 Welcome to this special broadcast on I-24 News for Holocaust Memorial Day. I'm Caleb Bendevede. On this day, the focus is, of course, on the victims of the Holocaust, the millions who suffered or lost their lives to the Nazi death machine, also those that heroically fought back against it, and the survivors who lived to provide future generations with the invaluable testimony of this unprecedented human tragedy. But in this hour of our coverage, we're going to shift that focus from the victims to the perpetrators of this monstrous crime. The millions of Germans and their collaborators, who either took direct part in the persecution and slaughter of the Jews and others, were helped enable it with little or no opposition. But we'll also look at the heroic few who did find ways to resist the unfolding tragedy. Our vehicle for this will be a documentary footage shot in the 1980s for a film sponsored by Switzerland's Wallach family through their Orion Foundation, in which director Alexander Sambati turned his camera on Germans and Austrians, speaking frankly about what they did or observed during this period. This film was shown once on German television and then donated to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum. We'll show clips from that footage and then discuss them, looking at them from a historical and psychological perspective. We begin with a key turning point in the unfolding of the Holocaust. Memories of the 1938 Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht. You are a Sudeten German, and during the Anschluss you lived in Linz, in Austria. What did you witness there? In the same street where the grammar school is and still is today, there was a shop with sweets, confectionery, and I used to go there every week to buy some sweets with my pocket money, Zuckerl as they say in Austria. And about a fortnight, three weeks after the so-called Anschluss, I went there. There was essentially a stormtrooper in front of the shop bearing a large placard Don't buy from Jews. Until then, I had absolutely no idea that the owner was a Jew. He was a very nice, very polite, obliging man. And I wanted to go into the shop, and at that point the stormtrooper blocked me with his leg and said, can't you read? I said, I want to buy some sweets. There's nothing to buy here. I went across the road to the other side to see what would happen next, and I'd scarcely reach the other side when the shopkeeper came out of his shop and he was wearing all his war decorations from the First World War. He had the big silver medal of courage from the Austrian army. That is one of the highest decorations a private can have and a whole row of other decorations. Shortly after that, a stormtrooper commandant came along with a group of stormtroopers, four men, armed, guns, pistols. They shoved the man back into the shop, slammed the door, and there were noises coming from inside, a racket, shouting. Obviously, they were beating him up. And shortly after that, the door opened. The shopkeeper came out. His head was bleeding. People looked at him. He was almost in tears. And his medals had been ripped off. Heinrich Setzler experienced the night of the pogrom, 9th November 1938, in Baden-Baden. Herr Setzler, you experienced the 1938 November pogrom here in Baden-Baden. What did you see? Yes, I came to Baden-Baden purely by chance. And as I was walking down Sofianstrasse, or Ale, I suddenly saw a procession of men marching past, escorted by German police and some uniformed party members, stormtroopers and SS. And I noticed that some people were really shocked by this pageant, especially because right at the front there was a young man carrying a placard. We Jews are greater Germany's misfortune. The Jews were then taken to the synagogue. A very famous, magnificent Jewish synagogue had been built here. There was a broad stairway leading up, and at the front there was a small landing. The Jews were then taken up there and had to form themselves into a tableau. A Jewish prayer mat was spread out, and then suddenly a Ruffian went up to the well-known lawyer Dr. Hauser and beat him to the ground. There were similar scenes going on inside the building, too. The synagogue attendant, or a cantor, had to read out a chapter of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. The Horst Vessel lead was also sung, allegedly, that's what I heard. Then the Jews were taken to the Hotel Zentral, opposite, and there they were given. They were forced to eat pork. Then I heard that the Jews were taken to the railway station at about nine o'clock, where they were loaded into cattle wagons and taken to Dachau. Joining me now in studio is Dr. Efraim Zurov, director of the Israel and Eastern European offices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its chief Nazi hunter. An author of the book, Our People, discovering Lithuania's hidden holocaust. Happy thank you for joining us today. Certainly just chilling to hear those reminiscences, if you want to call them that. Let's talk, maybe put in perspective, Kristallnacht and its impact, its place as we subsequently come to know it in the history of the holocaust. First of all, this was very important because the persecution and the actions taken were taken in broad daylight. I mean, at night, but I'm saying in full view of the public. There were still Western reporters in Germany who reported on it in the Western media and marked almost a case in which the Germans were sort of mocking the West in order to show them that we'll do whatever we want with the Jews and you can't stop us, or you won't try and stop us. But in other words, there