Charlie Scheidt & Kat Rohrer: Holocaust Descendants on Different Sides of History

Descripción

What happens when the son of a Holocaust survivor meets the granddaughter of a Nazi officer? In this powerful episode of TO BE CONTINUED... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, host Rabbi Jeff Salkin sits down with Charlie Scheidt and Kat Rohrer, co-authors of Inheritance: Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust [https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/inheritance/9781978846746]. Charlie grew up in a German Jewish household on New York's Upper West Side, surrounded by family members who had fled Nazi Germany, and a silence about the past that was deafening. When his mother died in 1988, she left behind an armoire filled with nearly a thousand documents: letters, visas, identity papers, and more. It would take Charlie twenty years before he could bring himself to open them. Kat is an award-winning Austrian filmmaker and the granddaughter of a devoted Nazi officer. Haunted by her family's role in one of history's darkest chapters, she had spent years grappling with what it means to carry that legacy. When they met, an extraordinary partnership was born. Over fifteen years, four trips to Europe, and hundreds of conversations, they pieced together a story of loss, memory, and unexpected connection. Together, they reflect on the silence that shaped them, the documents and discoveries that changed them, and why they believe that breaking that silence is the only way to ensure the oppressors don't own the story. TRANSCRIPT: This episode of our podcast is generously sponsored by Irene and David Beyth, in memory of David's parents, Hannah and Werner Beyth, who were both fortunate to escape Nazi Germany before the war. Let us start with a German lesson. The word is Erbe. It means both inheritance and legacy. Today's guests have spent more than a decade sitting with that word. One of them grew up in a German Jewish household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, surrounded by relatives who had fled Nazi Germany in a family where the unspoken motto was "Forward, never back." The other grew up in postwar Austria. The granddaughter of a man who volunteered for the Wehrmacht, Hitler's united armed forces of Nazi Germany, and a family that kept its silence about what that meant and why. And yet remarkably these two people found each other. They traveled together through Germany, France, Austria, and the Netherlands on a joint journey of discovery and empathy. The result is a book called Inheritance - Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, a memoir unlike almost any other in the crowded literature of Holocaust memory because it is written across the deepest moral divide of the 20th century, between the descendants of victims and the descendants of perpetrators. Welcome to this podcast, To Be Continued... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I am your host Rabbi Jeff Salkin, and our guests are Charlie Scheidt, born in New York City, the son of German Jewish refugees. His father Bruno fled Frankfurt in 1933. His mother Sous followed, as did many other close family members. But unfortunately others did not and became trapped in the Nazi Weis in Germany, Holland, and France. And when Charlie's mother died in 1988, she left behind an armoire containing nearly a thousand documents, letters, visas, identity papers, a baby's autopsy report...that Charlie could not bring himself to absorb and deal with for 20 years. Kat Rohrer is an award-winning Austrian filmmaker whose films include "Back to the Fatherland," a documentary about Israelis living in Germany. Her maternal grandfather was a devout Nazi officer, a true believer who died fighting in Yugoslavia before her mother was born. Her family, her mother, her grandmother, her great aunt -- who by the way married a Jew and escaped to Australia -- did not speak of him. Charlie and Kat met almost by accident when Kat was filming the 75th anniversary of Charlie's company, Roland Foods. He noticed she spoke German. A few months later he asked if she might help him translate some papers. She said yes because, as she told him, she had a personal interest in that period of history. It would be some time before he understood what that meant. Eventually she sent him an email. It was time she said that he knew her story. She told him that she had been haunted all her life by the same patch of ash that haunted his family. What followed was 15 years of research, four trips to Europe, hundreds of conversations with strangers who turned out to be guardians of forgotten memory and a book that refuses easy comfort, tidy conclusions, or the warm illusion that history is over. Today they are here to talk about all of it. Charlie and Kat welcome. It's good to have you here. Both of you grew up in families where the war was present but almost never spoken of. Charlie, in a German Jewish home in New York; Kat, in post-war Austria. What did that silence sound like? What did it teach you even when nothing was being said? This silence was pervasive. It was, the past was a taboo subject. And as you said, it was a matter of constantly looking forward. That generation and my parents and the people I grew up around were focused on creating a new life and thinking back and living in the past was painful to them. And they tried by being silent to spare me from the knowledge and the horrors of what they had witnessed and what the family had lived through. It was a way of protecting the next generation, but frankly it didn't work because the anxiety was so pervasive and the sense that the subject was a taboo was something I could not avoid and that affected the relationships in the family. And I was aware of something strange in some of the relationships so that the silence didn't work. And to grow up around the silence does not solve the issue of the past and is frankly one of the reasons for the spoke to break open that silence. What's it like for you Kat? It's a different kind of silence because my family did talk about what my grandfather was and that he volunteered and that he was a devout Nazi. So I can't tell you a time where I didn't know this fact. What we didn't talk about is him as a person because in actuality my grandmother died when I was three so I couldn't ask her. My great aunt who became my de facto grandmother, who had fled to Australia. I was too young to ask her questions about why she came back in the summers to Austria to a society that didn't want her, that she had to flee. So that I don't know, and that was just because she had passed away when I was old enough to ask. But the minute I asked about why my great aunt was living in Austria my mom told me why. So it was less of a silence. It was more of a we know this is a fact but we don't need to know more. And because I'm a third generation I have the benefit of time and being more removed. I started to ask questions, you know, what my grandfather had done and where he had been. Charlie you don't have to be silent anymore, luckily. And I want this to make sense to our listeners. So could you give us a brief synopsis of your family's Holocaust experience? The Holocaust experience is in several countries. So let's start with Germany where much of the family left but part of the family did not and he in fact was injured in the First World War and for the longest time thought they would be safe. Unfortunately that did not turn out to be true. Then we had family in Holland. There again Holland had been neutral in World War I and many people in Holland not just Jews thought that they would be safe in World War II as a neutral party and that turned out not to be true. And then we had family in France. France, of course, there was the fake war. There's a French expression, but in the Droit des Gares, there was a period from the declaration of war in September 1939 until the Blitzkrieg in April that people could have the illusion that this too would pass and unfortunately it did not. And of course we ended up with family in Vichy France in the southern France. And that's a difficult story. So it's really a story in those three countries and how people coped and tried to save themselves and hoped for the best. And for some unfortunately what actually did happen. Let's talk about a piece of furniture. A week before your mother died in 1988 she told you about the papers in the armoire. She had kept those papers hidden for decades and then at the very end she told you where they were. What was she saying to you? What was she giving you permission to do and why do you think she kept them hidden for more than 50 years? My parents, like so much of that generation and as we said before, simply looked forward. The past was scary, was upsetting and creating a life in a new country is not easy. It's not easy for any refugee or immigrant. So they worked very hard. They tried very hard to give me everything they possibly could in terms of education and a good solid life. So that's the ethos that they embraced and I was the beneficiary of. But by the time my mother was later, in her later years, and so ill in those final years, a couple of years, she must have come to the conclusion that the time had come for me to what that history really was. She didn't have the time or the energy to really dissect it all and tell me everything. But she wanted me to know that she had hidden all those documents and that she had saved them and she encouraged me to look at them and then decide what I wanted to do with them. In a sense, she bequeathed them to me. Kat, your mother was born after her father was killed in Yugoslavia and like Charlie's family, she didn't want to linger in the past. But there's a difference between not talking about it and not being affected by it. Those are two very different things. When did you first find out about your grandfather? Who told you? And what happened inside you when you learned? Honestly, I can't remember. I think there's not a time that I remember growing up that I didn't know. The reason, I imagined, I asked that question pretty early was because my great aunt who had immigrated to or had fled to Australia came every summer to take care of me, because my mom was a single mom, and was working. So I guess, at one point, I asked why she wasn't living in Austria and my mom told me. And then, obviously in school, when you go through the history, it all started to be pieced together. I think when I was first affected or really started in my adult life, [to] grapple with it was when I moved to New York. When I moved to New York and I had a colleague in university that was Israeli and we had a conversation. We're talking about Austria and he was saying he made a joke and said he didn't mean it as a joke. I didn't find it particularly funny. He said, "Your grandparents killed my grandparents." And I swallowed and I took a deep breath and for a long time I didn't want to introduce myself as being from Austria. Because it was hard to admit that. But with years and with me learning more about the history and also learning more about my family history and with Charlie's project and with making the movie, I became more forward and just telling the story because there's no point in hiding it. Charlie, you asked Kat to help you translate documents. You knew she was Austrian. You knew she was a filmmaker. You knew that she spoke German, but you didn't know her full story yet. So when she finally sent you that email telling you that she had been haunted by the same patch of ash, what did that moment do to you? What did it mean to you? She really asked the question how that would affect my willingness to work with her. And I simply answered that we don't know what we will find in the papers that I had inherited. Who knows what's there? And in fact, how will that affect anything? Because she is who she is and I am who I am. And each of us is responsible for ourselves. And I believe I even said the sins of the father or grandfather in her case are not her sins. So for me, it was a matter of starting to work together, getting to know each other better and getting to appreciate each other. