[Train rolls along tracks]
BILL BASCH: There is one thing that has puzzled me...
and has puzzled the world--
that the Germans dedicated manpower and trains...
and trucks and energy...
towards the destruction of the Jews through the last day.
Had they stopped six months before the end of the war...
and dedicated that energy
towards strengthening themselves...
they may have carried on the war a little longer.
But it was more important to them to kill the Jews...
than even winning the war.
IRENE ZISBLATT: I grew up in a town called Polena...
in the Carpathian mountains.
It was a small town of two main streets.
This leads all the way up to--
There is a church over there. You can't see it.
We had a post office, and we had a town hall...
and we had a church and a synagogue.
Everybody knew each other.
It was beautiful.
I lived in a town called Uzhorod.
It was a small town...
yet it had the feel of a big cosmopolitan town.
Right here was a little deli.
Right around... Right here.
And...
We used to come here...
to have our sandwiches for the afternoon.
ALICE LOK CAHANA: We lived in a town called Sarvar.
It's in Hungary, close to the Austrian border.
Every day, the peasants would bring their wares...
from the neighboring villages in big baskets...
and they would carry them on their head or shoulders.
Szaszovo was a very small, little community...
consisting of 3,000 people.
No electricity and no utilities at all.
So it was a very simplistic, boring life.
Nothing exciting.
But then Budapest, where I ended up...
was an entirely different life.
It was an enormous adjustment.
I looked at this city, and I said, "Wow."
It was like--I never believed anything like this exists.
TOM LANTOS: Budapest was a magnificent...
world-class city...
on par with Vienna or Paris or London...
as a great European capital.
This magnificent Parliament building...
saw the best and the worst in Hungarian history.
The bulk of the Jews in Budapest...
were utterly assimilated, deeply patriotic...
and enormously proud of their Hungarian cultural heritage.
There were about 800 Jewish families in our town...
and I think that the town was 10 or 11,000 non-Jews.
I had non-Jewish friends. I dated non-Jewish boys.
My parents had non-Jewish friends.
We also felt quite Hungarian at the same time...
not just Jewish.
So Judaism was our religion, but we were Hungarians.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: On August 2, 1934...
officers and men swear the oath of allegiance...
not to Germany, but to Hitler personally.
2nd NARRATOR: As Hitler's rule over Germany became absolute...
to his alarmed neighbor Austria...
Hitler promised to keep hands off.
TOM: ln 1938, when I was ten years old...
I bought my first newspaper.
And I saw the headlines--
"Hitler Marches lnto Austria"--
and I sensed that this historic moment...
will have a tremendous impact...
on the lives of Hungarian Jews...
my family, and myself.
NEWSREEL: Germany invades Poland and the free state of Danzig.
Warsaw is bombed, blasted, and shelled.
Poland is in ruins.
RENEE: There were refugees coming to Hungary...
running away from Poland.
And most of the Jewish families--
Friday night, the men went to temple...
to bring these people home and give them shelter.
They would come and tell stories...
and I remember, very often...
we didn't believe them.
I heard a conversation between my father and another man...
and he was telling my father...
what the Nazis are doing in Poland.
And one thing that l'll never forget that I heard--
And he said...
"The Nazis are taking our young Jewish infants...
"and they're tearing them in half by their legs...
"and they're throwing them in the Dniester."
The Dniester is a river in the Ukraine.
Then later, of course, the stories were getting worse.
We began to hear about mass shootings into mass graves.
But there was a sort of a naive--
I hate to use the word, but I have to--
patriotic feeling that we Hungarians don't do such things.
Hitler was in Germany...
so what happened in Germany didn't reflect on us.
We were far away from it.
DR. RANDOLPH BRAHAM: There were two wars.
There was a military war...
and hand-in-hand with that war...
there was a second war--
the war of the SS directed against the Jews.
[Gunshots]
The dark side of the Hungarian national character...
was becoming more and more obvious.
The persecution of Jews became more and more obvious.
Jews were losing their jobs, their businesses.
There was a Hungarian Nazi movement, the Arrow Cross...
and this became, of course...
the most hated and feared group for Hungarian Jews.
RENEE: People wonder how is it that we didn't do something.
We didn't run away. We didn't hide.
Well, things didn't happen at once.
Things happened very slowly.
So each time a new law came out or a restriction...
we said, "Just another thing. It'll blow over."
TOM: Hitler moved into Hungary on March 19, 1944.
I was sixteen years old.
1944. March 19th.
Germans entered. SS entered our town.
IRENE: Two motorcycles was the whole Nazi regime...
that occupied our town.
Because they were already there...
with the people that lived there the whole time...
and did their dirty work.
Most of them were people...
that we thought were our friends all these years...
but they turned overnight on us and went with the other side.
And the next restriction...
was that the Jew cannot walk out on the street...
without a yellow star.
We heard that in Germany...
they had to wear the yellow star before they were taken away.
And in Poland, they did that.
So at that point, we were worried.
TOM: I did not wear a yellow star...
and I was caught.
