Freeman: When I was six years old we moved to chicago,
a little country boy in the big city.
While I was there, you won't believe the things I saw people do:
Theft, vandalism, sometimes worse.
Things were different in small town mississippi,
where everyone knows everyone.
If you were up to no good, you'd never get away with it.
But the anonymity of a densely populated city, like chicago,
seemed to expose a more primal aspect of human nature.
Religions call it sin.
And faiths around the globe have their own prescriptions
for preventing, and punishing, sin.
I wonder, if we put all those ideas together,
could we actually conquer sin?
I'm traveling to the front lines of our battle with sin.
From blood-soaked mass rituals...
So this is where sin went viral?
To a festival that conquers evil.
Jaymin: We light candles everywhere and remove the evil from us.
Freeman: I'll meet an executioner, tortured by guilt...
Jerry: Why do I have to continue to sin over and over and over,
when I know it's wrong?
Freeman: And the hanoi jailer who seems blind to it.
Duyet: John mccain was my friend.
Freeman: I'll learn about purging sin from a corpse...
Dafydd: They would lay this directly on the dead body and then eat it.
Freeman: And ask if the biggest sins...
Tomas: So your grandfather was the one in auschwitz?
Rainer: The master of hell.
Freeman: Can ever be forgiven.
Every year, on good Friday in the philippines,
the people of the town of san pedro reenact
the passion of christ.
They parade a man, portraying jesus, to a small hill, where they nail him to a cross,
using real nails, and crucify him.
But that's not the only aspect of christ's agony they recreate.
Many villagers whip themselves,
just as the bible says roman soldiers whipped jesus.
Sharp pieces of bamboo make sure the whips draw plenty of blood.
What could drive shopkeepers and taxi drivers to take up such a bloody ritual?
The answer lies across the globe in perugia, Italy.
I'm meeting historian, roberto rusconi, at the church of san bevignate.
Inside frescoes from nearly 800 years ago tell the strange story
of how self-flagellation went viral.
Roberto: You see here, they made a representation of the flagellants.
They are scourging themselves naked to the waist.
The monks in the monasteries, they used to make this kind of penance,
to wash away every sin in your soul.
Freeman: But what made them think that flagellation would make them right with god?
Roberto: We have to make expiation for our sins,
and the only way is scourge ourselves,
and be beaten as jesus christ was beaten.
Our souls, as you know, have the original sin and
you have to wash away every part of it in your soul.
Freeman: And you have to wash it with your own blood?
Roberto: Yes. It was more effective than soap.
Freeman: The christian concept of original sin began when
adam and eve ate from the forbidden tree.
Their defiance of god corrupted the entire human race,
making sin something even devout monks must purge through penance.
But the walls of san bevignate reveal something more,
how flagellation spread from the monastery
to the everyday believer.
Roberto: So, in the corner, you see their representation
to be the image of raniero fasani.
Freeman: Raniero fasani.
Roberto: Raniero fasani's a normal person, a lay person.
He had visions when our lady appeared to him.
Freeman: Fasani had taken up the practice of self-flagellation.
Then, in 1260, he had a vision of the virgin mary.
She told him that the common people, like him, needed to purge their sins through a
great public flagellation.
Fasani began urging the perugians to whip themselves.
The holy mother came to him and said,
"listen, this is not just for monks, this is for everybody.
You gotta go back and tell them,
'get out there and start whipping.'"
roberto: Yes. Don't rely on monks, do it yourself.
Freeman: So fasani has his vision.
He comes in and he explains it, and people followed him?
Roberto: So, he was followed by a lot of people in town and countryside,
and they started scourging, as he suggested, and it became a practice for lay people.
It went out from the walls of the churches and it entered the square.
And it happened here in perugia, in the year 1260.
This place was crowded with thousands of people.
Freeman: All flagellating?
Roberto: All flagellating.
Freeman: They're drawing blood?
So, the square would have been covered with blood, right?
Roberto: Yes.
Freeman: As catastrophes like the black death swept across europe,
so did mass flagellations.
