All language subtitles for We.Shall.Not.Die.Now.2019.WEBRip.x264-ION10

So what are we
doing with the Holocaust,

we're doing what
the biblical Jews did

with the story of the exodus.

There was an Egypt
and there was a Pharoah,

there was a Moses and
there was the crossing of the sea,

and the struggle to go through
the desert to the promised land.

That's the story of freedom.

That is a particular story that
happened to a particular people

but has the universal
characteristics of saying

we must now work
to enhance human dignity,

to enlarge human decency.

To teach people of the
importance of human equality,

and the majesty and sacredness
of each individual human life.

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

And that's why we're
commanded to remember

that we were slaves in Egypt.

Not to enslave other people

but to make sure
that other people, what?

Not enslaved.

So that's the
task of this generation.

And that's what survivors
are bequeathing to us,

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

♪ [Somber Music ] ♪

Survivors tell us their story
not because they want to weaken us,

not because they want pity,

but because they want to
strengthen us in our commitment

to human dignity
and human decency

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

♪ [Somber Music ] ♪

After they finish bequeathing
to us their testimony,

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

Now it’s up to us.

♪ [Somber Music ] ♪

When we moved to
Prague from the town

of Olomouc in Czechoslovakia
when I was two,

I don’t remember any of that.

But my early memories
probably go back

to the time that I was five,

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

We lived in an
apartment in Prague,

an apartment house that
belonged to my grandparents,

my maternal grandparents.

And I remember the apartment

and I remember the music

that my parents would
play on the piano,

and at that point
I was about five years old.

So my memories go
back to that period

of all the very
comfortable life.

The earliest memories.

Well, I have some
pictures around here

of me sitting on
a bicycle about this high,

and the nurse
holding up the bicycle

so it wouldn’t take
off on its own.

That must have been
what, maybe 1925, 1926.

It seemed pretty normal

growing up in Breslau
at that particular time.

I didn’t realize
that disaster was looming.

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

It hadn’t lost a battle.

And Germany was defeated essentially

because it ran out
of certain types of essentials.

It ran out of the
essentials of rubber,

it ran out of the
essentials of gasoline,

it ran very low on food.

And they blamed it on the Jews.

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

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

He had written Mein Kampf
in 1924 and ’25,

told us what he was looking for,

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

and a world that
was realigned geographically,

looking for inner conquest
and German expansionism

and looking to
create the master race.

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

and he said what he meant.

The German version
in the years of the 1930’s

alleging that the
Jews are world conquerors,

would go out to conquer
the world if they could,

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

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

Jüden und iren Lügen
published in 1535.

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

is going to tap into deep
seeded discontent and fears.

In some ways, Mein Kampf
could not have been successful

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

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

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

marking the Jews with a star,
compulsory ghettoization,

all of which have
origins in canon law,

Cianites and decisions of the Church.

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

and the remarkable thing about
bureaucracy everywhere

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

When the Nazi forces took over,

within a few
months of that moment

there was heavy
anti-Semitism throughout.

We heard roars of people,

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

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

and you know,
that’s been in the family

I don’t know for
how many generations.

And people were shouting,

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

and people were
waving flags with swastikas.

There was a
feeling of complete betrayal.

Suddenly you were home
and you were not home anymore.

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

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

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

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

The Jews, of course.

Religious anti-Semitism
essentially said,

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

He said the Christian rulers
said you have no right

to live among us as Jews,
therefore convert.

The political leaders
who followed said

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

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

therefore we will kill you.

The difference between
Hitler and Roosevelt

was that both
of them came to office

where gross national product
had declined by 40 percent.

You had 25 percent unemployment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned
the nation one toward each other,

and Hitler turned the nation
one against the other.

And the Jews became
the ultimate scapegoat for that.

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

who had a sense
of the power of oratory.

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

Other people voted for Hitler

despite the fact that
he was an anti-Semite.

They figured that
they could accomplish

part of their agenda
through Adolph Hitler.

They believed first of all
that they were wise enough,

experienced enough, sophisticated
enough to control Hitler,

and secondly that
the majesty of office

would force Hitler
to the sector.

Neither of them proved correct.

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

can succeed full blown
in one single step.

There has to be multiple steps,

and those steps
have to be incremental.

They banned Jewish
from going to,

Jewish kids going to German
schools and Jewish businesses

and doctors couldn’t practice,
lawyers couldn’t practice,

any of the things that
made life a possibility.

All these kinds of movements
operate under the assumption

that there is some sort of
ethereal white purity that’s out there

that needs to be protected,
that cannot be adulterated

by these sort of threatening
hordes, the darker others.

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

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

He wasn’t Jewish.

You got to get out of here.

That night, while he was in the
hospital after the operation,

the Nazis invaded
the hospital as well as the homes.

They burned the
synagogues, you know,

there was a whole
big uprising kind of thing.

And they came into the hospital

and took every one of the
patients and lined them up outside.

And one of the bums hit
my father over the head

with a rifle butt
and that killed him.

So all of the ills that one
might encounter in society,

all the dissatisfactions that
exist within society and,

you know, you live
in a free democratic society,

there are going to be problems.

So hate provides an overly
convenient scapegoat,

a way to sort of
project all those ills

onto the bodies
of a different other.

Even the propaganda could rest
upon earlier conceptions and writings,

going back in this
case to the 16th century.

Nothing new here.

The newness came with
the Final Solution itself,

because all of these measures
supported church policy,

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

To make their
life miserable sufficiently

so that they would see
the light and become Christians.

But the Church could not
go further than that.

The Church would not kill, for
then it would lose its basic objective.

And that’s the reason that when
it came to the Final Solution,

the Germans had to become
inventors and innovators on their own.

For Nazi anti-Semitism,
the Jews were defined racially

based on the
religion of their grandparents.

Based on the nature of
the blood they carried within them,

so you could
be a believing Christian,

the Church might define
you as a Christian,

the state, the Nazi state
would define you as a Jew.

The Nazis regarding Jews
as a cancer on society

so they had to be
cut out of literally,

by the end of what they were
doing, cut out of the world.

And consequently, they felt that
they were healing Germany

by getting rid of the Jews.

My youth finished in 1939 when
the Germans invaded Poland.

The whole building started
to shake and rattle.

I thought maybe it was an
earthquake or something,

which I never experienced,
but it was strange

and I ran to the window and I
saw tanks rolling down the street.

After the Half-tracks
there were the Wermacht,

the foot soldiers,
with their shiny black boots.

Did I know what to expect?

No. You hear this terrible
screaming in this neighbor’s apartment,

and everyone screaming,
“Our baby! Our baby!
Don’t hurt our baby!”

You can see he was enjoying
this, with a smirk on his face.

He was sort of smiling.

He smashes the baby’s head into
the door post, killing it instantly.

The difficult part of leaving
Germany was not leaving Germany,

it was finding a place to go to.

The United States,
England, France, Europe,

all these places had cut off
visas for people to come.

Ghettos were transitory,
a transitional phenomenon.

Neither the German nor
the Jew understood that going in.

But ghettos for the Germans was
a place to contain the Jews until,

until ultimately became
clear until the infrastructure

for their destruction was developed.

They first wanted to
gather the Jews in a ghetto

so they should be able to have
an easier time to lay hands on them.

Unfortunately, as I said before,
my father was so successful in business

that he could not think of
abandoning the business and fleeing.

So he sent me
and my mother and my sister

back to Krakow
under the German occupation.

This was a tragic mistake
which cost us our life.

When Jewish apartments were closed,

the furniture was taken
over and was distributed

after the bombings began
to the bombed out Germans.

The furniture of Jews in Belgium
and in Netherlands and in France

was taken hold of by Alfred Rosenberg
and which he operated in the West

and were shipped to deserving
German families, bombed out, etc.

