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- There was a place in Ocala, Florida called Spaceballs,
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
which was a pool hall,
but also a place that we hung out at, a lot.
The owner thought of us as sort of as a type of security.
And one night, there was someone that showed up
that he really did not like,
and he wanted us to make the guy leave.
I used to wear these rings,
thinking that if I punched somebody,
it was going to cause more pain and it did.
Every time I hit this guy in the face,
he would scream.
And we had me hitting him.
We had this guy, Mike, hitting him.
One guy broke his hand, punching him so hard.
So I'm punching harder and harder and harder.
And eventually, he got loose.
One shoe came off.
I remember Joe taking it
and just whizzed it across the parking lot.
And as soon as we got him down on the ground,
I walked over and was like, all right,
and threw the guy a kick.
It was basically kind of soft at first.
And I remember the guy cried out,
"Mama, mama".
I had a thought for one second,
when I was giving really brief kicks,
that if you let this bother you now,
it'll bother you for the rest of your life.
So I made like a switch,
learning how to turn my conscience off.
And at that point, I just kicked the ever-loving shit
out of that guy.
And , walked off and left him.
He wasn't black or Hispanic,
not a person of color at all.
He was just a stupid white guy doing stupid stuff
that was in the wrong place at the right time.
- In recent years,
we've become accustomed to hearing how the Jewish Agency
for Israel has rescued Jews
from areas of distress like Yugoslavia, Chechnya,
and brought them to safety here in Israel.
But when we hear that the Jewish Agency
has rescued a young American Jew
from Daytona Beach, Florida,
that's another story, altogether.
It's the story of John Daly.
Welcome John.
Your story begins back in 1990 on a beach in Florida.
What happened?
- A group of seven Neo-Nazi skinheads,
some of whom were from the town of Ocala that I lived in,
recognized me and proceeded to do their best to do me in.
- And they tried to kill you? - Yes, sir.
- Hate crime in general,
there there's no statute of limitations on hate crimes.
So therefore, I'm gonna have to reframe from-
- Okay. - I mean.
If there's certain things I say,
I can literally wind up in prison.
- One of them shouted out, "Die, Jew boy die".
And they pulled me into the ocean.
And two of them sat on me
to make sure that I couldn't get up.
- The perpetrators of this crime
are members of a known national organization
who would not stop at murdering John,
in part, I think to save themselves from prosecution,
somewhere down the line.
- Because those kinds of people,
when you commit crimes, they don't forget.
I mean, like they don't forget.
And when you do it, you don't want them to forget,
you know, you want them to know what you're doing is wrong.
It's against them.
It's hatred.
Hey, I'm right here, don't forget me.
We're never going to let you live in peace.
- Luckily you survived, amazingly survived.
- Yes sir.
It's really hard to believe almost
that this kind of antisemitism, skinhead attacks,
exists in the United States.
Is this an isolated incident
or do you know of others like it?
- No, I don't believe it's an isolated incident.
I think that, while the attacks may not be against
necessarily Jews in general,
but they're against minorities.
And I think any attack on any minority is an attack on us.
- Six years after they were sent to jail,
if I remember correctly,
two of the people who attacked you were released.
Did things change for you?
- They were beginning to.
Some of the people went to jail
for just assault and battery.
Two went to jail for attempted murder.
They were leaders in the racist organizations
and they had made it clear that when they got out,
that they were going to finish the job.
- I always thought I had the greatest criminal mind
of anyone I'd ever met.
And John loved to entertain these ideas,
'cause I always had some good ones.
We just, you know, basically,
somehow stayed out of trouble,
while causing a lot of trouble.
One of our favorite things to do was go shooting.
We both had matching 38, five shots
and we put 'em to work.
- The skinheads are an organization such that
members from Orlando will sit around and laugh
and joke around at the beginning of the evening,
telling stories about the houses they fire-bombed
or the former members that they shot
before they began any discussions.
That way that the groundwork has been laid for you
to understand what happens to people that just walk away.
- What drew me to John was he was very quiet,
very well thought.
You could tell he was an incredibly methodical person.
He was like a chess player.
He was like Bobby Fisher, he was always 10 moves ahead.
He knew what he wanted from life, it seemed.
He wanted the same things I wanted, power.