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't work, well, then we'll go on with our lives. Fortunately, it did work. I guess I'd say, 15 years down the road, I think it works. Yes. Yes. And in a way, it's a deep friendship partially because of those differences and an appreciation, which I also gained, of what it means to be in her position. You know, you have to deal with a certain reality that I don't have to deal with. I think by naming the teaching that the sins of the parents do not fall upon the children, which is from the book of Ezekiel, you're actually naming one of the great internal reforms of the Hebrew Bible, which is that rather than visiting the sins of the parents upon the third and fourth generation, that this doesn't exist anymore. And it's how we are able to move forward. So the question is, this is a collaboration between the child of victims and the grandchild of a perpetrator. This is not a symmetrical relationship, I think it would be wrong to pretend that it is. So how did you navigate that asymmetry? Were there moments when it felt impossible to stand on equal ground? To finding out the truth, to finding out history, and to learning from history, and understanding the reality of what past generations have gone through, what they have dealt with, how they have dealt with the realities, and what that teaches us in terms of what we do with our lives. I mean, there's so many other aspects of us potentially not being on equal ground. I mean, Charlie is older. I'm younger, he's an accomplished businessman. I was just starting out with my business. So there's many, many other things. I think that history, despite it being that family history, despite it being very different, it's the lingering grasp this history has on our lives in a way, or be very, very different. That actually puts us on equal footing because I understand where Charlie is coming from. Another person may not have understood it as well. So I think in that respect, we were very complimentary to each other and with each other. And we had conversations that were very important for both of us, but also expanded our horizons when it comes to understanding. For me to understand Charlie or Charlie understanding me, and together understanding history. This is such an interesting relationship to me. To our viewers and listeners, how does each of your pasts help you understand the other? And were there moments when your opposite inheritance has actually clarified something that neither of you could have seen on your own? I think the perspectives, I mean, more important than being from different sides is that we're from two different generations. Charlie, because he knew his parents and he grew up with them and was so adamant about looking forward because that's what he had been taught, was in occasions afraid to ask questions. Me being the third generation being removed, not having a relationship with my grandparents because they were both dead, and having had a very open discussion with my mother and seeing some of the not wanting to look back, but forward for a different reason, but the same mechanisms allowed me to know how to approach certain subject matters with Charlie and to maybe nudge him into looking in certain areas that he maybe didn't want to look into. Nudge is a gentle word, I would say push, but I was willingly pushed because what I realized over time, and you mentioned earlier, Jeff, that for 20 years I really could not deal with the inheritance. Now, I rationalized that by saying I was busy building and running a business, raising a family, living in the present, but I think emotionally what I realized in the course of working with Kat was that I was also protecting myself emotionally from the past and that the world in which I had grown up had taught me that, had taught me to do that, to live in the present, and that the time had come really for me emotionally to deal with it, to understand it, and to understand how it has affected the world in which I grew up. Kat, you were a very important part, really an integral companion, and something harder to name -- was any part of this work for you a way of trying to make amends, and if so, can amends actually be made across a divide this wide? I don't think I can make amends for something that happened 40 years before I was born that, you know, by someone I didn't even know. So I don't think amends, I can make amends for anything. And what I can do, and I think that is the responsibility for the descendants of the perpetrators, is to take responsibility, or in my case, help Charlie, you know, go on this journey with him and have this amazing experience of finding out about this family history and preserving it, because very often family histories are not preserved, and I could use my knowledge, I mean Charlie speaks perfect German, but you know, let's say my talents in an archive and my talents in, you know, looking for the needle in the haystack to help him find the answers that he was looking for. So I think that is making amends. No, it was helping along and, you know, taking ownership or responsibility for the history that my grandfather somehow was a part of. You stayed overnight at La Ricoquette, the house in Normandy, where your Uncle Max, Charlie, and Aunt Erna lived before Max was sent to an internment camp. You wrote that you felt you were inhabiting the present and the past simultaneously. What does that actually feel like? Can you take us into that house and into that moment? It was not only in that house that I had the experience. The very first time was quite by serendipity when we luckily were invited into, or convinced somebody to let us into an apartment in Germany that my maternal grandparents had lived in. And suddenly being in that space and imagining them in that space really changed the way we approached future trips. And you mentioned the experience in Normandy. That was living in the present, because here, and I'll just mention, for example, sitting in the garden, and it's a beautiful Sunday morning and enjoying it and appreciating it. And then at the same time remembering and hearing my aunt and uncle's letters that they had written from that backyard. And for example, imagining my uncle chasing his cat, his tomcat, I would like to climb a tree. So I was living in that past and appreciating it in a way by just being there. And it was quite an overwhelming feeling. And I think it enriched our experiences immensely. Now, Charlie, in terms of these journeys that you took, you also went to Paris with Kat to trace your family's footsteps. And you found the streets and the apartments where they had lived. But when you traveled to Paris with your parents when you were growing up as a child, they never took you to those neighborhoods. So what did it mean to walk those streets now without them and without ever having been taken there? The first thing that came to mind is, "Why didn't you take me here? What's going on? You took me to see some sights. You introduced me to a cafe and a croissant in Paris, but you didn't show me where you had lived and why?!" And I could think that it was, in a way, painful for them. They seemed to have been very happy there. They were newlyweds. They were living in Paris. For example, when my father loved Charlie Chaplin movies and when we came out of a place that they had lived, I looked to the side and there was the Chaplin Movie House. It still has that name on it. So I was sorry that they hadn't. And yet, I think it was part of that pattern of not going back because I'm sure their memories were very, very bittersweet because so many of the people... I mean, we did trace some of the people who were mentioned in correspondence and did not make it into the book, but did not survive. So a lot of people that they may not have been family, the memories and thinking back about them, I think was painful and they avoided it. Kat, there was a moment in Amsterdam when a teacher produced a book of research about Jewish students who had been expelled under Nazi occupation and inside it, you found a handwritten note by Charlie's cousin, Ellien. Take us back to that room. What happened there? We had planned the first day and we were going... back then it was our first trip, so we visited the outside of some of the apartments that the family had lived in. And the last on our list was to go to that school that Charlie's cousin went to. While we were driving there, I realized that wasn't very smart of us because the school was probably closed. So we went anyway, because we said something to check out for our list and see a plaque and see what it looked like from the outside. But when we were there, Charlie went to the entrance of the school and tried to pull the door, but the door was locked. But in the moment, I believe a teacher who was also, or maybe the headmistress, walked out and Charlie stopped her and said, "If we could enter and see the plaque that was there in commemoration of the Jewish students of that school," and she let us in and we told her the story and she said, "Well, you should really talk to this teacher named Ronald, because Ronald wrote a book about them." And Ronald wasn't supposed to be there at this time. It was afternoon the kids were gone. He was supposed to be home, but Ronald happened to be in the school at the time. So she went and got him and we talked to him and he showed us the book he had written and we thumbed through it and ended up on a page. And we both looked at this picture of this handwriting and it seemed oddly familiar. And we looked closer and the caption said that was by Ellien Lissauer, who had written this poem for a classmate and Ellien was Charlie's cousin. And so we asked him where he got this from and he said he got it from a classmate Betsy Vandermeer and Betsy actually was still alive. So thanks to Ronald, we were able to connect with Betsy and we met with her a year later. She was still alive and she showed us pictures and shared stories with us about Charlie's cousin. And that was one of those very, very many fortuitous coincidences that we experienced on these trips. And experiencing, I would just add, very helpful people which we constantly experienced in each country. I mean, you asked before about Normandy and it's amazing to have been invited to not only to see the house that my aunt and uncle had rented, but to sleep in that very same house. And they certainly didn't know a thing about us when they invited us to do so. The book is very honest, Charlie, about your favorite, Aunt Lilo, who miraculously survived Bergen-Belsen and the Ravensbruck concentration camps. Now, Charlie, you were born in 1943 and Lilo came to New York after the war and you were very close to her as a child. Did you actually feel her grief even before you could name it? And do you believe that you carry some portion of her trauma in your own body? Lilo was my favorite aunt. She was a warm, loving presence. And I think that began when she first came here after the war. And eventually, I would stay with her and her husband. And it was a very close connection and I always felt her pain. Her pain was so obvious, was so real. And there was a certain tension with other members of the family. And I always felt protective of her. And yes, I think I did absorb some of her pain. And it is, I would say, it is with me to this day. Now, your father Bruno always worried that what happened in Germany could happen again in America. By the way, we hear this quite often from people. And he wanted you to be, these are his words now, adept, alert, and ready. In case it ever stopped being safe to be a Jew in America, I speak these and I tremble to say them. So we're witnessing a very rapid and severe rise in anti-Semitism right now on a daily basis. Do you ever think about his fears? And have you talked about this with your own children? Oh, I grew up around that fear. And I would say the fear was and is not limited to the United States. I mean, it is a pervasive reality. And that is when my father preached, when he believed and preached. And one must be realistic about it. There's an ebb and a flow. But when there is a flow, you want to be very much aware of it. Now, the difficulty, of course, is knowing where one is at at any particular moment. And he was certainly somebody who had a very keen sense of when the danger is really overwhelming. What's very interesting to me about what you're saying is that when I have this conversation with people, I have to remind them that Germany in 1936 and 1937 wasn't always Germany in 1937. It first had to be Germany in 1932 and Germany in 1926. And the truth is that we only know through 2020 hindsight exactly when it gets bad. And our early warning systems really in some ways have to be recalibrated over and over again, don't they? Yes, that's very well said. Now, Kat, over to you. You know, you've said that for many years you felt, well, there's no other way of putting it. You felt guilty, you felt shame, even though none of these were choices that you made. And you were born 40 years after the fact, and you made that very clear. And every understanding of Jewish ethics and theology that I have come to understand would speak to that. Charlie, did you feel anything like that on your side? I mean, not guilt. I'm not talking guilt. I mean, something. And do either of you think that there is such a thing as inherited guilt, or is it something else? Is it—I struggle to look for the words—a wound, a grief, a responsibility that has no name? I would call it a scar. I think the generation that lives through these terrible events is—was scarred. Individuals are scarred. Individuals who live through terrible events today are scarred, and those scars are passed on. And we, the next generations, deal with them. The question is, how do we deal with them, and what do we do as a result of those feelings and those experiences, even though they were not our experiences? We know about them, and we feel them, and need to do something with them for our lives, and also for the lives of our children and grandchildren and future generations. Kat, do you have anything to say about that? Yeah, I mean, I think what we—you know, I think we carry a unique sense of responsibility, honestly. So I think it is my generation or hopefully the subsequent generation's responsibility to make sure or try as best as we can, at least within the countries or within the realm that we are in, that something like that doesn't happen again. Because we are—I always feel like our warning systems are uniquely tuned, I mean, for different reasons, obviously. Charlie's warning system is very different than mine, but I feel very strongly when there is a political current in Austria or in Europe, a far-right current, that my alarm systems go off and I feel the need to do something and not just watch. Because dealing with the history and having studied it and knowing, having read letters that my grandfather wrote when he was 16 and stuff like that, I have a different insight. And I know that a lot of people in my generation in Austria who share the history of the perpetrator have that same feeling and passion. I mean, my mom has been a journalist and spent her entire lifetime trying to make sure that democracy is defended in Austria. You know, it's so interesting to me, Kat. We debate a lot in the Jewish education world, in the Jewish communal world, how effective Holocaust education has been. And one of the great truths that I live with is that whereas the facts of the Holocaust might have gone over the heads of many of our would-be students, the fine tuning of the alarm system is something that has come across the generations and actually works. In fact, it works it might overwork with how often we resort to the metaphor of the Nazis and the roundups in the concentration camps. It's almost a kind of political hypochondria, but we might argue that a little