 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, we're live, we're back. I'm Jay Feidell, this is Community Matters and it's a given Thursday. We have a special guest we've been waiting actually for months for, but now she's here with us. It's Ellen G. Friedman from the College of New Jersey where she is on the English faculty but she is more important to the show, the director of Holocaust and Genocide studies there. And she's written a number of books and we wanna talk about the book we reviewed earlier with her, the seven, which is called A Family Holocaust Story. We'll talk about that, talk about some of the other books and we'll talk about one that she's writing right now about post-war Berlin and what it was like to live there. And all this is based, I wanna talk about the credibility of authors who wrote about and write about the Holocaust which was a talk that Ellen gave yesterday at University of Manoa, at University of Hawaii Manoa. So welcome to the show, welcome to Hawaii. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me on the show. Ellen, so you came out this time, first time I've met you personally, I'm so happy to meet you. Happy to meet you as well. The purpose of the trip as organized by Peter Hoffenberg at UH Manoa, who cares about this kind of issue a lot, was to give a couple of talks at UH Manoa. Can you say what those talks have been and are? Okay, so yesterday I gave a talk at the history forum that was called Authenticity, Truth and the Future. And I tried to look very hard at this whole issue around Holocaust representations, stories that come out of the Holocaust and Holocaust scholars' attitudes towards them. And what concerns a lot of Holocaust scholars are issues of authenticity and the right to speak. Which stories are more authentic than others and who has the right to speak about the Holocaust and claim and make a claim towards the subject of the Holocaust? Why is this so sensitive? We know there are people who deny the Holocaust and to me that would be one good reason to make this a sensitive issue. We don't want confusion about what happened. We want only authoritative speakers to speak. Right, I think that's partially what drives this issue. But for me Holocaust deniers are like flat earthers. You know, a geologist would not seriously engage with the flat earth society or people who believe that the earth is flat. Why should Holocaust scholars engage with people who denied that the Holocaust happened? It's just on the face of it absurd. Yeah, why? But suppose I studied it. Yes. Say I'm, actually Ellen was not born in the United States, we're gonna talk about that. But suppose I'm born in the United States and I studied in school and I have a pension for the subject a big heart sympathy for it. I care deeply about it because I'm Jewish and I studied, I care about, I read everything I can and now I say, I'm gonna write about this. I'm gonna be a scholar, I'm gonna write about this. Do you give me less credence? Well, I would give you 100% credence. However, other scholars might not. It's not that you do or you don't have absolute credence. It's a hierarchy. In other words, whose voices are more authentic? Whose voices should we listen to as having the most credibility? And the theory is that the closer you are to the black hole of the gas chambers, the more credibility you have. That's fair. And well, it isn't, it isn't because what happens, how long do you have credibility? In other words, how long does that authenticity that right to speak attach to you? 10 years, 20 years? Give me the dichotomy there of the two books that compare in terms of veracity. Okay, well, it's not so much a question of veracity as it is marketability. And the scholar that first brought the attention of other Holocaust scholars that there was a first book, a Yiddish version, her name is Naomi Seidman. And she could read Yiddish and so she read the Yiddish version and noticed that it was 67 pages longer than the French version. The French version was edited by Francois Moriat who edited it in a way that it would follow a very Christian paradigm of martyrdom. While the Yiddish version was directed towards Polish Jews because it was part of a series for Polish Jews in Argentina and in their language and also in Wiesel's language. And there he felt free to express his emotions which was rage at what had happened to him, his family, all of the family members he lost and the final image in that book is of him taking his fist and smashing the mirror rather than him looking at it and seeing a corpse. So that image of the corpse in the French version makes him into a martyr, emphasizes his suffering like the suffering Christ. The Yiddish version talks about revenge, being enraged. So this goes through the whole European thing about reacting to the war and the Holocaust. It's a different reaction from the Polish Jewish point of view and the European point of view in general. It's hard to tolerate something for which you might be criticized or you might be found guilty. Well, my point was that even from the black hole, even from a book that was responsible, not he's written many books, but it was one of the books that helped him get a Nobel Prize for literature. It's been translated into every language you can imagine. It's so well known. It's just one of the most popular books on the Holocaust. There is. And yet this book has questions around the authenticity. So even out of this black hole, there are issues. So then I began to look at other testimonies to see what was there vis-à-vis this issue of authenticity. So I looked at Cloud Lundzman's French