I was almost like his antithesis
'cause I was very quick to react and very loud.
And John was exactly the opposite,
very calm, cool and collective.
When he would get mad, he would almost whisper
very quiet and smile a lot,
where as I would get loud and in your face
and move around a bunch.
So it was an odd dichotomy with the two of us together.
- At the hospital bed, we pressed John for more information.
He said it was his friends,
so-called friends who had beat him up.
And that's when his story began to come out.
He was very selfish.
Can still be.
The tumor has been the best thing
that ever happened to him, has made him humble.
And I used to pray, God, he needs to be broken.
John's father came from a very violent background.
He brought that into the marriage.
Guns, knives, you name it.
I've had it held to my head, to my throat.
- My dad, when he was younger,
was a gang leader in New York City.
No small thing unto itself.
My dad would hit Puerto Ricans
to see which way they would fall.
That was something I remember hearing more than once
from various members of my family as I grew up.
When he was younger,
he ran over my grandfather and shot my uncle,
both in the same night.
- It's about feeling safe
and not feeling alone and feeling you're part of something,
even if it wasn't something you wanted to be a part of,
once you were in, you know,
once I was tattooed and you know, recruited,
I was top of the pecking order.
As soon as you bring, you know,
five or six people to the table,
all of a sudden, everybody loves you.
- One thing that separated me
from a lot of the other guys
and something that got me noticed
was the fact that I had no tattoos.
The only tats I wanted
were ones that no one would give me.
I wanted skins on the inside of my lip.
The other tat that I wanted was a spiderweb
showing that I'd killed somebody.
And that of course, I had yet to earn.
I remember one day there was,
I was at somebody's house.
One of the apartments in the area
and a crew of black guys showed up
and they said they wanted one of the guys inside,
a white guy, a friend of mine.
And I don't know how many it was,
but they just came into the door
and jumped on him, started beating on him.
Got him back into the kitchen.
And there was a frying pan on the kitchen stove,
a nice big lead frying pan.
And it made an interesting whack
when they hit him in the head.
They hit him so hard, they dented this metal frying pan
on top of his head.
And just the fear and helplessness at that moment
that I had no one I could call and no one to turn to.
There's no one that I could say, hey, I need help,
that could come.
And that was a terrifying moment.
- Because of the bullying he'd had from black people,
he got, so he didn't like him.
And it put a fear in him.
And all of a sudden, he finds these people
to be a part of that's got his back.
He was tired of being picked on.
And I can't say, as I blame him.
- When I turned against racism,
was basically a group of skinheads.
One racist.
They weren't active,
doing much more than just seeking
where the next beer was going to come from
and looking out for one another.
And that was something that was new to me.
And I was instantly drawn to it.
I saw their style of dress.
I saw their comradery.
The fact that they flowed together,
laughed together
and more importantly, they all had each other's back.
- You know, coming from being a geeky kid
who was picked on,
you know, never felt to belong
to all of a sudden have people that would do your biddings,
it feels good.
I'm not gonna lie, it feels good.
- One of the guys lifted up his shirt,
showed me a white hand and a black hand breaking a swastika.
And he said, oh, it's cool that you're Jewish.
You know, we don't have a problem with races, whatsoever.
There were some guys from AYF that did have racist,
white supremacy tattoos
that I didn't know about.
They were hidden on their bodies
that I didn't see until much, much later.
Two of the guys went down to Orlando
and while they were down there,
they met up with some racist skinheads from AYF,
Aryan Youth Force.
AYF was led by a guy named Richie
who was a diehard neo-Nazi skinhead.
One day there was a knock at my front door
and he was outside
with two other neo-Nazi skinheads.
So in the back of my mind, I was like, all right,
if this is for you,
like if they're here for you, go with them.
I didn't know that the guys that he'd met up with
had already handed over the names and addresses
of everybody where we all lived.
And he didn't know I was Jewish.
That was one piece of information
that Chris and them, kept to themselves.
So as I rode with him
and they're telling me about this organization
that they belong to,
they're like, oh yeah, you remember that guy, Bobby?
Bobby moved to different city.
They found him crucified in his front yard.
And each one told a story about somebody
who's mysteriously this, mysterious this, mysteriously that.