Incidentally, some portion of
this furniture went to railroad employees

in recognition of the services
that the railroads were rendering

in transporting the Jews
under these difficult conditions.

And interestingly enough, very
little furniture was used from Poland,

because it was
in such horrible condition

that it wasn’t fit
for Germans, quite obviously.

So when we were kicked
out of the apartment by the SS,

we had to move to
another apartment in Prague.

We were there for,
I don’t know, six months,

maybe six to eight months,
and then we were transported to,

to the ghetto of Terezin, or
in German it was called Terezinstadt.

The conditions at
our ghetto were terrible.

We had one little room
to live in, all of us.

To eat, to sleep, just one
little room in the ghetto.

You could not live
a normal life in a ghetto.

There was no schooling,
no formal schooling.

Food was highly limited.

You couldn’t buy any clothes,
you couldn’t buy shoes,

you couldn’t go out
and buy an apple

or a piece of fresh
fruit or fresh vegetables.

So Terezin was
a walled city, was a ghetto.

Nobody could get out.

We had no contact
with the outside world.

We were totally isolated from
the rest of the Czech population.

This was really
the beginning of my Holocaust,

of the Holocaust for me.

Losing my home,
disrupting my family,

not being able to
strike any roots anywhere.

If one is going
to occupy all Europe,

if one is going
to have a world war,

and if one is going to
do all of these things

in a single space of time,
ten years, twelve years,

what, what are you going to do
with the Jewish population?

As one German SS Major said in
the Lodz ghetto in the middle of 1941,

we can’t very well
spend another winter here

and let them starve to death.

That would not be [German].

We would have
to find some device

that would be humane
and that would do the job.

And it is in that sense,
in the words of this one Major,

that one sees the inevitability
of the process reaching that conclusion.

There is a logic,
whether people recognize it or not,

that when you pass these laws

and each law being sort of successively
more punitive than the one previous,

that there is an inexorable march
toward ultimate murder and extermination.

Unlike the orders
of Adolph Hitler

with respect to the invasion
of the Soviet Union,

directives [German],
which were in writing,

what we do not have
for the Final Solution

is a written document
signed by Hitler himself.

So all of these Fuhrer directives,
Fuhrer wishes, Fuhrer orders,

are inferred from things
that he must have said.

Perhaps he said them to Goering.

Perhaps he said them to Himmler.

Perhaps he said
them to someone else.

Evidently, he said
them several times

and in several contexts,
but not necessarily clearly.

So here we are in this situation

which is so typical
of the Nazi regime

but is not well understood
outside the narrow participants

who know it well, and that is
that so much of what is assumed

to be a basic directive and a
basic structure is rather amorphous,

and that words are spoken and
interpreted and used and employed

in accordance with the
understanding of these words

by those who listened
or even those who are

one step removed from those
who have listened to them.

And this is the
reason that historians

to this very day
are asking everyone,

what was your understanding of
this or that other conversation?

And we know that
the so-called [German word],

the so-called order under which
the Einsatzgruppen moved out,

was, to say the least, vague.

What document, any document,
can you point to

that would say alright,
the primary objective

of this Einsatzgruppen was
the onset of the Final Solution?

We see this from what they did.

We could not infer
it from written documents

written before they
moved into Russia.

It was a session by
the top German leadership,

Reinhard Heydrich, he had the order
from Hitler to eliminate the Jews.

And at that time,
they had a big meeting there

to devise means and methods
how to murder the Jews.

Each knows what
the other is talking about.

Each comes to this
meeting with great expectation.

The tension is revealed
even in the many drafts

that this final summary
must have gone through

in that final version of the
talks as prepared by Eichmann.

And the tension shows through.

This was a moment of history,
and the participants knew it.

They knew it in the field
and they knew it in Berlin,

and they knew it
whenever they corresponded

or talked to
one another about it.

And they moved into it
with a certain confusion,

at first, with even
chaos in the field.

But soon enough, with the goal
very clearly outlined in their minds,

and now everything dovetailed
and everything produced

a well-oiled process
on the assembly line.

Hitler betrayed their
1939 pact in June, 1941.

He saw it as a racial war, and
he suspended all rules of normal warfare

and essentially allowed them to
go after the Soviet troops

and Soviet civilians
in a deeply vicious way.

And the very nature of
Barbarossa, an open-ended assault.

Not only is there
no ultimatum to the Soviets,

no warning, no condition, but
there isn’t any definite plan

as to where the German
army was going to stop.

There’s no envisaging
of any peace treaty.

There’s no clear-cut view
of what is to be done

with that population
once it is conquered.

Along with that came the
decision of the sending in

of three thousand Einsatzgruppen,
special mobile killers.

And their assignment was
to kill without pity or remorse,

they never used the word kill.

Eliminate without pity or
remorse every single Jewish man,

woman or child they
could lay their hands on.

Bullet by bullet by bullet.

They murdered Jews, they
murdered Soviet commissars,
former Soviet officials,

and they murdered what we call
Roman Sinti who were gypsies.

So these people ended up engaging
in a strategy of annihilation,

which they called extermination.

Extermination is what
we do to what,

to rats and vermin,
to mice and to bugs.

They called it extermination.

I would call it annihilation.

And they ultimately killed almost two
million people this way as part of the plan.

So Barbarossa was
the general invasion,

and the final solution
to the Jewish problem

began with sending mobile
killers to stationary victims.

In Ukraine, in Russia, in Belarus, most just
were not deported to the death camps.

They were killed
exactly on the sites.

So there are just
mass graves everywhere.

And some people have no idea
that there are these mass graves,

and there are no signs, nothing.

The secret of
understanding the Holocaust

is to understand that we went from
mobile killers to stationary victims.

And when that became
too difficult for the killers,

killers needed to drink afterwards

and then they started
to drink before and during.

You had mental breakdowns,
you also had a lack of discipline.

They reversed the process.

They sent, they made
the victims mobile

and they sent them
to stationary killing centers.

People arrived in Chelmno,

they arrived in
a place called the manor.

They were forced to undress.

They walked downstairs and
marched on to a furniture truck

that was then sealed and it was
driven about 20 minutes, very slowly.

And that’s the
moment at which the gas,

the gas from the exhaust
was piped into the rear,

and in essence when the gas was
piped into the rear, the Jews died.

They were brought
to a forest and ultimately

in the forest they were
buried, burnt, primarily burnt.

♪ [singing] ♪

Well, first of all,

how could you characterize
the diary of Czerniakow?

It is certainly the most unique

and I would say the
most important document

coming from the Jewish
side about the Holocaust,

because it was written by a man

who began keeping a diary
the very first week of the war,

before the Germans
entered Warsaw

and before he took
over the responsibility

of leading the Jewish community,

and who kept his
diary in daily entries

until the afternoon of the
day that he ended his life.

And it is an important document

because Czerniakow occupied
a post at the interface

between the German
and Jewish communities,

in daily contact with both,

receiving the requests
and appeals and entreaties

from the Jewish population
and in turn appealing

to the Germans every week,
several times a week.

And it is a unique document

because a man
holding that possession

set down in very
matter of fact language,

without embellishment,
in an almost laconic style,

everything that was transpiring,
every meeting he had,

every subject that was
discussed in these meetings.

Thus the diary
is just full of names

and incidents and
occurrences of various kinds,

and covers the waterfront
when it comes to subjects.

Food, space, labor,
hostages, children, shootings,

violence, deportations, ghettoization
in general, all of it is there.

There is simply
nothing that compares

in sheer content and coverage
what this diary contains.

But it is above all remarkable

because the farther away
we are from the event itself,

it seems that the diary
transcends the man.

It seems that keeping the
diary under the circumstances

was one of the most
important things he did.

