 Holocaust, today's remembering Holocaust, Holocaust remembrance day here, January 27th. And for this discussion here on Think Tech, we have Peter Hoffenberg, our co-host and Seymour Kazimerski who has had a long history with Think Tech, a long history with the Holocaust also. They both have. So, Peter, can you try, I know it's going to be hard, can you try to introduce Seymour? It's very difficult. I think many folks actually recognize Seymour. He wears lots of different hats. So we've asked him today to discuss on Holocaust remembrance day his public commitment to teaching children and other people about the Holocaust and his very deep family connection to the Shoah, which he'll talk about soon about his beloved mother of blessed memory. So Seymour, we're looking to you to update us, to think about what the status of Holocaust education is today and how, seemingly, as Rousseau said, two contradictory things can occur. There seems to be tremendous amount of education, a tremendous number of classes and exhibitions, and at the same time, a denial, revisionism, exploitation, I mean, both narratives are working together. So I return to Jay who always asks the on point questions, and then I will just chat when Jay and you would like me to. So welcome. Thank you for taking time. Welcome Seymour. I want to play a short piece that Think Tech made as a commentary on Remembrance Day. Okay, we'll play that now. That's an opener for you. So Seymour, what is the condition of knowledge or ignorance in the country, maybe the world about the Holocaust, and what are you doing about it? Well let's first talk about the education portion of it, Jay. And of course the country is a very, very large country. Here in Hawaii, I speak to about 140 schools. I've been doing it for 38 years now. I do it to about 4,000 to 5,000 students a year. We've been doing it by Zoom the last couple of years prior to that, we were doing it live. And I have to tell you, I have thousands of letters from students, from teachers who say that the experience of understanding the lessons of the Holocaust that we teach the children are some of the most important things they learn during the school curriculum. Why? Because they understand what happened to an individual. And of course I'm talking about my family, as Peter said. They understand what happened to my mother, and they understand how she saw her mother killed right in front of her. How she lost everybody, 64 members of her family, brothers, sisters, grandparents, everybody. And that itself makes a mark on the kids and the students. And even in college, when I go to U.A., these kids remember what we're teaching them. They remember the lessons of the Holocaust and why we have to continue to do what we do. And I think that part of the education portion here in Hawaii is important. And I have to tell you, just last night, we opened an exhibit at UH West called America and the Holocaust. And this is the opposite of what we're talking about. It's the education of non-education. It's what happened during the war in America. Why did America not give Jews? Why didn't they allow them to come into the U.S.? Why did they appease Hitler? And those are the questions for historians. Those are the questions for Peter. We need to understand exactly what happened during that time, because if we don't understand what happened, it's going to repeat itself. And it will repeat itself not just for Jewish people. It could be for many other genocides around the world. Peter, he mentioned your name. Oh, I heard that. I'm not sure why. Timur, what would you like me to add? I apologize. I have not been to the exhibit. I will go. I'm happy to come back and talk with Jay about it. Jay and I have talked about the Shoah and the U.S. It remains a controversial issue. So I would really like to go and visit the exhibit before I make any comments about it. I, just as a historian, have probably a less critical view of the U.S. than the organizers of that exhibit. So rather than misleading anybody, let me visit the exhibit and then I'm happy that we maybe can have you back on. I'm sure both of you individual, both of you guys have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Peter, you want to say what your experience was in visiting it? My experience had a couple of different facets, which will not surprise people. Just be honest, for a lot of folks situated on the Mall, it is just one more museum. That's always a risk. You know, in the morning you go to natural history and then the afternoon you go to the Holocaust Memorial. So it has a kind of a difficult challenge, right? It's not on the space of a camp. So it's not like visiting Auschwitz. It tries to suggest, and I think this is part of the difficulty, and Seymour and I, we can talk about this as good friends. There's always a great tension in the Shoah between seeking some universal lesson and remembering that is primarily a Jewish experience. And the two do not, the two are not easily married. For your listeners who might have knowledge about American history, it would be like going to an American museum about slavery, which there is not and there should be, and saying, well, slavery is universal. That does rob the experience of the African American component. And so part of my concern about the museum, you say, how did I react to it? It has an incredible archival collection. So the question is not denial as if it did not happen, right? That's really an extreme. And even today that's an extreme. You're more likely to meet people who revise it for their own interests. Or as it has to be on January 6th, I basically said the work was not done. The jerk with the camp