Then Richie leaned over the back and said,
oh, welcome aboard.
And I knew at that moment,
that I wasn't being asked,
I was being told, one, you're not with us.
And two, if you try and leave...
It wasn't that they did this to strangers that refused them,
they did to their friends.
So at that moment, I wasn't going to say, wait a second,
I'm Jewish, I can't be involved.
Little did I know I was meeting
with my future attempted murderer, that day.
- He's trying to hide the fact that he's a Jew,
getting more and more involved
in serious racist skinhead meetings.
There was no internet.
There was no computers.
You didn't have cell phones.
- These guys are totally meshed in society.
I knew they could find me
because you just didn't know, if you'd look,
the guy sitting next to you in a restaurant
was a supporter, was active.
And when you see that at 16 years old,
that you're near a police cruiser
and a police officer in uniform,
who's talking to you as an equal
because you're a racist and thinking, wow,
I can't call the cops.
What if they send this guy?
There were parties, you'd hear people bragging
about hanging out with judges.
You'd hear people talking about
hanging out with politicians.
I couldn't type into Google in 1990,
hey, how do I get out a neo-Nazi organization?
Can you help me?
I couldn't turn to my parents and say, hey,
I know you guys don't have money.
Let's move to another city,
change our names
and try and go into the Witness Protection Program.
No, it doesn't work like.
- And I would say, where are you going, John?
I'm going out?
Well, how did you hurt your fist?
It looks bruised.
I don't know, I just knocked it against something.
And suddenly, the doors shut.
I wasn't a part of John's life anymore.
- I really stopped dealing my parents,
my brothers and other people around me,
even some very close friends.
- They walked down the hall
in their Dr. Marten boots or combat boots
and the kids and the teachers stepped back
and made way for them.
- And by association, whether you're tough or not,
all of a sudden you are,
and you scare the shit out of people,
which is very attractive to somebody
that months prior,
was picked on.
And all of a sudden, you're placed in a position where,
hey, I can defend myself now.
I don't have to be afraid anymore.
On one hand, I'm terrified
that they're going to find out on I'm Jewish,
but on the other, I think it's so far away,
the chance is so far, so remote,
so removed from me,
that I'm safe now.
I've actually found safety in the embrace of Nazis
and as a Jew.
So if I'm stuck and there's nothing I can do,
I might as well try and be
as tough and as crazy and as wild
as the rest of the people around me.
The American front was a national organization
with chapters all over the United States.
And we started by David Lynch,
who was the Eastern States chairman of the American front,
who had ostensibly had 5,000 soldiers under his command.
And Bob Heick.
Bob Heick was somebody that was on the Geraldo Rivera Show.
- Sick and tired of hearing the sob stories from kikes.
I get sick and tired of seeing Uncle Tom here.
- He's a member of a group
where most of them haven't even finished high school.
And he's had his nose in books since he was a kid.
He knows the history of World War I, World War II,
the weapons, everything about it.
Both sides, the German side and the other side,
allies side.
So when he was involved with these people,
he would keep them straight.
They'd try to tell him a story
and he'd say, it didn't happen that way.
It happened this way.
And he could produce the facts and the book
and the page and show you where it happened.
So these people, the leaders began to see,
hey, we got a kid that can think on his feet.
He's not just out there boozing and fighting
and creating a ruckus.
He can think.
He knows how to think on his feet.
And they begin to take an interest in him.
This was a leader that they wanted to train.
- Bob Heick called me a good little racist.
One day when I asked about if he'd said anything about me,
and that's what was relayed back to me.
Bob said, you a good little racist.
And I remember at the time, being so touched.
So for Bob, this was something,
I was somebody that he knew,
David Lynch, as well.
I was somebody he'd spoken to.
In the summer of 1990, I received a phone call,
saying, I want you to be the Northern Florida leader
of the American front.
All of North Florida belongs to you.
I now had, in my mind,
unlimited power.
I knew that I could pick up a phone,
make a call and say, I want something done.
And there were guys that would do it.
It wasn't something that I was going to say,
oh, no thank you.
And truthfully, I was honored and flattered
that I had been recognized.
- We talked a little bit about it.
And I remember telling John,
John, you've been to Yad Vashem.
You've seen what the Nazis did.