hypochondria is not such a bad thing, is it? No, it's not a bad thing. I mean, you better be over sensitive and over alert than miss the signs, I would say. That seems like a very Jewish though my father used to say whenever my car was making weird noises, he used to say to me, "Jeffrey, not every cough is pneumonia." But sometimes they are. You know, there's something else that's going on right now in America and in Europe, and that's about refugees. This is the story you tell, ultimately a story about refugees, and millions of refugees today are bearing a stigma. They're being turned away just as your parents were. Your family foundation carries your parents' names and supports refugee protection. What do you want people to understand about the line that connects what your family endured to what is happening at the borders around the world right now? I'm glad you raised the issue of refugees today because my family were refugees. They were stateless. They dealt with bureaucracy, changing laws, uncertainty, and ultimately with their very existence, their ability to survive. And the story of my family as refugees certainly echoes for me with the story of refugees and the plight of refugees today. And I have noticed that in the book talks that we've given, how the children of refugees from other parts of the world and also first-generation immigrants to the United States really relate to this story of refugees and understand the story that we tell in the book, and that for them in the course of reading the book, their understanding of the Holocaust goes beyond six million, which is this. This, which has no names. It has no people. But our book is a story of refugees that others can relate to. And in so doing, can hear the echoes of the Jewish experience within their own experience. I remember years ago encountering a Vietnamese refugee, an author named Bí Thanh and she was talking about her experiences escaping from the Viet Cong, the travails of being in the South China Sea and facing being attacked by pirates. It was a horrific story. And she said publicly that what gave her strength was the soaking wet copy of The Diary of Anne Frank that she had with her, that she read that book. And she said, that's what gave me the strength. The book ends with a line. I want to read it back to you, Charlie. I'm going to ask you just to sit with it for a moment. I love this. "The work on this book, the travels, research, reading and questions became a way to end the familial cycle of silence. I did it because nothing is more important than giving meaning to the loss and suffering. Without that, the oppressors own the story. The oppressors own the story." And the book is called Inheritance. At the end of this 15-year journey, what do you actually, Charlie, want to pass on? Not just to your own children and grandchildren, but to every person who reads this book and to every person who hears this conversation today, what do you want them to own of this? I would like them to own the fact that it is up to each one of us to make a difference, that it doesn't have to be this way, and that we must be sensitive and empathize with the "others" in the world, whether they are refugees and immigrants, or defined in other ways, that the hope for us as Jews and for all people everywhere is to get away from the fear of people who have different skin colors, different religions, different habits. And there is hope if we create the hope. We must not throw up our hands and give up. Well, for us in this world, the greatest sign of hope is having a child, teaching a child, nurturing a child, "Kat, you now have a child." How old is your kid? He's nine and a half months. Wonderful. Congratulations! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So there's going to come a time, as our tradition says, when your child will ask you, "What do you want your child and any future children? What are you going to tell them about all of this?" Well, he's going to be able to read the book, right, when he's old enough. But when it comes to my family, I'm going to tell him the truth. I'm going to tell him about his grandfather and my great aunt, who was a very important influence on my life. And I'm going to tell him about the travels with Charlie and what we learned and how important it is to ask questions. And I want him to ask me as many questions as he can when, you know, while I'm still alive, because that makes it a lot easier. Plus, you know, keep in mind, we had all these wonderful letters to kind of reconstruct Charlie's family history with emails and the cloud. I'm not sure my text messages, I'm not sure my son is going to be able to do that. So he better ask questions while I'm still around. But Charlie and Kat, the two of you, are quite a team of warriors from memory. What the two of you have proven, really from the different sides of this abyss, is that honest memory is possible and necessary, that reckoning is possible and necessary, that you can hold a letter that was never intended for your eyes, you can walk a street your family was afraid to show you, and you can get a grave you never knew existed, and you can come out the other side not broken, but more whole. You know, the oppressors, they wanted silence, they wanted to own the story, but the two of you, Charlie and Kat, you've made sure that they don't. Inheritance - Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust is available now. You need to read this book, and there will be links in the show notes. This has been a really rare privilege for me and for all of us. This episode is a production of the 2G-3G Project produced and edited by Eli Hershko and co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman. Once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. You can find to be continued this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Audible, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you believe that these 2G and 3G voices are important and valuable, there are several ways that you can support us. First, hit the follow button on your podcast app. This way you won't miss an episode. Second, we're going to ask that you please share this episode with your friends and family and on your social media pages. And third, won't you please consider supporting what we do? We are fiscally sponsored by Jewish Creativity International, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We rely on donors for their generosity and vision to help us keep producing our show and telling these stories. Please contact us at info@tobecontinuedpodcast [info@tobecontinuedpodcast]. That's one word, tobecontinuedpodcast.org. Until next month, thank you for your support and thank you so much for listening.

Dina Kraft: The Legacy of Anne Frank’s Best Friend

Anne Frank's best friend survived to tell the story Anne could not. Journalist Dina Kraft and Hannah Pick-Goslar’s daughter, Ruthie Meir, reflect on friendship, survival, and the weight of carrying memory forward in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... They discuss what was lost, and what was rebuilt through resilience, testimony, and hope across generations. TRANSCRIPT: This episode of TO BE CONTINUED… is sponsored by Vicki Robinson and Michael Robinson in honor of Morton Kess, who helped liberate the concentration camps in Germany, and in memory of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis, and by Carl Fremont and Joanne Fremont Burns in loving memory and in honor of their parents. Ted Fremont, born official Fischel Friedman, who was a Holocaust survivor from Vilna, Poland. Ted lost his mother and seven siblings. He married Helen Garfield from the Bronx, and together they built a welcoming and loving home. Both Ted and Helen were beacons of hope and inspiration. Today's conversation is about friendship, survival, and what it means to carry memory forward, not as history alone, but as life. When we think of Anne Frank, we often think of her diary, her hiding, her tragic death. But Anne Frank was also a girl with friends… friends who loved her and who laughed with her, and who survived her. One of those friends was Hannah Pick Goslar. Hannah survived Bergen-Belsen, where she and Anne had a final heartbreaking encounter through a fence. Hannah lived. Anne did not. And that single fact shaped Hannah's life and the lives of her children and grandchildren, to be continued for generations. Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today we're joined by Dina Kraft, a journalist and veteran correspondent who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the JTA, among others. Dina is the co-author of My Friend Anne Frank, who writes not only as a storyteller, but as a third-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor. We also welcome Ruthie Meir, Hannah Pick Goslar's daughter, a second-generation descendant who grew up in the shadow and the strength of her mother's experience. Ruthie was her mother's right-hand assistant before and during the writing of the Anne Frank book. All of them live in Israel. And that matters. Because this is not only a story about what was lost, but about what was rebuilt. It's about how trauma travels through generations, yes, but also how resilience makes that same journey. How survivor's guilt lives alongside gratitude. How memory gives birth to responsibility. And how Jewish life continues publicly and unapologetically after catastrophe. This is a conversation about intergenerational trauma, but it's also about intergenerational strength. It's about the burden of telling the story, and it's also about the moral courage that we need to carry that story forward with honesty, compassion, and humanity. Welcome, friends. It's great to have you on To Be Continued. Ruthie, your mother, Hannah Pick Goslar, wrote in her book, My Friend Anne Frank, that “Anne Frank had become a symbol in many ways of all the hope and promise that was lost to hatred and murder.” I would certainly agree that she has become the overriding symbol of the Holocaust…”Talking about her story, our story would later become a thread that bound me to her and kept our friendship alive long after she was gone.” So tell us a short version of your mother's story, from her birth in Berlin to the Netherlands, how she met Anne Frank and their last meeting in Bergen-Belsen. My mother was born in 1928 in Berlin. She had a lovely childhood. And her father was a very high official in the German Otto Braun government. In 1933, when Hitler came into power, her father understood immediately that he cannot stay anymore in Germany because he also wrote against Hitler, and he went to England. So, we didn't go and stay in England, and he went to Holland. And my mother had to go to school. And so on the first day they would go to the grocery. Her mother sees another woman that comes from Germany. Of course they started to talk and they came from Frankfurt. They came from Berlin. And then she saw a small girl, this woman, and they started to talk. And the day after, my mother had to go to the kindergarten first day, without knowing the language, without knowing anybody. And she sees the same girl as she saw the day before in the grocery shop. She was ringing the bells in the kindergarten. And they saw each other, ran into the arms and began a big, big friendship, till the end. Then, they had a nice childhood till 1939. And in 1940, the Germans invaded Holland in five days. The families were very much very friendly. So every Shabbat, the Frank family came to my grandfather's home. And every Sunday, my mother used to go to the, what is today, the Anne Frank House. It was the office of Mr. Frank. Mr. Frank decided that all the family will go to hiding in his office. The school, now it was the Jewish school, every day one of the pupils or more were just gone. And you didn't ask what happened. Either they went to hiding, or they were caught by the Germans. Now in 1942, once again, her mother, my grandmother, had to give birth. And she didn't go to a hospital in Amsterdam, because she was already afraid from the Germans. They could take you from the hospital. So she gave birth at home. And she died two days after the birth. And the baby also died. It was a very hard delivery. And my mother was at home at that time. And since this day, she was like the mother for her sister. And (she) took her all the way to concentration camps, on and on. Let's see, they had the Paraguayan passport. And they were also on a list that was named the List of Israel. So as if to be exchanged in the future against German soldiers. But it didn't help them and they had to go to Bergen-Belsen. The situation was very hard and it became harder every day. Now, one day there was a rumor that a women from Holland come to the camp. And my mother was very curious to know who are these Dutch women. So somebody told her, you know, your friend Anne Frank is over the fence. My mother was in shock because she thought Anna is in Switzerland. And Anna was in a very, very bad shape. It was after Auschwitz. So Anna said, I have nothing to eat. My mother went to all her friends. All of them didn't have what to eat. All of them were hungry and didn't have what to wear. But everybody, everybody gave her something. And she made a ball with cracker and a sock and a glove and something. She made it like a ball, came to the fence and said, Anna, be careful. And she threw it over the fence. So it was really the last time that my mother saw Anna when she threw the ball with the food to her. And she didn't know what happened to her. Afterwards, my mother was liberated. And then after that, Mr. Frank came to visit her and arranged everything, that she can go to Switzerland. And then she went to Israel because this is how she was raised. She was a nurse in Israel. Then my mother got married and had three children. She became a nurse and was doing a very good job. This story is about an iconic Jewish figure, perhaps the most iconic Jewish figure of our time. So I need to ask you, as you were growing up, how present was Anne Frank in