I was put into a forced-labor camp...
in a place north of Budapest...
which had an important railroad bridge.
And our job was to repair the railroads...
the lines, the bridges-- nonstop--
while the British and Americans were bombing day and night.
We were obviously worried that we would die...
but we were also hoping that the bombers...
will hit all of their targets and destroy this bridge...
because that was the way to defeat Hitler.
I escaped from that labor camp...
and I joined the Hungarian underground.
And the next decree would be we have to pack up 25 kilos.
And at first, we didn't understand.
What do you take?
Think about your home, your own home.
What would you take? Twenty-five kilo.
What is twenty-five kilo? How much is twenty-five kilo?
Do you take the pillows? Do you take your covers?
Do you take your dishes?
What do you take?
When we were packing...
I wanted to take something to remind me of the good times.
I was very depressed and worried.
And so I came across a bathing suit...
a bathing suit that...
my father brought me.
I don't want to do this.
On one of his business trips about three years earlier...
my father came home...
and he always brought us something...
my sister and myself.
And...
of course we always asked, "What did you bring?"
And he opened this box...
and out of the box came this most beautiful bathing suit.
It had a shiny satin finish...
and a print of multicolored flowers.
And then in the afternoon...
when I heard the soldiers' boots coming up the stairs...
I ran back and put this bathing suit under my dress.
And that's how I left.
They broke down the front doors. They came in.
They gave us a few minutes--
they said a half hour, but it was not a half hour--
to get all our valuables together...
and they marched us out of the house.
ALICE: I couldn't imagine...
that they'd just take out people from their homes...
because they are Jewish.
Our friends, so-called, and neighbors...
they were standing lined up alongside of the road...
and they were yelling, "It's about time."
"You go on out of here."
And "We don't need any Jews in our town."
"We need to get rid of all you Jews."
And I stood, and I could not believe my eyes.
The people I went to school with, their children...
We were friends. We were sharing things together.
Why are they so hostile?
Why do they hate us all of a sudden?
It's like when you read that the Jews went out of Egypt.
We are carrying all our baggage.
The pillows and the covers are tied in a bundle...
and we children helped to carry it.
And I'm so ashamed.
RENEE: We wanted to believe they're taking us to Germany...
and that we're going to work.
We really wanted to believe.
And by then...
the whole European Jewry was already in camps...
which we didn't know.
The concentration, ghettoization...
and deportation took place in a concentrated manner--
that is, within twelve weeks.
And nowhere else...
was the deportation program carried out...
with the barbarity and speed that it was in Hungary.
They said that they will take us to a ghetto.
I mean, we never hear that word.
It is not a Hungarian word. "Ghetto."
RENEE: We had no idea where we were.
ln the morning, when we woke up...
I realized that we are in a brickyard...
a brick-factory yard.
And in April, it was rainy. It was a lot of rain.
And we were always--
We had to change the sheets, because the roof was sheets...
and we were always wet.
There were thousands of people there...
because they came from the whole county.
And there were guards everywhere with dogs...
walking around all the time.
Big German shepherd dogs on very, very tight leashes.
This was all just these huts with people all over.
ROBlN: Do you know where your hut was?
IRENE: Yes. My hut was right where these piles of bricks are.
[Irene crying]
And then one day, they announced...
that everybody that wants to go to work--
to Tokaj and the vineyard to make wine--
should come on the train.
And everybody, voluntary, gladly went on the train...
because this was hell.
And going to work in a vineyard was like going to heaven.
We were taken to the railroad station...
by the Hungarian soldiers.
IRENE: My mother said to me...
"I rolled up diamonds in your skirt--
"in the hem of your skirt--
"and if you don't have enough to eat...
"those are to buy bread."
When we arrived at the railroad station...
we realized that we're not going on passenger trains.
The cattle cars were waiting for us.
IRENE: My father said they ran out of the other trains--
because there's wartime they don't have other trains...
so they have to use what they have.
ALICE: Anybody who didn't go and didn't go fast was beaten.
IRENE: When they closed the doors--
when I heard that knock on the outside...
like a bolt closing us in there--
it wasn't normal anymore.
I didn't accept they were running out of the other trains.
BILL: ln Budapest, as times started getting worse...
I really had to acquire gentile papers.
I did not exist as a Jew.
I would have been shot. I would have been killed.
You were a hunted animal twenty-four hours every day...
and you didn't know if anybody you encountered...
was really on your side.
Had it not been for Wallenberg...
neither I nor the other tens of thousands...
would have ever survived.
Raoul Wallenberg arrived when all of Hungary...
with the exception of Budapest, was already free of Jews.
He went to Budapest at a time when, in the countryside...
the Jews had already been put into cattle cars...
and shipped away from Hungary.
And he decided to join the Swedish embassy there...
for the sole purpose of trying to save Jewish lives.
By issuing so-called Swedish protective passports...
he declared that the individual who had this document...
at the end of the war, planned to go to Sweden.
This was pure fiction.
But in the chaos and the confusion of the war...
this miraculous, worthless piece of paper worked.