Auschwitz. OK, to go to this museum, you cannot deny it happened. All right, that's that's for the most absurd position. But as Seymour says, what is the lesson? And my lesson as a historian was to see a real tension. You you see the Jewish experience and you come out and you're asked to prevent it from happening again or compare it to something else. When that's your objective, that conditions how you study something. So my short answer to you is look at the exit surveys and the exit surveys disproportionately from young people and their parents equate the Jewish experience with the experience of Jesus. You can even look at the most recent translation of Ellie Wiesel's night. And the editor equates the show up with the crucifixion. And I think we all ought to stop for a minute and think about that very common association. That's my answer. It wasn't that way for me. You know, I went there, I was blown over by it. And I told you guys before before the show, I would tell you about this one alcove, which had a bunch of correspondence where the rabbinical council was asking the Secretary of War during World War Two to blow up one of the concentration camps so that the infrastructure, the ovens and all that would be destroyed and they would have to stop the assembly line. And finally, after a long delay, the Secretary of War wrote back to them and he said, I'm afraid we can't do that because, quote, it would make Hare Hitler angry. And, quote, and then you get a window into what was going on in the government and why they didn't allow the ships here and why they didn't allow the ships after the war either. So I mean, my experience at the at the museum was really profound. But then, you know, in anticipation of this show today, Seymour, I watched Schindler's List and it was just as powerful the second time around, if not more powerful. And I go back, Jane, and I go back to the education because Peter and I are both involved in education. He is a historian and me as a basically an educator for the Holocaust. Two, three weeks ago, I went to Punahou when I spoke to a senior class at Punahou and one of the one of what the teachers have to do is they have to prepare the students for me, which means I don't want to be coming in there and just telling them what the what the Holocaust is, and they have to prepare questions for me. The questions led to the most important fact of why personal education is so important on the Holocaust. Every single student there asked me pertinent questions about bullying, about racism, about bigotry, about anything to do with how to treat other people as the most important part of the lesson. And I think that's something that we forget. Yes, Peter is correct. You go to the Holocaust Museum or Yad Vashem or any place else. And Jewish people like us three all have a very common, oh, my God, this is amazing. But don't forget, when I went to Punahou, I think there was one Jewish student there and the rest were not Jewish. And the letters I got from them afterwards, thanking me for opening their eyes to what they have to do to change the way they live against bullying, against hatred, against all of those racism issues that we have. And I think that to me makes me keep doing this over and over again. Oh, you should. And absolutely. But it should be happening all over the country. I was telling you guys there was an article in Haaretz, which is the New York Times of Israel this morning. Expressing outrage at the action of a school board in Tennessee that outlawed a book on the Holocaust from the curriculum in that school district is extraordinary. And this is a classic book, too. It's been around a long time. But, you know, in terms of whether people understand what happened, whether they have had education in general, I suggest to you that Hawaii is special and you can find people who are relatively tolerant here, for the most part. And I would like to put a list of the prison camps, the concentration camps, the death camps on the screen so that we can see how many there were and we can get a handle on whether people have heard these names. Can you read them just here on Remember and Stay? Seymour, if you can read the German. OK, so they start. Obviously, we all know Dahau and we know Auschwitz. And we know Treblinka. But has anybody heard of some of these other camps? Ravensbrook, Sopedor, Kovnos, Stuttihoff, Kemano, Belsa, Lublin, of course, we've heard of, Grossrozen, Flossenberg, Natsweiler, Gruferde, Hinsher, Wietensberg, Herzogenbach, Nürnke Bayer, Witzelaja, Buchenwald, of course, Mathausen, Dahau, Sophausen. There's so many. And these were all camps that very few people knew or know about. And I think it's important to realize that all of Europe was taken over by Hitler. And when he built his camps in in Germany and in Poland and some of the outlying areas, he really wanted to exterminate a race. This was not about just killing Jews. It was exterminating a race. And I'll never forget my mother, who said at the end of her interview with General Stackball, when she said, Hitler didn't win the war. I won the war. Mine here is proof to show that Hitler lost the war. And I think that's so important because people then realize that this was all about individuals. It was all about people who were willing and able, thank heaven, to withstand everything that they had gone through, including what you were talking about. And that is the United States, Britain, Canada, saying, oh, we don't want to get involved. We don't want to we don't want to do something that Hitler might not like stupid things like that. But yet we survived. So one thing, Peter, is that you look now and it says 70 years