was like a buildup, in other words, this was step-by-step, talking about in July of 38, there was the Evian conference, which was convened, the ostensibly to solve the refugee problem. But the conference, in a sense, was ruined before it began because they said no country will be asked to change their quotas, and it was the quotas that were keeping the Jews out. Only one country out of the 32 countries who were represented at Evian was willing to accept Jews, and that was the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo, and ultimately only 1,000 Jews actually ever reached there, and Palestine was off the issue, and that was not part of the agenda, and that was done at the insistence of the British. So, I mean, it was ludicrous. It was a trap from which the Jews had no escape, but let's talk about the Munich agreement. Let's talk about what we heard from the Germans there, because what's striking is that they're saying, we saw this respected figure who had fought in the First World War on the side of Germany and the, I guess, Austro-Hungarian Empire, the respected lawyer, but they don't talk about any sense of outrage at what they witnessed. They didn't talk about raising any kind of objection to what they witnessed, or trying to offer help or shelter to their neighbors. Well, listen, in a certain sense, what happened in Kristallnacht was just like the appetizer in a certain sense. In other words, they didn't see, these people didn't see the horrors of the Einsatzgruppen mass murders, of the death camps, and etc., so I don't know if their reaction would have been the same, had they been asked to relate to that, had they seen that, actually witnessed the mass murders. Right. But this was a sort of a culturation process, step by step by where Germans like this became accustomed to increasing persecution of the Jews. Right, but it was incremental. In other words, it didn't start with Auschwitz, okay? Auschwitz started in 1941, and the death camps in 42, and it started in 1933 with the law against the Jews in the civil service, and all sorts of other Jews, against Jews in professions, in other words, doctors' lawyers that could only have Jewish clients, etc., and it was step by step. Right. Well, stay with us, Dr. Frames, or of course, next, we are going to hear from Germans who did witness and to part in what happened in those death camps, including one very specific one, the death camp Treblinker, so please stay with us on this special broadcast for Holocaust Memorial Day on I-24 News. Welcome back to this special Holocaust Memorial Day broadcast on I-24 News. The Nazi anti-Jewish measures and sporadic outbursts of violence of the 1930s turned into the systematic extermination of European jury during the 1940s. In these clips, we'll come face to face with that horror in the form of a former commandant of the notorious Treblinker death camp, and in contrast, a German officer who speaks more frankly of the slaughter he witnessed and the moral compromises he made. Kurt Franz, born in 1914, trained butcher and cook, commandant of the Treblinker extermination camp, sentenced by the Düsseldorf district court for joint murder of at least 300,000 persons, for murder in 35 cases of at least 139 persons, and because of attempted murder to life imprisonment. Kurt Franz has since been released. He has never admitted before the German judicial authorities that he was the commandant of the Treblinker death camp. Herr Franz, half a century has now passed. These mass murders happened half a century ago. What are your thoughts on them? If I had known at the time what was going to happen to me when I left the army and transferred to the SS, then I never would have come to the SS. Why? For the simple reason that I cannot bear the thought of what I witnessed, this Belzec. Herr Franz, why were these people killed? But they were civilians, they were inoffensive people. I have never in my life, anywhere, ever had any problems whatsoever with Jews, although and I must stress this now, the accessory prosecutor at the time in the Treblinka trial, Dr. Joseph Neuberger, said that as a young man, I had been present in his apartment on Huttenstraße in Düsseldorf and threatened him, but I did not even know the man. I have never had anything against Jews. For example, I played handball with Jews at Rattigan 04. I played handball with Jews in the stadium in Düsseldorf, in Düsseldorf, Maccabi. I played handball as an opponent. There were never any problems. I did not see any difference between Catholics or Protestants or Jews. Hans Wilhelm Mück, born in 1911, Ulter Sturmführer in the Waffen-SS refused to select prisoners who were unfit for work for the gas chambers and went to Berlin to demand a transfer. This was refused because it was privy to a state secret. When Auschwitz was liberated, he was taken prisoner by the Red Army and handed over to the Polish authorities. In January 1947, he was the only one of 40 accused to be released by the Krakow Court for the reason that he was absolved from sin and atonement. Did you see how the people died in the gas chamber? At first, there was nothing to see. The doors were very large barn-type doors and there was just a small spyhole in them through which the people who were meant to be supervising could supervise the procedure or could check whether the gas had taken effect. I never looked in during this, shall we say, during the phase when people were dying. I was not in the right frame of mind. I was not strong enough to look inside. Only when the commando came and opened the doors so that the gas chambers could be opened so that