Stories from the Holocaust | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

It's not often you get the chance to meet a man who holds a place in history like Ben Fen. He is 97 years old, stands just 5 feet tall and served as a prosecutor in what has been called the largest murder trial in history. The courtroom was Norberg, the crime, the genocide. accused a group of German SS officers accused of committing the largest number of Nazi murders outside of concentration camps over a million men, women and children shot down in their own cities and towns in cold blood Foren es the last Norberg prosecutor alive today, but he is not content to be part of the history of the 20th century.

He believes that he has something important to offer the world now. You know you've seen the ugliest side of humanity. Yes, you have truly seen evil. Look at you, you are the happiest. Man, I've met the most optimistic, to get more friends. Oh, how nice to see Ben Fen during his daily swim. Well, his training in the gym. I'm showing off now and his morning push-up regimen. One is to realize that he is. Not only is he the happiest man we've ever met, he may also be the fittest. How was that? And that is just the beginning.

The case we present is a plea for humanity before the law. Foren made his opening statement in the Norberg courtroom 70 years ago. The charges we have brought accuse the defendants of having committed crimes against humanity The Norberg trials after World War II were historic The first international war crimes tribunals ever held Hitler's top lieutenants were prosecuted first and then a series of subsequent trials were organized against other Nazi leaders, including 22 SS officers responsible for killing more than a million people not in concentration camps but in cities and towns throughout Eastern Europe would never have been brought to justice if it weren't for Ben Fen You look so young I was so young I was 27 years old If I had never tried trials before in my life, I don't remember if I had ever been in a courtroom.

In reality, Fen had immigrated to the United States as a baby, the son of poor Jewish parents from a small town in Romania, growing up in a tough New York City neighborhood where his father found work as a janitor when he was taken to the United States. school when he was seven years old. He couldn't speak English. He spoke Yiddish at home. I was very small and they didn't let me enter. You didn't speak English until you were eight, that's right, could you read? No, on the contrary, silent films were always written and I asked my father.

Was this in yish? What does he say? What does it say? Could not. He didn't read it either, but Fen learned quickly, became the first in his family to go to college and later earned a scholarship to Harvard Law School, but during his first semester the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and he, like many classmates, he hurried to get ready. He wanted to be a pilot. but the air force of the army did not accept it and they told him no, you are too short, your legs do not reach the pedals. The Marines just looked at me and said, forget it, kid, so he ended up at Harvard and then enlisted as a private in the Army Part of an artillery battalion.

He landed on the beach at Normandy and fought in the Battle of the Bulge towards the end of the war. Due to his legal training, he was transferred to a new unit in General Patton's Third Army created to investigate war crimes. When American forces liberated the concentration camps, his job was to rush and gather evidence. Fen told us that he is still haunted by the things he saw and the

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he heard in those fields. A father whose son told me the story that his father had died just as we entered the camp and the father routinely saved a piece of bread for his son and kept it under his arm at night so the other inmate wouldn't get it. steal, you know, so you see these humans.

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that aren't aren't real aren't real but they were real foren he returned home he married his childhood sweetheart and swore never to set foot in Germany again but that didn't last long General Telford Taylor in charge of the Norenberg trials I asked him to lead a team of investigators in Berlin one of whom found a cache of top secret documents in the ruins of the German Foreign Ministry he gave me a stack of folders four folders and they were daily reports from the Eastern Front which unit entered which city how many people they killed classified so many Jews so many gypsies so many other fanatics had come across reports sent to headquarters by secret SS units called einot grouin or action groups their job had been to follow the German army as it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and kill communists, gypsies and especially Jews, there were 3,000 SS officers trained for that purpose and directed to kill without mercy or remorse every Jewish man, woman and child they could get their hands on, so they entered immediately behind the troop. round up the Jews, kill them all, only one film of the einot group is known to exist and at work it is not easy to see, well, this is a typical operation, look at this, they rounded them up, they all already have labels. they are chasing them they are making them run to their own death yes there was a rabbi coming there just put him in the ditch shoot him there oh my god oh my god yes this video came out years later at the time Fen I only had the documents and started adding up the numbers when I reached over a million people killed that way.

More than a million people. That's more people than you've ever seen in your life. I took a sample that I took on the next plane that flew from Berlin. to Newberg and told General Taylor that we had a new trial, but the trials were already underway and the prosecution staff was stretched thin. Taylor told the coroner that adding another trial was impossible and I started shouting, I said, look, I came here en masse. murder mass murder on a parallel scale and he said to me: can you do this in addition to your other job? and I said sure, he said yes so do it and that's how Ben Foren, 27, became the chief prosecutor of the 22 einot group and its commanders.

In trial number nine in Norberg, how do you plead in this accusation? Guilty or not guilty standard r n not guilty guilty or not guilty n everyone says not guilty not guilty but fan knew they were guilty and could prove it without calling a single witness who entered into evidence the defendants' own reports of what who had done test 111 in the last 10 weeks we have liquidated about 55,000 Jews test 179 from kyiv in 1941 the Jews of the city were ordered to report about 34,000, among them women and children, after having been forced to hand over their clothes and valuables.

All of them were killed, which took several days. Test 84 of Einat's group in D in March 1942. Total number executed so far 91.8. Einat's group in D was the unit of Fen's main defendant, Otto Olendorf. He didn't deny the murders He had the nerve to claim they were committed in self-defense He wasn't ashamed of it He was proud that he was carrying out his government's instructions How didn't you hit him There was only one time he really wanted one of these could defend himself, He stands up and says that's what they shot at the Jews. Hear it here for the first time, boy, I felt like if he had a bayonet, he would have jumped on the thing and put a bayonet right on you and left you.

The other one came out, you know, son of a bitch, I have his reports of how many he killed, you know, innocent lamb, did you look at the faces of the accused? The defendant's face was blank the entire time, the defendants absolutely blank, they might like this. They are waiting, they are waiting for a bus. What was happening inside you? From my. Yes, I'm still turning to this moment. I'm still shaking. All 22 defendants were found guilty and four of them, including Olendorf, were hanged. Foren says his goal from the beginning was to affirm the rule of law and deter similar crimes from being committed again.

Did he know many people who perpetrated war crimes who otherwise, in his opinion, would have simply been normal, upstanding citizens? Of course, my answer is that these men would never do it. They would have been murderers if it hadn't been for the war, these were people who could quote Gerta, the one who loved Vagner, who were educated, what turns a man into a savage beast like that, he is not a savage, he is a patriotic intelligent, although he is a savage when he commits the murder. No, in his mind he is a patriotic human being who acts for the benefit of his country.

You don't think they will become savages even for the ACT. Do you think the man who dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was a savage? Now I'll tell you something. Deep down, which I have learned over many years, war turns otherwise decent people into murderers, all wars and all decent people, so Foren has spent the rest of his life trying to deter war. war and war crimes by establishing an international Court like Norenberg, won a victory. When the international criminal court was created in Ha in 1998, with your permission, he delivered the closing argument in the Court's first case.

Now you've been at this for 50 years, if not more, we've had genocide ever since. minute going on right now in Sudan we've had Rwanda we've had Bosnia you're not getting very far well don't say people get discouraged they should remember for me it takes courage not to get discouraged, did anyone ever say? that you are naive, of course, some people are crazy, well, if it is naive to want peace instead of war, make sure they say that I am naive because I want peace instead of war, if they tell me they want war instead of peace.

Don't say they are naive, I say they are stupid, stupid to an incredible degree to send young people to kill other young people they don't even know, who never did any harm to anyone, they never hurt them, that is the current system. I'm naive, that's crazy, thank you very much, Foren is legendary in the world of international law and is still at it. You're going to help me save the world. I heard you say it's up to you. He never fails to convey his message. War, not war, never. give up never give up and is donating his life savings to a genocide prevention initiative at the Holocaust Museum says he's grateful for the life he's lived in this country and it's his turn to pay it forward you're so idealistic I don't think so I am idealistic, I am realistic and I see the progress, the progress has been remarkable, look at the emancipation of the women in my life, you are sitting here as a woman, look what has happened to same-sex marriages, to tell someone a man. you can become a woman a woman can become a man and a man can marry a man they always said that you are crazy but today it is a reality so the world is changing and you should not know how to despair because nothing new has ever happened before Have you ever happened before we left?

We're moving forward Ben, I'm sitting here listening to you and you're so wise and

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of energy and passion and I can't believe you're 97 years old. Well clearly I'm still a young man and I'm still out there fighting and you know what keeps me going. I know that right now I am an extraordinary World War II story, a humanitarian story that did not come to light for a long time. decades is about a young London emergency room named Nicholas Winton who went to Prague and ended up saving the lives of 669 children, mostly Jewish, from almost certain death.