later and you say, well, how do people remember really? Do they know, you know, many generations have passed and maybe there's a lot of deniers around and they don't know, they don't remember, they don't want to know. They don't remember. And, you know, for a long time, at least in my my childhood, never again really meant something. Now, you know, it's more like again. And some people have the chutzpah to say that six million were not enough. It's really extraordinary how out of the ashes there rises another new anti-semitism now. And so I ask you, you know, what what is happening, at least in Europe, with regard to remembering? You know, if you have to say remember and stay, you're kind of assuming that a lot of people are forgetting. Good point. Connecting Europe today with anti-semitism, which seems to be what you're asking me about. We see some similar seeds to the Shilla, right, extreme nationalism in Europe, which has always in one way or another attacked the Jew, it was known as the Jewish question in the 19th century. So for us, European historians, Hitler's attitude and policies are the extreme of a question that was asked for a long time and certainly asked ever since Jews were emancipated from the ghettos. So part of this is an assimilation issue. And look, you're seeing in places like Hungary and France, even in northern Europe, attacks on Jews are are also linked to attacks on Muslims and Muslim immigrants. Very rarely are Jews as only Jews targeted in all these societies, Jews. I mean, it's a traditional group, right? The Roma, Gypsies are still attacked, Jews are attacked, Muslims are attacked. So one answer is we're doing it with a period as the European Union fractures. And one of the issues of Mr. Putin is whether or not you agree with Russian expansion, you know, whether or not one ethnicity has the right to conquer another. If that's the case, that's another foundation of Nazism. Two is Hitler and the Nazis took advantage of the technology they had at the time. You and I talk every week about social media. Well, everywhere from FDR and on the one side, Hitler and Mussolini on the other side, they took advantage of radio and they took advantage of film, the way that anti-Semites and haters today, right? Create unions among people who will never meet each other who might ironically remember one of the leaders of January six was a person of color, ironically, probably on the web. The other jerks never recognized or knew this was a person of color. And so you have secondly, a transnational cultural connections which inflamed this thirdly. And I very much appreciate the listing of the camps. And that's not that's actually an incomplete list. There are more camps and traditionally now on a Holocaust Remembrance Day or Yom HaShoah, just the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the United Nations Day. There is Yom HaShoah, which is a Jewish day. And traditionally for the Kurdish, we add the names of all the camps and most young people fall asleep by the time you get to the end. It's a long it's a long list, but there are two points I'd like to make. And this is really Seymour's show, so let me just make it quick. One is that it is a intellectual and historiographical decision to focus on the camps. By focusing on the camps, we forget that just as many, if not more people were killed traditionally by knives and guns. And so in our lessons about the Holocaust and we talk about bullying and violence, etc. We don't do a full service to emphasize the industrial killer. As many murders were non-industrial. OK, that's that's one thing. Secondly, it's important to list the camps. It's more important, I think, probably historically to notice where they were. And a disproportionate number were on bullish soil. And that remains today a major issue. In many cases, the Germans, German students would recognize all those names. Polish students would recognize the names as places in which Poles were murdered or Soviets used the camps afterwards. So it's good to list, right? It's important to know how these different societies respond to each of them. Yeah. Well, you know, a couple of thoughts on that is that there's another alcove in the Holocaust Museum, which describes what happened when the displaced people, Jewish people who had been moved to the soft underbelly of Europe tried to go back to Poland in the late later 40s, 46, 47, 48. And the Poles in their towns and villages felt they were coming back to reclaim their land and their shops and their farms. And they killed them. So there was an abiding anti-Semitism there. And maybe that's one of the reasons why the Germans could put the camps in Poland, because it was a fertile ground, so to speak. Anyway, I wanted to see more. I wanted to ask you about Schindler's List because of all the movies that have covered World War Two, it seems to me to be accurate. It seems to me to be a, you know, a sort of one story in a larger picture of what happened. How do you feel about that movie? How do you feel about the examination of Schindler and its industrial complex against the background of the Holocaust? Well, assuming we realize that these are movies and there are poetic licenses that are that are taken by the directors and and and the producers, I think that they prove an invaluable resource for my teaching and for any educator. If we have the students watch any of these movies like Schindler's List, The Pianist, etc., they really do grasp it a lot better than me just speaking about it. And that's why I believe video was so important. But I wanted to ask Peter a question, social media. I'm finding more and more anti-Semitism. There are so many