the doors were open, not the doors through which they had entered but the doors on the opposite side which were just as big. And when the extractor fans were running, I looked in this spyhole and saw they were in a tangled heap cramped up and lying curled up on the floor and saw how they were dragged out with poles and instruments by special command. How is it that you refuse to do selections? The work to which I had been assigned was something with which I could identify to some extent. As a hygienist in the camp ensuring that the hygiene conditions were reorganized that was something which was completely compatible with my medical knowledge. But I could not bring myself to collaborate with these killings in the gas chamber. In these matters, and so I refused. Did you speak to your colleagues about the gasings? Yes, of course. I was in constant contact with them. What did they say? I was still acting as a hygienist and of course it did happen that we spoke about the gasings. But strangely what we really talked about were the shortages and the problems which we had because of the fact that a certain amount of the reports had to be improvised because Auschwitz was not in fact primarily a gasing camp. And as to the fact that the Jews had to be gassed or shall we say there was certainly no doubt among those who actively collaborated and with the fact that the humanitarian ethos, with the medical ethos they were not responsible since they had each come to terms with this a long time since. There was no longer a question, one had agreed to do it and it was now, so long as it went all right, part of it. That is, everyone was trying from his own point of view and from his own options to justify the whole matter of these gasings. And still with us in studio is Dr. Fryem Zoroff, director of the Israel and Eastern European offices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and his chief Nazi hunter and author of the book Our People Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust. Also joining us in studio is Dr. Kamila Forkash-Levan, a licensed practicing psychologist. And I think first let's set the record, historical record straight on Kurt Franz because anyone who knows the history of Treblink in his role knows that he's obviously not being honest there. First of all, he's not answering the question at all. Right. He's going back into his past and saying that growing up in Germany he had no problems with Jews. It all relate to Treblinka. You saw that? Yes. So he didn't answer the question. By the way, he was notorious sadist, Kurt Franz. Right. The historical record of him was that he was a butcher and a sadist. Right. Exactly. Right. Kamila, then how do we explain a person like this who is not only did these things but just simply lies about it or deflects it completely? Are we talking about a psychopath, a sociopath here? So it will be very easy to say like, okay, he's crazy or psychopath or something like that but the problem is actually far bigger and more insidious and I agree with you. Like he doesn't talk about the previous history and everything like that. So often in how we will behave, especially in such a horrible situation, yes, there's underlying currents of cultural already anti-Semitism or prejudice and it gets passed on through generations as well, right? And then from there, the step is not so great of where you will basically indoctrinate a whole population with the humanizing whomever you want to dehumanize and then slowly, slowly there's group think, of course, and different factors that socially are putting a lot of pressure on the individual. Right. You, of course, have been involved in the process of trying to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. How do we explain Kurt Franz? The record of him is horrendous. The individual acts he did was just freed from prison after a few years and allowed to live the rest of his life as a free man in Germany. First of all, if you examine the record of German justice until recently, you see that every effort was made to limit the number of people who were being brought to justice. And I'll give you an example. Until about 13 years ago in the Federal Republic in Germany, in order to prosecute a Nazi war criminal, you had to prove that that person had committed a specific crime against a specific victim and the motivation was racial hatred. Go prove that. That's almost impossible. And they did it on purpose. In Austria, they created a category of criminality called passive complicity and genocide. And if you were accused only of passive complicity and genocide, you can't be prosecuted. That maybe explains Kurt Franz's response bringing up this encounter, denying this encounter pre-war that he mistreated a Jew by showing, oh, it wasn't, there was no racial hatred involved here. No, he was just an athletic rival. That's all he was on the other team. That was Maccabi and not in his team. I know, and that somehow experiences the sadistic behavior at Treblinka. Let's look at the second soldier who is more honest about what he witnessed, what he saw there, but clearly he tried to come to some kind of, I would say, moral compromise with himself, saying, well, here's certain things that I wasn't going to do, but still I was willing to take part in the gassing of the Jews in some way, in an administrative way. So again, going back to what we started, of how this can happen and trickle down to individual people, and again, the part where you mentioned there is, of course, a difference on who's going to react how and what they're going to do. So for example, for someone that's already