BILL: Several of us acted as distributors or runners...
to deliver this fake passport...
to the people that were waiting in those protected houses.
TOM: Wallenberg leased large apartment houses...
put up a Swedish sign indicating that all the residents...
were under the protection of the Royal Swedish government.
I stayed at St. Steven Park, number twenty-five.
[Speaking Hungarian]
Most of these houses...
were upper middle-class apartment houses.
And a 3-bedroom apartment that may have had 4, 5, 6 people...
living there before this crisis...
suddenly became a hovel with sixty, seventy people...
jammed into a three-bedroom apartment.
GIRL: Very uncomfortable.
TOM: Well, it was very uncomfortable, honey...
but, more importantly, it was unbelievably dangerous.
The word "protected house" obviously is a misnomer...
because many people living in these "protected houses"...
were rounded up...
taken to the bank of the Danube and killed.
Now, to get into the protected houses...
was not difficult.
The soldiers didn't care.
They were out in the front. "Go in there."
However, to come out...
that was the very, very difficult thing.
lf German soldiers...
or Hungarian Nazi soldiers were suspicious...
they ordered us to take down our pants...
because we were the only people who were circumcised.
One day, I had on my body, strapped around...
the fake passports I was delivering to these people...
so they could get out of the building...
and I miscalculated.
I went through the sewer line, and I knew when to get out...
and I made a mistake.
lnstead of coming out in the middle of the building...
I came out in front of the building...
where two soldiers were guarding the building.
I started running as fast as I could...
crossing the street back and forth.
And they were deporting a group of Jews.
Not knowing where they are taking them...
I jumped into that group of Jews...
thinking, just as I got in so many times into trouble...
l'll get out one more time. This is just one more escape.
We wound up five days later in Buchenwald.
IRENE: We were on the train for about five days.
ALICE: Sitting on a heap of luggage that we carried there.
The cattle car I was in, there was about 120 of us.
Mashed together like sardines, and it's very, very hot.
They had one pail for going to the bathroom.
And suddenly the bucket filled up...
and then the odor was unbearable.
They never opened the doors to go to the bathroom.
They never gave us any water or any food.
The children were screaming. They wanted to go home.
Where are they taking us?
Nobody answers.
It was total darkness.
The light seeped only through the cracks of the cattle car.
IRENE: My father found a crack in the cattle train...
and he looked out, and he just spoke out loud...
"I don't think we're going to the vineyard...
"because we just crossed the border...
"and we're heading towards Poland."
And when he said Poland...
I remembered the man's story about the children...
what they're doing to the children in Poland.
I was holding my little brother, two and half years old...
and I was holding him so tight...
and I said to myself, "I will never let him go.
"They will never take him from me."
When they opened the doors suddenly...
and suddenly the light hit you--
and because you had your eyes for four or five days shut...
or used to this darkness, you're almost blinded.
We were so happy because we were going to get air.
We were going to get off and maybe go to the bathroom...
like normal people...
and have water and maybe some food.
And everybody would ask, "Where are we?"
"What is the name?"
And it was a very strange name--
Auschwitz.
Here we had to be stopped. Here was stopped.
Here was a lot of selection happened.
MICHAEL: So you're all standing in a line...
ALICE: Thousands of people, and close to each other.
And confusion and noise.
And "Don't move and don't..."
Like soldiers, standing straight, you see.
And in the middle would the SS go here...
to check all of us...
walking their dogs and just threatening.
MICHAEL: ln single file?
Or were there people standing next to you?
-Five. -Five in a row.
ALICE: So it was easy to count. Right.
RENEE: When I jumped off the cattle car...
I knew right away that whatever they promised us...
whatever they told us, were lies.
And you see a lot of people running...
in striped clothes and shaved heads.
Surrounded by Nazi soldiers and vicious dogs.
They were yelling, and they were screaming.
"Just hurry up. Leave all your luggage there.
"Just leave everything."
All of a sudden, there was a separation.
And my mother and my--
My mother and--
And my brother and my sister--
She held my little brother in her arms--in one arm...
and my 4 1/2-year-old sister in her hand--
and I was holding on to her hand...
and this is how we were walking towards--
They were pushing us towards that destination.
[Speaking German]
RENEE: My mother was selected at the railroad station.
"Go to the left"--
while my sister and I went to the right.
My mother was taken straight from the railroad station...
to the gas chambers.
By the time my sister and I were processed into the camp...
my mother was no longer alive.
RENEE: We were taken to a dressing room.
And we were told we were going to be taking a shower...
after this horrendous journey.
And we are going to refresh ourselves...
and then we'll be assigned to our work.
IRENE: They ordered us to take our shoes in one hand...
and our clothes in the other hand.
Then I remembered the diamonds and grabbed my blue skirt...
and in the crowd, you know...
I just took out the diamonds and held them in my hands.
And I had no clothes on my body.
And I remember I got undressed with the rest of them...
and there I was, standing in the bathing suit.
I had a premonition.
I had this feeling that if I take this bathing suit off...
if I leave this bathing suit behind...
all the wonderful memories...
that were built in this bathing suit...