sites now about anti-Semitism on social media. As a historian, aren't you worried that this could bring an uprising of anti-Jewishness or anti-Semitism to the world? Absolutely, Jane. I talk about this probably endlessly or explicitly every week about every topic. I agree with you. A couple of responses that I real quickly, because, yes, yes, 110 percent. I agree. So the question is, what do we do about it? Like, that's really what you're asking, right? In a lot of ways. One is is there is also a considerable counterattack on the part of those opposing anti-Semitism. So here you have the big tech companies deciding which algorithm they're going to send you to, right? But my, as you know, this is an issue of a deep concern to me. Probably half my time on the web is spent surfing about anti-Semitism. And I get a lot of active, educational and governmental groups opposing this. So one answer, of course, is the best thing about bad medicine is good medicine. And apropos of that, I think it's time the Republicans get off their tushies and allow lipstick to be the special envoy for anti-Semitism. A bottle of Deborah Lipstadt's appointment as other ones got Biden appointed her and this gets to your to your point of view because she has somebody with U.S. governmental and international authority can address this. You know, what should Germany do about old timey, et cetera, et cetera? My second response is apropos of your education is that most of these the demarcional groups are important. In other words, people who are necessarily inclined, it suddenly shows up. You know, I don't really want to eat a cheeseburger, but it shows up on my site. I'm going to eat it. The hard and anti-Semites will be hard and anti-Semites, right? But we're really talking about these young young people or somewhat young people who are impressionable. And that's where our education has to take a role, a formal classroom education. But more profoundly than just about the show up is teaching people critical skills to know what this website is created and perpetrated by people who have nothing good in mind. And I'm going to be able to comprehend that. So we're talking about the substance, but at a deeper level, we're talking about people's ability to be critical. And that's where we really have a problem, because let's be honest, the web is is just like going to marketplace. It's really an example of consumerism. So how do we educate people to consume properly? On the web. OK, I think there's more now. My final point, though, my final point to you is, though, and Jay knows this, I tend to be libertarian on the free speech issue. Right. So, for example, I don't agree with the German law that says Holocaust, probation or denial is illegal. I think that's a slippery slope. Because that's one of the responses, right? Just make this illegal and just censor it. But I know sides. We need Peter just one quick question, because I know we don't have a lot of time. Genocides in general are are I mean, we're talking Rwanda, we're talking China, we're talking all over the world. Right. If we lump the Holocaust into the genocide education experience, does it help or does it hurt in making people understand what happened? Oi, oi, I'll give you a tell you the answer. It's a solemn on a cancer, right? It helps because apropos what you said in particular, it allows a personal connection, right? A Cambodian kid can make a connection, very valuable. And I'm not saying one or the other. I'm saying we have to combine them. So we have to say, yes, I'm going to teach the Shoah as one of the most extreme examples we've documented of genocide. And as you heard about others, you probably know there's a working group in Europe, which has attempted to study and quantify all the different genocides we know quantifying for a second to be able to predict. So, you know, what is the economy like? Inflation rate, unemployment, et cetera. And they really have an algorithm to try to be able to predict. OK, if you remove the Holocaust from that, your algorithm would be in conflict. But I think what's lost on this is the magnitude. You talk about Rwanda, there was half a million people. I was terrible, terrible. It was neighbors killing neighbors. And, you know, in any of these genocides, you're talking about, you know, the substantial number, but none of them comes to six million. Well, I think we have to be focused, hatred and violence, six million people. And I think when, you know, I think it's an important point, I'm sure you teach it, Seymour. This was really big. This was industrialized. This was an amount to a national effort, whether everybody knew about it or not. And I think when we teach about it today, we should stress that. OK, Seymour, I have to tell you and I have to tell this to Peter, too. When I lecture on the Holocaust today, the Holocaust is a means to an end for me. It's to help young people understand how they have to change their way of thinking. I'm talking about the way they live, where they where they denigrate other people, the bullying that they do, how it all started, how how they how the Jews were taken advantage of. It's it's important for me not just to teach about the Holocaust and the numbers and the facts and all that. More important to me is to help them understand how to live their life today. If you're talking to somebody, Seymour, say on the mainland, you know, where the same level of tolerance doesn't exist. And this person is, you know, saying things like the Jews will not replace us. This person is bigoted living in a world of bigotry, a bubble of bigotry connected with all kinds of other bigotry and hatred issues. OK, and it's you