His story begins in late 1938 with Europe on the brink of war, in Germany violence against Jews was The escalation and the infamous Munich agreement paved the way for Hitler's armies to march unopposed into Czechoslovakia in London. Nicholas Winton had been following events and knew that refugees fleeing the Nazis were in Dire Straits. He went to Czechoslovakia to see if there was anything he could do to help. The strange thing is that for almost 50 years he barely told anyone what he had accomplished and for 50 years the children knew nothing about who had saved them or how we started on the 1st.

October 1938, Nazi troops marched into the German-speaking land of Sudan. Che region Czechoslovakia Prague the Czech capital was flooded with desperate people trying to escape a lucky few were able to send their children abroad these parents mostly Czech Jews felt that war was coming and wanted to take their children out by chance a cameraman filmed to a man holding a boy, a 29-year-old Londoner, his name is Nicholas Winton, all I knew was that the people I met couldn't get out and were looking for ways to at least get their kids out. Nicholas Winon is one of the few people I can testify to those days because he is 104 years old.

He told us that he went to Prague to see if he could save some people but what made you think you could do it? I work with the motto that if something is not impossible, it must be there was a way to do it in London Winton was a stockbrokersuccessful man who lived the good life with a passion for sports, but was deeply troubled by news from Czechoslovakia about German persecution. I went to the fields where the people who had been displaced were located. They were put on their feet and it was winter and it was cold immigration was not an option the doors of the world were closed to refugees the conditions in the camps were brutal for the 150,000 people trapped there especially for the children and no one focused on them until Nicholas Winon but what did he do?

We went to Jerusalem, to the Israel Holocaust Memorial Yadvashem and asked Dr. David Silber Clang, a high-level historian, and there we went to set up shop in a hotel in the center of the old city of Prague and We started searching. How can I organize to get some of these refugees out of here, especially the children? What kind of experience did he have to qualify him for this immense bureaucratic task? Neither of them created a small organization with the goal of getting as many children out as quickly as possible. potential people began to come to him in increasing numbers, he did not have time during the day to meet with everyone, he would work until 2: in the morning, get up early in the morning to meet the following people, as each time they came When he returned to London, he had a list of hundreds of children and set out to convince the British authorities to take him seriously.

He did it by taking office supplies from an established refugee organization, adding a children's section and becoming president, so eventually they had to adopt me, so in In fact, you managed to do what you did through a little deception, a little of smoke and mirrors, yes, to a certain extent, yes, it required quite a bit of ingenuity, no, it only took a printing press to print the paper notp, the children's section operated from a small office in central London when the mother was in charge of everything the staff were volunteers during the day Winon worked as a stockbroker At night he struggled with the British bureaucracy Did he approach any other country to take some of the children?

The Americans, but the Americans. He didn't accept any, which was a shame as we could have gotten a lot more out of it. Winton had written to President Rosevelt asking the US to accept more children. A junior official at the U.S. embassy in London responded that the U.S. could not help. Britain agreed to accept the children, but only if Winon found families willing to take them, so he circulated photographs of the children to publicize them, but even after a family chose a child, British authorities were slow to issue documents. traveling, so Winon started forging them and also handed out some money.

There was a bit of blackmail on my part. You were indulging in blackmail and forgery to get the children out. I've never heard it said like that before, but you seem to enjoy it. It worked. That's the main. The first 20 children left. Prague on March 14, 1939, the next day German troops occupied Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia Hitler rode triumphantly through the streets Hugo Misel was 10 years old. Do you remember the entry of the Germans into Czechoslovakia? Not only do I remember that I personally saw Hitler standing in the car and the children were expected to say h Hitler and so on.

I remember as if yesterday it was not long before the violence against Jews, property confiscations and forced labor that began in the territory of Sudan spread throughout Czechoslovakia, but the Nazis allowed the winon trains to leave in continuing with his policy of cleansing Europe of Jews, Hugo Mel's parents decided it was time to put him and his brother on one of the trains. I remember they told us that we were going to England for maybe two or three months, it would be a holiday for us and that they would join us very soon there, you absolutely believe them.

Were your parents emotional when they said goodbye to you? No I I I I have asked myself that question many times how my parents had the strength I'm sorry, it never occurred to me that what they told us was not true; In other words, they realized they wouldn't be joining us anytime soon. During the spring and summer of 1939, seven trains transported more than 600 children through the heart of Nazi Germany to Holland, where they took a ferry to the English coast, from there they took a train to London. An eighth train with 250 more was scheduled to leave Prague on September 1, but that was the day the war began.

Everyone was at the station, even on the train waiting. go and Waters stated that the train never left, I never really heard what happened to all those children, but there is reason to suspect that not many of them survived. I think it's true, yes, two years after that last train, the Nazis began to implement the final solution of their plan. to massacre all the Jews in Europe Czech Jews were rounded up and sent to Tanad, a former military garrison about an hour north of Prague. Their first stop on the road to Annihilation. These roads were the exit from Terán.

The only exit from the East LED tracks. The trains were called Polish Transport Destination Aitz. About 990,000 people took that one-way trip, among them almost all the children. Sir Nicholas could not leave on time. His parents and the parents of the children who were already in England after the war. Back in Czechoslovakia, there was a moment when you accepted the fact that your parents had been dead for three years. We used to visit them when the trains came from Siberia, especially when the communists moved in in 1948. A lot of people started returning from Siberia, so I went. to a station with the hope and when they showed films of people walking in the concentration camps of aitz and so on, there were so many shots taken by the germans and so on um I never stopped watching, the name of every Czech Jew murdered in the Holocaust is painted on the walls of the pinkest synagogue in Prague more than 77,000 300 names, including Arosa and Paval Misel Hugos Padres and Nicholas Winton during the war he volunteered for a Red Cross ambulance unit and later trained pilots to Royal Air Force married raised a family earned a comfortable living for 50 years hardly told anyone what he had done.

One question that I know intrigues everyone who hears your story is why did you keep it a secret for so long? I didn't really keep it a secret. I just didn't talk about all that. this time you are in England then you return to Czechoslovakia then you go to Israel you still had no idea how your departure from Czechoslovakia had been organized and no idea at all and you found out about it by watching it on television, that is, in 1988, the BBC found out about Winton's story and invited him to be part of a program. He had no idea that the people sitting around him were people he had saved.

May I ask if there is anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton? If so, could you please stand up? Please, Mr. Winon, would you like to turn around on behalf of all of them? Thank you very much, indeed. I guess it was the most emotional moment of my life, suddenly facing all these kids who weren't kids anymore in any way, they weren't. 't and for the first time they looked at you and knew that you were the reason they were alive, yes that's right, I wore this around my neck and this is the royal pass they gave us to come to England and I'm another one of The Boys you saved Lady Milla Grenfell Baines describes Winton as one of the most modest people she has ever met.

Why do you think he didn't say anything for 50 years? I think it was in the nature of him that he really felt that he had done it. He did everything he could and after he had settled those children, he felt that he was done, that my job was done. I have other things to do for the last 50 years. Winton has been helping people with mental disabilities and building nursing homes which we just opened. our second nursing home and it's

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and it's doing very well and there's a lot of old people like me to come in but you're not there you're at home oh I'd hate to go to one of my own homes don't PR that Sir Nicholas Winton in 2003 Winton was known and became Sir Nicholas Winton in the Czech Republic.

He became a national hero. He was celebrated in a documentary called Nikki's Family, but he's not really comfortable with all the hype. I am not interested. in the past I think that today there is too much emphasis on the past and what has happened and no one focuses on the present and the future in 1939 Nicholas Winton took advantage of a two-day vacation to go to Prague and ended up saving lives of 669 children. in the decade since, of course, children had children, who then had children, etc., and the numbers multiplied, you want to sum it up in one sentence, a guy takes two, we go on vacation and he ends up with 15,000 children, yes, yes, it's a pretty good story. a great story, they have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and none of them would be here if it hadn't been for Sir Nick, that's right, yes, yes, terrible responsibility, isn't it?

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the world. World War II and the liberation of concentration camps across Europe, most of the remaining survivors are now in their 80s and 90s, so soon there will be no one left to experience the horrors of the Holocaust first hand, no one to answer questions or witness Future Generations. But as we first reported earlier this year, a dramatic new effort is underway to change that by harnessing the technologies of the present and future to keep alive the ability to speak and get answers from the past. Hello Aaron.

Hello, can I ask you some questions? questions you can ask me anything you want within a reason our interview with

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survivor aaron ster, who spent two years of his childhood hiding in a neighbor's attic, is unlike any interview we've ever done. Aaron tell us what your parents did before the war they owned. and he operated a butcher shop it wasn't the content of the interview that was so unusual where did you live? I was born in a small town in Poland called sov podlaski is the fact that this interview is with a man who was no longer alive Aaron Elster died two years ago How is the weather today?