I kept remembering how I wore there on the swimming pool...
and how the boys were whistling at me...
and my friends were so jealous.
And now I'm gonna take it off, and I'm gonna leave it here.
Everything that meant anything in life to me...
I'm going to leave behind.
They kept on saying...
if anybody has any valuables left, to leave them.
They had a section for that.
And I held on to the diamonds for dear life...
because that was to buy bread.
So I put them in my mouth.
And then, when I walked up again...
I saw they were opening up people's mouth...
and they were looking in the mouth and--
But I was at the road of no return.
I couldn't give them up anymore because I would be shot.
"Why didn't I leave them back there?"
I had them in my mouth, and I didn't know what to do...
so I swallowed them.
We walked into the shower room...
and the dressing room was locked behind us.
And a commando came in...
and removed all our belongings right away.
They did give us a shower-- a little trinkly shower.
Again, there was another door...
on the other side leading out to the courtyard...
on the other side of this building.
And at the door they had a pile of clothes...
and they ordered everybody to pick one piece of clothing.
We waited till about midnight, and then they permitted us...
to walk into one of these wooden barracks.
ALICE: A thousand people in a barrack.
lf one person turned, everybody had to turn...
because we were so close to each other.
I used to wake up so cold.
And I used to have returning dreams...
that I'm at home, that I'm very cold...
but my father would come and cover us.
And then you wake up to a whistle.
It's dark outside, and this is a madman's hell.
RENEE: We saw this group of about twenty men...
coming through the camp.
And as they were marching by, I was watching.
"Maybe I know somebody."
And suddenly I recognized my father.
And my first thought was to hide.
It was terribly painful seeing him with his shaved head...
in this uniform like a prisoner.
This man who was helping everybody...
who was the kindest human being.
I just couldn't imagine how would he feel...
if he saw us with the shaved heads in this rag.
So I really just wanted to hide so he can't see me.
And at that moment, our eyes locked.
And I could see his tears rolling down his cheek.
That was the last time I saw my father.
IRENE: I saw trucks coming...
and screams on the trucks.
And I saw two children fall out of the truck.
And the truck stopped...
And the truck s--
And one SS man came out from the front...
and he picked up the children like that...
and he banged him against the truck...
and the blood came running down...
and threw him into the truck.
So that's when I stopped talking to God.
They told us that we're going to get a number.
A prisoner's number.
Well, of course, we expected to get a prisoner's number...
on our clothing or somewhere.
And they set up these tables...
and at each table sat a few girls...
with these huge books opened in front of them.
And we presumed that they are going to put our name in it...
and the number that they are going to give us.
And then we realized that they are putting this number...
on our flesh, on our arms.
They took five of us and put drops in our eyes.
We didn't know why. They didn't tell us.
And they put us in the dungeon.
They closed us in there...
and we were standing in water up to our ankles, tightly packed.
And it seemed like forever.
It seemed like it was an eternity.
They never opened the door.
They never gave us anything to eat or drink.
So we drank the water we stood in.
We went to the bathroom in the water we stood in.
And then they opened the door and took us out.
And they brought us up into the courtyard...
and they examined our eyes.
Some of the people couldn't see for several days after that.
And they took us back to the barrack.
We found out later that what they were doing...
is they were trying to change the color of our eyes.
[Speaking German]
RANDOLPH: Having survived the first 4 1/2 years...
of the war...
the Hungarian Jews were killed...
in the last chapter of Hitler's war against the Jews...
when the leaders of the world were already fully aware...
of all the details of Auschwitz.
When we came to Auschwitz...
it was during the Final Solution...
when he just was desperate already.
He was losing the war. Hitler was losing the war.
But he was not going to lose the war against the Jews.
The sadism, the cruelty...
the irrationality...
of the German and Hungarian Nazis...
of killing the remaining Jewish population...
when the war was all over...
when they could have gained brownie points...
by being more civilized with-- vis-a-vis these people...
was really not present because their hatred was so blind.
RANDOLPH: The Nazis diverted trains...
and other transportation means useful to the Germans...
for purposes of deporting Jews.
That is, to complete the Final Solution program.
While I was in Auschwitz, the transports were coming in.
Two, three transports a day with thousands of people.
RANDOLPH: Within less than six weeks...
more than 438,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
The gas chambers, the crematoria could not cope.
The SS had to dig special pits to burn the bodies...
using the Jews' own fat as fuel.
I saw how they were throwing people into these fire pits.
I said to myself...
"Something is wrong with me. My mind is going.
"I couldn't be seeing this."
ALICE: What vast landscape you are seeing here.
How could people, normal people...
go back after working here or plan this?
OK, somebody had to plan it.
Somebody had to be an engineer.
Somebody had to really put on a map this kind of efficiency.
The whole time I was in the camp...
through the experiments, every time I was selected...
I swallowed the diamonds.
So every time I swallowed them, I had to find them again.
We were allowed to go to the latrine once a day.
I never sat on the hole because I had to find my diamonds.
One day, the SS woman walked by the door...
and she saw me in the corner.