your family life? Not as an icon, not as a historical figure, but as your mother's childhood friend. Tell us briefly about the presence of Anne Frank in your family when you were growing up. It was from the beginning. From the beginning, when I was one-year-old, my mother went already to the United States to talk about Anna, to talk about the Holocaust with my father. And since then, all the time, it was like a sister of ours, like an aunt of ours. And Mr. Frank was like the big, big uncle that was in the picture all the time with writing and with sending people all the time. It was just one of the family all the time, true today, even for my children and grandchildren. I can imagine that's true. Dina, as you worked with Hannah on My Friend Anne Frank, how did she describe the way her friendship with Anne lived on inside her, not just as a memory, but as responsibility? How did it shape how family understood loss and remembrance and moral obligation? Yeah, I mean, for her, you know, the last time she saw Anna, of course, was at this very dramatic moment where these two girls on either end of a fence, crying in this freezing rain on other, you know, at Bergen-Belsen. And they were still so hopeful. They talked about meeting at school the next fall. That's how, like, sort of, where their heads were. They were still optimistic they would come out of this hell. Of course, Anne didn't come out of this hell. And she only, and she didn't get to tell the story of, really, before or after the Annex. She told the story of being inside the Annex. And that's a very kind of, like, small prism. Of course, you'd read into Anne's, like, deep inner world. But all of that life that came before, that incredibly rich dynamic of a German Jewish enclave in Amsterdam, where they lived as the daughters of German immigrants, and the games they played, and the life that they lived, and the shadow of this war that was approaching all the time. And then, of course, afterwards, you know, what was happening outside, the roundups, and being taken first to Westerbork, and then to, and then in Anne's case to Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and in the case of Hannah, all of that horror Hannah witnessed and was able to tell, because she lived to tell the story. So, she felt this obligation to sort of carry on, you know, where Anna couldn't. And I think because, you know, from very early on, the diary became a huge success, and then it was a Broadway hit, and there was a film…she had cache because of Anne's story. She had legitimacy. So at a time when people didn't even have a name for the Holocaust, as Ruthie referenced, her mother went off in the 1950s on an 18-city tour, speaking tour of America, talking about her experience in Bergen-Belsen, and talking about her friendship with Anna. It was a time when there wasn't even a name Holocaust or Holocaust survivors. I think she was probably one of the very first survivors to publicly tell her story. And it was always very, very important to her to share that story and tell the world. And until she was, you know, I was interviewing her when she was 93 years old. She was using oxygen to breathe. She wasn't in good health, but she was very, very sound of mind. She was incredibly sharp and incredibly funny still, as well, I might add. And she felt this obligation to keep telling her story, even though these were like her last days. Why do you think, that already being beyond 90 years old, that Hannah felt it was essential to tell her story now to this generation? Well, you know, it was interesting. It wasn't her idea to tell the story. It was a Netflix film came out, based on her life, and that generated a lot of interest and conversation. And then a publishing house in London reached out to her, and that's how this began. From our very first meeting, she would say, "Who is going to be interested in my story? You know, who's going to be interested?" I think the answer came in the fact that it became a New York Times bestselling book. It's in over a dozen languages, from around the world now. But she was so modest. I think she couldn't really imagine the reach that it was, you know, she wasn't just writing on the tales of Anne Frank's story. She herself had an incredibly rich and interesting story to tell, you know, from the very beginning. From her father, who was one of the few Jews in the Weimar government in Berlin, and a very outspoken force against Hitler, and had to flee, to the story of what it was like growing up, and again, in this very close-knit, beautiful place, that felt very safe in Amsterdam. And, then she always talked about how that safety and that feeling of being cocooned was suddenly washed away, you know, as a Nazi grip got tighter and tighter. And you live with her. I mean, part of the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it, you know, it was not to write it from the point of view of a 93-year-old woman looking back, but being with her in real time as the noose was tightening and tightening all the time around, not just her, but the Jews of Amsterdam. You know, as Holocaust denial continues to grow exponentially, this narrative is extremely important. I was in a used bookstore this past summer in the Berkshires, and I found an old Life magazine from the early 1950s with artist's renditions of what Anne Frank went through. This is such an important historical document that we have to keep alive. Now, let me ask you, you've said that Hannah's accent was familiar to you. Tell us about your family's Holocaust experience and how hearing Hannah's accent affected you. Well, she immediately reminded me of my own grandmother who was born in Salzburg in Austria, ended up, was living in Italy, in her 30s. And that's where she was when the war broke out, before the war broke out, as the Nazis began to take over Europe. And my family, they were living in Italy, but they were not citizens of Italy. And according to Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws, all Jews that were not of Italian descent had to leave the country. Of course, this was sort of a blessing in disguise. They couldn't wait around and hope for better times. They had to figure out what was what. And so my grandmother furiously wrote for affidavits and letters and visas across the world. And the one place they finally got a visa to was a place that my grandfather had singled out in a map of the world. He saw that New Zealand was the furthest place in the world from Europe. And he said, "I'd like to go there." And indeed, they got a visa to New Zealand. And they left shortly before the war broke out in Europe. They arrived in September 1939, just days before the war broke out, and had this safe refuge in New Zealand. But very, very far away, and very cut off from the rest of the family, and didn't know for years what happened to the fates of their own families back in Europe. Literally at the end of the world. The very end of the world. The very end of the world. And it was extremely stressful. They were treated as enemy aliens because they spoke German. Their mail was gone through by the government and censored. And in fact, it was only in 1944 when Italy was liberated. And one of my cousins whose name is Jana and is 98-years-old, and lives in Tel Aviv to this day. And I'm actually working on a book with her about her life now. She's actually a year older than Hannah. And she was a 17-year-old girl, and spotted a New Zealand soldier in the square in Florence the day that Florence was liberated. And she went up to him and said, "I have an aunt in New Zealand. Can you please pass on word that our family is alive and well?" And that is the first news that my family got, that part of their family survived. You said in The New York Times article about Hannah…this is the quote, "When you look at history backward, she was living history forward." What did you mean by that? And how does it relate to Hannah's enduring friendship and memories of Anne Frank and her own family who perished? Yeah, I meant by that is, you know, we look at history and we know how it ends, you know, or you know how the story unfolds. She didn't know how the story was unfolding. And she had to live every single day sort of in that sort of, as I was saying, this noose tightening, that sort of gradual understanding of what was going on for her. And so keeping, you know, she lost her parents during the war. And she was like the guardian of her little sister, who's only four years old. Imagine she was taking care of her little sister basically from the age of two to four in the most horrific of conditions. And so, she was living it forward and not knowing what one day would bring to the next. And that was sort of, you know, in the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it captivating to people to make it sort of feel like a thriller as it was and keep people's attention. I wanted to keep the camera as it were on Hannah as she was experiencing it, as she was going forward and not knowing what was going to be what was happening, not knowing what was going to be next. But Hannah had incredible determination and focus. And also she talks a lot about, you know, survival was a group activity, you know, as it is today. You know, as we saw now in the stories of the hostages coming out of Gaza and those that were with others, you know, really talk about how they leaned on each other and the story, you know, of real, like female solidarity. And the barracks at Bergen-Belsen that when she sees Anne Frank and her friend Anna, you know, cold and shivering and starving in Bergen-Belsen and begging her for some food, she goes back to the barracks and is able to collect food from all the people who had barely had no food themselves, but had hidden a little crust of bread here and a little bit of dried fruit there and a wool sock here. And they were able to sort of together, you know, help this young woman they didn't even, who they didn't even know. So I think, you know, part of the story of survival is community and how Hannah found community even when her own blood family was gone. So this is for both Ruthie and Dina. Anne Frank's story, of course, is for many people, the story of the Holocaust. As we all know, that story ends too soon to fully embrace the horror. And I'm wondering, to what extent do you now see yourselves as guardians of not Anne's iconic story, but the human story? I think, first of all, that you cannot separate the iconic and the regular life. She was just this. She was Anna and she was the best friend of my mother. And my mother wanted, really to tell about her, and that everybody will know her, will know her life and really her legacy, because she was not the regular girl. She was very, very talented. When she was very small, she wrote lovely stories. I don't know why it is not so famous, but she wrote the tales from the secret Annex. And she wrote about poor people, about really how the life is hard for them. And she did it so nicely with such messages that we really should go on with all that she wrote about the poor people. And of course, about all that she wrote about, all the, she is the symbol of all the children in the Holocaust. One and a half million. Millions. So as my mother used to say, you cannot perceive six million. You cannot perceive one-and-a-half million. But when you see one story, and of course, if you see some more stories, but when you see one story, you can identify with all that happened. I understand. Dina, how about for you? Yeah, I mean, I think this story, what I got from Hannah is a sort of feeling of passing of a torch in a way, passing on a story. It was difficult when she died. She died before the book came out. And I felt like I was doing, wrapping up the interviews with her. And it was her health sort of deteriorating, even more after that. And I felt this sort of almost like guilt, like, oh, my gosh, like, is she stopping to tell the story? Is this sort of the beginning of her descent? And then someone, from actually Yad Vashem, told me maybe she felt like now that her story was in good hands, she could she could have her final rest, as it were. And I hope that is somewhat, somewhat true. And I felt like this sort of like, you know, she's not there to tell it anymore. The whole Holocaust sort of like, you know, memorial project is so built on survivors and survivor stories. So now we have this challenge of what happens when the survivors aren't there anymore. So now we are here to tell their stories and in different forms, you know, whether it's through books and novels or plays. We're speaking and the message I got from Hannah was very much that, that racism kills, that hatred kills, that ignorance and intolerance kills. And in the case of the Holocaust, the hatred was targeted against the Jews. And she was very specific about this was specifically an anti-Jewish hatred. This was not some sort of, you know, anything else. But it was, but it was part of a bigger story of hatred and racism. And that is, that is a lesson that we have to take with us, you know, not just in this time of occurring anti-recurring and rising anti-Semitism, but just xenophobia and hatred and intolerance and ugliness. And we're just seeing a lot of bullying going around in the world, you know, from the leadership as well across the world. And this is a time where people have to remember their humanity. And Hannah ended almost every, every speech she gave in all the many years that she spoke, she talked about how we are all created in God's image, every human being. And that is something I feel like it has been tragically forgotten in the various conflicts of the world, that we are all human and all lives do matter. And if you are not the same and if you are with another color, with another religion or whatever, you should respect each other and you should live in peace together. Ruthie, that, of course, is the universal lesson of this. And I'm wondering what emotional atmosphere did growing up in a survivor's household create for you? Safety, urgency, silence, gratitude, fear? I