In fact, I'm recording. I can't answer that question. The survivors were getting very old. Heather Mayo came up with the idea for this project. She had worked on exhibits with Holocaust survivors for years and she wanted future generations. to have the same opportunity to interact with them that she had had. I wanted to talk to a Holocaust survivor like I would today with that person sitting in front of me and we were having a conversation that she knew back in the '90s, after making the movie Schindler's List Steven Spielberg created a foundation named after him. from the Hebrew word for the Holocaust showa, go ahead and sit down to film and collect testimonies from as many survivors as possible.

They have interviewed almost 55,000 of them so far and stored them at the University of Southern California, but Mayo dreamed of something more dynamic, being able to actively converse with the survivors and after they left and realized that in the era of artificial intelligence tools like Siri and Alexa, the technology had to be createable. I have been involved in interviewing Holocaust survivors for over 20 years. She brought the idea to Steven Smith, executive director of the USC Showa Foundation, and now her husband loved it, but some of her colleagues weren't so sure. One of them looked at me.

It was like you wanted to talk to dead people and you said yes because that's the point, well maybe people thought you were making the Holocaust into something maybe silly, yeah they said you were going to Disney going to Disney for the Holocaust, We had a lot of rejections on this project, is this the right thing to do? What about the well-being of survivors? Are we trying to keep them alive beyond their death? Everyone had questions, except for one group of people, the survivors themselves, who said: where do I sign up? I would like to participate in this project, there are no barriers to entry, in fact, I did both.

In fact, the first survivor they signed up for testing was a man named Pinkus Gutter, who was born in Poland and was deported to the Midic concentration camp with his parents and twin sister Sabina at the age of 11. He is the only one who survived. They took Pinkus from his house in Toronto to Los Angeles and asked him to sit inside this, so you're in this Dome, what do I call it? It's the sphere, they call it the Dome and then finally it was called the bubble, a bubble that surrounds it with lights and more than 20 cameras.

What is our objective? The goal was to future-proof the interviews so that as technology advances and a 3D hologram is projected. becomes the norm, they will have all the necessary angles, so the first day we went to film Pinkas we had these ultra high speed cameras that were all linked and synchronized to make this video of him, soWe sit down and they press record nothing happens so Pinkus is sitting there with 6,000 LED lights on him and cameras that don't work can I go back to sleep now? sunglasses protected his eyes. When are we going to start?

I was bored sitting in that chair, so I started singing. to me, suddenly Stepen had this idea, oh, he's singing, let's record some songs of his, he was a good sport, he was a very good sport, finally the cameras rolled and they asked Pinkus to go back to the bubble to see really. thing how long were you in that chair a whole week from 9:00 to 5: one week we were there with lunch breaks and but I was there from 9:00 to 5: answering questions oh my god it took so long why they asked him almost 2,000 questions. The idea was to cover every imaginable question someone might want to ask you.

Did you have to look exactly the same? He had to wear the same clothes and he had three pairs of the same jackets, the same shirts, the same pants. The same shoes every morning. Pinkus can now be seen in those shirts, pants and shoes at Holocaust museums in Dallas, Indiana, and here at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skoki, outside Chicago, where visitors can ask him their own questions about What kept you going or what gave you hope while you were experiencing hardships in the fields. We expected the Nazis to lose the war. Pink's image is projected on an 11t high screen.

What we see here. Smith joined us to explain how the technology works. So what's happening is all the answers to the question. The questions Pinkus gave go into a database and then when you ask a question, the algorithm goes through the entire database. Do I have an answer for that? and then it will return what it thinks is the closest answer to your question. to try to talk to Pinkus yes, okay, you had a happy childhood I had a very happy childhood my parents were winemakers my father started teaching me to be a winemaker when I was three and a half years old when I was five years old I could already read and I could already write.

Wow, you are very smart. Thank you. I've noticed that there's a little movement right before Pinka starts speaking. What you're seeing here isn't a human being? They are video clips that are being buttered and played and while you search and bring the clip in you are simply watching a little jump, the jump cuts stop being distracting once we start talking about the fate of Pink's family , tell us what happened when you arrived at the camp, as soon as we got there, we were separated into different groups and my sister, somehow, was pushed towards the children and I saw her, she must have seen my mother, so she ran to my mother .

I saw my mother and she hugged her and from that moment on the only thing I can remember when I think of my sister is her long, long, long blonde braid, that was the last time she saw her twin sister. Saina learned later that day that she and her parents had been murdered in the gas chambers. Pinkus was alone at age 11 and was put to work as a slave. Has he ever seen someone murdered? Unfortunately, I saw many people die in front of my eyes. they were people. I wasn't sure how a recording would handle what I wanted to ask Pinkus next, how can you still have faith in God?

How is it possible that you don't believe in God? Well, how did you let this happen? God gave human beings the knowledge of good. and evil and allowed them to do what they wanted on this Earth to find their own way to my mind when God sees what human beings are doing, especially things like genocide, he cries wow Stephen, I could ask him questions for 10 hours and in On screen yes W since Pinkus gutter was filmed, the showa foundation has recorded interviews with 21 more Holocaust survivors each for a full week and they have reduced the setup required so that they can take a mobile travel platform to record the survivors nearby from where they live. have deliberately chosen interview subjects with different wartime experiences, survivors of hidden Owitz children, and, as we saw last fall in New Jersey, they are going to connect me again with Alan Mosin, 93, who is not a survivor of the

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, it was a The liberator who entered that field was the most horrible place I have ever seen or expected to see in the rest of my life.

Mosin was an 18-year-old soldier when his army unit liberated a little-known concentration camp called Goon Kirchin. pile of skeleton-like bodies on the left there was another pile of skeleton-like bodies on the right those poor souls, that's the term my lieutenant kept shouting oh my god, look at these poor souls, every one of Alan Mosin is then isolated by a team of investigators from the showa foundation office. I remember the expression and attitude of all of us, what the hell is this Almighty God that adds to the system a variety of questions that people could ask to trigger that answer for every question we asked? 15 different ways to ask the same question and that is entered and it is all manual and the editors rotate the image, turn the green screen background black and then a long process of testing begins in schools, so the question is asked Mr.

Pinkus on his screen to the students. To test it, ask any questions you want and see if the system shows the correct answer. How did he find out that his city was being invaded by Germany? Would he ever want to seek revenge? How did he feel about his family? Can he rephrase it? this please, then every question and answer is reviewed, we record every question that is asked to the system and see if there is a better answer that addresses that question more directly, as we found that it is still a work in progress, please tell us about his family when he was A little boy, how about you ask me about life after the war?

A couple of things about artificial intelligence. It's mostly artificial and not that smart for now, but the beauty of artificial intelligence is that it develops over time, so we're not changing. The content, all the answers remain the same, but over time the variety of questions you can ask will improve considerably and you had to keep silent to find out what it was like for Aaron Elster hiding in that attic 75 years ago. I prayed to God to let me live to be 25. I wanted a taste of what adulthood would be like. The rest of that conversation with Aaron Elster, as well as one with a survivor of Joseph Mangala's infamous twin experiments at Owitz, when we return.

I'm a lucky guy, yes I am. The goal of the showa foundation project is to allow meaningful conversations with Holocaust survivors to continue even after the survivors themselves are gone, and of the more than 20 men and women who have participated so far, four have died. Already tonight we wanted to share conversations with two of them, conversations that sometimes seemed so normal that we could almost forget that we were talking to the digital image of someone who was no longer alive first, a brave 4-foot-4 woman named Eva Core, an identical twin. who along with her sister survived aitz and the notorious experiments of Dr.

Joseph Mangala Eva Core spent her life after the war in Terot Indiana died last summer at the age of 85 Hi Eva, how are you today ? I'm fine and how are you? I'm fine, it seemed natural to answer his question before asking mine. So how old were you when you went to Aitz when I came to Aitz? I was 10 years old and I stayed in Aitz until the liberation, which was about 9 months later, when we were. released, so we made a little announcement about the fact that we were starting this project. I received a call the next day from a lady named evocore.

I didn't know her at the time and she told me I want to be one of those 3D interviews. I Want to Be a Hologram Steven Smith, executive director of the USC Showa Foundation, and his wife and colleague Heather Mays Smith were leading the project. I said, well, I'm traveling. I'm so sorry, where are you going? Well, I have to do it. go to New York I'm going to DC when are you going to DC I'm going to DC it turns out we were going to the same event in DC I arrive at my hotel she is sitting in the lobby waiting for me when Eva on the right and her twin sister Miriam arrived at aitz they separated them of their parents and older sisters and took them to a barracks full of twins they never saw their family again 50 years ago on a railroad 60 Minutes reported on the mangala twin experiments in a The story dates back to 1992, the reason why which my number is not and in fact we interviewed Eva Cor who was alive in her house in Terot.