and this person. What do you say to get him out of that bubble or her? Don't. I don't check. There's no way that I could convince anybody who has a black and white opinion that there's great. It's not going to work. I listen to him and I say, if that's your opinion, more power to you. That's what you think. I think you're absolutely incorrect and you have to be willing to respect my opinion. I'm respecting yours, respect mine. And of course, they say I do, I do. And they probably don't, but it doesn't matter. Jane, we're not going to turn the world over. All we're going to do is try to make the world a better place to live in. That's my job. Peter, you have lots of thoughts about this. You want to take a whack at summarizing and expressing those thoughts? I'll give my thoughts because that's going to take another week or two. So let me just thank you more very much, as always. And let me see more correct, correct me. But usually at the end, we like to summarize what our guest has given to us. So let me just give a couple of points and then correct me. Seymour's dedication to education, particularly at the pre-college level. So the way in which Holocaust and genocide education and it should be part of normal social studies courses, public and private schools. Does that make sense? Seymour, is that representing? Yes, you're 100 percent. And secondly, and not really secondly, but a number one is that's connected to a sense of human decency, of respect, of disagreement in words, but not violence. And so the education about the Holocaust is, yes, an education about the Shoah. But to a greater degree, it's an education about humanity and the decency that we really need to apply to humanity. And as far as the history, Jay, I think we should come back. I'd like to invite Seymour back because in the last 10 years has been a lot of very important historiographical contributions to the study of the Shoah. So when you take a course at the college level on Holocaust, it's very different than it was 10 years ago. Not not denial, historiographical revision. In other words, yes, it happened. It happened here and there, who did happen to why, etc. And it will even expand your great fears, Jay, because among the historical contributions has been the policy of anti-Semitism outside of Europe to the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, the Bishi in the French colonies, Jews living in Indochina. So you can go to sleep even more worried. All right. Now, the answer to your question I tell my students is not numbers, because really, if you want to get in the numbers game, Stalin and Mao are the biggest genocidal maniacs, right? There's not even there's not even a debate, OK? But one way to look at this is that if Hitler had one. Every Jew everywhere would have been evicted. The consequences of the Rwandan genocide are horrendous. But Hutus and Tutsis very rarely chased and murdered each other outside of one. Stalin a little bit, Mao very little. You want to one of the unique aspects of this really is that potentially, potentially every Jew everywhere. Would be a big. And I think that actually, existentially expands on the six million. No historian agrees with six million, right? I mean, there's no way to say exactly six million. And there's a controversial Israeli documentary out about that now. But we don't debate that. Well, we're interested in those, right? Those who were able to escape to survive. And that six million would have been at least doubled or trebled, right? If Hitler and his allies and one. So that's how I teach it, not not six million versus one million because you see what you could get into potentially and your viewers would be interested in this is African American slavery because of the numbers. Greater than any other or more worrisome than any other form of slavery. And that's that's an interesting historical question because in the numbers game, there's about 20 million people were upset by the transatlantic slave trade. There's no other slave trade, probably in human history, which is comparable. You know, it's up to you. We're running out of time now, as we always do on this show. So can you can you can you leave your words that you would like people to remember about this conversation? I want people to remember that we are all ambassadors. And it's not ambassadors of the Holocaust. We're ambassadors to make the world a better place. Use the teachings and the lessons of the Holocaust to make people understand who treat each other fairly to treat each other with respect. That's the key to what I try to do. And I really believe that I get somewhere doing that. So I hope the next time we get together, we can talk a little bit more about that because that to me is the key. I need Peter to help me understand how to teach that even better than I'm teaching it now. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. Thank you, Seymour. Thank you, Peter. I am, on the other hand, not as liberal as either of you guys. I am still outraged. I'm outraged with what happened and I'm outraged with the anti-Semitism that has grown up in our world. And our engineer told me that he found a map during the show showing geographically all those camps. So, Eric, would you play that map now? There are a lot of camps. There are a lot of camps. And the people who the people who died or were killed, they can't report to us. History is told by the survivors. And if we wanted to have a really clear picture of the horror, we would have to speak to those who were killed. Thank you so much, Seymour. Thank you, Peter, remembering the members. Thanks for your good work, Seymour, to Repair the World. Thank you. Aloha.