must say that, as I know, a lot of survivors never talked about what happened to them. They said, oh, we don't want that, our children will suffer even by hearing what we we have endured. But my mother was talking about her story, as I remember, myself. So it wasn't like that. And my mother was a happy woman. She was full of life. She was very energetic. She was doing all this, all the time something, and helping someone. And so I think we grew, let's say, in a normal house. I must say there were the anxieties, you know, when you go somewhere and tell me when you come and like this, but not something very, very not normal, let's say, as I look at this. We had a really happy house. I think the resilience of my mother gave me a lot of strength. Dina, in your conversations with Hannah, did Hannah ever express guilt about being the one who lived to tell the story? You know, she didn't have survivor's guilt. She didn't have guilt. We talked about that. And I think she felt that God was with her. She was also a religious Jew. It's important to note. And her faith was always sort of like a North Star for her. And so I think she sort of saved time, as it were, you know, sort of psychologically. In fact, that she didn't have the survivor's guilt. That she felt like she had a mission. She had a purpose. She had to take care of her sister, which she did very admirably and very beautifully. And so she was sort of spared that agony, I think, of survivor's guilt. And I think also having this very clear vision of her life passed down from her father, who was an ardent Zionist, that the land of Israel, that was the goal. And then she came to Israel as a young woman, and she built up her life and career as a nurse. She was always giving back. She also was very much the story of Israel's creation and Israel's development, working as a nurse specifically for young children and for babies and for immigrant families from all over the world, and was part of that melting pot story. So she always had meaning and purpose. And she had a very good marriage, and she had a beautiful family, and she poured her heart and her love into that. And again, I think because she was sort of singled out early on as this friend of Anne Frank's and was sort of given this mission from Otto Frank to tell the story that Anne wasn't there to tell anymore, that that gave her meaning and purpose. And so she was unburdened with that terrible burden of survivor's guilt. Dina, what do you hope our listeners, and especially the children and the grandchildren of survivors, will take away from Hannah's story? How can stories like this help counter denial and antisemitism? What's its role? I think its role is to tell a very gripping and very real story through a child and then sort of an adolescent's eyes. So again, it's sort of making it feel more real and more immediate and not sort of some sort of abstract thing. You know, when you hear about, for example, you know, she witnesses an older woman being deported, you know, being deported, being taken off the streets and thrown into the back of a Nazi vehicle, you know, and she's seeing her neighbors disappearing. And I'm sorry to say that like today we have, you know, in America, for example, we have people being disappeared into ICE vans. And I think, you know, when I was growing up, this sort of this time felt very distant and very far away that we were in this sort of era of progress and liberalism and the world was going, had sort of, had learned the lessons of this terrible, you know, this terrible, you know, unprecedented slaughter, right, of millions and millions of people. And now we're in an age where, you know, totalitarianism and wanton destruction are sort of, you know, the warning calls around us, right? So I hope this sort of tells the story of what happened before and the brave people who did speak out and the people who did help each other out in different ways. And it reminds us that, you know, the Holocaust wasn't something that was some sort of, you know, a blip, some sort of historical accident, like people can do this, people can do terrible, terrible things to each other, you know. We have to be on guard and we have to be vigilant all the time. It's not paranoia to be vigilant. It's important to know our own history. If we don't, if the grand, yes, but the grandchildren, the children of Holocaust survivors, like, this is a legacy nobody asked for, right? Nobody wanted this sort of very heavy history to have to like, drag around you like a ball and chain, but it has doesn't have to be a ball and a chain. It can be like this is, this is your sort of gift to the world, just be able to tell people how low humanity can go. And it's important for you to be able to tell the story, so others can't twist it and doctor it. And we're seeing in the age of social media, these sort of quick clips in this terrible antisemitism being spewed by various influencers that has incredible reach. And it's really important to know that our story, but this is also a human story. This is also a broader story, you know. Genocides don't only happen…Jewish people aren't the first and the only people to experience a genocide. So we have to be very, very vigilant and very, very on guard. But we also have to be, we have to be proud of the survivors that risked so much both to survive and to tell their story, so people will know. Hannah has told her story so people will know and we can't throw that away. We have to do something with that legacy. I'm very curious. How did being a third generation descendant influence the way you listened to Hannah's story, not only as a descendant, but also I'm very curious as a journalist and as a writer. I mean, I felt, I guess as a third generation, you know, it felt like I was able to sort of have this conversation with Hannah that was so, it was a really beautiful task. It was a really hard task. It was really painful at times. You know, sometimes Hannah and I would meet and we would both describe how we'd had nightmares the night before. And it was almost like our, you know, she was re-conjuring up these stories and I was hearing them and I was sort of taking them on. And it was very different task than being a regular journalist as a journalist, the story, you have a certain remove, you're telling the story in second person, you know, third person, you know, this happened to this person and this happened to them and she said, and he said, now I was not just asking Hannah questions and interviewing her and maybe I want to go to very, very deep detail with her. But I was also having to inhabit her story when I was on the, at the computer writing. I had to become Hannah in a way. I had to, sort of imagine, I was to take on her emotions and her feelings and her impressions and sometimes imagine them and she couldn't even imagine them. She had trouble sort of tapping those emotions herself. And so it was painful and it was difficult. I remember one particular time I'd come across, you know, in my internet sleuthing, a list of all the children that were at the birthday party at Anne…I call her Anna because that's what Hannah called her. They were Anna and Hanna, and they had another good friend Sanne. They were Hannah, Anna and Sanne. And Sanne was also murdered in the Holocaust. And so Sanse was one of the girls that was at this birthday party and girls and boys, and this list on the internet described the fate of each of these children, which very much mirrored the fate of Dutch jewry -- 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. That was the biggest number in Western Europe. And there's a lot of, we can go and go into sort of why and how that may have happened. And of course, that story was glossed over by the story of Anne Frank. Even Hannah didn't realize until recent years that the actual data, you know, the actual numbers behind it and, you know, the story of people, think, oh, the Dutch just were constantly hiding people. No, Anne Frank's family story was a complete anomaly. Most Jews were not hidden, you know, in Holland or protected by their neighbors…the opposite. And so, yeah, so taking on her story in that moment of reading the fate of all these different children, you know, most of them slaughtered. I remember just like collapsing into a heap and just sobbing, you know, it was just so painful to sort of realize what and I decided that that should be the very end of the book, an elegy for a birthday party, you know, what happened to these different children. And I also paired it with what Anna herself wrote about these children. She had, like in her diary, she had like a, what we call like in more modern parlance, a slam book about what she thought of them. This one was a gossip, this one was it flirt, this one was this, this one was that. But the toll of how many people were lost and again, the loss as Ruthie talks about these incredible people that were lost to us, like, you know, what Anne Frank would have become, what you could have become. So as a journalist, it felt like a very, it was a very beautiful task and a very difficult task, but it felt really like something borderline of obsession. Like I wanted to get my hands on every scrap of paper and every, you know, letters she had written in every sort of photograph I could get from her, but also tales of others who've gone, who had gone through simultaneously what she was going through, diaries and lots of testimonies of people from her neighborhood in Amsterdam, and people who were in the barracks with her. And also she tells a story, one of the things she was doing in the last months of her life, besides talking to me, was speaking to a German documentary crew about the lost train. This is this train, this journey of 13 days, the very, very last days of the war, careening through the Eastern German countryside. And while bombs were falling, and it was really clear what the goal of this train was, I mean, eventually I think the idea was to bring them to some sort of, to Theresienstadt and killing them there. But, you know, in telling her story, you know, in telling all these moments,I felt like it was an amazing opportunity to sort of like, be inside the story, but it was also painful. It was also difficult. But also incredibly important. It was a mission of a lifetime, really. Dina, it's hard to imagine this, of course, and is there something almost psychological about imagining it? I wonder had Anne survived, had Margot survived, would they have wound up in Amsterdam, London, Melbourne, or perhaps in Tel Aviv? Yeah, it's impossible to know. But what we do know is that Anne felt very, very Dutch, you know, and she imagined that this book would come out in Dutch after the, you know, she'd read a novel based on the secret Annex. And she felt herself very much to be Dutch. I don't know, you know, how she would have come out of, you know, no one can know how she would have come out on the other side of things. But I think she would have told her stories. I think that's, that was so central to her. She was such a writer. And it's sort of a misnomer, we call it like the diary of a young girl, you know, she was a young girl, but she really matured, like as if she was in a hot house inside the Annex. A teacher of Hannah and Anna's, later was asked by Hannah, Anna seemed to, you know, not be like an extraordinary kid, she was a kid who was very, very, you know, smart and witty and always kept a notebook by her side and would’t let anybody read it on the playground. But she didn't seem extraordinary. She exhausted the adults around her. She was today's, in today's language, we be called “a spirited child”, you know, it's very intense and kind of overwhelming. And so Hannah's teacher, Hannah and his teacher after the war said that, you know, she didn't seem like she was a special smart girl, but no one, you know, the sort of extraordinary ability she had to sort of put emotions to words and to express what she was going through. She was described this way because she was, you know, in this little hot house of intensity inside the Annex for those two years. And I think, in the fact that she didn't just write her story, you know, in real time, she goes back and she edits and she revises. That's what makes it even more of an interesting story. She hears…so there was a radio address. Everyone in the attic was listening to this radio address from this Dutch minister in exile saying Dutchman, please, please keep your diaries in your letters so that after the war, people know what happens. And then she goes through and she starts adding background material about the Jews of the neighborhood, about the Jews of the anti-Jewish law, adding context like a real journalist was what an adding sort of suspense and and, you know, key pivotal moments in the story, to make it, you know, to make it even more engaging. Again, imagining this will be the basis of a novel when she comes out. So we don't know where she would have physically landed. But I think we know that she would have been an incredible storyteller, had she lived. You know, Hannah had a dose of prophecy in her and she prophetically worried. And she was right, that as time passed, people would care less about the Holocaust. I have seen this in my own lifetime. In fact, I think I've seen it more in the last several years than I ever dreamed I could have experienced this. And to be true to our mission, this is one of the main purposes of this podcast. We stand up for memory, to make sure that this amnesia, this moral amnesia, does not happen. So is this book a warning? Is it a bridge? Or is it both? Bridge, because it shows, you know, that it didn't have to be this way. You know, it didn't have to. If, you know, if various things had happened differently, you know, Hitler could have been stopped, and all of that. But, it's a voice from time. You know, it's a voice from the past that bridges us to this current moment and tells us, and whispers in our ear very, very loudly. Don't forget. Don't forget. And remember what happens, when when when hatred and racism and cruelty and totalitarianism run amok. This is not a good formula. Stop. Stop. And we're in this time in the world now where we're seeing really terrible things, you know, happening and on the brink of happening, as well. You just said something very powerful, Dina, and I want to underscore this. Evil is always a matter of human choice. People choose to do evil. They choose to do good. At every step of the way, this unfolded in history and now, people have choices and they make those choices. And we are the beneficiaries or the victims of those choices. And, as we move towards our conclusion, I just need to ask, in what way does Hannah's resilience live in your lives? And what about that? We always have to end on hope. Every Jewish message ends with hope. How do we get hope from this story? Dina, how about you? I think, you know, to quote Mr. Rogers, always look for the helpers. And I think there's a lot of stories of helpers in this, in this book. There's a story, you know, of Hannah's father herself who sets up with a fellow refugee friend, an agency to help fellow German Jewish refugees who are trying to find their way, you know, in Amsterdam. There's a story of their neighbor, Mrs. Goudsmit, who's a Christian woman who's married to a Jewish man who tries to, when they tried it, when they come to deport the family in June of ‘43, she tries to take the little girl, tries to take Gaby for herself. And one of the Dutch Nazi policemen, the Green Policemen, says to her, "How dare you? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" You know, a Christian woman trying to take a Jew. And she says, "I'm not ashamed of myself." And she reminds them of the humanity. And so these various times, the sort of, the humanity comes through. It turns out, as I found out after writing the book, I think, speaking to her son, she hid Jews in the basement in a crawl space during the deportations. She was very, very brave. And there's lots of these stories of bravery and camaraderie and specifically female solidarity, and female friendship and connection. And so that gives me a lot of hope. I'm currently working on a project with Emily Damari, who's a hostage who came back from Gaza. And she also very much has a very recurring theme of, like, the power of friendship and connection in these very dark times in the Hamas tunnels and the apartments in Gaza. And the power of not losing yourself. And I think that's from the story of Emily and also from the story of Hannah. Hannah always kept sort of her moral compass and her true self. And that helped her later on in life as well. But she always cared deeply. In the last weeks of her life, she was following the protests in Iran. Again, we're having another round of revolution, another round of street protests in Iran. And she was, kept asking me, "What's going to happen to those girls and those women who are protesting in the streets of Iran?" Again, like, her care was very much about the Jewish people, but about people writ large. She really cared deeply about people and humanity. And that's what we need is people to care about humanity, in order to stop atrocities. You know, Dina, you just said something very powerful, and I'm going to leave it at this. What's amazing to me, both disquieting and inspirational, is that our generation will now have its own stories of resilience, bravery, and courage to add to this Sefer Torah, as it were, that we are writing of Jewish courage. And those are the stories from Gaza, from the tunnels, etc. And those are stories that are going to endure. And I would like to think that future generations will read those stories, will read your work, will imbibe the memories that Ruthie has shared with us, and that they will become the storytellers as well. There is a profound responsibility for us, not only to share the horror, but to share the hope. I think sometimes we have to make those choices, those two "H" words. It's either horror or hope, and I always want to go for hope. I'd like to say that hope is the biggest invention of the Jewish people. We'd like to thank our friends who are with us today. We want to thank Dina Kraft. We want to thank Ruthie Meir. This episode has been a production from The 2G-3G Project, produced and edited by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman, and I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Friends, you can find TO BE CONTINUED on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, wherever you listen. But you need to be part of this story. You need to download it. You need to listen to it. And you want to do us a real mitzvah? Leave us a five-star review so that other people will be able to be part of this lasting, ongoing conversation. So to you, Ruthie, and to you, Dina, your time is precious. Your memories are sacred. Thank you for sharing those with us today.

10 de mar de 202645 min

Jacki Alexander: De-Jewifying the Holocaust: Why Naming Jews Matters

"De-Jewifying" the Holocaust is the concerning trend our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin talks about in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... with Jacki Alexander, CEO and President of HonestReporting. We are witnessing the media, politicians, religious institutions, and others talk about "6 million who died" while erasing the Jews. This episode explores this trend of Holocaust distortion including minimalization, inversion and denial, and examines how it threatens both accurate historical memory and contemporary Jewish safety. Is this a form of antisemitism? Listen to find out. 🎧Listen now on your podcast streaming service of choice, and watch on YouTube. Here is a related article by Rabbi Jeff Salkin: The Many Forms of Holocaust Distortion: https://religionnews.com/2026/02/03/the-many-forms-of-holocaust-distortion-and-why-jd-vances-remarks-matter/ [https://religionnews.com/2026/02/03/the-many-forms-of-holocaust-distortion-and-why-jd-vances-remarks-matter/] TRANSCRIPT: Usually on this podcast, we sit with the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We listen carefully as they reflect on memory, legacy, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and what it means to carry stories and experiences that were never meant to survive, but did. This is Sheryl Hoffman, podcast founder and co-director, and this episode of TO BE CONTINUED… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors is a little different. Not a departure from our mission, but in many ways a descent into its deepest urgency, because in recent years, the Holocaust is increasingly being remembered without Jews. Please listen and share on social media and with your family and friends. This is "To Be Continued." We discuss the implications of trauma and resilience for second and third generation Holocaust survivors. And where we are in the calendar right now is very important. We are now following up on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we're talking about what it means to remember the Holocaust, to remember the Shoah, and what that memory entails, and how sometimes bad actors abuse and distort that memory. I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin, I'm your host. And we're talking today to Jacki Alexander. She is the CEO and president of HonestReporting. I've been a big fan of HonestReporting for quite some time. So Jacki, this is really a treat for me. And so thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me to talk about this incredible, important topic, and one that's really personal to my heart, giving my background. Well, I want to talk about why that is in fact the case, but I want to go right to something you wrote. I want to talk about something that I wrote. I want to talk about your background as well. You know, what you did this past week was, you used a term and I love it. In fact, I've been quoting you over the last several days to friends of mine. The “De-Jewifying” of the Holocaust. In simple terms, what that really means is that when people discuss Holocaust today, and specifically in the media, within religious institutions, political realm, what happens is that there has been a diminishing of what is central to our understanding of the Holocaust and that is its Jewish component. You cannot understand this without its Jewish component, without the Jewish component, we wouldn't be having a conversation. So let me ask you a simple question, a pointed question. Is this a new phenomenon or is history simply repeating itself? History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, right? That was Mark Twain, however many years ago. And I think for our entire history, we have always been targets of, the Jewish people have always been targets of bad people and then we have always been identified with then the bad people, right? So how does that rhyme today? Israel and the IDF are the new Nazis. Jews were the victims and now we are the oppressors. Yossi Klein Halevi had a great speech about this a couple of years ago, going through history and saying, when the communists were the bad guys, the Jews were the communists. When the capitalists are the bad guys, the Jews are the capitalists, right? Today, Jews are the oppressors, Jews are the colonialists, Jews are, you know, white people has become a four letter term now, Jews are the white people. So I think that this is just erasing Jews from something that can bring sympathy or an understanding is just the next step in a long history. So your article, Jacki, uses this wonderful phrase, you really are very good at turning phrases and creating them, "Erasive Jew hate," as if it were the children's game Etch-A-Sketch, where you draw something, you turn it over, you shake it and it's gone. So let me ask you, how is erasing Jews from Holocaust narratives different from overt antisemitism? Is it the same and is it just as dangerous? So erasing Jews from the Holocaust takes the biggest trauma, the biggest generational trauma that Jews have had in the last hundred years and makes it not about Jews. And if you follow the discourse around this specifically, what's happening is, is Jews are constantly online being told, "Stop making the Holocaust about you. You're erasing how horrible this was to the Roma, to the Sinti. You're erasing how horrible this was to gay people and to trans people and to black people and to political prisoners. This wasn't just about you." And I do think that that is a new form of antisemitism, which is again, another word which we can't even use anymore because that has been weaponized against us. And as soon as you say antisemitism, people stop listening to it. But people forget that it wasn't just the final solution, right? It was the final solution to the Jewish question. Jews were the problem. Hitler wrote an entire book about Jews. This started not with the stab in the back of the Sinti. And again, this is not taking away the horrible history that happens. This was the stab in the back of the Jews. But for what the Jews did on the homefront in Germany, Germany would have won the war and therefore they are the bBreiggest scapegoats. And I think that by removing Jews and erasing our history, it allows it, as you said, to repeat. So I published an article this week in the wake of a very famous American politician omitting the Jews from the Holocaust narrative by talking about the taxonomy of Holocaust distortion. Where people minimize the Holocaust, where they say the numbers were not as high as they say, or they universalize it as if to say, as you've said, the Roma, gay men, labor leaders, Slavs, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, they were also victims. Or worse, inversion, which is what you just talked about, which is the Jews are the new Nazis, which by the way, works very well in Europe because that's an excellent way for contemporary Europeans to erase the burden of guilt that they may or may not have inherited from their grandparents. So it feels to me that when we do this, Jacki, that we are entering a very savage new world of Jew hatred. So where do these distortions fit into the framework of antisemitism? So the way that antisemitism today is manifesting is in the very nature of information itself. We're not being told not to believe what we're seeing, what we're being taught is a brand new history that didn't exist before. We're seeing it in academia, we're seeing it in the nonprofit industrial complex, we're certainly seeing it on social media and in AI, where you have the Jews are responsible for the Holocaust, but also the Holocaust didn't exist, but also Hitler is amazing and he should have finished the job, but also only 271,000 Jews were killed. And all of these things exist at the exact same time. And the people that are putting it out there have no problem with the fact that they don't align with each other because it doesn't matter. They want to put out whatever they can in order to change what the status quo is. And the reason why that's dangerous is because you and I grew up in where we knew what the bottom line facts were. We were taught the same things in school. When we had to write a paper, we went to a physical building called a library that had physical books called encyclopedias. We got our baseline information there. And then we started looking at secondary sources, tertiary sources and understanding how information evolved. What's happening today with the manipulation of Wikipedia and how all of these information sources are then feeding social media and online information sources is that what people are being taught from the very beginning has no basis in reality. And yet that's the new status quo. This is so dangerous for Jews, for the Jewish people. And if I may be so bold as to say, the only universalization that people should take from the Holocaust is that what starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews. This is a very important point. And by the way, I got into an argument that was a foolish thing for me to do with a Holocaust denier. And kids, do not