Eva then told us that she had become seriously ill after an injection of Mangala arrived every morning and night with four other doctors and he testified. very sarcastically, I laugh very badly, he is so young he only has two weeks to live when I heard that I knew he was right and immediately made a silent promise that he would prove Dr. Mangle that he was wrong. Imagine picking up a conversation almost 30 years later and After Eva's death, Eva tells us about Dr. Mangalo, what he was like. He had a beautiful face, a movie star face and very nice, actually, dark hair, dark eyes.

When I looked into his eyes, I couldn't see anything other than evil people say the eyes are the center. of the soul and in the case of mangar that was correct Eva and Miriam are visible in images taken by the Soviet forces that liberated awit 75 years ago they returned to the camp many times Eva continued to go even after Miriam's death in 1993 because if the train came in that direction, it was on one of those visits that Eva made a surprising announcement. Eva Moses that she had decided to forgive her Nazi captors. I hereby grant amnesty to all Nazis who participated.

She was subjected to a vicious attack by other survivors. How can you forgive? How is that possible? My forgiveness doesn't mean I forgot what happened. Which is impossible. My forgiveness is an act of self-healing. Liberation and self-empowerment. Can you forgive Aaron? I can't forgive Aaron ster that he doesn't agree with them receiving it. They have to apologize to my little sister Sarah, who was brutally murdered. I have no right to forgive and I will not forgive. The important thing for me in this project is that we have Holocaust survivors who have different views on God, religion, faith and forgiveness and that is what this project will allow us to do Aaron elster, unlike many Holocaust survivors, He never spent time in a concentration camp while Jews were rounded up in his town's market and sent to Trinka, his father told him to run away, he was 9 years old and I managed to crawl into the sewer that ran along the market street and I kept crawling until I felt I was out of sight, I got up and started running.

He arrived at the building of an older Polish couple named Gersis who had been clients. At the butcher shop he shows up and she didn't want to take him, she started crying and then she let him up Aaron, how long did you stay in the attic? I lived in that attic for almost two years, two years with only one visit a day to bring food and water what it was like in the attic oh there are so many things I remember the hunger the fear the absolute total loneliness what are you doing all day are you sitting there I used to catch flies desperation tore off their wings so they wouldn't fly away so I had them there how did you survive? how did you survive in that attic?

I had the ability to daydream I used to write novels in my head I was the hero all the time and We have that ability to give in to our misery and our pain and die or absorb the physical pain, but keep your mindset, keep your soul, keep your mind, so I was bored, I was afraid, I needed someone to accept me or tell me. that I'm fine, that I'm a good boy, of course, but that wasn't part of my life. we received a phone call to say that Aon Elster had passed away suddenly. I was at a conference at that time.

The next morning, I walked into the Uh, the little space we had and I turned on Aaron St's testimonial and I realized I was going to be the first person to click that little button and ask a question to someone who's no longer here. alive when for the next 6 hours people came in. and outside that room his funeral had not yet taken place and yet the Legacy was already continuing and it was a very powerful and moving moment you're okay, you're doing great, a moving moment that will soon be available to others beyond the community. from Holocaust Survivors are going to come in and make you look Heather Mayo Smith says that in the process of developing and testing this technology she was bombarded with questions, there was literally not a single person, not one who didn't. ask me if you could do a similar interview with a loved one for yourself unrelated to holoc completely unrelated can I do this with someone I know what is the answer yes she has started an independent company that is trying to expand usage of this technology I was an astronaut for NASA and recorded interviews with other historical figures as astronauts and, eventually, withanyone what unit you were in.

So do you think this will just be a tool that people will use? Everyone will record their stories. people can interview them mhm that's what life will be like yeah let's go ahead and start for now although the race is on to capture interviews with as many holocaust survivors as possible while there is still time so the conversations can always continue with people like Aaron Elster do you want revenge when I was young? I wanted revenge so badly and I hate it, I hate it, but most of the perpetrators, most of the murderers are dead, so who am I going to hate the grandchildren who had nothing?

What to do with that is not right revenge is not part of my life it is not part of my thinking you know here you have these people who were basically destined to be annihilated who survived like a miracle but they were supposed to be killed and now they are They have made immortality, they were not supposed to have a name, they were supposed to be destroyed forever and now, through this program, they will be able to continue answering questions hundreds of years after the Nazis are gone. Never forget that we have had a lot. of clichés about the Holocaust, you know, never again, never forget, we must remember all these kinds of things.

What this does ensures that there is no closure because it is not a statement, it is not about something in particular that is instructing you. It's up to you to ask the questions, it's up to you to be curious and want to know, so in a sense you turn learning on its head and say, I'm not going to tell you what the lessons of the Holocaust are. I'm not going to tell you what the Holocaust means, but if you want to know, you can ask: it's tremendously important, so here we were in a special moment when the pinkest black man alive could talk to the one who will live forever.

Could you ask us a question? I'll make you the one that's my favorite. Okay, can you sing me a song from your youth? Do you want me to sing it for you? Yes, please, yes, no, what does that mean? Which is the song? It's a happy song, yes it's a happy song, it's like a brother and sister of course my twin sister are traveling through the forest or on the road and they can't forget how beautiful the world is, oh God, the sign above. aitz steel doors say arbite M fry work frees you was, of course, a chilling lie in a bad hope, but there was a surprising source of temporary escape within the doors.

Composers, singers and music musicians, both world-class and recreational, were among those imprisoned and What is not well known is that in the bleakest conditions imaginable they performed and wrote much music. More than 6 million people, most of them Jews, died in the Holocaust, but their music was not thanks in part to the extraordinary work of Franchesco Loro, an Italian composer. and pianist Loro has spent 30 years recovering interpretations and in some cases finishing works composed in captivity almost 75 years after the liberation of the camps. Franchesco Loro is on a remarkable Rescue Mission Reviving music like this piece created by a young Jewish girl in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944 before the miracle is that all this could have been destroyed it could have been lost and instead the miracle is that this music reaches us music is a phenomenon that wins that is the secret of the concentration camps no one can take it away from us no one can imprison it it seems unlikely and even impossible that music could have been performed and composed in a place like this, a spectacle of evil unspeakable, the most horrendous mass murder in human history, this is Awit Spear Canal, the Nazi concentration camp in southern Poland created by the Germans in 1940 as part of Hitler's Final Solution became the center of extermination of Jews in the world.

More than a million men, women and children died here for those who passed through this entrance known as Death's Gate. These footprints were a path to genocide. and Terr, after disembarking from the cattle cars, most were sent directly to their deaths in the gas chambers. The sounds of the countryside included the screeching of train stops, the haunting screams of families separated forever, the staccato orders barked by SS guards, but also in the air. of Music, the language of the gods, this piece titled fantasy was written for OBO and the strings were composed by a prisoner in Poland in 1942 in Switzerland, since in other camps there were prisoner orchestras created by the Nazis to play marches and entertain, There was also unofficial music. secretly developed a way to preserve some dignity where little existed during the Holocaust an entire generation of talented musicians, composers and virtuosos perished 75 years later Franchesco Loro is giving life to his work in some cases we are facing masterpieces that could have changed the path of musical language in Europe if they had been written in a free world Franchesco Lor's work may culminate in moving musical performances, but that is only the last bar, so to speak, as his largely self-financed rescue missions begin in the old way with many difficulties I work knocking on doors and face to face meetings with survivors and their relatives I have heard that you have searched in attics and basements I imagine that sometimes families do not even know the musical treasure they have there are children who have inherited it All of his father's paper material, which survived the camp and was stored when I recovered it, was literally infested with paper worms, so a clean-up operation was required before taking it.

Dein Loro grew up and still lives in Barletta, an ancient city on the Adriatic coast. In southern Italy, his modest home, which also serves as an office, is filled with tapes, audio cassettes, diaries and microfilms, with the help of his wife Graia, who works at the local post office to support the family. L Toro has collected and cataloged more than 8,000 pieces of music, including symphonies. operas, folk songs and gypsy melodies scrawled on everything from food raps to telegrams, even sacks of potatoes. The prisoner who composed this piece used the charcoal he was given as medicine for dissidents and toilet paper to write a complete symphony which was then smuggled into the camp laundry where he is. using his dissident medication as a pen and he's using toilet paper as paper and that's how he writes a symphony when you lost your freedom.