with the sadistic qualities or psychopath, this is beautiful, an opportunity to go crazy and do whatever they want. For someone that doesn't have those qualities, you have to package it somehow in a neat way where you can sleep at night. So I'm going to do only this but not that. I only went till this part but not that part. For example, we can see an obedience studies with Milgram, the pressing of the button to hurt someone. So you can see how almost anyone, to an extent, can be turned into this. The question then brings us to our personal moral question and the work of Franco, who are you in this situation? Who do you choose to be in a way, yeah? Right. There's a lot of question. You've been involved, and again, in still finding former Nazis or concentration camp God officials, even at an advanced age. When you see someone like Kurt Franz being allowed to live out his life peacefully, surely, just as an example to be made that someone like that, even no matter what age they should be, should not be allowed to end his life like that. Listen, today the Germans are putting on, there are two trials going on now in Germany. One is of a 96-year-old woman who was the secretary of the commandant of Stutthof, the camp near Gdansk. Another trial is going on of an SS guard, served as an SS guard in Sachsenhausen for three years, who's 101. So in other words, now the Germans have completely changed things. In other words, now, based on service alone, you can prosecute these people. But had they applied that same level of evidence, they could have prosecuted hundreds of thousands of other Germans, which they didn't want to do. Right. But an example in this case, we're not talking about, we're talking about the commandant of maybe the worst death camp of them all, in terms of the actions that were taken there. That's arguable, but okay. But one of the worst, certainly. Right. Listen, he in Stegel, Stegel was the commandant of Treblinka, and he built Sobibor. So that means that one person had actual responsibility for the murder of over a million Jews. One million makes him the biggest murderer in human history. Right. It's just incredible to witness. And I'm incredible to witness to see the way, at least if someone more of a cog in that machine tried to rationalize what he was doing there and talking about how they discussed, chilling to hear how they discussed the shortages that they, that was their concern. Dr. Freimzor, if I want to thank you for joining us on this special broadcast, Dr. Kamila Forkash-Levan. I want to ask you to stay with us. We're going to now turn to another area of the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto, and how Germans who witnessed that had to deal with. So please stay with us on this special Holocaust Memorial Day broadcast on I-24 News. Welcome back to this special Holocaust Memorial Day broadcast on I-24 News. The Nazi persecution and destruction of the Jews took several forms, including the Jewish ghetto set up across Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Warsaw. In this segment, we'll hear remembrances from Germans who worked at or near the ghetto, and hear their accounts of what they witnessed there. You asked me about the relationship between Germans and Jews in a company like the one we're talking about. You know, if you walked into the work rooms and saw these frightened people there, you know, they were fully aware of what was going on. Every woman, every child, every man had the fear of death in their eyes when a German came. The atmosphere in the company was terrible. That was the worst thing for me. And then when you came out, our offices were opposite on the other side of Sibowska. Number 30, former Jewish cafe. When you cross the street, how the people shoved each other, one behind the other. You know, they were seeking refuge, but they didn't know where to go. They were being chased through the streets. And then what was going on in the meantime? For example, I saw when I went out once, I didn't like it, I didn't do it often, there were these three completely naked children about two or three years old with these bellies, swollen heads, protruding eyes in the gutters, lying on the pavements and gulping the filthy water. This ghetto sewage, three years old, still children. Perhaps they were even younger than that. Children who must have been thrown out by their parents because they simply couldn't feed them anymore. Hans Siekman was an occupied Warsaw as a soldier and witnessed the conditions in the ghetto after the war he was a legal official. Did you see the SS brutalizing people? Yes, I saw that a few times. Did they beat them? I saw that a few times, yes. Did you see shootings? I didn't see any shootings, no. Were people begging for food? Yes, begging for food and also for a drink. How did people survive there? Do you mean the people in the workshop? Generally, how did they survive? By trading. There was a lot of bartering going on. There would be one man with a pair of pants over his arm and he would trade it for a pair of shoes or someone who had, let's say, a pair of shoes. He would trade them for potatoes or food. That is if anyone had anything to trade. Did you also see dead bodies on the street? There were bodies lying in the street, yes. Did you talk to your comrades about the conditions in the ghetto? Sometimes we talked about it. In fact, some pictures were taken. I was not the only one to take pictures, others did too. What did your comrades say? Well, they were all saying the same, that it was human slavery that mostly people just couldn't understand. Was it clear to you that