try this at home. It's not worth your time or your energy. It's like what Brett Stephens said at the 92 Street Y the other night. “Here, we don't care. There's some people who are not worth our emotional investment.” And I said, “This is the most documented crime in human history, documented by survivors, documented by their descendants, and documented by the perpetrators themselves.” And I said, “Isn't it interesting that no one ever denies the fact that there was slavery in the United States?” Right. Now, what they are doing with slavery, is saying that some of the slave owners were good, right? As though you could have that. So you are, again, what starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews, but you're right. The way that Jewish history is erased and made acceptable, it cannot be compared to anything else. There's something else as well about this universalization of the Holocaust. I wrote about that this week in ReligionNews.com in my column, "Martini Judaism." I have been accused by some Jews of engaging in the macabre game of comparative victimology. Or forgive me, of hogging the Holocaust. It's as if Jews, this is terrible, cannot name their own particularity and believe that in order to sit at the cool kids' table, they have to shed this. I find this problematic. What do you think? I think that we should follow what Elie Wiesel said about centering Jews, which is that, I am Jewish and therefore, I am going to worry about Jews above and beyond everyone else. And that doesn't mean that I can't have compassion and worry for other horrible things that are happening in this world. And we Jews are our own worst enemies. If we think about the universalization of the Holocaust, which has been so detrimental to Holocaust education, that isn't driven outside of our community. It's driven by our community. And the article that you're speaking about that we published this week, by the way, is written by one of our fabulous, fabulous writers, Ben Freeman. He focused on that. He focused on the fact that Jews need to be comfortable being the center of a horrible thing in history and not having to make our trauma about other people to get them to care. We shouldn't have to say we weren't the only ones murdered, for you to care about learning about it. This is a class, first of all, it is unique in its history of evil, the Holocaust is. And, it is also a case study in what happens to those parts and those elements of society that are not protected when the socioeconomic framework of a country fails. Right? The Holocaust didn't arise out of a wonderful place. It arose out of the fall of democratic Germany, the fall of the Weimar Republic. As the socioeconomic safety net failed, the othering of the Jew got bigger. Again, it didn't start there. It started way earlier. The immune system crashed. The what? The immune system. The immune system crashed. People didn't have money anymore. There was 4,000% inflation. In order to buy bread, you had to take a barrel full of cash. We don't even use cash anymore, but you have to take a barrel full of cash to the bank and to the grocery store to buy bread. There are things that happen when, like you said, the immune system of a country fails. That's the universalization that we need to be studying, not that Jews weren't the only victims, because the fact is, that, again, as Elie Wiesel taught us, this was the only genocide specifically of the Jewish people, the only targeting of the Jewish people, where you couldn't convert your way out. If you were Jewish, if you were one quarter Jewish, you were going to the ovens along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you had been converted to Christianity for a few generations. If they could trace your Judaism, you were going alongside everyone else. There was nothing you could do to escape it. That is not true for any other community. And that's an evil and a hatred that we need to teach because that can rhyme again in the future. And many people are hearing that rhyme right now. My friends say to me that when we make the Holocaust more universal and more inclusive, we're saying that the lessons are more universal and more inclusive. So where is the line between drawing these universal lessons, which by the way, I believe, and I have a list of universal lessons that is actually rather long. What's the boundary between that and the deliberate distortion of history? I think it all goes back to how we teach it. And it goes back to the Holocaust museums and the Holocaust education that's out there. We get a very limited amount of time to teach Holocaust history, forget to Jewish students, but to Americans, regular community members. Maybe if you're a public school, you get a single field trip. So what do we do? When that happens, we teach concentration camps. And if it's not concentration camps, then it's not, this is what genocide looks like. And we don't teach everything that led up to it, right? The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust did not even begin with World War II. We count the Holocaust as starting in 1933 when Hitler rose to power and within six months had a watertight dictatorship and the first concentration camp, to be fair for political prisoners, but the first concentration camp opened. That's when it happened. That's when Jews started not being allowed to go to school, not being allowed to be teachers anymore. All of these things started early. And that's where our issue comes, because once you understand what the Holocaust was, what discrimination looked like, then it's a lot harder to then take the universalization of those messages and say, the IDF are Nazis, or this person who I don't like is a Nazi, or that person who I don't like is a Nazi, or this horrible war is a genocide. No, you have to understand the totality. And we need to go back to figuring out how to reteach Holocaust education so that it's actually impactful. It's so important what you're saying. I was having this conversation with someone just the other day. I think part of the challenge here, Jacki, is that too many people look too narrowly at the Holocaust and they look at the camps. And you correctly named very important historical fact, which is that the original occupants of the concentration camps, the original occupants of Dachau, were political prisoners. Mind you, by the way, in a bizarre early form of intersectionality, you had political prisoners who were Jews and were also labor leaders and also gay men. People could occupy, as it were, several categories. But people forget that even before the final solution, even before the conference Wanasee, you had the Holocaust by bullets. You had the mass executions, people digging their grave in the Soviet Union, executed by the Einsatzgruppen. And this happened to no other people. And the ghettos also, by the way, the war in Gaza, the war with Hamas, has pulled out so many, antisemitic microaggressions, right? Gaza is this great concentration camp. There are parts of Gaza that no one would want to live in. And there are also beautiful parts of Gaza. There is incredible income disparity that exists there. There was no income disparity that existed in the ghettos. So important. Multiple families in single-family apartments. There was disease in the streets, stepping over dead bodies. I mean, the ghettos, you had kids going out and stealing food if they could get out to come back in. And that's before right, the Holocaust by bullets. And again, all of this came after six years of Jews being shunted out of society. They were not allowed to take part in society. And everyone likes to say, for 10 years I've been hearing, this reminds me of Germany in 1933. Nothing reminded me of Germany in 1933. I will tell you now I'm starting to get echoes. Echoes… nothing that's saying this is happening, right? I don't think the Holocaust as an industrial, like killing machine is going to repeat itself any time ever, but certainly not in the near future. But the saying Zionists aren't welcome here. Saying it's okay to have clubs where Zionists aren't here. Things like that, once it's acceptable to take someone out of polite society and make them your scapegoat, bad things tend to follow. It's a really amazing situation in which we find ourselves. Again, just this past week, someone asked me if I thought that America in 2026 is tantamount to Germany of 1936. And I said, there's one thing that is separating America from Germany. And that is that Americans are responding very differently right now than the way the Germans did. And there's something else as well. I was just talking today to someone who was a professor of German history. And he reminded me of something that should be so clear to everybody. America is a democracy. And Germany was not, Hungary was not, Poland was not. It had, in these situations, there was a very thin veneer of democracy. What we're experiencing now, while there have been totalitarian impulses in American history, to be sure, what we're experiencing now is a deviation from the norm, which makes that deviation even sharper. So, you know, that's so important, because people don't think about that, right? I mentioned Weimar Germany before. Weimar was the name of the republic, the democracy that existed in between the two world wars, right? So think that it's 1918 to 1933. That is not a long time. That's less than 20 years that Germany experienced a democracy. Before that, there were kings. Then before that, you know, they had only become an actual country in 1891, I think. Before that, you had these separate kingdoms. You had Saxony, you had Bavaria. So you didn't have this sense. America's celebrating 250 years of democracy, right? We have a strong emotional connection to democracy. We understand what democracy looks like. Germany did not have that. With Admiral Horthy in Hungary, you did not have that. Across Europe in general, you didn't have that. Democracy was very, very young in most of the countries that it were able to fall to this. And that piece of history is actually really important to understanding why it was so unique at that moment in time, versus anything that could possibly happen in America today. By the way, since you mentioned the unification of Germany, which happened, I think, in the 1870s, if I remember my 10th grade history well, around the same time. Was that 1870 or 1891? I always get it confused with Italy. What's a couple of decades between friends! But, the point is that neither was there a unified German national identity. There was German language, there was a literature, but the Nazis were able to create a false sense of German unity. Yes. Again, without going too deep into my historical background, the fact that Prussia was the largest state, it was a very militaristic state, that overwhelmed a lot of the other pieces of Germany that came in and Hitler played to that very much. That's also why they were able to bring Austria into this. There's so many unique elements of what happened that allowed for Hitler to take over and to create this watertight dictatorship. If Russia hadn't had their March and October revolutions at the end of World War I, and the fear of communism that was happening across Europe, there are so many things that had to have come together in order for Hitler to rise. That being said, how we teach what happened and how it happened is so important to it not repeating itself. So the eyebrow-raising event that happened, let's just name names here, was when Vice President JD Vance avoided mentioning Jews. And just turn this back a little bit. Why did that raise alarm? And it's just one speech. Why does it matter? So, first I would say that it wasn't just JD Vance. It was the British Royal Family. It was the BBC. There were numerous elected officials in America, on both sides of the aisle, that erased Judaism and Jews from the Holocaust. And there are a couple of problems with that. Everyone listening to this podcast knows that we commemorate the Holocaust Remembrance Day later on in the year, April or May on Yom HaShoah, right? That is when Jews typically do this. This is a day for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, bigger than the Jews, that was only created about 21 years ago by the UN. Do you know why? You know, I actually don't tell me. Yes, I'm gonna tell you. It was done in order to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army as a way of exculpating the former Soviet Union from its crimes against the Jewish people. Of course, but that makes perfect sense, including the timing, perfect sense. Thank you. So here's my thing about the three remembrance days. I just wrote about it. Kristallnacht is about what they did to us. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is what they did for us. And Yom HaShoah is what we did for ourselves. That’s beautiful. Commemorating the Warsaw ghetto uprising, right? That is beautiful. And with your permission, I'm going to steal that with full credit. I will let everyone know it came from you. S-A-L-K-I-N. (Laughing) But, you know, the fact that even though it is meant to be, like you said, this universalization to bring everyone into it, bringing other people in does not mean taking Jews out. So now you have, if people say, millions were killed in the Holocaust, it's bad. Especially by the way, because Holocaust specifically is the Holocaust of the Jews, right? Genocide is the larger term. Holocaust is the Holocaust of the Jews. So it's bad when they say millions were killed. No, I know what I hate. I hate the passive language anyway. Though that's a given. But when they say 6 million people died, there's a famous TV show where they were interviewing a guy who was found with Hitler paraphernalia, World War II paraphernalia. And they wanted to make sure he wasn't a Nazi. So they started asking him questions and they said, what do you think the worst part about World War II was? And he said the millions of people who died said, great, who are those people? Just to check, says, oh, well, 5 million Germans and 6 million Soviets, or I'm getting the numbers wrong, but all these things. And he goes through all of the various people that died in the war, doesn't mention the Jews at all, to which the interviewer then says, I'm adding up the till here and I think you're a couple million short, right? That was a joke five years ago when it aired. Today it is reality. And when the Vice President of the United States, and elected officials in the United States, and the British Royal Family, and the BBC, and other outlets start talking about millions who died without referencing the Jews, when again, it was the final solution to the Jewish question, that is problematic. That goes back to what we were talking about, that there is a new status quo of information that people are learning and it's becoming acceptable to remove Jews from that. And that makes it easier to put us into that category of colonialists, white, and again, I'm not saying white is a bad thing, but in the vernacular of how people speak today, calling Jews white is essentially a slur, putting us into all of those categories that make us the evil villain. And whenever we are made the evil villain, what comes next is we become the victim of something. And the only thing giving me hope that that doesn't happen again, is that with the existence of the State of Israel and the IDF, we are no longer a group of people that history happens to. We are a group of people that are in control of our own destiny. So Jacki, let me pick up on something, because you mentioned something when we first started talking, I don't wanna let it slide. Why does this matter so much to you? So my great uncle, escaped Auschwitz, was a partisan. And I grew up with, I guess a fascination with the time period. I was a history major. I ended up getting my master's degree in the Fall of Weimar Germany and the Rise of Hitler. And my first born son was born on Yom HaShoah and he had his bris on Yom HaAtzmaut. And to me, that is the journey of the Jewish people from victim to victory. And Holocaust history in general, I think it is so important that we honor those who were murdered. They didn't die, right? Every single one of them was murdered. It is a genocide our people still have not recovered from, which is so important for people to know as we throw those words like genocide around. Gad Saad was on Joe Rogan's podcast and asked him how many Jews do you think there are in the world? And he said a billion, no, you know what? I'm gonna revise that, half a billion. We are not even where we were in January 1933. That's how much our people were decimated. This is incredibly important to me. And again, I think that 80 years after the Holocaust, we are now understanding and accepting that we didn't get it right when it came to Holocaust education and it is critical to get it right going forward, especially in a post-October 7th world. Especially in that world. I sometimes mused Jacki that I don't believe that Holocaust education has done anything to ameliorate Jew hatred, but I will say one thing, especially as we look at what's happening in America today, false comparisons, shoddy comparisons, and hearing the echoes. I do think that Holocaust education might have successfully inculcated within people a sense of what an early warning system must look like in order for a nation to protect its democratic institutions. What do you think of that? I think that's spot on. Look, on the one hand, I will say that having survivors around was the best Holocaust education that we could have had, speaking to those people one-to-one. As they are dying off and the Holocaust becomes something of history, if I remember, my math is right -- right now, the Holocaust is as far away from us, as the Civil War was away from them, when it started, right? Ancient history, ancient history, and it shouldn't be, because that is the personification of evil, and it's less than 100 years old. So yeah, I agree with you. We did not get Holocaust education, right? And there are still Holocaust museums out there that are getting it wrong. And for me, I have a lot of unpopular opinions. One of mine is, you mentioned Brett Stephens at the 92nd Street Y. I agree with him wholeheartedly that we have to stop worrying about getting beyond the choir and we have to focus on our choir. Where I would take it a step further is that I don't think our Jewish day schools, and I am a paying parent of three children at Jewish day schools, are doing a good enough job doing that education, whether it's Holocaust related, Israel history related, the Palestinian conflict, anything like that. And I think that we have to do a better job preparing our own future leaders with our own history as information is being poisoned, and then they will be the bulwark against everyone else that needs to hear it. And while you're talking about our young people who are attending Jewish day schools, that is a drop in the communal bucket, realizing that the overwhelming majority of non-orthodox Jewish young people in this country, end their Jewish education sometime around puberty. We are sending kids out into the Jewish world who have not gotten their vaccinations. Yes, and they don't get it at home. Jeff, you're putting me on the spot. These are all of the opinions that get me in trouble. Go ahead. Hey, you've got nothing popular to say, say it to me. And how many of our friends are listening? Let's compare our battle wounds, come on. So look, I think I wanna start by saying you can do everything right, and your child can still grow up to have very different beliefs than you and very different values from you, right? So that is a given, and if your child has strayed, that does not mean that you were a bad parent or you did it wrong. That being said, I think that there are a lot of parents who, well, let me say it this way. I have a nine, a seven, and a two. They go to Israel every single year. Every single year, and they went in utero, every single one of them. I want to make sure that my children understand the values. They are in Jewish day school. We are not Orthodox. My children are in Jewish day school. We live in a Jewish community, so that my children can understand, or maybe don't understand, but have the privilege and the luxury of living among other Jews and feeling like a majority, because they won't feel like that for long. There are things that we need to do at home that are uncomfortable conversations that can help make sure that our children are imbued with the values that we have. I never wanted to have a conversation about October 7th with my children, and I had no intention of doing it until I realized that other parents were doing it, and they were gonna hear about it from someone else or from me. And then when we went to Israel after October 7th, and the hostages still weren't home, I couldn't protect them from that. So I took a deep breath, and I leaned into the conversation, and we had a conversation about the bad people that exist out there, and the fact that there were hostages being held, and then we celebrated at home once they came home. So I think that we need to, we need to invest in our children. Our children are going to be the shining leaders of the future. I have no doubt about it. But we can't rely on other people to do it. We can't say, okay, my kid had their bar mitzvah, then they graduated public school. Now they're on a college campus, and I'm afraid of losing them. So hey, legacy organization that has a student program, why aren't you doing more to make sure that my kid comes to Chabad or goes to your events? Well, because there's only so much people can do on the back end, and there are a lot more that needs to happen on the front end. Again, this is where I get in trouble, because I think a lot of parents are doing really as much as they can, and Jewish education is expensive, and trips to Israel are expensive. But sometimes we have to make value judgments and priorities in our lives, in order to make sure that we are, let's put it this way, every Jewish trip I've ever been on, when you ask the madrich what the point of the trip is, they say to make Jewish babies, right? We have to do everything we can to make sure that we're putting those Jewish babies out into the world and that they will make more Jewish babies. And what saddens me, Jacki, about what you just said the last 10 seconds, is that in some circles in which I hang out, even the phrase “making more Jewish babies” has become controversial. I once said to a Jewish leader who was offended by this, I said, "We need more Jews." I said, "Either through conversion, adoption, or childbirth. I don't care how we get them, but we need more Jews." What is wrong with this? Unless we are the stamp collecting club, which if it went out of business, no one would really notice. There is a beauty to being part of this weird and eclectic community, right? How many other communities are there where the jokes are two Jews or two x three opinions? We are a community that thrives on arguing and fighting and trying to use Talmudic logic to become the best and most educated people we can, to not accept any sort of status quo. That's why we excel so much beyond our numbers. And I think you're right, we need more Jewish babies. I will never apologize for saying that. And we need more people in the world who are Jewish adjacent and just think like us, right? Our haters have done a great job of stealing our history and turning it against us, right? Zionist is a bad word now. They use “goy” against us, as though we're these horribly racist people who talk about “the other” as though that word doesn't exist in every single community, that there is a word for “the other” and it doesn't have to be derogatory, right? But if we have other people who are just thinking around, and by the way, we do have those allies. I will single out Van Jones because he is brilliant. He is, and not just him, but people like that, that just think the way that we do in terms of questioning everything and figuring out how to tikkun olam, right? In the non-bastardization-way of saying that word. You know, I along with several other alumni of my university formed a group to essentially support Jewish students, staff members and faculty who are experiencing antisemitism on the campus. When we got started, someone joined our group, is very active in that group, and I said to him, "You know, it's great to have you here, but I remember going to college with you decades ago. It was not my experience of you back then that you were Jewish." That's something very powerful, and I've been quoting this all over the country. He said, "Oh, no, I'm not. I'm an Irish Catholic kid who grew up in the Bronx. When I married a Jewish woman, we have Jewish children. What happens to you, happens to me. I am your ally." Amazing. And while we talk a lot about the challenges of intermarriage, I certainly did in my career. One of the things that I have come to understand, didn't take me that long, is that when people are part of a Jewish family… look, the Torah portion this week is Yitro…Jethro, the Midianite, father-in-law of Moses. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna be giving a sermon about it. If you happen to be Wichita, Kansas friends, I’ll be there. And he was an ally. And it's time for us to realize that we have Jews by Velcro, who are part of our extended community. Everyone who's married to a non-Jew, and that non-Jew has a family, those are candidates to be our allies and to carry our story for us. Yes. So, I got one last question for you, Jacki. We're in a time machine, we go to 2036. Okay. I'm 10 years older, but you're the same age. Fantastic, I'm loving this already. Already, it's fantasy, right? So in media, politics, education, popular culture, what would you like to see Holocaust remembrance look like a decade from now? I think it needs to be centering Jews, not because Jews need to be the center of everything, and not because there's any sort of hierarchy of horror, but because in the future, in 10 years time, I hope that there has been a great balancing of information and media and news. Right now, what the statistics are telling us is that 93% of all of the information on the internet next year will be false or fake, whether it is AI-generated or something not true. And that is terrifying for the future of democracy, that is terrifying for the future and stability of the Western world. And how goes Western democracy, so goes the Jews. So in 10 years time, if we are having an honest conversation about what the Holocaust meant and the horrible things that happened around it, where we center the Jewish experience, that will have meant that everything else will have balanced out as well. We have been hanging out with Jacki Alexander, who is the CEO and president of HonestReporting. Friends, I hope you're all reading HonestReporting. I do, forgive me for using the metaphor, almost religiously, and I've been a fan of Jacki for a long time. So it's been a total gift for me to be able to spend time picking your brain and your soul. I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin and this has been TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. This episode is a production of The 2G-3G Project, produced by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our founder, Sheryl Hoffman. Once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Please do us a mitzvah. Give us a five-star rating, wherever you listen to this podcast via Apple, Spotify, YouTube or Audible. And please go one step further and share this podcast, share it to be continued with your friends and family. And if you would like to sponsor an episode, please send us a note to info@ToBeContinuedPodcast.org. Thank you, friends. We'll see you again with a new episode in March. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. This was great.

12 de feb de 202644 min

Charlie Scheidt & Kat Rohrer: Holocaust Descendants on Different Sides of History

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