Toilet paper and company can be freedom. It is a testament to the ingenuity of how far artists will go to create. It is also a testament to the variety of emotions that the prisoners experienced what kind of music is this is 1944 in buval in a field them here the swamp this ACH this will surely be composed for orchestra is a March Loro is not only collecting this music, but who is arranging it and sometimes finishing these works is this work complete or is it only partial no uh here they are uh Only The Melodies this tender composition was written by a survey while he was in a banal concentration camp loru says that if music like this is not interprets it as if he is still imprisoned in the camps and has not been released.

This was not an obvious calling for an Italian raised as a Roman Catholic, but from the age of 15, Loro says he felt the attraction of another religion. You converted to Judaism. You say you have a Jewish soul. To define what that means, there was a rabbi who explained to me that when a person converts to Judaism they don't actually convert, they become a Jew again. Doing this research is possibly the most Jewish thing I know as Jews have a word that expresses this concept Mitzvah is not something someone tells you to do, you know as a Jew that you should do it.

L Toro's search began in 1988 when he learned of music created by prisoners in the Czech concentration camp to raise the Nazis. the camp to fool the world into believing that they were treating Jews humanely. The inmates were allowed to create and perform theatrical performances, some of which survive in this Nazi propaganda film. Parrot was amazed by the level of musicality and wondering what else was there, he approached Brett. WB music curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC WB says Franchesco Loro is building on the legacy of others who have sought out concentration camp music, but Loro is taking it to the next level by making the scores are executable.

Why did the people in the concentration camps turn away? a music helped people cope helped people escape gave people something to do allowed them to comment on the experiences they were going through Did music save lives during the Holocaust? There is no doubt that being a member of an orchestra increased her chances of survival. Anita lter vfish is one of the last survivors of the AWI women's orchestra. She is now 94 years old. We met her at her house in London. What had you heard about the camp before she arrived? We found out everything that was happening there.

We're just not trying to disbelieve it yet, but when I got there, I actually knew it was a reality. Gas chambers and yes, you came prepared for the worst. I came prepared for the worst. Yes, his parents were German Jews. They took her away in 1942 and she never saw them again. She was only 18 years old when she arrived at the extermination camp, a year later, they put us in a kind of block and we waited all night and the next morning there was a kind of welcoming ceremony to U and there. There are a lot of people sitting there doing reception things, like tattooing you removing your ET hair, it's all done by the prisoners themselves.

The numbers are still visible on her left arm. They took me to a girl who is also a prisoner and a kind of normal conversation began. place and then he asked me what I was doing before the war and like an idiot I don't know I said I used to play Jell-O he said it's fantastic you'll be saved he said I had no idea what I was talking about and that's how you heard there was an orchestra yeah and this is your salvation that was my salvation here the conductor of the orchestra was the virtuoso violinist Alma Ros niece of the famous composer comes Gustaf mer Anita lasar vfish says Ros a prisoner she herself had an iron discipline and I tried to divert attention from the deep misery of the camp.

I remember that we were very afraid of him. She was very much the boss and she knew very well that if she couldn't put together a reasonable orchestra we wouldn't survive there. so it was a tremendous responsibility this poor woman made all the members of the orchestra live together in a wooden barracks like this one in Block 12 in binau known as the music block we were located very close to the crematoriums we could see everything that was going. practicing your orchestra and you can see everything that happens, yeah, I mean, once you're inside out, you knew what was going on, you know how you play music, pretending to ignore everything that's going on around you, you arrive and you're ready to go .

In the guest room, someone puts a sheller in your hand and you have a chance at life. Are you going to say: Sorry, I don't play here, I play at Carnegi Hall, but you know, I mean, you know people have weird ideas about what it's like to get to a place where they're going to kill you what I hear you say? It's just that your ability to play the cello saved your life. Yes, as simple as that, the main function of the camp orchestra is to play marches for the prisoners here every day. at the front door, a way to literally set the pace of a work day and a way to count inmates.

This is where the men's orchestra played. Yes, there was a procession like A and the orchestra played there. The orchestra also played when the new ones arrived. disembarked from the trains at the Beer Canal to give the impression that it normally fooled newcomers into believing it was a hospitable place, when at the height of the massacres the Nazis were murdering thousands of men, women and children each day, evidence of the scope and scale of the atrocity. There are still mountains of shoes suitcases glasses shaving brushes murder on an industrial scale an ingenious architect showed us some of the instruments that were taken from the field by members of the orchestra at the end of the war and later donated to the museum this clarinet a violin and a accordion and part of the music they played this is the prisoner orchestra of the Eltz concentration camp yes and this is the inventory of the instrument yes what is inside the orchestras they also gave concerts on Sundays for the prison and for the SS officers Anita lasar vfish remembers playing for the infamous Dr.

Joseph Mangala, known as the angel of death. Mangala conducted medical experiments on prisoners. His notorious infirmary still stands just steps from the railway tracks in Beero. What he was interested in is that these people, these arch-criminals, were not uneducated people, that this monstrosity. The man could still appreciate Schuman, yes, how does he reconcile himself to that? Franchesco Loro took us to another place where the Aitz camp orchestra played for Nazi officers and their families. It is just a few meters from the crematorium and within sight of the commandant ofthe Country House. Rudolph, you were saying that sometimes the smoke from the crematorium was so thick that the musicians couldn't even see the notes in front of them yeah, it happened, it happened and uh, it's tragic, life and death, uh, uh, they were together, life and death intertwine and the point of connection between life and death is music this is all we have about life in the country life disappeared we are just music for me music is the life that remained music can be the life that remained music like this 1942 piece titled fantasy but It is the people behind the music who animate Franchesco L.

Toro's long and ambitious project. His compositions were created at a time when fundamental values ​​were in danger today, as the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles. It is more common for their offspring to be tracked by Parrot when we return. Musical genius brought to life decades after death for 30 years Italian composer and pianist Franchesco Luro has been on an intense quest to collect music created by prisoners during the Holocaust while traveling the world primarily at his expense. He is both a detective and an archaeologist. digging into the past to recover and discover real artifacts, but perhaps even more importantly, he meets with survivors and their families to excavate the stories behind Behind the Music, we travel to Nurburg, Germany, to meet Bemar Kopinsky, he is the son of Joseph Kinsky, perhaps the most prolific and versatile composer in the entire Camp constellation Voldemar Kopinsky says that his father's work was totally unknown before Franchesco Loro brought it to light I thought it was something that did not interest anyone because my Father was already dead and not a single Camp composition of his was performed in Poland Joseph Kinsky, a Roman Catholic, was 26 years old when he was caught working for the Polish resistance and sent to Aitz, where he became the first violinist of the male orchestra and began to compose in secret, first for himself and then for other prisoners, in 1942 he wrote. this piece he titled resignation yes this is the list my father made seven months before his death this is all his music kinsky wrote hundreds of pieces of music during his four years in prison in outtz and then in buenos calvo including tango love songs Waltes even an opera in two parts, even more AST ising, he composed most of them at night, by candlelight, in this small room that the Nazis diabolically called a pathology laboratory, where during the day bodies were dismembered, other prisoners had secured space for kinsky so he could have a quiet place to compose this is where he worked this is a pathology room where corpses were mounted and he wrote music yes paper was in short supply so kinsky wrote music in articles like this Nazi application form stolen because there was clean paper on the other side and my father could write notes What is the name of this piece? the spirits of his fellow prisoners his music really touched hearts and was very positive it was important that the prisoners could hear something else at this time something moving so that they could go back in their memory to the old times and feel encouraged in April 1945 as The allies approached the banal, the camp was evacuated and the inmates were forced to embark on a death march.

Kinsky was able to smuggle his violin and hundreds of pieces of music, some hidden in her violin case and others in the secret pocket of his coat, but only 117 survive today. In March he sacrificed the rest to light a fire for his fellow prisoners. Are you saying that your father took paper on which he had written compositions and used it to light a fire to warm people and save their lives? Yes, not just his life but lives. from others Fresco Loro says that Kinsky, like so many other musicians, has not received the recognition he deserves. He was a man who obviously suffered a lot in the camps but made himself available to others by creating music.

He was a man who should be understood not only as a musician but as someone who created solidarity created Unison in the camps when you first had contact with Franchesco Loro Franchesco Loro called me and told me that he heard about my father that he heard about his mission about his music I couldn't believe me, so I immediately wanted to meet him. We wanted to see what one of Lor's retrieval missions was like in practice, so we went with him to the medieval town of Kakou, one of the oldest towns in southern Poland, to meet Kristoff.kulevich Krist oh Francesco, did you?