And I already had the diamonds in the hand...
and usually I was waiting until on the way back...
I would rinse them off in the mud...
or if there was no mud...
in the soup that we were gonna get next.
But I had no time, and I had to swallow them.
ALICE: My God. This is the latrine.
Oh, my God.
At this place, I was with my sister, Edith, next to me.
And so Edith whispers to me and says...
"It's almost Shabbat. This is Friday.
"It's almost Shabbat."
How we used to celebrate Shabbat in our house...
with food and with singing...
and with praying and lighting the candle.
I told her, "Why don't we celebrate inside the latrine?"
We ran back to the end...
and we started to make our Shabbat ceremony...
and we started to sing...
[Speaking Hebrew]
And as we sang the melody...
other children came around us...
and they started to sing with us.
Somebody was from Poland, somebody was German...
somebody was from Hungary, Czechoslovakia...
all thrown together...
and suddenly the Hebrew songs, prayers, the Shabbat...
united us in the latrine of Auschwitz.
IRENE: People couldn't endure all this pain...
the conditions and the hunger and the lice.
The lice were as big as my pinkie nail...
embedded into our bodies.
We were sore from scratching and infections.
And so when the electricity went on...
they ran to the barbed wire to commit suicide.
Then they punished us.
For every man that ran through the wire...
they took a hundred inmates and killed them...
in front of everybody as an example.
They didn't even let us die when we wanted.
And then I thought of something.
They took away my parents.
They took away my identity.
They took away my siblings.
They took away my possessions.
There is something that they want from me.
And then I thought of my soul.
And I says, they're not going to take my soul.
And I decided right then and there...
I'm going to get up from this mud and I'm going to fight...
because I'm not going to become ashes.
RENEE: When we arrived to Auschwitz...
thousands and thousands of people were cremated every day.
The Nazis used Jewish inmates, a special Sonderkommando...
to remove the bodies from the gas chambers...
and taking the bodies into the crematorium.
As far as I know, there is only four of us...
that worked in the Sonderkommando alive today.
And we are the only eyewitness...
that saw the whole thing from "A" to "Z"...
how the Final Solution was done.
I'm Jewish from Greece.
And I lived in Greece...
until the time they took me to concentration camp.
The first week of April, 1944, I arrived in Auschwitz.
They selected some of the Greeks to go to work on crematorium.
Now is my first day there. I don't know what was going on.
I saw 2,500 people, all naked, go into the big chamber...
which eventually they take only 500 people.
They were putting in 2,500 people.
So nobody could do anything but stand up their children.
And fifteen minutes later, after they close the chambers...
and the SS threw the gas from these four openings...
they open up.
What did I see?
I see the people I saw fifteen minutes ago.
I see them all dead...
standing up with their children, black and blue.
And I said to myself, "What's going on?
"What's going on here?"
There was a Polish guy that was there before...
and I said, "Where is God?"
He says, "God is where you have your strength."
There were four crematoriums, you know.
And they were working twenty-four hours.
There were a lot of big shots from Berlin...
coming and watching how the Jews were dying.
There was a hole in the hermetically closed...
and they were looking there how the Jewish people were dying.
It takes two to four minutes. Depends where you are.
A lot of people think that we-- working in the Sonderkommando--
we were guilty of something...
because we were doing such kind of a work.
But ourselves, we couldn't get out of it.
lf you don't do whatever they're asking you to do...
they kill you right away.
One time I had two friends of mine...
very close friends of mine, they came in, you know.
Their names were the Venezias.
And I told them right away that they were going to die.
They asked for food.
Whatever I had, I gave them to eat.
I told them exactly where to keep themselves...
where the openings were, so they can die fast.
And after they were through...
I took them out, and I washed them...
and I put them in the oven to be burned.
[Machine gun firing]
TOM: We could hear the artillery moving closer and closer.
And Budapest was the battlefield...
between the Germans and the Soviet Army.
And although we knew it would be weeks before the Soviet Army...
would hopefully liberate the remaining Jews...
we knew that lots of hardships were still ahead.
ALICE: ln Auschwitz, after Christmas...
we hear more the bombing came closer and closer.
IRENE: The Nazis didn't want anybody to get liberated.
So they were herding the people away from the camp.
RANDOLPH: The death march was in winter.
Those who could not keep pace were simply shot by the wayside.
lf anybody tries to run away...
or do anything that is not permitted...
will be shot on the spot.
There were three of us friends together up to that point.
And we swore that we would sacrifice...
each other's life for each other...
that we would never let each other down.
Kids. We had this sort of a dream that will be possible.
One of the three had a knee injury and had gangrene.
One of the soldiers noticed him limping...
so he comes up, and he wants to shoot him.
When we step in front of him, he pulls out his Luger...
and he says, "I give you three seconds.
"Count to three. Either you let him go...
"or all the three of you die."
Can you imagine?
Even though you're young, that decision we had to make.
Here we promised that we will die for each other...
but we couldn't keep that promise under threat of death.
We did let him down.
We arrived, about ten days' march or so...
we arrived into Dachau.