director who in 1996 showed this film, his film called Shoah, very famous film, nine and a half hours long. And that was cut from about 350 hours of footage. And interview footage. Interview footage of perpetrators and survivors. So what you see on the screen are people testifying to their experience. How more authentic can you get? Yes. Yet Lundzman himself called his film a fiction of the real and he did it for good reason because those interviews were scripted. They were manipulated. For instance, perhaps the most infamous of his, I'll tell you two stories about the film. First is about Abraham Bomba who was a barber at Treblinka cutting women's hair in the gas chamber. As people were about to be killed. As they were about to be gassed. Women's hair was in charge of cutting women's hair right before they were going to be gassed. And so we see the footage and here he is in a barber shop who are imagining that he's still a barber cutting people's hair. And he's talking as he's cutting a man's hair and there are other people in the barber shop. And so we think this is very natural. And Lundzman is off camera interviewing him. And suddenly he's telling the story of his best friend from his town who's also a barber cutting hair. And in walks, I think it's his mother and his sister. Although I'm not positive about that. Into the gas chamber. Into the gas waiting for their hair to be cut. And it's one of those moments suddenly Bomba and telling the story stops talking. You can see the emotion on his face. He stops cutting hair. He's sweating. He's overcome. He's beginning to cry. And Lundzman is insisting that you have to tell the story. You must. You have to tell the story. This goes on for I'd say about four or five minutes until the barber collects himself a little bit and in a very emotional way, finishes the story. So that's what we see on screen. What we learn afterwards as we study Lundzman's methods is that he rented that barber shop that the people in the barber shop was in Israel where Bomba had just moved but the interview was in English. So the extras in the barber shop didn't understand what was going on. So it was a scripted set. I suppose if you look carefully, you would have seen that the people in the barber shop didn't really know what they were talking about. I guess so. But you don't, you know, you're looking at Bomba. That's your focus and it's the focus of the camera which is telling you where to look. And the film doesn't tell you that there's a scripted stage. Oh, no, no, no. Lundzman, for instance, the other story I wanted to tell you is that he also wanted to interview perpetrators, some of whom agreed to talk to him as long as he didn't film it. So what Lundzman did was he put a, they created a kind of bag with a secret camera in it that he brought into the room with the perpetrator and he kept a microphone behind his tie and there would be a van. Should pick up the sound from the fellow he was talking about. Exactly. And there was a van outside of the perpetrator's house that was manipulating remotely the camera so they could capture the interview. And this is how he, how he captured the voices and the stories which are some of them incredible of perpetrators. And- These were the guards, the prison guards? Yeah, and you don't know this as you're watching it. You think that this person has agreed to be interviewed. You really don't know it. Maybe you do, I'm not sure. But anyway, afterwards Lundzman said, what do I care if I hurt their feelings? These are murderers. I killed them with them, my camera. That was his attitude. And you know, you can sort of accept that because these were really horrible people. But he was also tricking us. He saw yes, but when he does us, when he manipulates Bumba, it's a different story because he's re-traumatizing someone who lived through an incredibly horrible experience. Imagine being in the gas chamber. And my larger point is that what seems like documentary may not be. Then you have the Shoah Foundation, which is now creating holograms. The Shoah Foundation is probably the largest repository of survivor video testimony in the world. Some of that was done by Spielberg? Yes, absolutely. And what they're doing with some of that testimony is creating holograms. So three-dimensional images that may look like a kind of high-tech madame Tussaud of Holocaust testimonies, right? And so they ask the real survivor these many questions, create the hologram, and somebody comes in and begins to interact with this hologram, ask them a question that the computer, I guess the computer is programmed so that it responds to certain keywords. And then you get an answer as if you're speaking to the survivor. So the attempt is to get to that black hole of experience, but it's all make-believe. It's all as if, you know? Because you're not speaking to the survivor. Are you troubled by that? Right now I'm incredibly creeped out about it. I don't know how I'll feel, say, three years from now. I need scholars to kind of process what's going on, and there's even a more extreme case of virtual reality. Right now, for $5, you can go to the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage and for five bucks and an entry ticket to the museum. You can walk with Pinkus Gooder through a Midonic. You can go into the gas chambers, you can go to him to the platform where he said goodbye to his mother and sister. You're there with him as he goes through this experience. And it's all virtual reality. It's a virtual reality experience. And to me that's even creepier. I'm troubled by that. It's a movie. It's making fact into