Are you back on Kristoff? He is the son of Alexander Kulevich, a Pole imprisoned by the Gestapo for anti-fascist writings and deported to the Saxony concentration camp in 1939. You see, this is, for example, the original for more than 5 years of imprisonment. He became a kind of field worker who helped prisoners cope with their hunger and despair and performed songs like this at secret meetings, but he not only composed and sang, he also used his extraordinary powers of memory to memorize hundreds of songs. of other prisoners that he dictated to them. a nurse after the war so they could be recorded What was happening inside. the camp he always said I'm living for those who died can't s can't speak for I can it sounds like music is a way to find just a portion of humanity's dignity all these horrible things exactly this this is what my father used I mean, the dignity portion, he said, as long as you can sing and compose and have it in your mind and the SS officer doesn't know what you have in your mind you are free, what was it? like for you the first time you heard your father's work as out of the Shadows by Franchesco Loro and you interpreted what that was like because it was incredible, it was incredible because I never thought it would come to life again and now it was like My Father's Voice returns as real music again, so I met him living for me again.

Voldemar Krinsky can relate to the joy of finally hearing his father's music performed. It was a very personal feeling even today, although I know these pieces. I come back and listen to them often and every time I listen to them I cry. To date Franchesco Loro has arranged and recorded 400 works composed in the camps, including those by Alexander Kulevich and Joseph Kinsky in this piece by a Jewish musician in Terán this spring Loro will perform some of them in a concert on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the liberation of the camps what happens in the C is more than an artistic phenomenon we have to think of this music as a last testament we have to interpret this music as bomman maler Schuman this musician to I just wanted a wish that this music could be performed.

Loro is building what he calls a citadel in his hometown of Barleta, thanks to a grant from the Italian government. In February he plans to begin construction of a studio campus at this abandoned distillery. of concentration music will include a library, a museum, a theater and will house more than 10,000 items that Loro has collected the true beneficiaries of this music are not us who are researching it nor this generation the generation that will benefit from it that will enjoy this music is the generation of those who will come in 30 or 40 years it is an operation completely for the future he continues to raise funds from the public and hopes to complete the project in 4 years you have described what you are doing as a mitzvah, this Jewish term for good action.

I think a lot of people would say that what you're doing goes way beyond a good deed. I don't know, maybe I'll be doing something good when I complete this research we'll talk about. repeat it and then we'll see if we really did anything more than good for now. I only see all this as expensive, difficult at times, discouraging, but you have to do it to the end, like a musician who benefits from Word. of Mouth Franchesco Loro and his remarkable work are beginning to build a fan base around the world. Just last month he performed in Toronto, Jerusalem and at this concert hall in Sal Paulo, Brazil, and that's where we end our story tonight as Franchesco Loro brings the music to life. he has rescued this is a story of survival the incredible story of how a six-year-old Jewish boy survived the Nazis' final solution and kept how he survived a secret for more than 50 years is the story of Alex Keram who at the age of six saw his family shot by the Nazis, he escaped and wandered alone for months until he was captured by Nazi soldiers, but instead of killing him they made him their pet, that's right, the Jewish boy's pet for the Nazis Alex was so young who quickly forgot about his family.

He names his age and the name of his town, but he did remember that the Nazis had surrounded the Jews in a ghetto and on his last night there, Nazi soldiers broke into his house and began to hit his mother. I remember when she protected me and her blood was dripping. I felt my face and there was blood on my head, it was my mother's blood, the one you were hiding under your skirt, you know, with three of us, I had a little brother and sister and she was protecting us, like she could protect them. the soldiers hit but not their bullets and he told Alex that the next day they would all be shot that night my mother took me in her arms and said tomorrow we will have to die and I saw myself I don't want to die, I will have to try to escape, so That night, crawling through the grass, he sneaked past the Nazi soldiers and climbed to the top of a hill and hid in a forest overlooking the town and when dawn came I heard a lot of commotion and noise.

Below, when I looked down, I saw soldiers lining up people and shooting them in a big pit and then I saw my mother with my brother and sister also LED. You saw your mother, your brother and your sister all being led to the well. Hate I want to ask you this, but did you see your mother get shot? Yes, I saw it all lined up and you still see it today. Yes, that is very visible in my head all the time. Records say the Nazis massacred more than 1,600 people there on October 21, 1941. A Nazi record shows that a Nazi battalion took in Alex on July 12, 1942.

The intervening months are a mystery. Alex says that all he remembers is that he was wandering alone, cold and hungry in the woods. He took a winter coat off a dead soldier to prevent him from freezing. death and slept in empty sheds and in trees tying himself to marks why did you decide to sleep in the trees I heard wolves in the distance and I knew that if the wolves found me sleeping on the ground they would most likely eat me like that I was scared of that, like that that the only way to survive was to climb a tree and beg for food on farms until one day I knocked on the wrong door and the man told me: "you're Jewish, you shouldn't be alive, you should be dead." With the others I will take you to be shot and he took you to be shot he took me he dragged me to the school yard where they were lining up people and shooting them and hey the soldier who is close to me I told him please kill me before you do? could you give me some bread?

Ola I was thinking I'm hungry. I wish I could get some bread before I die. The soldier who gave you bread. Yeah, then he took you around the school to the school and said he wanted to see if you're Jewish that's right so he made you pull down your pants that's it and he saw that you were Jewish and he said no good no good no good that's it he kept saying no good no good no good I understand that he put a gun to his head to show you what was going to happen if they found out you were Jewish, but then he says that the soldier took pity on the boy, not only did he give bread to Alex, but he gave him his life , told me. he said what I will do, I will tell the other soldiers that you, Russian orphan, the soldiers gave me a new name and a new birthday and that's how I became the mask of this particular division's charm once the soldier convinced me. his unit to turn Alex into a Nazi got his own telecompanion SS uniforms his own miniature pistol and his own rank corporal the youngest corporal in the Nazi army then all dressed up this little Jewish boy left with his Nazi division they went to killing Jews Sometimes I get to a town where we have been patrolling and you see people lined up to be shot in groups, then you get to another place and you see 20 or 30 people lined up to be hanged and you see people shot that way.

Did it bring back memories of your mother? Yes, I turned my head many times because I thought you might as well have been one of them and that's what happened to your whole family where you live later in the war when the Russians counterattacked. and the fighting became too intense for him to stay with the soldiers, the Nazis gave Alex a new family and placed him with a prominent Nazi family in Ria lvia during the summers, when he was seven and eight years old. Alex and his adoptive family laan spent the weekends. One weekend on a beach near Ria, the Germans made a propaganda film right here, starring Alex, the youngest corporal in the Nazi army, a role model for the master race,a role model that the Germans did not know was Jewish.

Did you feel strange because here? The Nazis were making a movie about you and you were Jewish? I know it all the time. I felt like something was wrong somewhere. How am I a star when I'm in the hated race? He lived in fear every day, the soldiers said. and later his Foster family would discover that he was Jewish. He had to be aware that every moment no matter where he was. Beach bedroom bathroom. Every moment I had to think that I am here under false pretenses if they discover that I am gone. How did it feel to live under false pretenses 24 hours a day?

Well, very stressful, very, very stressful. What do you think would have happened if they had found out you were Jewish? Oh, I don't think so, there was no doubt you would have been shot. No. I doubt that after the war he emigrated to Australia, married and had his own family, but he still kept his secrets and did not tell his wife or children that he had spent the war with the Nazis or that he was Jewish. He kept those secrets for More than 50 years before he felt compelled to answer the questions that had haunted him since the war, before he died he should know who I am and I also always wanted to go back to the village and put a flower on my mother's grave. . but this would not be easy, an orphan at six years old, he remembered the trauma but he had long forgotten his true identity, he did not know his name or his date of birth or the name of his town or where it could be, the only clue he had for anything was a word that had stuck in his mind for all those years, a word he remembered, but had no idea what it meant.

Yeah, for a moment I thought it might be my name or something, but that's what he remembered. I know his son perfectly. Mark made a documentary about his father's quest for history, searching for months in dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases until a historian finally discovered that kinof had been the former name of a town in Billow Russia on the outskirts of Minsk. With that breakthrough, he then found a half-brother. He didn't know it existed and when he returned to Quiden, that's right, he found his old house still standing. An apple tree and an apple tree he used to climb.

This clicks everything. I told. Not this click, I couldn't. believe it you couldn't believe it you couldn't believe it and then you found out your name your name yes we found out that my name was Ilia solomonovich Garin this half brother gave him a photo of his father who had died 20 years before the similarity For Alex it is surprising Alex thought that his father he had been killed during the war, but he had actually been taken to a concentration camp and survived when his father returned to his village and heard that his wife and all his children, including Alex, had been killed, so father. and his son had thought the other was dead.