For he left us a
window through which

we can observe a Jewish community
in the terminal hours of its life.

As you know, in Warsaw
there were post offices,

and the ghetto had
one such post office,

but delivery of all mail and
parcels was carried on by Jews,

not by the regular
post office employees.

And once, a
15-year-old was substituting

for his mail carrying father
with very vital parcels.

As you know,
parcels kept people alive.

He was shot and he collapsed,

and with intestines coming
out of his abdomen

and a spinal cord that
was apparently severed,

he crawled to the nearest house
and asked that another policeman

deliver the packages
that he was carrying.

Czerniakow says no more.

For him, that story tells all.

The boy was fifteen.

The constant dilemma
of every Jewish council,

and particularly of Czerniakow
as the head of the largest of them,

was that one could not stay at ones
post without serving the Germans,

and one could not leave the post
without apparently hurting the Jews.

This was a paradox
and a contradiction

with which they all had to live.

It was impossible to separate
the two elements of the job.

It was a fatal combination,
and it killed him.

That motorcycle
came down the surface,

an incredible roar
came down the street.

It was two
German military in them.

And the thing which
I remember most vividly,

my brother had this
wristwatch in his pocket

and he was just
removing it from his pocket.

And so his hand
must have trembled

because his watch
fell to the floor,

and I remember seeing
it was 9:10 in the morning.

And I always take it as something
that that was the moment when,

when my world was gone.

Every apartment and every
house had the hiding place.

They called it the bunker.

Now if you’re found hiding,
they shot you immediately.

When they’d come in the trucks
and they were on a loudspeaker,

everyone has to come out
and get into those trucks,

and supposedly they’re going to
take us to labor camps, if you believe it.

One of the boys that was in my
dormitory in the school that we were in,

I was about eleven
and a half then,

he came in one day all upset
telling everybody that his,

that his grandmother just
must have taken an overdose

of sleeping pills and
that she’s in a coma.

And when I asked him what he thinks
triggered her taking the sleeping pills,

he said she was apparently told
that she was going to be shipped east.

My rabbi, Sholom, when
he conducted a shish, he was crying.

He was crying with great tears
because he couldn’t explicate,

he could not share the terrible feelings
that he had about the fate of the Jews.

The worst day of my life,
the 28th of June, ’42.

That is when I saw
my father for the last time.

The following day my mother.

I heard my parents, of course
we all lived in one room,

and I heard my parents
talk through that night,

and I still cannot comprehend
their incredible bravery.

They spoke only of their lives
together, of their love,

the good times,
their children, of their parents.

And with that
they faced the morning.

And I know it sort of became,
perhaps my own defense,

I always felt, you know, and things
were very tough in the following years.

But I had to emulate my parents.

If they could do it, I can do it.

One wish and one prayer
and one thought: to survive.

We felt it.

Although the Germans were very adept in
hiding their intentions and hiding their deeds,

there was a certain feeling that something
terrible is happening to the Jews.

I just heard my mother’s voice over
that entire, over crying and everything,

and it came like an echo and she
was saying, you know, be strong.

Sich Stark in German.

And then the trucks
rolled out of there,

and ironically the sun
came out, sort of, I still see it,

the rooftops of wet,
illuminated by the sun

and the church
bells were ringing.

And that was the last view.

They took us in
a train in Krakow, Poland.

Cattle cars.

We stayed there for several hours.

It was very hot.

A day, a full
day in the hot summer,

and everybody was crying,
yelling, water! Water! Water!

People were dying
in a cattle, in a train.

And these cattle cars
was absolute hell on earth.

You can’t imagine how tight it
was and how squeezed in we were.

And didn’t have any sanitary facilities.

There were no toilets.

The Germans came
into the ghetto.

Those who worked for them,
and I was one of them,

were transferred
on foot to Plaszow.

Those who did not work,

who did not have
a job through the Germans,

were put in cattle
cars and transported

to either to Auschwitz
or to Belzec.

They took us,
went to Plaszow camp.

It was very bad.
We had to work.

I was one of
the carpenters there.

I was the carpenter group.

And we build the barracks.

My barrack happened to be situated
right as I showed you the plan,

where there was the killing,
was a killing spot.

They called it Hajowa Gorka.

It was a little mountain.

And we could see, I could
actually see the Nazis

lining up people and shooting
them with machine guns.

This is the map of the
concentration camp Plaszow.

This is the place
where all the killings,

the killings were all over, but
this was an execution place.

My barrack was right there.

This was a
carpenter section here.

Thousands upon thousands
of Jews were murdered

by the Germans
when they came into Russia.

In the ghetto of Poland, the
process of murdering was slower

because they had to transport
the Jews in cattle cars to
different extermination camps.

What made the victims
mobile were the railroad cars.

And the death camps were situated
almost inevitably along the railroad lines,

the most famous of which is
Auschwitz at 44 parallel railroad tracks.

Treblinka was situated on the
Warsaw to Bialystok line.

1944 Germany was fighting the
advancing Soviet armies from the east,

the advancing American and
Allied armies from the west,

and even then they
deported, and this is Hilberg,

approximately 437,402 Jews
on 147 trains

between the 15th of May
and the 8th of July.

The most amazing thing about it

is that notwithstanding the fact that
Jews were shipped in freight cars,

the railroads still billed the
SS as though the shipment

had been taking place in regular
passenger cars third class.

In other words, there was no
difference in the payment.

Indeed, there was no difference
in the various offices.

The offices that shipped
the Jews were civilian traffic.

So the key, the principal was,

that if people were being
shipped, by whatever means,

then passenger traffic sections
of the railroad were responsible

for the shipment and they
billed the SS accordingly.

The substitution of
freight cars was done

only because of the
shortage of passenger cars,

and because quite obviously,
no one would insist that Jews,

of all people, should be
shipped in passenger cars

when on arrival they
would be gassed anyway.

Cars were scarce
and time was scarce.

I thus thought, for many, many
years, that there must have been

a priority system into which
these particular trains would fit.

And I was looking
for such a priority system.

But whenever I saw one,

I didn’t see any designation
of Jewish trains anywhere.

And of course
that was my failing.

How would a German administration
place these particular death trains

into a category of trains
without admitting on paper

that this is
what they were doing?

Thus, we find the most
paradoxical situation of all.

Jewish trains, that is to say, death trains,
were leaving for their destinations

without priority for the
most part, without priority.

There are certain exceptions,
especially at the end of the war.

And yet, this does not mean that
these trains were left behind.

The one conclusion that I drew,

and this is perhaps the
most significant of them all,

no Jew was left alive
for lack of transport.

Somehow or other,
these people managed to find time,

special time, or to find cars
wherever they could get them,

to get the job done.

And no one in this
system failed in that task.

Now who knew about the trains?

You had schedulers.

You had also train conductors,
the locomotive engineers.

And what did the
locomotive engineers see?

They saw trains arriving full
and going back empty.

They understood that food was
not being delivered to the camps

in sufficient quantities to
feed this type of population.

And they understood that there
was death and destruction.

They also used the trains to
transport all of this clothing

and all of this human hair and all of the
confiscated property back to the Reich.

Now of course, once the Jews
arrive in the death camps,

they just come with their few
kilograms of personal belongings.

But they may have gold,
they may have foreign currency,

they may have other
things in that last search.

Those things are taken,
and they’re funneled through elaborately,

through the mechanism of banks
and various other institutions for final utilization.

And it gets so that the long
hair of women is cut off

for purposes of making the crosshairs necessary
in submarines you see, for firing torpedoes.

And it gets so that
gold teeth are pulled

because gold is very valuable
and it’s still a foreign exchange earner.

You see, in this regard
they are totally rational.

They are rational
to the point of bizarreness.

You are taking what
ordinarily would not be taken.