BILL: Oh, my God.
After fifty-three years...
it's as if it were yesterday.
You could find them right here in the street, just laying...
and we didn't even pay any attention.
You stepped over bodies. Didn't pay attention.
They didn't mean anything.
-Right here? -Yeah.
I never knew anybody's name...
never wanted to know anybody.
I never wanted to know just in case someday...
someone will know this person...
whose shoes I have taken off when he died.
lf you can imagine that every morning...
my job was for a while--
I had to go barrack to barrack to barrack...
and take those bodies and bring them to the crematorium.
We had one of those pushcarts.
I remember the Sonderkommandos that worked the crematorium...
came out and opened the gate.
They took it over from here and walked it in.
We were never allowed to cross this.
They never talked about a crematorium, but we knew.
lf we walked in here, we never got out.
We never got out from here, from this area...
because if they let him out, and he escapes...
they have witness, they have testimony...
so they wouldn't let him out.
Oy, look at this.
The inhumanity of man against man.
It's beyond belief.
This is the most monstrous thing that man devised.
Burning human beings just to get rid of them quicker.
Unbelievable.
It's just so emotional for me. It's so hard.
Now, why did I survive?
Why did God spare me?
Somebody started to yell, "Americans, Americans!"
We didn't know what they mean by Americans...
and they were pointing up to the sky.
Planes came out from behind the mountains, from nowhere...
and they just bombed the convoy.
And they didn't touch us. None of us got hurt.
That's when I found out the first time...
that the United States was at war.
It was April 29th when I was ordered to go to Dachau.
Actually, it was the night of the 28th...
and we were ordered to take off...
as fast as possible to get to Dachau...
not knowing what we were facing.
We thought it was a German military camp...
that we were going in to take...
and therefore we were gonna capture the people inside it.
We were in the vicinity...
of what we found out to be concentration camps.
BILL: Suddenly, we hear machine guns...
guns shooting off.
First thought was that we are being killed.
And then we saw the American soldiers...
climbing and crawling and shooting...
and then we saw German soldiers coming from that direction.
As they met here in the center, the Germans gave up.
But visualize 32,000 people coming out of those barracks.
Outside the camp on railroad tracks was...
forty boxcars, I believe, was the count...
absolutely full of dead bodies.
And not having had any knowledge of what we were facing...
this was totally unreal.
Most of them were wearing flannel pajamas.
That's all what they had.
Blue striped, white striped flannel pajamas.
PAUL: People were weak.
Weak probably isn't even the right term.
But they were emaciated.
Some of the people looked very old who weren't old.
MIHO: They were walking dead. That's what we called them.
Skeletons.
PAUL: A few came out first...
then more came out and more came out...
and they kept coming toward us...
because it was almost as if they realized--
and I guess they did--
they realized that we were different...
that we were people coming to help them.
And the Americans held the gun against the Germans...
but they didn't kill them. They let us have them.
And taking a dozen or so German soldiers we caught...
literally tore them apart piece by piece.
We captured a German colonel, and I went back and told him...
that we're gonna send you to our officers to talk to you...
and he spit in my face...
and I killed him.
It wasn't long before the war was over after that...
but throughout those last days, we intended to stop Germany...
from ever having the opportunity...
to stand up again and do this to anybody.
l've seen many a horrible sight...
that two years in ltaly, France, and Germany...
but the worst l've ever seen in my life...
were the survivors of the Holocaust.
This is something which is...
to this day I cannot forget.
I wasn't young anymore.
I was very old.
I was sixteen, but I was very old.
Returning to freedom was very difficuIt.
We didn't know how we were going to make peace...
with the outside world which didn't want us...
and we didn't know...
who we were going to find or not find.
They didn't know what to do with us...
and they put us in a DP camp...
which is a displaced persons camp.
And the closest one from where I was was in Austria.
And all the survivors that had no other place to go...
were in that camp.
So it was another camp, but it was free.
TOM: After the Soviet Army liberated Budapest...
and I became a free human being again...
I did not know for months...
whether my mother or other members of my family...
would ever return.
RENEE: I was hoping that going back to Auschwitz...
is finally going to give me some closure.
And I was shocked to find out...
that it opened up new questions and new doubts.
Renée. R-e-n-é-e.
RENEE: This is the first time that I decided...
to find some records on my family.
And my sister was Klara.
Give me some.
Klara.
Mm-hmm. lt's my sister.
Yeah.
RENEE: I found records of my sister, my father...
and my own...
and when I asked about my mother...
the archivist, the historian told me...
that those who were taken...
from the railroad station and killed immediately...
there is no record of those.
This is a test of her blood or...
or some medical researchment of Klara Weinfeld.
RENEE: I found out that my sister was experimented on...
that they were doing some blood tests on her.
And what does the zero mean?
RENEE: And he said, "I really don't know.
"Nobody ever asked me."
But there is a Dr. Munch who was the head of this clinic...
who is still alive.
Then I found out you're going to interview this man...
and that I may have a chance to ask him...
what those symbols meant.
MUNCH: Nothing important.