I would have liked to meet him, you know, after he came back from the concentration camps and tell him that he had a son who survived the war, but it didn't turn out that way. H in cenov Alex fulfilled his other lifelong wish: he placed flowers on his mother's grave in a memorial to the 1,600 Jews murdered here by the Nazis in 1941. It's my family and everyone, all my relatives, who were a number pretty big. I assume you know everyone. Alex welcomed us. the hill where he had hidden behind trees that no longer exist while watching his mother and hundreds of people being killed below, he told us that he bit his hand to keep from screaming and that he fainted several times from the views and Los screams and the pain in me, the shooting lasted all day, all day and uh, I knew I couldn't do anything about it, but it wasn't very nice to see either, so I took a look and then I turned my head and cried and used to feeling guilty for having survived, but now he feels relieved to be able to tell his story.

The Jewish Claims Conference has verified it and his son wrote a book about it. Still, the past is not a happy place for Alex, but he went there and he came back having found his name, his town and his mother's grave, but did you ever find out what your birthday is? No, I never knew it, but every morning I wake up, I wish myself a happy birthday and one day I will be lucky, so I hope you get a gift every day. It's not a gift. A gift that I can see the sun. A gift that you can see the sun.

Yes. Two years ago, German authorities carrying out a routine tax investigation stumbled upon the largest treasure. of art missing since the end of World War II The huge collection just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of works of art still missing was discovered in a Munich apartment owned by Cornelius Guret, the reclusive 81-year-old son of one of Hitler's favorite art dealers. most of it was art looted from museums and Jewish collections for the Germans. It was an unpleasant reminder of a bitter story for the victims. Perhaps it is a last chance to recover a small vestige of family history.

The discovery also sparked a legal battle. about who really owns that art, did you have any idea he had so many paintings in that apartment? I tell you what no one really had any idea about this, how can you live with 1,400 paintings in a 90 square meter apartment? maybe he's 100 or 150, but once we were all surprised, you know, Ard Gett is Cornelius's cousin, a rather extravagant photographer who now lives in Barcelona, ​​his friends were his paintings, right and for the last few For 60 years he lived with his paintings, this was his idea of ​​life. I know about the 14400 1.46, you have it down to the last one.

I mean, it's different if you have 1,400 Picassos or you have 1. ,46 Picasso was just the beginning Cornelius gett secret horde of art art included modern masters like matis shagal France Mark and auto dicks gett The little world fell apart in 2010 almost by accident while traveling back from Switzerland to Germany a customs inspection put him under suspicion and triggered a tax investigation that would be his downfall. They had caught him on a train with 9,000 in cash in his pocket which made him suspicious so they tried to search for him in his files and they couldn't find him the man didn't seem to exist he wasn't registered he didn't pay taxes he didn't receive any benefits so the man just wasn't there V CTE is a lawyer who specializes in tracking down stolen art.

I can imagine the conclusions they drew when they saw it. this old man surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of works of art something very suspicious is going on and maybe he is a secret art dealer maybe he is involved in some smuggling activities there must be huge amounts of money at stake it was February 28, 2012 when As German customs police officers raided an apartment on the fifth floor of this nondescript Munich building, it's fair to say they were shocked by what they found. 1,400 works of art, some of them valued in millions. They also found Cornelius Guret, 80, a virtual hermit.

He said the only friends he had in this world were his art, art thought to be worth more than a billion dollars, art piled up in shells, much of it was art that the Nazis declared degenerate, it was art taken from the walls of Jewish-owned museums and galleries. and collectors, all acquired by hilderbrand guret cornelius, his father, was a prominent art dealer chosen by hitler to sell art to clients abroad for a difficult price. Much of it appeared in a 1937 exhibition of degenerate art in which Hitler wanted to show the Germans what he considered. like the decadence and depravity of modern avant-garde art, art historian Vanessa evoked an art specialist of that era who was called by the police during the raid.

I saw Cornelius schooner there. um, he is a man who is sick, he was um afraid and he didn't do it. He didn't speak. Cornelius stood stunned as the agents searched his apartment. Did he say anything to you or to government agents? No, he was really shocked by this situation. I think there were no people in this apartment for many years. I think maybe there was an art dealer um but no one else seemed to be sane yeah, it was his cousin says that after Cornelius's father died he never allowed anyone into the apartment or his ruined house in Salsburg, Austria, where He kept a collection of 238 works of art of immense value like this painting by Monet, he gave him the entire collection of these paintings as an inheritance right to survive, so every time Cornelius ran out of money, he sold one of these paintings that it was almost overlooked among the cash. it was a small drawing of a pianist by the German romantic Carl Spitz it is one of it is a drawing Martha Henriksson has spent most of her life trying to track down the Nazis she had confiscated it from her grandfather Henry Henriksson along with his entire art collection before the collection of girls was discovered, if you had practically given up hope, I was absolutely stunned.

Not expecting anything like that during the raid, agents found Gurt's father's records from 1940 that revealed details of a sale of four works she once owned. grandfather the sale was actually a robbery by other means henrix had never received the money in 1942 he was legally gassed in aitz it was a sale morally and ethically is another question but it was a sale in which the seller had no other option exactly another Grill painting that had Max Liberman's It Was Two Horsemen on the Beach now valued at over a million dollars. They stopped us. David Torren is now 88 years old and left Germany blind on a Kinder transport days before the war began.

He last saw the painting at his uncle's house in Breslo recently. Before the Nazis arrested his father, both parents were killed in Aitz, two guys from Gapo came and we have instructions to take you to the Gapo headquarters that day. I remember every little detail. He was sitting in a room in the Winter Garden. and I looked at the photo and that was the last time I saw that photo. T had been looking for any trace of his family's art collection but all he found was a 1939 Nazi inventory that mentions the Liman painting. The letter says that the action to confiscate Jewish-owned art has been very successful, but there are still some rich shoes left and the first example it mentions is my uncle and the letter ends with I warned the Jew David Fredman not to get rid of any of them. art objects until we returned after the war.

The Allied Art Recovery Unit Monuments Men found and returned millions of works of art. They also found Hilderbrand Guret hiding in this Bavarian castle owned by a local Nazi party leader. Inside were hundreds of treasures that Hilderbrand and his young son Cornelius had hidden, apparently many more were hidden. in hideouts all over Germany The Monument Men took some of his paintings but let him keep most of his collection, didn't they? It is an unsolved mystery. I think to this day he was able to produce story after story about how he had acquired these before the war and for reasons I struggle to understand if he got away with it, among the works of art in that castle was the painting of David Torrin.

Hilder Brad Glick told The Monuments Men that it was a gift from his parents before the war and that painting like most others was returned to him. Did he feel guilty for working for the Nazis? I'm sorry, but he had to survive, so what would you do? I mean, this is just a thing, what what would you do, but it was? He is as innocent as he claimed that most of these works of art were stolen. I think they were confiscated from Jewish families or stolen. Yes, Hanes Haron and Tito Park, two lawyers who represented Celus Guret say that the sins of the father should not be visited on the sun.

Philip and G. was not completely innocent, that's for sure, now there are cases, we will treat them fairly because, according to German law, morality has nothing to say, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry to tell you that German law is a a law that hasn't been made for the horrible outcome of the Third Reich and everything that happened, so what we're talking about now is morality and how to deal with moral responsibility. German law sets a 30-year statute of limitations for non-stolen property. the works by law remain the property of Cornelius Guret as for the art itself the authorities do not explain why they kept the discovery a secret for almost 2 years how strong is the government's criminal case against him they really do not have a strong case they claim to have a case because, of course, they have to justify the seizure of the entire collection by the SE.

Right now, the collection is in the hands of a working group that is examining each work for evidence of looting. Ing. Berren Merkel heads the Uve Hartman working group. is the lead researcher, he says, even when Germany was collapsing in 1945, the Nazis diligently recorded art thefts, why did they keep these records of the evidence of their own crimes? They should throw away public documents, that's what they learned, That's what they did, that's what they did. uh, the German gr kite, it is your duty, yes, they were not allowed on the last day, the task force is initially examining 590 works aspotentially looted from Jews, starting with this nuance that was looted from Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1941 beyond the minutiae of legality there is a broader issue that is the moral question 80 years after Hitler took control 75 years later that the synagogues were burned in Germany, yes, we know that this is the moral obligation and we take it seriously, very seriously, on the other side are the laws, so you are not making judgments, no, we are not a court, we cannot , we must, but you can still recommend, Mr.

G told me when I spoke to him, what they have taken, what they have been stolen, his words must be returned. Cornelius Guret, who is recovering. After a tough operation, he says that the collection is his by right and that his father did nothing wrong, but he says that he is willing to negotiate. What many people might ask is that there is nothing to negotiate here. These paintings belong to German museums and should return. to German museums or to Jews who had collections and were forced to sell them. Mr. Gett is absolutely willing to find fair solutions, but what we need, of course, is clear evidence because we have some letters addressed to Mr.

