.
And we didn't know…
who we're going to find or not find.
They didn't know what to do with us. And they put us in a DP camp,
which is a displaced persons camp.
And the closest one from where I was, was in Austria.
And all the survivors that had no other place to go were in that camp.
So it was another camp, but it was free.
After the Soviet Army liberated Budapest,
and I became a free human being again,
I did not know for months
whether my mother or other members of my family would ever return.
[Renee Firestone] I was hoping that going back to Auschwitz
is finally going to give me some closure.
And, uh, I was shocked to find out
that it opened up new questions and new doubts.
I would like to find out about my family.
[in Polish] She'd like to look for information about her and her family.
[speaking Polish]
Your name, please?
Renee. R-e-n-e-e.
[speaking Polish]
[Renee Firestone] This is the first time that I decided…
to find some records of my family.
And my sister was Klara.
[door closes]
[translator in Polish] You found something?
Yes, I found something. We can look together.
[sighs]
Give me some.
[speaking indistinctly]
[in Polish] Please lay the cards down like this.
[speaking indistinctly]
-Klara. -Klara. My sister.
Yeah.
I found records of my sister, my father, and my own,
and when I asked about my mother…
uh, the archivist, the historian, told me
that those who were taken from the railroad station
and killed immediately,
there is no record of those.
[in Polish] Take this upstairs to the archive and ring the bell, okay?
[speaking indistinctly]
[in Polish] Thank you.
This is a test of blood or, uh, or something medical.
Subject of Klara Weinfeld.
I found out that my sister was experimented on,
that they were doing some blood tests on her.
And what does this here all mean?
And he said, "I really don't know."
He says, "Nobody ever asked me."
But there is a Dr. Münch, who was the head of this clinic,
who's still alive."
And then I found out that you're going to interview this man,
and that I may have a chance to ask him what those symbols meant.
[in German] My sister Klara died in Auschwitz…
Yeah.
And I recently obtained these papers from Auschwitz.
Yeah.
-I would like you to explain these papers. -I will try.
Uh…
Can you tell me what this is?
[Hans Münch in English] No, nothing important, no.
What kind of experiments were these?
[in German] It's nothing. Everything is good.
-Why did she die? -"Clinical Institute."
-That's my institute. -Yeah.
-[Hans Münch] She did die. -[Renee] Yeah.
When did she arrive? How long did she stay?
[in English] Six months.
-Six months. -Six months? Yeah, six months.
-[in German] And then she died. -Yeah.
Well, that is the normal period. Do you understand?
You were in Auschwitz as well? Well then, you should know.
[Renee Firestone in English] I tried to be civilized,
but he was very evasive,
and I became very angry.
I kept thinking that thousands and thousands of people died in his clinic.
I am going to go back to Crematorium V
because I know that my mother was taken there for sure.
I'm going to light some candles.
And I know that I am not coming back here anymore.
[sniffles]
And now…
just very recently,
I got a new letter from Bergen-Belsen
that they don't have Edith Lok. They looked through their books.
But they found an Edith Schwarz.
And I remembered at one point,
my sister Edith decided
that she will use my mother's name, but I forgot it.
And all these years, I looked for Edith Lok.
-Can you find me, though, with Hungarian-- -Hungarian?
Let's just find it. Okay.
-It's not alphabetized. -Yeah?
[speaking indistinctly]
[sighs]
[soft music playing]
[Alice Lok Cahana] Going back to Bergen-Belsen,
I want my husband to say a prayer with my children and with me
because we will symbolically bury Edith.
This is the cemetery where all the people were buried
who were brought after liberation to the military blocks.
We found the name of your sister.
She died here.
We think at the 2nd of June, 1945.
So, all the people who died in those days were buried here, one beside the next one.
[Alice Lok Cahana] Today is the most special day of my life.
Finally, the search is over.
And we now know what happened, and when it happened.
I brought here my mother's prayer book,
and here we will say for you
the prayers that's traditional
and light this candle in your memory.
And remember… [clears throat]… you…
forever…
as long as we live.
[sniffles]
[praying in Hebrew]
[Alice Lok Cahana] But there are a lot of people like me out there,
who are still looking.
Because for us…
liberation was not the last day.
[dramatic music playing]
[Tom Lantos] I got an announcement that I'd been selected
to receive an academic scholarship
to the University of Washington, in a town called "Seattle,"
because nobody told me it's supposed to be pronounced "Seattle."
I had a ticket on the SS Marine Falcon.
I went to bunk B-20, put down my knapsack, and they called for chow.
I had no idea what chow was. It wasn't part of my English vocabulary.