They killed Jews.
And he just sorta like shrugged his shoulders,
like, oh well.
- I distinctly remember my mom sitting me down one night
and saying, John, they're going to hurt you.
I knew what she meant.
When they find out you're Jewish,
they're going to hurt you.
- I didn't find out, John was Jewish,
I think until they tried to put him in the ground,
was how I found out.
- The evening of October, the sixth, 1990,
the phone kept ringing off the hook.
And it was Heather,
the ex-wife of one of John's best friends.
And with urgency, she kept saying,
he must be at Daytona Beach.
We're having a special meeting tonight.
He's got to be there.
- And uh,
that's when,
I found out that they knew, yeah.
Everybody was involved.
None of these guys were going out of their way
to be like, hey, maybe you should get out of here.
Every time I went into a room, it would get quiet.
I'm like, man, this is weird.
This is just the weirdest vibe I've ever gotten.
At one point, someone said, let's go down to the beach.
One guy punched me behind my ear.
I heard somebody shout, "Now!"
Then the rest came in and the punches just started flying.
And I'm shouting out, "I'm a skinhead",
'cause I was trying to think, in my mind,
I'm trying to rationalize why this was happening.
And somebody shouted out, "Die Jew boy, die".
And at that point I knew,
there was no coming back.
It wasn't just one or two kicks.
My God, it was an ongoing, continuous savage beating.
- They were going to kill him.
And they beat him up and dragged him out in the ocean,
drowned him and left him, floating out to sea.
- And when I couldn't hold my breath any longer
and I inhaled,
I could feel the water hit my lungs.
And as soon as it hit my lungs, I shot it out.
And then my lungs went .
And they filled it up again.
- I read the depositions.
Every one of 'em,
they went back into the ocean,
sat on him,
pushed him down to the bottom of the beach,
where he could feel the abrasion of the sand on his face
and held him down until he died.
- You feel the water rush into your lungs.
And just as quickly,
your lungs will collapse to shoot it out.
And then again, it'll expand again.
And it takes two pulls of your diaphragm to completely
fill your lungs with water.
And you can feel it.
Oh, you can feel it,
especially on an October night,
you can feel when that cold water hits your lungs.
And that's when I felt myself die.
The darkness just began to close in,
covering up the light and then it sealed it out.
And that was it.
I ceased to be.
- And according to their statements in court,
the water was a foot over his face.
His mouth was open and his arms were out to his side
and he was floating out to sea.
And I believe God washed that kid back up on that beach
and saved my son's life.
- And apparently, the doctors told my parents,
get ready to say goodbye to your son.
He's most likely not gonna survive.
And I remember I had an Indian doctor that came in
and looked at me and said,
there's no medical reason why you should be alive.
You need to find something to believe in.
A table, a chair, you need to find something to pray to
because there is something that saved your life.
- So at first, I didn't believe it.
And then when I,
I knew it was true,
I was more concerned about his well-being.
It was a hard time in our little town.
I'm not gonna lie.
Everybody, it seemed like everybody was out
to get everybody else.
Everybody was throwing everybody else under the bus.
So like I said, as soon as I graduated high school,
which was quickly,
I got a regular old high school diploma
and I was like a prom dress, I was off.
I ended up moving to Gainesville for a bit,
still in the movement
and then wound up in a pocket of Florida,
hanging out with the same group of guys,
eventually that tried to cause John's demise,
at which time I realized,
I was probably in a little bit over my head.
- The last threat I received
was a very simple,
when the last guy gets out of prison,
we're going to have a reunion.
All of us together with you.
And we're going to finish what we started.
I contacted the Jewish Agency
and I said, "I need to move to Israel, now!"
- They were a Jewish family in trouble.
This was a Jewish kid in trouble.
And we were not asking a lot of questions.
We just wanted to know how we could help.
- And they began to get the wheels moving.
And I found myself in short order, in my new home,
in the state of Israel,
where here, I felt safe.
Mom!
- I'm coming, I'm coming.
- I had two awake brain surgeries.
And that's exactly what it sounds like.
You are awake while you're going through surgery.
And the operating table is such that I was strapped down,
my legs and my arms were out to the side.
I could feel them pulling my scalp
as they detached it from my skull.