fiction. Well, what's authentic? Who's speaking in those cases? And so the lesson that I draw from it is not to police even more vigilantly what counts and what doesn't count, but to, in this age of tweets and sound bites. And fake news. To look at everything in its full complexity to understand what Luntzman is doing, to understand that there was a first version and that market forces drove the second version of night and to be fully, fully aware. Henry James said that awareness is everything. He was right. And I think that's right. That you really need to know and not to simplify things. Well, the other side of it is if suppose I'm a denier, I'm a denier. I deny the Holocaust, which is an incredible thing for any human being to do. But then this is fodder for me. So, oh, here's somebody making it up. So how much can I believe? And I can use this to undermine the whole notion. But I don't care what you believe. I mean, you're so, if you're a Holocaust denier, you just have such an absurd. You're a non-person. No, you're not a non-person. I would never say that. But your position is just untenable. It's absurd on the face of it. It's as if you said the earth was flat. You know, it's the same thing. If I were a geologist, I would not be talking to flat earthers. Why should I talk to you if you're a Holocaust denier? You're just not relevant to me. One footnote before we move on to what you're gonna talk about this morning. Okay. Really soon is the notion of the voice. You discussed that a minute ago, the voice. So if I read the book, the account, if you will, I'm listening for a voice, an authentic voice. And that goes to all of literature, all of recounting, really, to find an authentic voice. And the voice, usually, you're looking for these days, anyways, English, I think. So, or it could be any language. So as a professor of English, you know about English and voices. And you're gonna be sensitive to when a voice is authentic, whether it's in this book or that book, whether it's in the seven book, on the stand here, or in any other book, you're looking for the, isn't that true? Tell me. Yes, you're looking for a compelling, convincing voice, a voice that moves you in some way that has something to tell you, something to give, that evokes, resonates. But that's a different issue than... No, it goes to all of literature. Yeah, it does. And I wanted to just throw that in. And I say in my preface, straight out that I made some things up. But nevertheless, my book is true. We'll talk about your book for a minute, the seven. It's all about your family. It's a family Holocaust story. Yes. What happened to you and your family that is the driver of this book? So when you say that you're writing a Holocaust memoir, the image that is usually evoked is a barbed wire concentration camps, death camps. But what's much less known is my story of survival. 10% of Polish Jews survived World War II. Those 10% most of them survived in the Soviet Union. In a way, Stalin saved Jews from Hitler. Incredible to say that, but in a way that's true. And I've heard stories of remnants of Jews who were saved in the Soviet Union having portraits of Stalin in their living rooms out of gratitude. So my parents and my father and his two brothers, my mother and her brother, my father's sister and various other seven of them left Warsaw where they were born and where their parents were and went to an uncle's house in Brezhnev. And I think that's the story of the Holocaust. And went to an uncle's house in Brezhnev, which was over the border of the Hitler-Stalin line then in the Soviet Union. There came a point in the war, escaping the Nazis. Things had already begun to happen. There were actions against Jews. And one of my uncles was in the Polish Army, saw the awful might of the German Army and said, we've gotta get out of here. So he initiated the process of some family members going to this uncle's house who had a house in Brezhnev, which was now in the Soviet Union. So they went there and at one point, Stalin got worried about all these poles right at the border of Poland. And he wanted them either to become Soviet citizens or to go back to Poland, or he would banish them to some remote prison settlement or gulag depending on how political you were. And at first, these seven just hid. They hid in the attic. And there's this very dramatic story about my great uncle whose house they were in. He had a wooden leg, which he had acquired in World War I. So when the Soviet police came knocking, and these were people from his hometown, he showed them his wooden leg. They came asking for all these relatives, named them by name. They were up in the attic hiding because they had seen the progress of the police going from house to house. He showed them his leg. These were not German people looking. German police, these were Russian people. Russian, right. It sounds like things that happened in Germany, no? Well, they were looking for the Jews hiding in the attic. No, they weren't looking to imprison them. They were looking for them to declare what they were going to do. Would they become Soviet citizens? Did they want to go back to Poland? Or did they want to be banished? So that was their choice. They couldn't stay put. So he showed them his wooden leg. He said, I was a soldier in World War I. Don't tell me I'm lying. You have to believe me. I fought for this country. And so they said, well, we know you're lying, but we're going to leave anyway. Incredible defense. But then when they gathered themselves and thought about it, they figured they have to do something. They can't stay in the attic forever. And so they