Believers thought that bloody penance would bring salvation in this life and the next.
So, we're literally standing in the square where sin went viral?
Roberto: Yes.
Freeman: It just spread out.
Freeman: It seems to me there was a deep human desire to take action against sin,
sometimes by beating ourselves up.
But to the catholic faithful, flagellation was something more than that.
It was a way to share the burdens of jesus,
whom they believed died to wipe away the sins of humanity.
It does what penance is supposed to do,
bring us closer to god.
But what if a sinner doesn't do penance?
Is there another way back to god?
In the misty borderlands of England and wales, there once was a way.
Journalist, sal masekela, has come to the village of ratlinghope,
to learn about the lost tradition of sin-eating.
Dafydd mills daniels is a religious scholar and theologian.
Sal: Hey. Dafydd: Hello.
Sal: How are you? I'm sal.
Dafydd: How are you? Nice to meet you.
Sal: Dafydd? Dafydd: Yes, dafydd. Yeah.
Sal: This is a beautiful country.
Dafydd: Yeah.
And we brought you here because this is the home, or would have been the home,
of the very last sin-eater in England, a man called richard munslow,
who died in 1906.
Freeman: Munslow was a prosperous farmer for much of his life,
but he died performing bizarre rituals with the dead.
Sal: Sin-eating. What exactly does that mean?
Dafydd: Well, sin-eating was a practice prevalent in this area,
England-wales border, about 500 years ago.
It started to die out in the 19th century.
And it was a practice that involved people taking on other people's sins.
Sal: And where does the eating part come in?
Dafydd: Ah, right, it's a good question.
Why don't we go into the barn and get some things, and I'll show you how that worked?
Sal: Alright, cool.
Dafydd: Okay, let's see if this is open.
Yeah, so here we are in munslow's barn.
Sal: Wow!
Dafydd: Why don't you grab hold of...
Sal: These chairs?
Dafydd: Yeah. And I'll take this board.
So why don't you put those chairs out there.
Sal: Okay.
Dafydd: So when you had a sudden death,
and so it hadn't been possible for a priest to come to the house
for the person who died, and they'd sort of be considered to die in a state of sin,
then the family may well have called a sin-eater.
Okay?
Sal: What have you got there?
Dafydd: Well this is some of the paraphernalia of a sin-eater.
And what they used were things like this.
So they would have a wooden plate, a wooden bowl,
some bread, and some salt.
So, you'd have this process, usually outside the house.
The body would be laid out.
They would take out the salt, put it in the plate, put the bread on top of it
and then actually lay this directly on the dead body.
Where a sin-eater would lift it up and eat it.
They also consumed liquid, as well as bread.
So in some places milk, but also beer.
And we'd pour it into the bowl.
And again, the sin-eater would lift it directly from the body.
At the end of the ceremony of sin-eating, the sin-eater would have said,
"I give easement and rest now to thee, come not down the lanes or in our meadows,
and for thy peace I pawn mine own soul."
sal: Mmmmm.
Translation: Ghosts, please don't hang out here.
Dafydd: Exactly, yeah.
Sal: Why would they think then that food, milk, beer
would be a process to absolve someone of their sins?
Dafydd: Yeah.
Here we had this idea of sin being its own entity or substance.
The sin of this other person has been transferred into the food
and then into the sin-eater themselves.
When a soul is weighed down by sin, it's burdened.
It has difficulty in the afterlife, gets caught between heaven and earth,
and can come back as a ghost.
Sal: Mmmm.
What type of person would become a sin-eater?
Dafydd: Well, usually desperately poor.
So, essentially what you have here is people selling the only thing they have of value,
which is their own soul.
This person sells his own soul, but then he stops the community being affected and
disturbed by this dead person's soul coming back.
Freeman: But if sin-eating was an act of desperation for the destitute,
why did a successful farmer like richard munslow
choose to dine over the dead?
Freeman: This rugged borderland between England and wales
was the scene of many battles over the centuries,
and it's a place with a rich tradition of ghost stories.