For some reason, the anesthetic that they used
to numb my cranium, my skull, so I wouldn't feel it,
didn't work.
So once that thought saw started sliding in,
it was a pain that I cannot even begin to describe.
The neuropsychologist I was dealing
with explained to me that this
was most likely the product of a slow bleed in my brain.
She looked at me and said,
you've had this tumor for a long time.
The only thing I can think of
that would cause a slow bleed in my brain
would have been the beating in Daytona.
- The thing I'm looking forward to the most
when I go to Prague is to spend time
with somebody who was a friend of mine 20 years ago,
in entirely different circumstances.
And really,
to show,
the power of change.
That no matter who you are or who you were,
you can always become somebody else.
That only you stick yourself in a pattern
of self-indemnification.
I'm a loser.
I'm a failure.
That he opted, he made the decision
to get out of the skinhead racist lifestyle.
So um...
- Similar to what happened to you?
- I believe part of it was because what happened to me.
He and I were very, very close at the time.
But I think it's also,
from what I understand,
that I went underground, no one could find me.
And there was definitely revenge taken
on the friends of John the Jew.
And he apparently, was one of 'em
that was attacked and beaten up several times
because he was loyal and had been my friend and didn't,
didn't betray me.
And I just disappeared.
And there were a lot of friends, him included,
that were offended at the fact
that I didn't believe their friendship
could span boundaries,
but as far as I was concerned,
no one was to be trusted and no one was.
And to this day, nobody is.
It's just the way it is.
Kevin was one of my best friends
at a period in my life, when,
my life was smoke and mirrors.
The last time I remember sitting
and standing and talking with Kevin face-to-face,
both of us had guns in our hands.
And it's a lot to digest.
Leaving Israel, cutting the umbilical cord to my hospitals.
I'm excited to see him.
I'm excited to see who he's become.
Where he's gone in his life,
which I'm quite impressed with.
But at the same time,
what if he's still with the white power movement?
- I was going to be in Prague for a week,
'cause that gives me girl time with my twin sister
and we can talk late and cook popcorn
and do all kinds of noisy things
and besides, she likes cooking on my stove.
And I know that I get Southern fried chicken.
I provide the stove and the gas.
She cooks and I eat.
It's a great combination.
It's a win all the way around.
- All right mom, I'm out of here.
- John, do you want some extra cookies
with you to eat along the way?
- No thank you, I'll get something at the airport.
But at least give me a hug.
God bless.
First things first.
I need to call home and let 'em know that I'm alive.
That I made it.
It's not letting me call out.
It's not letting me call anybody.
I got it set up for Wi-Fi.
For some reason, it's not doing it.
I trust that this is the real deal.
This isn't anything else.
I'm already looking out,
to see if anybody's looking at me
harder than they should.
Harder than I feel they should.
Am I gonna meet somebody with long sleeves, hiding tattoos,
a weird haircut?
Am I gonna meet just a normal citizen?
- It was a long road
coming out of the skinhead movement.
I'm not going to lie.
It was a long road to where coming back
to what I thought was
like everybody else 'cause I never felt normal.
I never felt welcomed.
I never felt like I was one of the gang
or I was like other people.
I always felt it,
there was something different about me or I wasn't right.
John and I were quite close
right up until the attack.
I was actually getting more involved
with the skinheads locally.
And then after that happened,
those same skinheads that I just started hanging out with,
branded me a Jew-lover.
So as soon as I graduated high school,
I was gone from Ocala.
because I was really afraid of what they might do to me,
thinking I might be the next guy, you know,
to get a boot party
or maybe stabbed in a parking lot somewhere,
just for being associated with John.
- What are you hoping for?
- What's up?
How are you? - I'm great.
Good to see you. - Same.
- All right, let me see your scar.
Where's the scar?
It's huge.
My name's Kevin Connell and I'm a sommelier.
My brother was hated, was a known racist to blacks,
but they were scared of him
'cause he was a pretty big violent guy.
Because they couldn't
or wouldn't do anything to my brother,
I was a prime target.
I was 14 and my brother had graduated high school.
And I was attacked by no more than six,
no less than four,
black youths.
They crushed my orbit socket, my nose, broke my jaw.
I had a cerebral hematoma,
with the right frontal lobe.