Git that say, "Look, my grandmother had a painting 70 years ago uh in her living room There is no evidence whatsoever regarding Martha Henriksson, she filed a complaint with the task force, but there is little confidence that she will ever see her grandfather's drawing. Honestly, I don't believe in my life because I think this is going to happen. be a very long battle. IUS Guret is close to reaching an agreement with the German authorities. He agreed to hand over the paintings that were proven to have been stolen and will keep the rest. The horrors of the Holocaust faced various forms of resistance.

They fought back. By smuggling food and weapons into the Jewish ghettos tonight we will tell you about a very different type of resistance group nicknamed The Paper Brigade, composed mostly of writers and intellectuals living in what is now the capital of Lithuania, Vilnus. Members risk death smuggling books of artwork and rare objects. manuscripts hidden in underground bunkers today 80 years after the Paper Brigade fought against cultural genocide their heroic acts are still unfolding there is an active search and rescue mission underway in Vilnus where treasures of hidden material discovered and recovered continue to be discovered my intention is not to take it and take it and take it somewhere it's to open it so that the public can see it publish it and publish it to the world Jonathan Brent is the executive director of yes, a New York-based institute that houses 24 million Jewish cultural objects last spring we met him at Vilus, where the Yeo Institute originated in 1925 and where part of its collection has been missing since World War II.

We watched as Brent examined documents in a storage closet at the National Library of Lithuania. This is very A very active investigation, yes, this story has not ended under the hill of Three Crosses. Vilnus carries his story with Gracia, but her beauty masks a dark chapter. Today, the city is mostly Catholic, but before World War II, Vilas was almost half Jewish and an imam. While artists, musicians, poets, and playwrights throughout Eastern Europe wrote primarily in Yiddish, the German Hebrew dialect of Eastern European Jews, most people in the United States know nothing of the great flowering of Jewish culture that took place. place in this city in the summer of 1941.

The Germans invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Lithuania. Many of the local citizens collaborated with the Nazis and within six months, 50,000 of the 70,000 Jewish villains were murdered. One of the worst massacres during the Holocaust. Between 90 and 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered. brutally cruel, sadistic, not common in the camps I believe, shot dead, horrible, the Nazis were also determined to extinguish Jewish culture and in Vilas there was no place more central to Jewish culture than Yeo, the Scientific Institute Yiddish, a kind of Smithsonian that is part museum, part library, part university. His archive was as varied as huge Sigman Freud and Albert Einstein sat on the original board of yeo Mark Shagal, who painted the synagogues of vas, opened his artwing.

It strikes me that someone had an unhappy present feeling about all of this, that you are creating this collection and capturing this story. just before other people try to erase it yeah, yeah, well, the Jews have had quite a bit of history that prepared them for that eventuality after the Germans invaded Vilnus, a special squad of Nazis took over Yeo's headquarters for the purpose of loot art in rare books. and burning everything else, but the Nazis needed help assessing what was valuable, so they gathered 40 Jewish writers and artists, mockingly nicknamed The Paper Brigade, to sort through room after room that housed Yeo's collection, but La Paper Brigade had other ideas and they left aside the most important manuscripts. and art, including this Picasso sketch, and organized a smuggling operation back to the ghetto.

Homemade diapers sewn into his pants hid Nazi G Y contraband. They had 10 hiding places, the largest was under this house, 60 feet deep and could only be accessed through a sewer. tunnel you have said that some people resisted by taking weapons or smuggling food or medical supplies and this was a form of resistance also because they knew that if they were not going to survive the Jewish people would have their culture again to remember. she is the granddaughter of aam sug an avant-garde poet in Vilas in the 1930s during the war she became one of the leaders of the Paper Brigade it was a nickname for the Paper Brigade people in the ghetto laughed at them oh you , paper smuggler, smuggles the food we need food what was the answer to that we must understand that poetry, literature and culture were part of her Alma Ceron grew up listening to her grandfather's War Stories so we invited her to meet with We in Vilas from his home in Israel retraced the suit donor's smuggling route and he told us about the night his grandfather narrowly escaped the Nazi guard at the gate of the Jewish ghetto, they knocked him down and his papers came out. and he took the guard's gun and said, "You can't carry anything." In all she says she told the guard that the papers were necessary for lighting and she let him enter between the suits.

Giver hid the original writings of Sholom Alim known as The Mark Twain of Eastern Europe, whose stories inspired Fiddler on the Roof In 1944, the Soviets liberated Lithuania and reclaimed the country as part of the Soviet Union. Only eight of the 40 members of the Paper Brigade had survived the war. This is an amazing picture of them coming back to see what he can do. We saved, armed with a homemade wheelbarrow and shovels, they unearthed the treasures from their hiding places. Your grandfather took a big risk doing this. Did he ever talk to you about whether it was worth it or not?

He felt that if he survived, then a mission to be the liberator of the dead for the stories for the cultural, so that's the goal of living, but now that the Soviets control Lithuania, Jewish life came under attack again. Everything the Paper Brigade risked their lives to protect was in danger for the second time. These Treasures that connected you today to the past of 700 years ago gave you a sense of your own history and its value and importance and the Soviets desperately wanted to destroy that and make you a Soviet citizen, another form of eraser, yes, absolutely.

Aam Suits Giver and others began a second secret operation, filling their suitcases with books and recruiting cers who redirected materials to Yeo in New York City, where the Institute had moved during the war. The rest of the material was assumed destroyed, but Antonus Opulus, a brave Catholic librarian. he took the C in vilus risking his own life Opus hid everything that was left in this empty Catholic church, but for almost 50 years the remains of Vas's Jewish life disappeared and the city's Jewish past was not discussed. Vilnus University professor Mowas Vusus grew up Catholic and became Lithuania's minister of culture.

My knowledge of Jewish history, culture and the Holocaust was very vague when I was a teenager. They didn't teach you about the Holocaust in school. No no. I had to discover this legacy for myself. He was 17 years old when he finally got the chance. about faded Yiddish inscriptions in the old part of the city As his curiosity grew, he studied Yiddish and says he became intoxicated by the culture it encompassed. Yish literature for me is this nexus of poetry of beauty and human destinies. It is full of voices of Victim survivors and also of heroes who tried to rescue this culture, this community against the evil of totalitarianism.

Whispers were heard in vnus of a hidden literary bounty, but it was not until the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s that Jewish culture was able to emerge. From his hiding place, Kusus was invited to enter the 18th century Catholic church, where Opus, the brave librarian, had hidden the books. Over the years, Opus had created a book sanctuary with literary works rescued and hidden from the floor to ceiling of the Red Army under the church's dusty baroque arches. now empty and awaiting renovation, but we asked KET Kowski to take us there, oh wow, and show us where the books were hidden underground in the confessional, even in the 18th century orgone bellows.

I'm just trying to imagine you walking towards this unexplored place. book Palace some of those books had blood stains some of them had inscriptions made by readers who were probably murdered today these books are slowly bringing Legacy back to life, so says Jonathan Brent, who became director of yeo in 2009 , the materials Yeo had collected represented a body of materials that, if removed, would leave an absence that could never be filled and lead to total cultural deprivation for those Jews who could survive the literary equivalent of Easter eggs, the salvaged artifacts continue to appear in Lithuania, that's all It triggered a well-known custody battle.

The Lithuanians advocated that the treasure remain in Lithuania. Yeo executives insisted that the material be reunited with his collection in New York, fearing that the documents would continue to deteriorate. Brent's broker reached an agreement. Yeo would fund preservation now and iron out ownership details. Later, these are fragments of books that were extracted from the burned rubble of the Yeo building, brought here to New York, preserved in these boxes, the director of Yeo archives in New York, Stephanie Halper, has just completed a 7-year project. years and $7 million to oversee cataloging. and digitizing the entire Paper Brigade collection, do we know if The Paper Brigade preserved this thing they made and these are the surviving pages?

It is not the complete manuscript, we only have about a dozen pages, as new works are discovered, voices from a century ago. are Amplified consider the works of aam suger, who now, years after his death, is coming to be appreciated as a towering poet of the 20th century. His 1946 memoir was published in English last year. It is being learned in many universities, not only in Lithuania, but also in the United States. and in Canada, China and Japan, Lithuania is now home to only 4,000 Jews, but it is thanks to the continuing discoveries of the Paper Brigade that the country is beginning to reckon with Nazi atrocities and its uncomfortable history, even in schools They are starting to teach. about how the Jews of Lithuania died and how they lived, do you know that the phrase CPR catches my attention?

You are really bringing her back to life. I hope so, but we still lack broader recognition in our society over the course of the last 20 years. Society has become more open to different versions of its own past and, in the process, Lithuanians have begun to learn how an unlikely group of resistance fighters, both Jewish and Catholic, took maximum risk to ensure that the arts and the letters survived.