Sal masekela and historian, dafydd mills daniels,
are on the trail of England's last known sin-eater,
a man whose job was to rid the dead of sin and purge the land of ghosts.
Dafydd: Here we are at richard munslow's tombstone.
Sal: This is his actual gravesite?
Dafydd: Yeah. This is it.
Sal: Wow!
Dafydd: So this is the final sin-eater.
Sal: And there you see his family, his children.
Dafydd: Yeah.
Sal: Four children.
Wow, this gives more of a sense of him as a person.
Dafydd: Yeah, it does.
Sal: And you mentioned earlier that usually it was poor people that chose to
practice this, almost out of necessity, not necessarily choice.
Munslow was a farmer, a family man, it seemed like he was fairly successful.
Why would he choose this?
Dafydd: Yeah, it is a curious choice, isn't it, particularly for someone like munslow.
The basic motivation he seems to have had is that his children died quite suddenly.
Freeman: Three of munslow's young children took sick and died in a single week in 1870.
Dafydd believes munslow may have linked his personal tragedy to the notion that
unforgiven sins were haunting the village.
Dafydd: This fear about the souls from the dead
coming back to haunt their own society.
What the sin-eater was doing was saving society from negative consequences of sin.
Sal: So while they were viewed somewhat as a pariah, within the community,
there's also the sense of this is a value.
Dafydd: Right. Yes.
Christ, taking on the sins of the world, but he has to die for that atonement to happen.
And so munslow, he's agreed to be damned.
Munslow seemed to have viewed it as this act of self-sacrificial love.
Freeman: Personal tragedy led richard munslow to become the last sin-eater.
Bereft by the loss of his children, he sacrificed his soul
to save the soul of his community.
He provided grieving families with a sense of peace that he himself would never know.
For someone already so heavily burdened, it was an incredibly noble act.
Christians believe that we must reckon with our sins on judgment day.
But does that day come in heaven, or down here on earth?
I'm meeting jerry givens...
Man, this is a lovely place.
Jerry: It is. Beautiful.
Freeman: A man who has always been a firm believer in god...
Jerry: This is god's creation, these trees, aw, look at the beauty.
Freeman: And who spent 17 years as executioner for the state of virginia.
I want to understand how a man can take another man's life
and not believe he's committed a sin.
How many different ways of execution did you take part in?
Jerry: It was 25 by electrocution,
and 37 by lethal injection.
Freeman: You executed... Jerry: 62 people.
Freeman: Personally? Jerry: 62 people.
Freeman: How did you feel?
I mean, what kind of adjustments did you have to make,
mentally or emotionally?
Jerry: Well, before each execution I would pray.
Freeman: You would pray? Jerry: Mm-hm.
I received the condemned 15 days before I kill him.
During that 15 day period, I'm trying to prepare him for his next destination.
For electrocution, you had to shave the head.
So I would put my hand on his head and I would pray silently to him.
And we used to get on our knees.
"now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take."
freeman: Yeah. I know that.
Jerry: So these guys are gonna die before they wake.
Freeman: Did you think what you were doing was a sin?
Jerry: That's when I first started, nah, not really, because...
What I used to say, morgan, I say, well,
god, these people don't deserve to live for what they done to other people.
They should have to suffer for what they done.
I'll give you an example of one of the crimes that this guy committed.
There was an 86 year old woman.
He nailed her feet to the wooden floor, and nailed her hands to the chair,
and poured gasoline on her house and set it on fire.
You know?
And to me, does this guy deserve to live after doing this to another human being?
Freeman: And it's in the bible, "eye for an eye."
but it also says, "thou shalt not..."
jerry: Kill.
Freeman: How do we come to terms with two opposites there?
Jerry: Because, morgan, inside of each human being lives a thing called 'death'.
You understand?
It can't sentence you to death, you're already sentenced to death!
God said you're gonna die.
Freeman: But jerry's conviction that he was doing god's will
was eventually shaken.
Jerry: God brought earl washington to me.
Freeman: Who is earl washington?