You regard even what is in the body
as the property of the German Reich,

in accordance with the eleventh
or the thirteenth ordinance of
the Reich citizenship law.

There was a transport of
clothes coming from Auschwitz,

from the killed
Jews in Auschwitz,

children, grown up,
shoes, jackets.

Everything was in
Plaszow in a center.

I don’t know what
made me walk over to it.

One of the sleeves was sticking
out in the pile of clothes.

I don’t know what made me go,

I went over there
and I was crying.

I was still young,
I was crying like a baby.

I said that’s my father’s,
my father’s jacket.

How could it be?

How could you know that this,

you go in there,
they wouldn’t believe me.

Then I reached in
my father’s pocket.

Believe it or not, I found passports,
pictures of my father, my mother,

my whole family pictures in
the pockets in this jacket.

That happened to me,
which I try to

explain it to myself,
I cannot understand.

Why would I go, and out of
hundreds of pieces of clothes,

go right to this spot
and pick up the jacket?

Well, I did it.

And then they used
an assembly line process.

It’s a combination of Charles
Darwin and Henry Ford.

Charles Darwin’s survival
of the fittest, total domination,

and Henry Ford
the assembly line.

So what happened in three camps,
in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka,

which are Action Reinhard camps,
everybody, there was no selection.

Everybody who arrived
was sent directly to their death.

And the process took several hours
and thousands of people were murdered.

My mother and my sister were
murdered, the locality was Belzec.

Belzec in Poland, not far from Lublin.

This was an extermination camp where
half a million Jews were put to death.

This included my mother,
my sister, and my entire family,

my entire family on my mother’s
side and my father’s side.

Belzec, you were sent directly to the
gas chamber unless you were a woman,

you were sent into
a barracks to have your hair cut

and then you were
sent to the gas chamber.

Then the bodies
were buried in fields.

And essentially it was primitive because
it again was the first of the camp,

and the Germans learned from
each camp how to do it better.

And therefore Belzec was primitive.

While the women were
rounded up naked and shaved,

whipped like cattle
into a slaughterhouse,

the men were already
dying in the gas chambers.

It took two hours to shave the
women and two hours to murder them.

Many SS men
using whips and sharp bayonets

pushed the women toward the
building with the chambers.

I heard the noise of sliding
doors, moaning and screaming,

desperate calls in Polish,
Yiddish, bloodcurdling screams.

All that lasted fifteen minutes.

Screams of children, women, and finally
one common, continuous horrible scream.

All that lasted fifteen minutes.

The machine ran
for twenty minutes,

and after twenty
minutes there was silence.

We dragged bodies of people
who minutes ago were alive.

We dragged them using leather
straps to huge, prepared mass graves,

and the orchestra played,
played from morning til night.

Every day we died a little bit,
together with the transports of people.

Belzec had 500,000 dead,
and two known survivors:

Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman.

Chaim Hirszman was killed

the day he was
about to give testimony.

And his wife said:

“I’m not an eyewitness
but let me give testimony,

because all my husband did

in the time we’ve been married

was to talk about
what went on a Belzec.”

Rudolf Reder gave
testimony, and he said....

in one of the most painful
quotes I’ve ever read.

He said: “Only when
I heard a child say

‘Mommy, it’s dark, I’m scared,
haven’t I been good?”

Only then did I begin to cry,

and later... I had no feelings.

Now the camp was divided in,

it was a part
where the Germans lived,

and there was a part where we lived,

and there was the
working group where we worked,

and there was the what we called it,

the camp tree where
the people got gassed and burned,

where the final station was.

So the death camp was about
five or six and what there was,

just for transport and
direct to the gas chamber.

No matter they’re young, old,
strong, weak, child, woman,
child, man, doesn’t matter.

So they took me
to clean up the quarters,

the living quarters
of some of the SS people,

which the windows
faced the railroad track.

And while I was there
cleaning with another girl,

the whistle was there
that the train comes in,

so we knew we have to remain
there, we cannot go out.

And the transport came in,
everything very fast, their
unloading of the people.

And a mother left a baby,

I don’t know for what
reason, in the box car.

And Frenzel, who was at that
time in charge of the transport,

grabbed that little baby
and smashed the head,

the skull against the box car
and he just threw it in like a dead rat.

And that just I cannot forget.

Although we heard a lot talking
about they killed the people,

but it was so incomprehensive we
never believed it really happened.

And on the way
the farmers allowed that.

And they said you
know where you’re going,

they’re going to kill you and
they’re going to burn you.

As much as we knew before, and
as much we heard, we didn’t believe it.

We couldn’t even figure
that this was a death trip.

I’m sure they felt something,

but they couldn’t
imagine that a nation

that produced Beethoven,
Brahms, Goethe,

would stoop so low and stoop so
tragically into an abyss of murder.

By the time they got to the
third of the action Reinhard camps,

the second was Sobibor,
the third was Treblinka.

At Treblinka they were
able to do it far better,

far more quickly,
far more cost effectively.

The minute they opened
up the door I was facing right,

there were two story dead
peoples right in front of it laying there.

This was the people that came
before, dead riding the trains.

Here were the transport
where the rail track came in

right here and
right in the middle,

and they opened up the doors and
they make them walk straight here

where it says women left, men right.

And over there they
had to take off the clothes,

and they pushed
them right into the gate,

and when they
come into the gate,

they come this way and
this way and they join together.

And they just went, they just went,
at that time I didn’t know where they go,

but then they went to the gas chambers.

The gas chambers
was about fourteen meters.

They were the size
of a single garage,

something like that,
a garage and a half.

And they pushed them in there.

The Gestapo and the Ukrainians,
people didn’t want to go in, they saw it.

You know, they hit them, they
pushed each other right in,

and they were standing up against,
packed, and then they gassed them.

And from the other
side there’s a sliding door,

they just slide it off and
another group was taken into the graves.

And this was the mass grave.

Then came some kind of a law,
they had to take out from the mass grave here

and made a big grave here
and burned all the bodies.

Took out those bodies before,
and the new arrivals,

they dragged them in right through
the big grave where they were burning.

People, the minute they got into
Treblinka and they saw what’s going on,

the dead bodies, they
were screaming, that’s all.

Everybody was screaming,
screaming, crying.

I still have nightmares.

Still nightmares.

And look, they even
provided at Treblinka,

I was just at
Treblinka last, last week.

They even had a zoo,

because apparently people
spent all day killing people

needed to relax
a little bit, and well,

you relax by petting animals and
by looking at animals in cages in zoos.

So they were very mindful

of how they had
to treat their people

who were doing
this unpleasant work.

Treblinka killed 925,000 people,

perhaps as many as 925,000 people
between July 23, 1942 and August 2, 1943.

Staff was 120,
30 Germans, 90 Ukrainians.

Belzec killed 500,000 people

between March, February and
March, 1942 and December 1942.

Its staff was 104 people, of
whom fourteen were Germans.

So you can look at that
and you can say oh my God,

44 Germans were able
to kill by the process of killing,

were able to kill essentially
one million four hundred and
twenty-five thousand Jews.

March of ’44, the Nazis just
marched right into Hungary like it was,

like they were invited guests.

Why would he siphon off soldiers from
the front to occupy a friendly country?

It didn’t make any sense,

except there were 750,000
Jewish inhabitants in Hungary.

To Hitler, killing Jews at that
point and pilfer their wealth

was more important than
winning the war, obviously.

Auschwitz was more complex

because Auschwitz was
actually three camps in one.

We know it as Auschwitz 1, as
Auschwitz 2, which is Birkenau,
the killing center,

and Auschwitz 3, which is Buna
Monowitz, which is an industrial center.

In 1942 I was arrested,
was imprisoned for a year,

sent to Auschwitz for also nearly
a year, and then to Bergen-Belsen.