-Six months. -Bitte?
-Six months. -Six months.
RENEE: I tried to be civilized...
but he was very evasive...
and I became very angry.
I kept thinking that thousands and thousands of people...
died in his clinic.
I am going to go back to Crematorium 5...
because I know that my mother was taken there for sure.
I'm going to light some candles...
and I know that I am not coming back here anymore.
And now... just very recently...
I got a new letter from Bergen-Belsen...
that they don't have Edith Lok.
They looked through their books...
but they found an Edith Schwarz.
And I remembered at one point...
my sister Edith decided she will use my mother's name...
but I forgot it.
And all these years I looked for Edith Lok.
Can you find me, though, with Hungaria--
Hungaria?
Let's just look at it.
It's not alphabetized.
ALICE: Going back to Bergen-Belsen...
I want my husband to say a prayer...
with my children and with me...
because we will symbolically bury Edith.
MAN: This is a cemetery where all the people were buried...
who were brought after liberation...
to the military blocks.
We found the name of your sister.
She died here, we think, on the 2nd of June 1945.
So all the people who died in those days...
were buried here, one beside the next one.
ALICE: Today is the most special day of my life.
Finally, the search is over...
and we know now what happened and when it happened.
I brought here my mother's prayer book...
and here we will say for you...
the prayers that's traditional...
and light this candle in your memory...
and remember you forever...
as long as we live.
Yitgadal v' yitkadash shemai rabah.
B'almah divrah charutay viyamlich malchutai...
b'chayachon uv 'yamaichon...
uv'chayai kol bet Yisroel...
ba'agala u'bizman kariv, v'imru amen.
Yehai shemai raba mevorach l'olam olmai olmaya.
Yitbarach, v'yishtabach.
'yitpaar v'yirroman, v'yitnaseh...
v'yithadar, 'v'yithaleh v'yithallal...
shemai dekudisha, b'rich hu.
ALICE: But there are a lot of people like me out there...
who are still looking...
because for us...
liberation wasn't the last day.
TOM: I got an announcement that I had been selected...
to receive an academic scholarship...
to the University of Washington in a town called "Seetle..."
because nobody told me it's pronounced Seattle.
I had a ticket on the SS Marine Falcon.
I went to bunk B-20, put down my knapsack...
and they called for chow.
I had no idea what chow was.
It wasn't part of my English vocabulary.
So I got into the chow line.
We had these huge metal trays...
and this was a period when, of course...
my mental preoccupation was still with hunger.
And these wonderful people slopped on...
all the wonderful things on this metal tray.
And at the end of the line...
there was a huge wicker basket of oranges...
and a huge wicker basket of bananas.
My mother always taught me to do the right thing...
and I didn't know what the right thing was.
So there was another huge sailor...
and I asked him, "Sir, do I take a banana...
"or do I take an orange?"
And he said, "Man, you eat all the damn bananas...
"and all the damn oranges you want."
And then I knew I was in heaven.
IRENE: I loved my town...
and I see it picturesque and happy.
I'm planning to go there for the first time...
since I left in 1944.
Now, look at the sign, Robin.
Look at it. It says Polena in Russian.
The river is running on the right-hand side.
We used to go bathing here.
I'm hoping I can find...
some of the people that I knew before the Holocaust...
and maybe that I can talk to them.
ROBlN: There's the mushrooms in the jar, see?
[lrene speaking Hungarian]
IRENE: Maybe they can tell me...
things that happened while we were away.
[Speaking Hungarian]
IRENE: This one woman, Mariska...
she remembered my grandparents, my father, my mother, and me.
I was most surprised that she remembered me.
I was really afraid the people were going to be hostile...
that they were going to be accusing me of coming back...
to take something away from them.
I was asked in a very nice way...
am I planning to take my property...
and come back to live there?
And I said no.
I just want my children to know where I come from...
and I wanted to see my town where I grew up...
one more time before I die.
RENEE: Going back to my hometown...
with my family, with my child...
showing her this beautiful town...
which everywhere we went, the word "Jew" doesn't exist.
This building was the Jewish community center.
I wanted to go to the Jewish temple...
which was a beautiful synagogue.
Look how they let this-- Oh, my God.
What they did to this city, you just have no idea.
It's just unbelievable.
We went to the temple...
and there I met this man, this Jewish man.
He was also in Auschwitz.
Hello.
RENEE: Then he walked us through the temple...
and explained to us this is no longer a Jewish temple.
RENEE: It was very painful to see that this holy place...
was transformed into a place of entertainment.
The most difficult part was going back to my house.
Oh, my God!
That is the original...
That's the original gate.
The entrance.
The entrance. Yeah.
RENEE: It was neglected...
this beautiful house that my father took care of always...
and everything was manicured around it.
MAN: I think it's locked.
RENEE: No, it isn't. It just doesn't open.
[Sobbing] It doesn't open.
RENEE: At that moment I wished I wouldn't have seen it.
[Sobbing]
One of the neighbors who was a young child...
at the time they took us away was still there.
He has now a Russian wife who was very sympathetic.