this was a case of mass murder? Yes. I didn't see mass murder in that sense. I saw a few corpses on the streets or people who had starved to death. And then once I saw a hearse and they were picking up the dead from the street and loading them from one of the better phrase onto a wagon full of bodies and then they carried them away. And still with us in studio is Dr. Kamila Fokash Lavani, licensed practicing psychologist and joining us now is Professor Gideon Greife, a Holocaust historian and expert in the Auschwitz extermination camp. And Gideon, let me just ask you about what we just heard. You know, the defense of a lot of Germans is we didn't know what was going on in the camps, which were isolated, but not the ghettos. I mean, the ghettos were there, the existence was known and what was happening, the slow death comparatively was certainly known to Germans as we saw. The problem with these reminiscences is that they are very late. The perpetrators read reports, they read books, they mix their own reminiscences with what they have read. I wouldn't take it too serious, what we have just heard. In the time of the ghetto they were merciless, they were cruel, they were brutal. The fate of the Jews did not interest them. So I would take it in a very limited manner, what we have just heard. Right, you're talking about more of the first, certainly maybe the first where this. The second was kind of dispassionate in describing what he saw there. The cruelty of the Germans was immense, was huge. Many bodies were there in the ghetto, not only in Warsaw. There were hundreds of ghettos, smaller ones, bigger ones. They didn't save even one Jew in the time of the ghettos. They were satisfied with getting rid of the Jewish race, so to say. Let's talk about, because previously you talked about not just the individual psychology, as you said, of sadists perhaps who worked in the concentration camps, but the way the Germans themselves, kind of a mass sociopathy, at least certainly when it came to the Jews and other individuals. So again, I want to highlight the progress of how something like this can happen. Again, because it's very important for all of us to know, to hopefully, like what we talked about before a little bit, to also prevent. But basically, as soon as you start to dehumanize people or a certain group of people, it becomes very easy or much easier to then take the next step and the next step and the next step and I agree with you. There was so much cruelty and this was either looked away from or looked at as like, okay, we're doing actually a good thing. We were ridding our society of an evil of a past of something that's dragging us down. So really they were happy in a way to see or not just in a way. A lot of times they were happy of like their progress and finally they're succeeding in getting closer to their goal. That's great, sure. Surprising is the fact how they could differentiate. They saw a Jewish child, ten years old for instance, and they had the same child at home. To whom they were very friendly and with warm feelings. But the Jewish child, they could slaughter him in one second. This way of differentiation is amazing. How can a person split his own personality? And they could, they did. Right, I mean that is one of the things that is shocking because the liquidation of women and children, of course in war you can always rationalize the killing civilians especially men that could be combatants, but in this case the youngest of children, the way Germans were able somehow to rationalize that to themselves. But that's the thing, exactly. You're freeing yourself by reading yourself from a group of people that are making you sick. The dehumanization was very, very strong of like comparing Jews to rats, to pests, to bacteria, to illnesses, to how they're controlling on a bigger world scale. Even now there's a lot of this, right, of how Jews are controlling everything, controlling the banks, controlling the politics, controlling all the evils come from there. So as soon as you get rid of them, this is the answer for all your problems. And don't forget also it was easy because it was literally on the heels of World War I where they got beaten and felt very set about themselves and economy wasn't so good. So this was like a prime place for Hitler to come in and utilize all this. Just a few seconds, Gido, because you want to respond. I would like to emphasize the tool or the manner Germans used everywhere, and this is starvation. It is so easy. You prevent food and within 24 hours your so-called enemy is weak. I hate to say that we have some contemporary, it seems like some contemporary examples going on in our world right now are that kind of tactic. This was the most powerful weapon in the hands of the Germans, starvation, to starve many people and by this way within two days they are lost, they are weak. Firstly a weapon of terror and warfare that is still certainly going on in the world. And in fact when we come back we'll look at some examples of people who did resist and also how these lessons could apply to what is happening in the world today and may happen yet again tomorrow. Dr. Kamila Forkash-Levan and Professor Gideon Greif, please stay with us and please stay with us. We'll have more on this special broadcast on I-24 News of Holocaust Memorial Day. We'll be right back. Back to the special Holocaust Memorial Day broadcast on I-24 News. Now one of the horrifically ironic aspects of the Holocaust was its perversion of the medical profession with doctors such as the notorious Josef Mengele turned by the Nazis into practitioners of torture