allowed themselves to be banished. And that's how they wound up in Comey SSR, where, I mean, these were city folks. What city were they from? Warsaw, Poland. The biggest city, for sure. Big city, very urban people. And they found themselves in this hinterland with mosquitoes the size of golf balls, with trees everywhere, just so that you couldn't even see the sky. Bears. It's a big country. It's a huge country. And they were young. And so they made the best of it. They survived. And they survived. But they went to many places. That was only the first. And in each place, in order to, because they weren't given enough food, and it wasn't that the Russians were starving Jews, they weren't. Everybody was starving. And as the war progressed, everyone was starving to a greater degree. They had to learn how to adapt, how to negotiate their situation, so that they could survive, which they did. And it meant learning a new language. So it's so interesting to me. Many new languages. It burned a hole in my head when you told me about the 10% last time. What that means is that 90% of the Jews that were in Poland died. That 0% of the Jews that were in Poland went west into Germany, because there was no future for them there. And 10%, the remaining 10%, went east into Russia. About 10%. 10% survived, most of them survived in the Soviet Union. Yeah, it's fantastic. One of my aunts by marriage was a hidden child in Germany, actually, and her sisters also survived in Germany. There weren't many. There weren't many, but yeah. So, okay, the other thing is you, where were you born in all of this? I was born in Kyrgyzstan, near Frenze, a small town called, it's now called, actually, Frenze is now called Biskak, I think. No, yes, Biskak. And I was in Kyrgyzstan. I was born in a tiny village called Kant. And my parents always talked about the mud roofs, you know, and how when the rains came, the whole roof would collapse and the house practically disappear. So these were, you know, these were not the conditions that urban dwellers who lived in high-rise buildings were used to. No, I'm sure not. So how did you make your way, can you give us a preci of how you made your way from Kyrgyzstan, it sounds like Sasha Baron Cohn in his first movie, if you remember that. I never, not my brand of humor. No, I understand. So you made your way from Kyrgyzstan all the way to New Jersey to teaching and being the director of the Holocaust and Genocide Department. How did you do that? Well, my parents, my relatives traveled halfway around the world until they got to New Jersey. So it was a long, painful, arduous trip. And we got to the West illegally. I was an infant and they had to bribe guards on both sides of the border in order to cross. And we were in some kind of covered truck or vehicle and I couldn't make a sound because we weren't supposed to be discovered. And I of course began to cry at the critical moment at which point my mother, this is her solution to everything, just stuffed a cookie in my mouth. And that was that. That solves every problem. Food solves every problem it did for my mother, who was a great Jewish cook. So Ellen, there's so much more to your life and I hope we can do this again, but so right now you're heading back to UH Manoa. I am. You're giving a talk there today. Can you tell us, give you a praise, see about what you're going to say? Yes, I'm giving a talk at the Biography Center where I've been before a couple of times. The first time I was there, the book was just a glimmer in my eye. And I remember telling some of the stories that I had from my interviews. And one woman from the Jewish community in Honolulu said, and I was talking about all the hurdles in the way of my writing the story. She said, ah, just write it already. And that really stayed with me. And I said, yes, I should just write it already. So that sort of gave me my jumpstart. And then I came back to read from a draft and now I can read from the book itself. So I'm going to read a chapter called Joseph. It's about this uncle who was in the Polish Army. And he's in the book here. Yes, he's in the book. He's the second chapter, I think. So one question I'd really like to know are your thoughts about this. You've lived in at least two worlds. And you have found yourself in a position where you can comment and teach and write about a world that, I wouldn't say it's long gone, but it's gone a long time anyway. A world, that world in Europe that is so painful for so many people and still with us in so many ways. And it's really a fantastic story. You're different than most mortal beings right now. So you must have some philosophical core by which you see the world. I can tell you what that core is. And I would like to know what it is. Yes, confusion. No. I know you wanted a pearl of wisdom. No, actually not confusion. There's one thing I'm not confused about and that is that the world is a very complicated place and you have to allow that complexity. You have to try and see that complexity. And my sort of second life lesson is concerns the rule of law. One of the reasons that the Jews suffered were so vulnerable in Europe is because they lost their citizenship. They were citizens of no country. Hitler deprived them of the, he took away their citizenship. They had no protections and that's what made them vulnerable. If they had been citizens and they could call on the protection of their country, who knows. And so the rule of law and I think people should think about immigrants vis-a-vis what happened in the Holocaust and be generous. Thank you for that. Ellen Friedman, thank you so much. You're very welcome.