So, I got into the chow line.
We had these huge metal trays, and this was a period
when, of course, my mental preoccupation was still with hunger.
And these wonderful people slopped on wonderful things on this metal tray.
And at the end of the line,
there was a huge wicker basket of oranges.
A huge wicker basket of bananas.
My mother always taught me to do the right thing.
And I didn't know what right was. So there was another huge sailor,
and I asked him, "Sir, do I take a banana?"
"Or do I take an orange?"
And he said, "You eat all the damn bananas and all the damn oranges you want."
And then I knew I was in heaven.
[Irene Zisblatt] I loved my town, and I see it picturesque and happy.
I'm planning to go there for the first time since I left in 1944.
Look at the sign, Robin. It says "Polyana" in Russian.
You see?
The river is running on the right.
We used to go bathing here…
I'm hoping that I can find some of the people that I knew
before the Holocaust…
and maybe that I can talk to them.
-Mushrooms in the jar. See? -Yes.
[speaking Hungarian]
[Irene in English] Maybe they can tell me things that happened while we were away.
[speaking Hungarian]
[crying]
[Irene] This one woman, Mariska, she remembered my grandparents
and my father and my mother and me.
I was most surprised that she remembered me.
I was really afraid that the people were going to be hostile to me,
that they were going to be accusing me of coming back to take something from them.
I was asked in a very nice way,
"Am I planning to take my property and come back to live there?"
And I said no.
I just want my children to know where I come from,
and I wanted to see my town where I grew up once more before I die.
[speaking indistinctly]
[Renee Firestone] Going back to my hometown
with my family, with my child,
showing her this beautiful town, which…
Everywhere we went, the word "Jew" doesn't exist.
This building was the Jewish community center.
I wanted to go to the Jewish temple, which was a beautiful synagogue.
Look, look, look how they let this…
Oh my God.
What they did to this city, you just have no idea.
It's just unbelievable.
We went to the temple,
and there I met this man, this Jewish man.
He was also in Auschwitz.
[in Hungarian] Hello, do you speak Hungarian?
[Renee] Good morning. Are you from here?
I was born here in 1928.
[Renee] I'm from the Weinfeld family.
Weinfeld?
[Renee] My father had a shop on Cobbler's Lane.
And of course, my mother attended this temple.
I had my Bar Mitzvah here when I turned 13, in 1941.
And why did you stay here?
Because I came back from Auschwitz
on June 6, 1945.
And a few days later, the borders were closed.
[Renee in English] Then he walked us through the temple, and he explained to us
that this is no longer a Jewish temple.
[man in Hungarian] In the old days, there were Stars of David here.
[Renee] What did they do with them?
[man] They made it into a concert hall.
They removed everything.
[Renee Firestone in English] It was very painful to see
that this holy place was transformed into a place of entertainment.
The most difficult part was going back to my house.
Oh my God!
[sobbing]
That's the… the original… That's the original gate.
-The entrance. -The entrance, yeah.
It was neglected.
This beautiful house that my father took care of always.
And everything was manicured around it.
-[Bernard] I think that's locked. -[Renee] No.
No, it isn't.
-It just doesn't open. -[Klara] Can we go?
[Renee] It doesn't open.
At that moment, I really wished I wouldn't have seen it.
[crying]
One of the neighbors
who was a young child at the time they took us away was still there.
[speaking Hungarian]
Thank God that you are still alive.
I'm telling you, I can still remember everything as it used to be.
[Renee in English] He has now a Russian wife
who was very sympathetic.
[in Hungarian] Your own house…
To take someone's house, how could that be?
There would be a lot to tell, but you know what they say…
Even the walls have ears.
[Renee in English] She was scared to tell me what really happened after we left.
[in Hungarian] Tell me, after we were taken, did you talk about it?
We were so sorry for Klara. We heard she died on the way.
No. She died there.
Poor thing.
I have only seen it in the movies.
Did they really burn people like that?
Unfortunately, it was much worse than what they show in the movies.
[Renee in English] At that moment, I felt very lucky,
that I would have a chance to go back to the United States, to my home.
I saved the diamonds all the way, through the whole… everything.
And when I was free, I, uh, didn't talk about the Holocaust,
but I took the diamonds, and I mounted them into a teardrop-shaped pendant,
because every time I had to save them, I had to cry so much.
So, I felt that the tears are appropriate for that.
And I told my children that these diamonds should go down
from generation to generation,
to the first-born girl in the family, until forever.
…what it tastes like. [chuckles]
And you can see their different shapes and different cuts.