and murder. But there were other health workers who even in the midst of that terror managed heroically to stay true to their oaths of healing sometimes at the risk of their own lives and we're going to meet and hear about some of them in the following clips. Ella Lingen's born in 1919, doctor and lawyer in Vienna. After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 she helped Jews to emigrate. She was denounced and sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner as a doctor. Dr. Lincoln's, you are a privileged prisoner there, a doctor. Did it ever happen that you spoke to an SS doctor about the glassings of the Jews? Yes, I spoke to several of them about it. One was Klein from Siebenberg in Hermannstadt who often visited us female doctors on Sundays and talked to us. And once that was the time of the hungry transports when uninterrupted day and night these flames were coming out of the chimney and you could even see the fire outside the crematorium from a distance. And I was standing right next to him and he was watching that. I said to him, how can you reconcile that with your Hippocratic oath? And then he replied, because I have sworn a Hippocratic oath I cut a festering appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the festering appendix in the body of Europe and must be cut out. That was one of the conversations. Wolfgang Scherler, born in 1921. During the war he was a lieutenant and company commander. After Stalingrad he became a Russian prisoner of war. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr after the war. I often used to meet Jews. At the start of my imprisonment we had a Jewish attendant in the prison camp in Czechoslovakia who really made an effort for us German prisoners of war. In that he provided good food to some extent and then later too in prison in Russia in Nazarbazan I came across Jewish doctors, both men and women who were very good to us. I myself also spent a long time in the military hospital when I was sick for the first time. I was at death's door with dystopia, fluid retention, edema so the Jewish doctor often came to my bed and looked after me. And then when I was back on my feet again I was assigned to him in the sick bay in his hospital barrack as an assistant and this was in fact after he had discovered that my father had been a doctor. I must say this particular doctor has stuck in my memory. He was a Jew and came from Karkov and the most shocking thing for me was when he told me that in the war his wife, his two children and his mother in Karkov had been shot. And according to him the SS had done that and to me it was somehow astonishing the way he behaved towards SS men which some of us prisoners were. Because every time one of these sick SS men came he said, I'll write you a sick note I'm giving you two days off work and giving you permission to rest in the barracks because you SS men shot my wife and my children and my mother. So this was an act of charity? Yes, certainly two days off for prisoners was an act of charity. King Mut Frank, born in 1923 as a soldier he became a Russian prisoner of war after the war he built up a company and became managing director of a paper factory. That a series of doctors who were whisking around my bed so fast were giving me a wide berth because they had obviously said to themselves there's nothing more to be done for this one. So I just lay there until one day an attractive young female doctor came in she came up to my bed unlike the others and she said, how are you doing? In German, that was something that really struck me it really stood out and then I also noticed that she spoke with an accent which reminded me a bit of Yiddish I was used to hearing in Vienna because we had friends who also spoke a bit of Yiddish. So without more ado this woman looked at my leg and immediately five minutes later when she came back she gave me two injections and injections were harder to get at that time than anything else. In short even giving injections was a small miracle and I took that in too despite my reduced grasp on reality I managed to take this in anyway this woman remained by my bed for nearly 24 hours after these 24 hours I felt a lot more alert again and I took in my surroundings a little and of course I began with my little saviour and had conversations with my beautiful little saviour and we were together she kept coming back to see me for eight maybe even fourteen days and it turned out firstly that she was Jewish which I had already guessed on account of her accent after the war after going home and after life had got back to normal I would so have loved to have talked to this lady and I would have said my dear child thank you from the bottom of my heart if one can in any event simply say thank you in a case like that because she really did save my life and still with us in studio is Dr. Kamila Forkash-Levon who is a distance practicing psychologist and professor Gideon Greif a Holocaust historian an expert in the Auschwitz extermination camp and Gideon I want to get your reaction to some of what we heard there It is really unbelievable how enthusiastically German medical doctors cooperated with this criminal regime not only in Auschwitz in many many camps just to give you an example we mention very often the name of Mengele on the ramp conducting the so called selection 21 medical doctors did it day and night and they all liked it they wanted to be there on the ramp instead of sending their patients to hospitals to clinics they send them being aware directly to the guest chambers for the first time in the history of medicine Right, Kamila