She was scared to tell me...
what really happened after we left.
At that moment, I felt very lucky...
I will have a chance to go back to the United States to my home.
I saved the diamonds all the way--
all the way through the whole everything.
And when I was free...
I didn't talk about the Holocaust...
but I took the diamonds and mounted them...
into a teardrop-shaped pendant...
because every time I had to save them...
I had to cry so much...
so I felt that the tears are appropriate for that...
and I told my children that these diamonds...
should go down from generation to generation...
to the firstborn girl in the family...
until...forever.
And you can see they are different shapes...
and they're different cuts.
And they're the only thing that l...
that I'm holding that my mother ever held.
OK, well, I don't know what you think about...
TOM: My life today is something I myself cannot believe.
Having been elected by my constituency in California...
of some 600,000 people nine times...
it all seems like a dream, and it all places...
an incredible sense of responsibility on me.
As the only survivor of the Holocaust...
ever elected to the Congress of the United States...
I know I speak for all of my colleagues...
Republicans and Democrats...
in expressing our outrage at the most recent terrorist...
The central focus of my life obviously is human rights...
because I am convinced that this is really the path...
of a more civilized world.
My wife Annette and I have known each other all our lives.
We grew up as children in Budapest...
and we have been married now for forty-seven years.
We have two daughters who early on came to us...
and said that they planned...
a special gift for their parents.
Since our families were wiped out...
they will give us a large family.
And we have been blessed with 17 wonderful grandchildren...
and it's really the focus of our life.
RENEE: I would like to be known...
as an educator of the Holocaust...
so I go to the Museum of Tolerance...
where I was a founder of the Outreach Program...
and I speak to groups who come into the museum.
...came into being. When these things are happening...
you almost begin to believe that you did something wrong.
Why would they do this to me...
I feel that it is my duty...
to make the world aware...
of what happened during that time.
I always felt that my language is inadequate...
and that if I wanted to tell the story of my experiences...
I have to talk through a medium.
And I found art, because art transcends.
It's beyond words.
I wanted the surface to be very much layered.
It should look like a crumbled wall...
like it's papered over with yesterday's news...
because people want to forget the past.
People want to forget about the Holocaust.
What keeps me going is really...
the family...
that my husband and I created.
My grandchildren, three wonderful children...
two of them rabbis...
and my beautiful daughter.
She teaches me every day what is important in life...
And my husband, who is four-generation lsraeli.
And such a gallant man.
And he helped me to construct a life.
This painting is "Arbeit Macht Frei."
When you read this welcome gate, so to speak...
"Arbeit Macht Frei..."
My art today is about the Holocaust...
because I have no memorial for my people.
I don't know where they are.
Why, so many of my family members died...
so many got killed...
that the Basch family was almost wiped out.
We have regenerated.
So when we get together, we are quite a large group.
And the joy of sitting with my family...
and looking around and saying that I was so close to death...
and here I am sitting at a table...
and there are eleven, twelve of us rejoicing life.
The pleasure of living is wonderful.
-Salud. -L'chaim.
One day, it was on a Sunday, someone knocked at my door...
and I asked him into the door.
They had something wrapped in a newspaper under their arm...
and they said, "Are you Paul Parks?"
And I said yes.
He says, "We've been looking for you for several years."
"Off and on, various people have been looking for you.
"We wanted to find you." I said, "Why?"
"There was a fellow who was liberated by you guys...
"at Dachau who remembered you...
"and he died several years ago...
"and he'd made a menorah in the camp.
"He made it out of concrete nails...
"and welded it together and braised it together...
"while he was in the camp, and he wanted you to have it.
"So we've been looking for you to give it to you...
"and here it is."
And he gave me this beautiful menorah.
IRENE: Liberation was like a present from the world...
and that's the first time I acknowledged God again...
that He is around and helped me get to this point.
I don't think that God created the Holocaust.
I think that God gave us a mind and a heart and free will...
and it is up to man...
what he's going to do with his life.
And I blame man, not God.
I cannot rationally explain, emotionally explain...
intellectually explain the Holocaust.
I cannot find...
a place for a higher authority...
in this nightmare.
What kind of people are we?
What are the books teaching us?
What is the difference between me...
and another child?
What is the Bible teaching me?
What is this about?
Hitler remained a pathological anti-Semite to the end.
ln one of his last testaments, or warnings to his followers...
was for them to continue the war against the Jews.
BILL: ln his will executed April 29, 1945, it says...
"Above all, I enjoin the government...
"and the people to uphold the race laws to the limit...
"and to resist mercilessly...
"the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry."
RANDOLPH: The Holocaust has to be taught as a chapter...
in the long history of man's inhumanity to man.
One cannot ignore the discrimination...
inflicted on many people...
because of race, color, or creed.
One cannot ignore slavery.
One cannot ignore the burning of witches.
One cannot ignore the killing of Christians...
in the Roman period.
The Holocaust, perhaps, is the culmination...
of the kind of horror that can occur...
when man loses his integrity...
his belief in the sanctity of human life.