And I ended up,
when I arrived in Auschwitz

I already knew what
was going on in Auschwitz,

so I arrived there,
you know, thinking that I would,

next step is the gas chamber.

The world was full
of rumors in those days.

Everyone heard that there was
gas chambers in Auschwitz.

One didn’t want to believe it,

but by the time I arrived
there I knew it was a fact.

So if you arrived in Auschwitz,
you came off the train.

The people were divided into five.

They then faced selection.

And selection meant that somebody
looked at you, a German doctor,

decided whether you
were capable of work or not.

And the system was the same.

Any person, no matter
how old or young you are,

you carried a young child, you
went automatically to the gas chamber.

Didn’t matter, they didn’t tell you,

give this child to somebody else.

You could have been nineteen
years old or twenty or sixty.

Whoever had a child carrying or
a little child on their hand,

automatically went to the gas chamber.

I literally had no time or a
chance to reflect yet on the separation,

because everything was done with such
brutality, with such screaming and yelling.

They opened up the doors and
they screamed, all different languages.

They had people in striped
clothes who worked in the camp,

and they were yelling Hungarian,
Yiddish, Polish, German.

And right away there were
the kappos and block elders

who started to lead us into line,

and the SS with
their dogs who were barking,

and they were trained to tear anybody
to pieces if one did not obey the orders.

Male and female, they were divided
with children going with their mothers.

Males on one side, females, women
and their children on the other side.

I’m holding onto my sister
Goldie, my little brother Tule,

and we’re just being pulled
apart, never to see each other again.

The women that looked
healthy to Dr. Mengele,

went one way,
and one to the ovens,

to gas chambers this way.

So my mother and my littlest baby sister,
twelve years old, were on one side

and put my oldest sister, who was
fourteen, fifteen, to the other side.

And she wanted to be with
her mother and her sister,

so she crossed the line
back and she got hit

with a rifle butt
to go back there.

And she’s the one that survived.

My mother and my little sister
went to the gas chambers.

Those who were
selected to work were then

what we call in
Texas branded and sheared.

Meaning they had a tattoo
which gave them a number

and their hair was
sheared, but all of their hair,

even their bodily hair was
sheared because they recycled this.

They used the hair to line submarines,
to serve as detonators, even to create fabric.

They gave us a bundle of
clothes, striped clothes,

and they gave us a tag on a string.

Mine was 41212.

From this moment on
I was no longer Ben Lesser.

41212 was my number.

When you are processed to
become an inmate of Auschwitz,

you have to pass a person
who shaves your head

and tattoos a number on your arm

and takes your clothes off you.

And these are all prisoners.

And obviously, a prisoner
in Auschwitz now meets

somebody who’s just arrived
in Auschwitz, normal questions.

How long do you think
the war is going to last?

And what’s going on?

She thought I’d come from
outside, which of course I didn’t.

I had no idea.

And then, what did
you do before the war?

And that’s the moment that I
said, I used to play the cello.

♪ [music] ♪

Nobody asked me about the cello.

I said I used to be a cellist,

completely crazy thing to
say under the circumstances.

There I was naked,

there was a number
on arm, I play the cello.

She said, fantastic.

The orchestra played
from dawn to night,

with the idea that the Nazis
had a macabre sense of humor,

so you had music taking place
as all of this was developing.

We were the entertainment.

I mean, we had a job, of course.

Our job was to play marches
in the morning and the evening,

because Auschwitz is
surrounded by factories

like IG Farben and Buna, etc.

And the prisoners of
Auschwitz were marching out

every morning to go
to their various workplaces.

And we sat at the gate and
played marches for them.

♪ [music] ♪

You know, Auschwitz
is not a place

where you give yourself
a lot of time for feeling things.

That is for normal people.

What you feel like is that you’re
surprised that you’re alive today,

because tomorrow you
probably won’t be.

If when you went to sleep you
could only sleep on your side because,

and if one turned
all of us had to turn

because there was no way that
one could turn and the other one,

because there was no room otherwise.

In the wintertime,
people were staying in line

for about an hour
and a half, two hours,

they used to wake
us up when it was still dark.

People were frozen to death.

You couldn’t move, you have to stay
just straight with your hands down.

Five in a lane, they used to
count us every morning.

And used to go out to work.

When I was in, Mengele was the guy that
mostly was selecting people for experiments

or who’s going to be in camp or
who’s going to go to the gas chamber.

When I heard stories from my
sister, who survived at Auschwitz,

that the women wanted to look
good for Mengele so they’ll survive.

Nobody knew which side’s going
to live, which would be dead.

They would prick their fingers

and put the blood on their
cheeks so they would look healthy.

Those who were selected to die
were sent directly to the gas chambers.

Their property was confiscated.

All that they
brought was taken from them,

and essentially it was used to recycle.

Even gold teeth were used
for the Nazi war economy.

And they had gas chambers and
the gas chambers were complete
with an undressing room,

a gas chamber, an elevator to
raise the bodies to the top.

And at Belzec and at Treblinka
they used a Soviet tank engine.

And at Auschwitz they
brought it to greater perfection,

they used Zyklon B, which was gas.

And the gas again was, came in pellets.

You opened the pellets, the
Germans poured it down the chute,

and then it was able to kill two thousand
people in a matter of about 30 minutes.

And then the crematoria,
which were ovens,

and the ovens were again even sealed
with the mark of the construction group,

Tough & Company, but the ovens
were used to burn the bodies

and therefore not to leave
evidence of the crime.

And then we asked the ones,

the kappos were escorting us,
what is this smell?

So she said these are your
fathers, your brothers, your
sisters, your children.

And if you don’t behave
and do exactly what you’re told,

this is how you’re going to wind up.

Ashes. I couldn’t believe it.

You could see flames
and you could smell.

There was a smell of smoke as
you would barbecue something.

And we see six chimneys,

huge chimneys and fire shooting
about them and ashes flying.

And every time you make a step
you leave a footprint in those ashes.

When the wind was coming from
the crematoria towards our camp,

which was the Czech
family camp and later my,

later when I was in the men’s camp,

when the wind was
just in the right direction

we were literally
covered by human ash.

Everything, our hair, it was in
our hair, it was in our clothing,

it was in our skin,
it was on the ground,

everything was covered by human ash
because the hundreds of thousands of pounds

of human ash was
blown out of the chimneys.

The Sonderkommando were people who
worked in the vicinity of the gas chamber.

Let’s remember the Jews did not kill.

The Zyklon B at Auschwitz was
brought in Red Cross trucks,

regarded as a medical operation.

It was put down the chute by two
SS officers wearing what, gas masks.

The Sonderkommando were
with the Jews as they got in,

as they were in the undressing room,

and then they were with the Jews
after the gassing took place

to take them out for cremation,
or in other camps for burial.

They were, they had
the worst job imaginable

because they were seeing death
on not a daily basis but an hourly basis.

So my dad was saved and then my mother
and brother were gassed on the tenth.

All the people ever left from
the December transport,

almost five thousand people,
children, grandchildren, grandparents.

My mother knew what her destiny was

and my mother knew
what my brother’s destiny was.

When she found out and my
brother was doomed to go into
the gas chamber,

she decided to stay with him.

A lot of, many parents did that.

Many mothers stayed with their children

when they knew that they
children were going to be gassed.

So she stayed with him.

She volunteered to stay with
him, and they died in the gas chamber,

either on the tenth or eleventh,
I think it was on tenth of July.

Just before she was
taken into the gas chamber,

she is wishing him and me
a good life, a good healthy life.

She’s asking him in the letter
not to spoil me with his love.

And she just goes
on to say, you know,

have a great life
and into eternity.

So she I guess
picked the right person,

because she gave
it to this guard

and then he gave it
to my dad the next day,

who was already
in the medical camp.