Jerry: Earl washington was a man on death row.
He was innocent, but he was sentenced to death for a crime that he didn't commit.
Freeman: In 1993, earl washington became the first man ever exonerated
from virginia's death row, by dna evidence.
Back in 1985, jerry had come within nine days of carrying out his execution.
Jerry: But when one man is found innocent...
Freeman: It cast doubt on the whole system.
Jerry: That's right, on the whole system.
In all of my prayers I will always ask god to never allow me to execute an innocent man,
'cause I didn't want to be in the position to take an innocent life.
Freeman: So now you're in serious doubt about what you do.
Am I right about that?
Jerry: Yeah. It put doubt here.
It put doubt in the executioner.
Freeman: Despite his growing doubt, jerry continued his work
as executioner for several years.
Then, in 1999, jerry helped a friend buy a car
with what proved to be drug money.
He was convicted of money laundering and lying to a grand jury,
and went to prison.
Even though he still claims innocence, he sees this moment not as a fall from grace,
but as his salvation from sin.
Jerry: When this happened, god told me afterwards say,
"well, I brought earl washington to you,
I answered your prayer, but you didn't leave."
so god said, "well, if you wanna do that, I'll bring this here case against you.
I will make sure that you will leave."
I went to prison, for 57 month, and that's what helped me change my mind.
Freeman: If I offered you the job now?
Jerry: No, I wouldn't do it.
Freeman: Why not?
Jerry: Because I've learned that innocent people be executed.
The court system is not great, right?
It's not fair.
Freeman: You will not tell me that, because it's a sin?
Jerry: It is a sin. It is, it's a sin to kill.
Freeman: After jerry was released in 2004,
he became an anti-death penalty activist.
He has traveled around the world trying to educate people
about alternatives to capital punishment.
Jerry: Why do we have to kill a person to show that killing is wrong?
If I cut this finger, do I have to cut this finger to stop the bleeding?
No.
Freeman: That's just compounding the error.
Jerry: Yeah.
You know, we all have sinned and come short of the glory of god,
we all, as humans.
We live in a simple world.
Why do I continue to sin over and over and over, if I know it's wrong?
Freeman: How can we know what's right and what's wrong?
You can avoid the seven deadly sins,
you can follow the ten commandments,
but the bible rules aren't clear in every situation.
Jerry found himself caught between, "an eye for an eye,"
and "thou shalt not kill",
and stuck in a moral dilemma over life and death.
What he did, maybe that's what we all need to do,
wrestle with ourselves and our faith,
to do what we believe is right.
But this struggle doesn't have to be morose or solitary.
In fact, it can be a celebration.
Freeman: I'm in london, home to nearly half a million hindus,
to experience diwali, the hindu new year.
This five-day festival of light celebrates the triumph of good over evil,
and the wiping away of bad deeds from the previous year.
I'm visiting tarun and jaymin patel and their family...
Jaymin: Oh, welcome! Namaste. Freeman: Namaste.
To learn more about this ancient tradition.
Thank you so much for inviting us into your home.
Tell me about your celebration.
Tarun: Diwali is an annual festival.
Jaymin: It's the biggest festival of the year in hindu calendar.
We do a big family dinner.
It means all our family get together and we all eat lots of food.
Tarun: But the greatest thing of all is that during diwali, it's important that we also
remember god, and we keep him central.
Freeman: Diwali centers around the story of a beautiful princess
called sita, an avatar of the goddess lakshmi.
She was kidnapped and imprisoned, by a many-headed demon king
called ravana, backed by an army of demons.
But sita's husband, lord ram, an avatar of vishnu,
came to rescue his wife.
Armed with his bow, he took on ravana's demon army.
With one final arrow...
He slayed ravana, and freed his beloved wife.
Hindu tradition says that ram and sita's subjects
lit oil lamps to guide the couple back to their kingdom,
representing the triumph of good over the darkness of evil.
Jaymin: It is festival of light, but we're welcoming you, god, come in.
It's like ram came that time.