And they're the only thing that I…
[inhales]
…that I'm holding that my mother ever held.
[sniffles]
Okay, well. I don't know what you think about…
My life today is something I myself cannot believe.
Having been elected by my constituents in California of some 600,000 people,
nine times,
it all seems like a dream.
And it all places
an incredible sense of responsibility on me…
As the only survivor of the Holocaust
ever elected to the Congress of the United States,
I know I speak for all of my colleagues,
Republicans and Democrats,
in expressing our outrage at the most recent terrorist attacks…
The central focus of my life, obviously, is human rights
because I am convinced that this is really the path
of a more civilized world.
My wife Annette and I have known each other all our lives.
We grew up as children in Budapest.
And we have been married now for 47 years.
We have two daughters
who early on came to us and said
that, uh… they plan a special gift for their parents.
[children shouting]
[Tom] Since our families were wiped out, they will give us a large family.
And we have been blessed with 17 wonderful grandchildren,
and it's really the focus of our life.
[Renee Firestone] I would like to be known as an educator on the Holocaust.
So I go to the Museum of Tolerance,
where I was the founder of the outreach program.
And I speak to groups who come into the Museum.
…came into being.
You know, when these things are happening,
you almost begin to believe that you did something wrong.
Why would they do this to me?
I feel that it is my duty
to make the world aware of what happened during that time.
I always felt that my language is inadequate.
And that if I wanted to tell the story about my experiences,
I have to talk through a medium.
And I found art
because art transcends.
It's beyond words.
I wanted the surface to be very much layered.
It should look like a crumbled wall,
like it's papered over with yesterday's news
because people want to forget the past.
People want to forget about the Holocaust.
What keeps me going is really…
the family…
that my husband and I created.
My grandchildren.
Three wonderful children.
Two of them rabbis.
And my beautiful daughter.
She teaches me every day what is important in life.
And my husband, who is four generations Israeli.
And such a gallant man.
And he helped me to construct a life.
This painting is Arbeit Macht Frei.
When you read this welcome gate,
so to speak, Arbeit macht frei…
My art today is about the Holocaust
because I have no memorial for my people.
I… don't know where they are.
Why so many of my family members died, so many got killed.
The Basch family was almost wiped out.
We have regenerated.
So when we get together, we are quite a large group.
And the joy sitting with my family
and looking around and saying that I was so close to death.
And here I am sitting at a table, and there are 11, 12 of us,
rejoicing life.
The pleasure of living is wonderful.
[cheering]
One day, it was on a Sunday, someone knocked at my door
and walked into…
And I went to the door.
And they had something wrapped up in a newspaper under the arm.
He said, "You Paul Parks?" I said, "Yes."
He said, "We've been looking for you for several years."
"Off-and-on, people have been looking."
"We wanted to find you." I said, "Why?"
He said, "There was a fellow liberated by you guys at Dachau who remembered you."
"And he died several years ago."
"And he'd made a menorah in the camp."
"He made it out of concrete nails
and welded it and braided it together while he was in the camp."
"And he wants you to… He wanted you to have it."
"So we've been looking to give it to you. Here it is."
And he gave me this beautiful menorah.
[somber music playing]
[Irene Zisblatt] Liberation was like a present from the world.
And that's the first time I acknowledged God again,
that He is around, and He helped me to get to this point.
I don't think that God created the Holocaust.
I think that God gave us a mind and a heart and a free will.
And it is up to man…
what he's going to do with his life.
And I blame man, not God.
I cannot rationally explain…
emotionally explain, intellectually explain the Holocaust.
I cannot… I cannot find…
a place for…
a higher authority
in this nightmare.
What kind of people are we?
What are the books teaching us?
What is the difference between me…
and another child?
What is the Bible teaching me?
What… What is this about?
[Randolph Braham] Hitler remained a pathological anti-Semite to the end.
And one of his last testaments,
or warnings to his followers,
was for them to continue the war against the Jews.
In his will executed April 29, 1945,
he says, "Above all,
I enjoin the government and the people
to uphold the race laws to the limit,
and to resist mercilessly
the poisoner of all nations,
international Jewry."
[melancholy music playing]
[Randolph Braham] The Holocaust has to be thought as a chapter
in the long history of man's inhumanity to man.
One cannot ignore
the discrimination
inflicted on many people
because of race, color, or creed.
One cannot ignore slavery.
One cannot ignore the burning of witches.
One cannot ignore the killing of Christians in the Roman period.
The Holocaust perhaps is the culmination
of the kind of horror that can occur
when man loses his integrity,
his belief in the sanctity of human life.
[sniffles]
[sobbing]