And then my dad
kept it most of his life,

in his bedroom, the letter.

And when my dad
passed away in 1967

I got the letter and
I’ve kept it with me.

The atrocities I witnessed,

I witnessed hanging, I witnessed
shooting, I witnessed terrible beatings.

There was a lot of things.

Sure, you don’t want
to talk about it because it’s,

I choke or I start crying
or something like that.

And besides, I tell you that
except people that have been in there

that saw it and witnessed this,
it’s very hard for people even to imagine

that this was there, that
this happened, you know.

Survivors were not a random
sample of the victims.

They weren’t a random
sample of victims age-wise.

In order to survive, most had to
be between eighteen and forty.

Too young, you
didn’t have resources,

too old, you didn’t
have the endurance.

So what did survivors do?

They survived by luck,

but they also did
not survive without skill.

You couldn’t panic.

You also needed a certain
measure of endurance

and you needed almost
an indomitable will to live.

Because otherwise, death
was all around you.

Death could be running to the wires
and touching the electrified wires.

They were a hundred
yards away from you.

They were fifty feet
away from you.

They sometimes were
two feet away from you.

You gave up, you could do that.

And consequently, survivors
had an indomitable will to live,

and even those who had
an indomitable will to live,

they were in the wrong place
at the wrong time, they died.

They were killed.

People who go into deep and
profound despair sometimes

don’t have the will to live.

But people who go to false
optimism also have a problem,

which is they’re not
prepared to face the situation

in which they find themselves.

And consequently, they have to somehow
understand that hope is a dangerous commodity.

The sort of metaphor of sheep
being led to the slaughter is,

that kind of argument fails to
recognize the complexity,

it fails to recognize the nuance
of different forms of resistance.

Ultimately, the people who did best

were the people who could
confront their own vulnerability,

who could look despair straight
in the face, not be frightened by that,

not be paralyzed by that,
but act in the face of it.

Now, 310,000 were deported in
the summer months of 1942,

leaving approximately 70,000.

Now that’s a remnant, which means
that perhaps 90,000 had died,

310,000 had been deported
and 70,000 were left.

But in January, there
was another deportation

in the course of which the
entire council was decimated.

And in the course
of that deportation,

maybe ten percent of those
that remained were deported.

So now we have
a little over 60,000.

There is no record of any
activity by the Jewish council
after January of 1943.

They could not have
any hope for survival.

They could not even trust
production to save them,
the factories, even that.

And Czerniakow was
still capable of writing

“a sewing machine
can save a life.”

But these people now knew that not even
the sewing machine could save a life.

And from that standpoint, they
organized themselves for battle.

A distinct goal, purpose,
and with quiet resolution,

they got a few weapons,
not very many.

The battle that ensued
the following April

between the Germans
and the Jews,

which has come down
as the Warsaw Ghetto battle

and which is symbolic,
in a sense,

to the extent that Auschwitz is
of the entire destruction process,

as though they
were two extremes,

that battle was a very
small infantry engagement.

The Germans
reported sixteen killed

and eighty-five wounded
throughout the battle.

One should not
look at this statistic

as though there were
extremely few German casualties.

Because under the circumstances,
the Jews possessed weapons

that would not have equipped
a modern infantry company of that day.

It’s understood and
understandable as an evolution,

but it was such a rapid evolution
that we may justifiably call it

a revolution in Jewish life,
because once again,

Jews were fighting
with weapons in hand,

conspicuously, visibly,
watched by the entire world.

And they had not done that for
quite some time in quite that manner.

Therefore, one justifiably points
to the Warsaw Ghetto battle

as a pivotal
development of Jewish history.

I used to say that resistance
was not a way to live

but a decision as to how you
chose to die, by exacting revenge,

by taking what, by taking
action, by refusing to go along.

A famous resistance fighter, one of the
commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,

said to me,
Berenbaum, you’re a fool.

He said resistance was
a way to live until you died.

Once we decided that
we were going to resist,

we were the freest
people in all of Europe,

because we had
nothing left to lose.

We planned, and
we saw ourselves outside

and we saw all the Nazis killed,
and this kept us going.

So we couldn’t stop any,
it was just preserving.

If it’s any chance, we have to
go through to the very end with it.

We knew we were
going to be dead any time,

so might as well do that, kill
whoever we can, and run out.

Whoever got saved, got saved.

The uprising came along and everybody
screamed run, run out, and that’s it.

And who has the
ammunition used it, and that’s it.

In this aspect I was
lucky I didn’t get killed.

I was not a hero to be, to
escape, but just happened,

all the bullets was falling
right in front of me and didn’t hit me.

People got hit in the legs, I
saw it, and fell back and
couldn’t go any farther.

No one explained,
this was all split seconds.

And I just jumped
up that stepladder.

And as I was on top, I noticed a
lot of bodies already under mine,

some people went before me.

I got a bullet shot from the
tower right here, and I fell down.

I took several over the head,

and I figured if we
don’t run here we are dead.

And I grabbed it and we run to
the main gate and people after us,

and that is the way we came out.

After I fell down,
I was so much aware

and the will to live was so great
that there’s no measurements to it,

that I started
hopping on dead bodies.

And soon I reached the woods.

Resistance was looking at the
circumstances in which you lived,

understanding your acute vulnerability,
the fact that you’re going to die,

and then saying okay,
I have a choice now to make.

And the choice is
not between life and death.

The choice is,
in Marek Edelman’s words,

the choice is how
am I going to live until I die?

Or the choice is, what
statement am I going to make

by the fact that
I’m going to die?

And I want to
take them down with me.

One of the important things in
understanding the Holocaust

is to ask the question, what did
people know and when did they know it?

And what did they
do with that knowledge?

Some of the bystanders were
laughing at what was happening.

Some of them were anxiously
wondering what property could they get,

whose apartment could they take
over, whose business could they control?

Some said, bye, bye Jews!

And some indicated,
you’re going to die.

So if you can do
something and you do nothing

and you sit idly
or stand idly by and watch,

you know, an atrocity being
committed, that’s problematic.

There were others who
were merely complicitous.

Complicitous means you go
along because you get along.

There were the bystanders
who didn’t oppose it

and essentially stood
by and watched it all happen.

And then there were
the few who were the upstanders

who were people who were
prepared to resist the Nazi intentions.

Then in 1944 when the
Russians came close to Krakow,

we were transported
to the Schindler’s factory.

This is where I
was together with my father.

Very gruff man,
you know, chain smoking,

and I was told that he
was the one who makes sure

that twelve hundred Jews
were working for him.

I regarded Oskar Schindler
as an emissary from God,

to save twelve hundred Jews, and
me and my father among them.

We were saved by Oskar Schindler
and by the grace of God.

It just took offering a home or
a haven, a meal, a place to hide,

a moment of encouragement, a moment
of decency, to people desperately in need.

♪ [music] ♪

We can learn that among
all the peoples of the world,

none helped the Jews,
none raised their voices,

although they knew what
was happening to Jews.

But there were Schindlers,
very, very few of them, very few,

insignificant number,
who took interest in saving Jews.

Apparently General Eisenhower
ordered as many troops to go back,

to be a witness, at any
concentration camp that may be nearby.

He was very smart,
because he figured some day

they’re going to
say it never happened.

And so we got in trucks
and we headed for something

we had no idea
what we were going to see.

The stench of burning flesh
permeated the whole area as we got closer.

Out of the clear blue came hundreds
of people I could not recognize as people.

There’s a town of
Dachau not too far away,

and they made the people from
Dachau come and take a look at
what went on at Dachau.

It’s just mind boggling
and it’s an unforgiveable scene.

Befreiung! Befreiung!
Liberation! Americans! Americans!

So I tell my cousin come on,
let’s go see what’s going on.