We light candles everywhere, and we believe that the evil from us,
the darkness from us, we should remove and bring the light,
the good things, from everybody.
Freeman: That's perfect.
Tarun: Ram was a symbol of righteousness.
He was the ideal father, the ideal son, the ideal brother, the ideal husband.
So those things over diwali, as hindus we will reflect on, and we will try and be that on
a personal level, as much as we can, for as long as we can.
Jaymin: If you reflect back, you will realize that you committed sin.
That is what diwali is about.
Freeman: Gotcha.
Tarun: It's the opportunity to forgive and forget.
Freeman: Do you manage that?
Tarun: We try.
Forgive, yes; forget, perhaps not.
Freeman: Ah yes, I gotcha.
Okay.
There is sin and karma.
Are they compatible?
Do they sort of mean the same thing?
Tarun: Karma is the good things that you do.
You accumulate good karma.
And bad things that you do in life, you accumulate bad karma.
So the idea is to make the good karma bigger than the bad karma.
Freeman: You really want to weigh heavily on the good and try your best to...
Tarun: Get to moksha, which is the salvation of the soul.
And the karma dictates how fast or slow you go towards moksha.
It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
So, we've gotta be patient and we've gotta persevere.
But with faith as your light, you will get there.
Freeman: You just explained a lot of stuff with that one sentence.
Thank you.
Jaymin: You're welcome.
Freeman: After celebrating at home, this third and most important day of
diwali culminates with families going to the temple.
The rituals done in the home are performed again as a community,
on a much grander scale.
The last ritual of the evening is the ultimate display of light overcoming darkness,
clearing away the bad karma of the past year,
and lighting the way toward the liberation of the soul.
Just like the yearly cleansing of the monsoon rains in india,
diwali is a time for hindus to clean up their karma,
to renew their efforts to avoid the temptations of selfishness,
to keep working on moksha, or liberation.
We all make mistakes in judgment.
Our conscience, often guided by faith, leads us to correct them.
But faith can also drive us to commit sins,
and believe we have done nothing wrong.
Freeman: The christian idea of sin has shaped how western civilization
grapples with questions of right and wrong.
But I want to understand sin from a different perspective.
So I've come to vietnam,
a country with three overlapping religious traditions:
Confucianism, taoism and buddhism.
This country was devastated by war for much of the 20th century.
Sin is an inevitable part of war.
American bombing campaigns killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Vietcong executed tens of thousands of south vietnamese villagers,
and were infamous for torturing captured americans.
Here, in hanoi, the hoa lo prison held hundreds of american pows,
they knew it as the hanoi hilton.
I'm meeting tran trong duyet, the former director,
to understand how he looks back on those days now.
Mr. Duyet, so nice to meet you.
Duyet: And you.
Freeman: So, this is the famous hanoi hilton?
You worked here?
Freeman: I'd like to talk to you some more about that.
Let's go and sit down and talk. Okay?
Perhaps the most famous prisoner at hoa lo was a young john mccain,
who was taken there in 1967, after he was shot down over north vietnam.
Mccain never fully recovered from the physical and mental
torture he suffered at the hands of his captors.
Now, that's john mccain, yeah, and that's you, right?
Duyet: Yeah.
Freeman: So, can you share your memories of john mccain with us?
Duyet: What I remember the most was, when we come to meet together
after my working time, and he'd teach me english,
and we talked together, just like friends,
and we had a very kind of, like, friendly relationship.
Freeman: Interesting.
Well mccain says that he was tortured.
Does that fit your recollection?
Duyet: I have to say there was no torture at all.
John mccain was my friend.
Freeman: So you're saying that there was no torture at all.
He was never tortured?
Duyet: 100%, no torture. We save him.
He nearly die when he gone into the lake in hanoi.
And we actually rescue him and cure him.
Freeman: Okay.
Well let me just ask you in a general sense.
Do you have any feelings about that scenario,
where people regret what they did in prison or during war?
Duyet: In the war, of course, there's no other choice.
It's a duty of each soldier to do what they were told.