I'm sure as a doctor you're half-fied with that but we do have the example of that woman that we saw who did resist and was sent to Auschwitz for it and you know one of the questions is why some people were able to make that sacrifice were able to take a stand for example in Schindler's list one of the interesting things about the film was it wasn't as Schindler was not someone you thought would be take a stand like that are people like that built differently psychologically that they're able to take the pressure? For sure and how they are first of all built I mean the natural inclinations and things like that but then also how you grew up and how you were raised and things like that that allowed you under this huge pressure of society and brainwashing and everything like that to still remain intact with your own truth and to be able to choose which brings us again back to work of Frankl, right of like how do you really know a person in a stressful, horrible situation and when the more someone thinks that they cannot be that person on the other side the more they're likely to be that person on that other side because they do not provide themselves the possibility of like I, me, what does that mean about me? A sense of empathy is key here Yes but you being able to make a decision to understand that under difficult situations you might be faced with difficult choices who are you going to be, what are you going to choose it's important to think about that Right, I'm not a psychologist but I'm a historian but I fully agree I think the secret is within the family your father and mother this leads your, paves your way to the path of behavior Right, so I want to move now from looking at the past and bringing this to the present and even in the future one of the reasons I know that this project this footage was shot was the sponsors felt it was important to have the testimony not only of the victims but of the perpetrators what they would witness because Holocaust deniers can always of course say of course the Jews are exaggerating or they're saying this they have an agenda but if you hear Germans talking about the horrors of either they took part or they witness it carries a different value but what, how much value does this have in preventing something like this happening again and if not what could or should be done to prevent something like this from happening again? Such testimonies are of course extremely important and I would like to tell you a little story a little fact that I'm since last five years in close contact with grandchildren of German Nazi perpetrators who are very much pro-Israel pro-Jewish people and they really regret the crimes of their ancestors and I think they can be a model of reconciliation and looking into the better future of Germans and Jews. Well that's education Kamil, you're feeling on what because I'm not going to draw comparisons over what's happening now in some parts of the world and what happened in Europe during the war years because of course the Holocaust was a unique event but we do see things on a similar scale let's say you're seeing that you wonder if it could develop further to where it was how can this kind of behavior be prevented from being re-occurring? I think it's very important to again education but on a scale where it's not just education we're going to show a history course or a little clip during first not fifth grade, tenth grade or whatever and everyone's playing on their phones and they forgot what you were talking about education in terms of development of the human being who is this human that you're developing? For example we also touched on the different sections of like the violence on TV and the lack of awareness of where this is going generationally where is this going people are getting so desensitized to violence in general and there they weren't yet desensitized and look what happened and like now they are desensitized and this ability to stand up and think of like what is my choice even though someone's forcing me in a way or trying to get me to do like press that button and someone's going to die yes what am I going to choose when that comes to talk about these things to ask these questions like who are you going to be not just to assume like okay I'm a good person of course I wouldn't do this but what if you would how would you get out of that those questions are very important to examine age appropriately throughout our lives to teach a person to be to be to really think and be in touch with themselves one sentence I think one of the many lessons of the Holocaust and World War II is the danger of tyranny and dictatorship because dictators even killed their own their own people look the case of Assad etc etc many many examples and it's so easy to identify a dictator when it just appears we have to do by all means I don't tell you how to reduce them to eliminate them because they are dangerous to their own people and to the whole world. And dangerous as much today unfortunately than I want to tell. If one of the attempts to eliminate Hitler would be successful I think half of the Holocaust wouldn't happen. Right the danger of dictators unfortunately still with us today. Professor Gideon Greif, Dr. Kamila Furakash Levan thank you for joining us on this special broadcast. Again I would like to thank the Wallach family and Yad Vashem for supplying us with this footage and providing with us and again unfortunately the past that's the great author William Faulkner said the past is not dead it is not even past unfortunately these memories are still with us thank you for joining us on I24 News.