And we hop outside and we see
some of the Jewish inmates

were crawling on their hands and knees
and kissing the boots of the American GIs.

They were like gods,
they looked like gods to us.

My cousin, the night after
liberation, dies in my arms.

The night after
liberation dies in my arms.

And when they came
take him away, I followed.

My feet just gave
out and I fell down.

It was, it was virtually, can
you imagine trying to talk to someone

that they don’t even have the strength
for their vocal cords to even operate?

We were warned not to give them
anything like our C-rations and our K-rations.

Don’t give them that.

See, these people
had to be fed a broth,

something that was soupy
that they could swallow

that would not
choke them to death

because if you fed them,
they couldn’t swallow it.

I can, I can still see it.

The ground was
covered with dead people.

And they were in
the uniform of the prisoners,

and they were
all being worked to death.

The moment they
could no longer work

they were sent to the
crematorium, and that was that.

I just couldn’t
believe that an individual

that is supposed to be fighting
for the preservation of his culture

and his country could be doing
this to people that had no defense.

I couldn’t believe this.

The crematoria are going.

They had bodies in them.

Outside there were
bodies looked like skeletons,

only skin and bones,
piled up like cordwood,

one on top of the other,
ready to be burned.

People on the ground, you
couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive.

They were skin and bones.

You, can you imagine
a skeleton trying to talk to you?

And holding out his hand?

Can you imagine that?

You get any kind
of inkling what it’s like?

And this is all you saw.

These people could not get up.

These people were literally abandoned.

My very clear view of freedom
and liberation came that morning

when I stood in this doorway
of that abandoned factory.

And I saw a car
coming down the hill.

And the reality of
that came when I saw

the white star on its
hood and not the swastika.

There were two men in that car.

One jumped out, came
running toward me and asked

if there was anyone
who spoke English or German.

I told him I spoke German.

I remember that aura of
oh, the disbelief in daylight,

to really see someone who fought
for our freedom, for my ideals.

And he looked like God to me.

And I knew what I had to say,

and I said to him,
we are Jewish, you know.

For a very long time, at least
to me it seemed very long,

he didn’t answer me.

And then his own
voice betrayed his emotion.

He was wearing dark glasses,
I couldn’t see his eyes.

He said, so am I.

And the impact of that, to be
liberated not only by an American

but by a fellow Jew,
and he said to me,

won’t you come with me?

I didn’t know what he meant.

So he held the door open for
me and let me proceed him.

And that was
the moment of restoration,

of humanity, of humaneness,
dignity, of freedom.

And this first young American of
liberation day is now my husband.

He opened not only
the door for me,

but the door to
my life and my future.

And there was something
else which I will recite to you

which is not generally known.

In one of the camps,
I don’t know

if it was Buchenwald or
Flossenburg or Ebensee or
Mauthausen.

It may have been Flossenburg.

The camps were
basically the same.

I come in to the office.

We got into the camp, and he
said I’ve been waiting for you.

So he says, come with me.

So he takes me out
to the electrified fence

which surrounded
all these camps.

If anybody touched the fence

they got an electric
shock would kill them.

And he had a shovel with him,
and he dug up next to the fence,

he knew where he was digging,
he dug up a box.

And in the box
there were little cards.

I think I’ve got
something like that.

Almost like a passport.

And the SS officers,
the storm troopers, had a club.

And when you came
to the club meeting,

they put a stamp
in this little book.

And when the book
was filled with stamps,

they gave you a new book.

And the guy in charge
of the deck was an inmate.

They usually were inmates,
they worked with the inmates.

Instead of giving them a new book
and throwing away the old one,

he saved the old one
and he put it away.

Now every time he did that,
he took his life in his hands,

because they would have
killed him right on the spot,

right then, if they ever
saw him hold a book.

They would have put a gun to his
head and blown his brains out.

And he had a whole
box of these cards.

And I knew the names and a
photograph of all the SS guards

who’d been in that camp
for the last year or two.

Invaluable piece of
evidence, you know?

So what impressed me
was here’s a guy

who is risking his
life a hundred times,

knowing that one day there’d
be a day of reckoning.

And I was that day.

So never give up.
Always have hope.

He was hoping that one day it
would be a day of reckoning,

and that was the evidence
I got from that case.

After May 8, 1945,
myself and my father

traveled as much as we could by
horse and buggy, by some trains,

back to Krakow to look
for any remnants of our family.

We didn’t find any.

They took us by train,
they took us back to France,

which was completely
liberated where we had fought,

and I found the synagogue
still standing there,

stone building, beautiful
edifice, but the inside was gutted out.

As I was standing there, a Frenchman
came up to me with three little girls.

I believe the ages were eight,
ten and twelve at that time.

He gave me to remember him by,
the actual yellow Star of David,

the cloth that he had to wear
when the Nazis took over France.

Every Jewish person, young and
old, had to wear the yellow Star of David,

piece of cloth sewn
to their, what they wore,

and it says on it Juif,
which means Jew.

I treasure this.

I think that the Holocaust was a
disparity, it was a hiding of God’s face.

God’s face was turned
away from the Jewish people.

I asked a young rabbi
here in New York one time,

why did God allow
to do these things here?

He couldn’t answer me.

I can’t answer you,
I don’t know the answer.

There is no forgiveness for the
enormity of the crime, of this crime.

There is no forgiveness for this,
there is no forgetfulness for this.

There are no such thing.

We can tolerate
but not forgive, never forgive,

because if we forgive,
I feel we are desecrated,

we are desecrating
the memories of those victims.

♪ [music] ♪

They had surrendered unconditionally,

which was the requirement at the time.

The Allied Powers, the British, the French,
the Americans and the Russians,

got together and they had conferences
on what to do about the Germans,

and the Americans
said look, we need trials.

You accuse them of crime,
give them a day in court,

let them come in and present the evidence.

You present the counter-evidence,
have judges there who will judge it.

As we in America do, it says on
the Supreme Court building,

justice under law, the law
applies equally to everyone.

Give them a fair trial.

The British and the French
and the Russians

sent their best jurists to
appear as judges of the trial.

The trials were open to the
public, they were filmed.

The evidence was submitted.

The guilt was overwhelming.

In this case, the victims were
killed simply because they didn’t share

the race, the religion or the
ideology of their executioners.

And I thought as a young
Harvard graduate, that’s horrible.

And if we can create
a new rule of law which asserts

the right of all human beings
to live in peace and dignity,

regardless of their
race or creed or color,

then we will have created
something of permanent value.

And that’s what I asked to do.

I got on the next plane going
from Berlin to Nuremberg.

I went to Nuremberg.

There was Taylor,
who was then the General,

he had been promoted from Colonel.

I said General,
we got to put on a new trial.

So I thereby became the chief
prosecutor of the largest murder
trial in human history.

I got to the kitchen and I came
out with two cups of coffee,

and my friend came out of the
kitchen with two cups of coffee,

and we sat down with
Herr Goering and Popin

and whoever happened to be
sitting on the terrace, and we talked.

I mean, their answer to that was,
we did what we were told to do.

The orders came down from
headquarters, this is what you had to do.

The military men
did what they had to do.

I accused 22 defendants selected
by me on the basis of their education.

Many of them had PhDs,
one had a double doctorate,

and their rank, generals,
colonels of the SS.

I rested my case in two days.

I convicted all of them.

They were, they feared for their
life, for one thing, justifiably.

I mean, they knew about the laws
that they would be going on trial for.

You asked about what people
I didn’t talk to or did talk to.

There was only one
man I wanted to talk to

after he was sentenced to death.

That was Dr. Otto Ohlendorf.
General of the SS.

He was fairly
honest at the trial.

I knew he was
the father of five children.

I thought I’ll go down
and talk to him.

Maybe he’ll have
some remorse, you know?