I am really proud that I tried my best to do the duty to my country.
Freeman: I'm not sure whether mr. Duyet simply
doesn't remember what happened in the war,
whether he's avoiding the truth, or whether his apparent lack of guilt
stems from a difference in cultural perspective.
To gain insight, I'm going to hanoi's confucian temple of literature to meet
dr. Duong ngoc dung, a professor of religious studies.
Dr. Dung, I presume?
Duong: Oh, yeah. Are you mr. Freeman?
Freeman: I am mr. Freeman.
Duong: Okay, please. Please.
Freeman: Thank you. Duong: Okay.
Freeman: Now, I had this conversation with the head of the hanoi hilton.
Duong: Oh yeah, yeah, I know him.
Freeman: Were there some bad things that happened,
and his idea was that if so, it doesn't really matter.
Duong: Because yes, you're a soldier, yes.
Freeman: Yeah.
He's say, soldier to soldier, it's an even deal.
Duong: Okay.
Freeman: Big question is, do the vietnamese look at sin the way we in the west do?
Duong: The dominant religion in vietnam is buddhism, but
the dominant moral education teachings is confucianism.
According to confucian philosophy, we sin because we are not well educated.
There are five cardinal laws of morality.
Number one thing is benevolence, and then righteousness,
trust, wisdom and then social rituals.
Freeman: These five cardinal rules, if I break one 'em,
I haven't done anything as far as god is concerned,
I've actually sinned against society?
Duong: Yeah. Against society, yes.
Freeman: Yeah.
Duong: You destroy your social relationship.
Confucian ethics is very practical.
It is not metaphysical, it is not philosophical.
It just asks us to do something
that we want people to do the same thing to us.
Freeman: Golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Duong: Exactly.
Freeman: So a good, concise explanation of
confucian philosophy would be what?
Duong: Something like, we should be personally responsible for social harmony.
Freeman: Brings up the question, however, of a whole society going off the rails,
like nazi germany.
The holocaust happened because the community allowed it to happen.
Duong: Yes, of course.
One of the weaknesses of confucian philosophy is that it has put a lot of power on
the role of the king.
So if the king is a good guy, people can benefit.
But if the king is a bad guy, oh my god, everything, you know...
Freeman: Everything goes to pieces.
Duong: Yes, yes, exactly like that.
Freeman: Confucian ethics act like glue holding society together.
But under despotic leaders, or the immense pressure of war,
the confucian mandate to be a good member of society
can blind people to the fundamental morality of their actions,
even in retrospect.
So now let's go back to the idea of mr. Duyet at the prison.
Because, his thinking is that if you're in uniform you're bound to do it,
it doesn't matter what it is.
Duong: Personally, I think he's totally wrong.
I can refuse because I'm human being.
You can think.
Right, confucius, he lives in the perfectibility of human nature.
You should think before you do something, right?
Freeman: Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight
for a cause that is larger than yourself.
Now that might be a bit of confucian wisdom,
but in fact those are the words of senator john mccain.
The confucian tradition of vietnam drives its people
to do what society asks them to do;
but that doesn't mean that its adherents must blindly follow a leader
down a path towards sin.
Confucius would expect us to be well-mannered,
to be trustful, to have a good head and a good heart.
But when society goes off the rails,
and people commit the most heinous of sins,
can there ever be forgiveness?
Freeman: The town of terezin, in the czech republic, is a
memorial to one of the most horrific sins in human history,
the holocaust.
The nazis turned the town into a jewish prison ghetto.
From here, they sent nearly 140,000 jews to extermination camps.
Christianity teaches that all things can be forgiven.
But how do you forgive a sin as monstrous as this?
Rainer hoess is a german activist who has devoted his life
to reckoning with the crimes of the holocaust.
He has come to meet dr. Tomas kraus, a jewish community leader,
to understand the sins that were committed at terezin.
Rainer: Hello. Nice to meet you.
Tomas: Nice to meet you, the same.
Rainer: So, let me know a little bit more about your history here.