Maybe he wants to tell
me he loves his wife,

tell a message to
his children that, you know,

he’s sorry ending this way.

So I went down and
I spoke to him in German.

And I said, can I do something
for you, Dr. Ohlendorf?

And he said well, you’ll see.

The Russians are
going to take over,

the Jews in America will suffer,

you’ll see that I was right.

And he began to repeat the
argument he had made at trial,

that he had his right of
self-defense because he knew

the Russians were
going to attack

and therefore they could
preempt that by attacking first,

and that was lawful.

And he presented big legal,

German legal opinions to that,
support that argument.

Three American judges
say that’s not lawful,

that’s not good law,
it’s bad law.

What would the world look
like if anybody went out

and he wanted to kill his
neighbor because he had a gun,

and he kills his neighbor
and his mother

and his grandfather and
his neighbor next door?

What kind of a world
would we have?

And they sentenced him to death

and I was sure he was going
to hang, and he was hanged.

In the world completely
infested with this kind of mentality

that you need more
power in order to prevail,

but you need more power, you’re
going to end up with more people.

You got to treat the people better.

You must recognize the
importance of compromise,

the importance of being able to
see the other fellow’s point of view.

The requirement of your
humanity in everything that you do.

Those are the guides
which should be the guides,

not to say who,
how many more can we kill?

This is Wakulla
Springs Wildlife Sanctuary,

and it is one of the most
beautiful spots in the United States.

It is the way Florida, or at
least the northern part of Florida,

was before it became
as settled as it is now.

I suspect that 150 years ago
most of Florida looked like this.

As you see, the kind
of wildlife we have here,

the trees and the
fauna and also occasionally

you’ll see all kinds of
alligators and other wild animals.

And they’ve been kept this way,

where the rest
of Florida has changed.

For people like me, it is a
great source of tranquillity

to be able to come down here

and to simply come to
this spot every so often.

I’m glad that we can talk
in this particular area.

So do you think that it fits

to talk about the
Holocaust in this place?

Well, if one wants to talk
about a polar opposite,

I would say that what the
Holocaust represents

is the dialectic extreme
opposite of this,

because what we have
here is an area

in which nature has been
completely unchanged.

And what the Holocaust
represents is the most extreme form

of manmade action
and manmade project

with a peculiar
kind of destructiveness

and with a peculiar
kind of calculation,

which was never
present in nature

and could never
be present in nature.

So that it’s as
appropriate a spot

to talk about the
Holocaust as any that I know.

If this is the place of nature,

then what the Holocaust
represents is the,

the most extreme form
of the city of man

and its radical destructiveness.

♪ [singing] ♪

Twelve thousand people were on
the march living walking into Birkenau.

And I stood at front of the
march and I looked back and I said,

twelve thousand people
are marching into Birkenau.

That’s the number that were
killed at the busiest day in 1944.

They came to remember.

Twelve thousand people
entered Birkenau in 1944,

in the summer of 1944,
and were killed in that day.

In 1996, I was at
the state capitol in Hartford.

I was still wearing my
Eisenhower jacket.

And a gentleman walked up
to me and recognized the insignia

that every air infantry
officer had a different insignia

and I always
called it a Thunderbird.

And I asked him, he says you
remember that symbol, huh?

And I said were you in Dachau?

He said yes.

He and his wife were inmates at
the time the camp was liberated.

I did not know him at
that time, but they live in Avon.

We became very good friends.

And in 2006, I went to my
cardiologist and he said Ben,
you got a blockage.

He put me in St. Francis
Hospital and I had open heart surgery.

The cardiac surgeon that operated
on me and saved my life was their son.

What goes around, comes around.

They were heroes in every way.

Because while they lived,
they did some wonderful things.

They made this world
a wonderful place to live in.

Their loss is a
loss for all humanity

and we hope that future generations
will never know of our pain,

and that everybody will stand
up to any form of persecution.

I taught my children
love and not hate.

But I could never forget.
I could never forgive.

This is my father and my mother.

They’re young.

And this is my father again,

and this is my father
and my little baby sister.

And this is the jacket he was
wearing, that I found the jacket,

this is the jacket, before he
went to the gas chambers.

Growing up with
Jack Betteil, a survivor,

he always told me
what happened to him as a child,

and I always knew that there
was some kind of anti-Semitism

and perhaps evil in the world.

And after telling me
how he lost his family,

his home, and just about everything,

I remember when I was growing up

and if I came home
from school, like any kid,

if I had a little problem I would
look to him and tell him the story,

and he would look back and me
and just go, that’s terrible, Matt.

And I knew that it was nothing compared
to what it was like growing up for him.

And so it gave me perspective in
terms of what problems really were,

as opposed to what
I thought were problems.

He gave me a way to look at the
world and see it through his eyes,

which is sometimes very frightening,
but also there were lots of good stories

about when he survived,
about little kindnesses

that made the difference
between life and death.

And it was just something
that I learned how to appreciate,

both the good and the bad.

And growing up
with someone like Jack,

I can see that he always
kept his sense of humor.

He was always
wonderful with people.

He did incredible acts
of charity for children.

So he was very tough,
he was very strong,

and he knew about the bad but he
also taught me about the good.

What survivors represent for us
is they faced the ultimate defeat.

They lost their entire family,
their mothers and fathers,

their sisters and brothers,
their husbands and wives,

their children, their grandparents.

And they didn’t allow
defeat to define them.

They developed the courage and
the ability to rebuild their lives.

You know, people ask me,
if you played music in Auschwitz

how can you play music now?

You know, the idea that Hitler
could destroy music is ridiculous.

He destroyed a great deal, but
music is not destructible by Hitler.

But once you are in this world,

you have a responsibility to be
worthy to be called a human being.

That’s all.

I think it’s really important to
tell the story and to tell the truth,

to tell what you saw,
to tell what you felt.

And when you
see things going wrong,

you really need to look at it
and not pretend that it’s not happening.

And I feel that
that’s why it’s so important,

it shouldn’t be forgot, it shouldn’t
be forgotten because it can happen again.

Survivors tell us their story
not because they want to weaken us,

not because they want pity, but
because they want to strengthen us

in our commitment to human
dignity and human decency,

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

And after they finish
bequeathing to us their testimony,

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

Now it’s up to us.

I have a card that
says no act of kindness,

no matter how small,
no matter how small, is ever wasted.

If everybody would just practice that
and bring respect back to one another

and remember we all, I don’t
care what your religion is or
what your background is,

we all belong to the
same race. The human race.

Let’s appreciate our differences rather than
hate them and live side by side in peace.

The hatred must stop, because we
can now see what hatred will bring.

Human beings are capable
of the most noble acts imaginable

and the most horrific acts imaginable.

And the question
becomes for each of us,

is what type of human
being do you want to be?

One person at Sachsenhausen
said it in the following way.

He used to tell his prisoners,

his arriving prisoners what
they were about to face.

And he said
"I have told you this story

not to weaken you
but to strengthen you.

Many of them believe
they survived by accident

but the question is...what do
you do with your accident?

And they have decided to bear witness,

to tell their story.

That is a particular story that
happened to a particular people.

But has the universal
characteristics of saying,

we must now work
to enhance human dignity,

to enlarge human decency, to
teach people of the importance
of human equality

and the majesty and sacredness
of each individual human life?

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

Dear Mother,

This letter I’m writing to you
will be placed in a museum.

I was under the impression that
only fine art finds its way to museums.

However, this is a
special kind of museum.

You and six million like
you created this museum.

As for time, Mother dear,

time did not work
the magic of healing.

In each phase of my life,

my pain was emphasized as
was the realization of motherhood.

And let our suffering cause
absolve all the generations to come,

and may they know the inner
peace which was never mine.

♪ [Emotive choir music] ♪