Tomas: Here, we are in terezin, and behind us is the ghetto.
The trains were going right into the ghetto,
and the gates closed after the trains.
And then, actually, they took the people out of the ghetto
and they were sending them to auschwitz.
Rainer: So it starts here in terezin,
and it ends up in the way of auschwitz.
Tomas: My father was sent here to terezin with the very first transport.
It was November 1941.
The family of my mother was also affected.
She was from a family with seven children,
and she was the only one who survived.
So we are very emotionally attached to this place.
Rainer: Wow! Oh my goodness.
Tomas: This is the main entrance.
And as you can see, it's black and white.
Very symbolic.
Some people say that it's swallowing people.
Freeman: The prison was meant to be a holding place
for jewish and political prisoners,
but inmates were tortured, hanged, or shot.
Tomas: And over there now, this is the tunnel of death,
and nobody who was behind it would come out alive.
This is the jewish cell here, which is for us a very important site,
because it was used for jews from the ghetto as a punishment.
And in the cell, which was built only for a dozen of people,
at one time it had, like, 90 people.
Rainer: And none of them survived?
Tomas: None of them survived.
Rainer: It's sad.
It's a strange feeling to be here.
Everything shows me exactly what I saw in auschwitz,
what I saw in buchenwald, in majdanek, in treblinka,
in all these different, disgusting camps.
My grandfather organized the genocide.
He was a master in it.
Freeman: Rainer's grandfather was rudolf hoess,
the commandant of the auschwitz extermination camp,
and one of the chief architects of hitler's final solution.
At his trial, hoess admitted his role in the holocaust and was sentenced to death.
Before his execution in 1947, hoess gave confession
and was absolved by a catholic priest.
But hoess's sins were not eradicated.
They have scarred the lives of countless jewish families, generation upon generation.
They've also left their mark on rainer hoess.
Tomas: What is your feeling?
Do you feel any responsibility?
Rainer: Well I'm not guilty, I wasn't even born when things like that happened.
But responsibility, of course.
My family is not dealing with it.
So they're big deniers, they glorify more my grandfather.
It never happens.
I'm the black sheep in my family.
But I'm proud to be the black sheep.
I'm wearing a cruelty name.
I think it's important to use the name to change things in life.
Tomas: So this is our joint mission;
because I feel also my responsibility.
I have to give the witness of my parents to further generations.
Your grandfather was the one in auschwitz...
Rainer: The master of hell.
Tomas: And my father was the prisoner there.
So it's very important that we not only are admitting, it's very important that
we are sending out the message to the world.
My father, and my mother, by miracle, they survived and they came back from the camps.
Their main slogan was, "never again. Never again."
it was a mantra for them.
Never again.
It's on us, the second, third generations continue to take the torch.
It's interesting, your pin, zachor.
Rainer: Remember.
Tomas: Why you have it?
Rainer: It is together with the survivors.
We deliver it to pupils and people in the world, 1.6 million times.
And, our idea was that, if you use that pin,
maybe in the jewelry box at home, sometimes
one of the grandkids or kids ask about it.
So it gets delivered over centuries, over generations.
Tomas: It's a wonderful idea, because this is how you fight.
Rainer: If we do nothing, we learned nothing.
Tomas: Exactly.
Rainer: I think that's the message I deliver.
Tomas: And we have to raise our warning finger, because it's a never ending story.
Freeman: The teachings of christianity ask us to hold
two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time:
That sin must be forgiven, but that we inherit original sin.
Well it may not be so contradictory, 'cause it points to a subtle truth,
that all sin can ultimately be forgiven, but it takes honesty,
courage, and sometimes many lifetimes of work.
Religions differ in how they define sin,
but all faiths strive to steer us away
from our base of instincts, our selfishness.
They make us wrestle with right and wrong.
They keep us honest about our own failings, and help us to
ask for, and offer, forgiveness.
A poet once wrote,
"to err is human, to forgive, divine."
forgiveness, I think this may be the best of human qualities.
Captioned by cotter captioning services.