They had to drill a hole, put a catheter in my skull.
So things were pretty rough.
I was in the hospital for several months.
After that, I was enrolled in a special school
for problem children even though, I had done nothing wrong.
But while I was in the hospital,
the local skinheads had found out what happened.
And they were the only people to come visit me.
But there were the people that showed me
that I didn't have to be scared anymore.
I got involved in the movement,
Joseph Goebbels.
I read his biography.
You know, it also has his journal that he kept.
And he talks about when he was a child, you know,
being ostracized and being lonely.
And his story really hit home with me.
And then I read Mein Kampf and you know,
I was never a big guy,
but I was always a smart guy.
So I learned, if I was smarter than everybody else,
they would protect me.
You know, I grew up in a household
where we moved almost every year.
My father worked for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
So I lived all over the country.
By the time I was 13, we'd lived in 11 cities.
So I never really had any close friends, my whole life.
So it was nice to have people
that I didn't care about that cared about me.
And then my parents moved to Ocala
because of my involvement with the skinheads.
Second day at school, I met you
and it just kind of kept snowballing from there.
And then John's attack happened pretty quickly after that,
I'd say, less than nine months after that.
It was the day or the day before.
And I didn't know that he was going to meet with the guys
and he thought he was getting a promotion
and was moving up even further he ladder.
He was quite excited.
And when I learned about it,
I didn't believe it at first,
'cause I'm like, John's not Jewish.
I've been to his house.
I met his parents.
They're not Jewish.
There have a cross or something somewhere there,
I remember thinking.
I'm like, they can't be Jewish.
They're wrong.
And then as it unfolded
and John pretty much disappeared for a while.
As it unfolded and it made the newspapers and whatnot,
there was no denying it
that John was definitely Jewish.
And John had been pulling the wool
over a lot of people's eyes
and doing a fantastic job
and feeding 'em lines of shit.
And they were just eating it up.
'Cause he was good at being thoughtful and maniacal,
all at the same time.
And I still don't even understand
how everyone else found out
'cause he was so good about not letting people know,
'cause he always had an answer for everything.
So I find it hard to believe
that somebody saw through the facade
or somebody figured it out on their own.
To this day, I'd like to ask him exactly, you know.
I know that it was a mutual skinhead that we knew,
wife and mother of his child at the time,
that threw him under the bus per se.
But I don't know how she found out.
Keep taking a left, you'll find the bathroom.
- Keep taking left.
I found it!
Let's hit the streets.
See how much trouble we can not get into, hopefully.
Hopefully.
How did you get in there?
So it's closed?
- I'd been trying to find John on Facebook
for quite some time.
I literally had to find everybody else from Ocala
and make friends with them until I found somebody
who was friends with John.
Risotto arborio with carrots,
zucchini, shallots and parmesean.
- Yeah, let's do it.
Yeah. - Yeah, I'm down.
Nice and eclectic.
Looks like they have decent beers.
The easiest way to recruit people into the skinhead movement
and the white supremacy movement
is people that are just outside,
they're right on the fringe,
that are trying to put their foot into a clique
or they're trying to belong.
They're trying to make friends.
They're slightly geeky, slightly, not everybody,
not like everyone else.
Because when you show people a little bit of power
and you show people loyalty,
you'd be surprised what they'll do for you.
- And what they do is they go through
and they take all of your failures in your life
and say, no, no, no, no,
it wasn't a failure.
It's a conspiracy.
And they build this conspiracy slowly but surely
and strong enough that you really buy into it.
And then you're like, I am at war.
And these people that are trying to do this to me,
my culture, my family, my race,
need to be destroyed.
And you really feel like you're doing something
for the betterment of society, your race,
because all they want to do is destroy your race
and bring your race down.
And once you've got somebody like that, you've got,
you've got a Holy warrior, you've got a terrorist.
- So it all starts at the top.
And I was at the very bottom,
but by recruiting,
you're moving up
and then all those people are at the bottom.
As they recruit, they move up.
So it's a mentality and ideology
and a movement perpetuates itself,
preying upon the weak, the downtrodden,
nobody's ever getting into the movement
than somebody that's been bullied
because you have all these people
that you think are like-minded that will defend you.
And that's one thing that I will say,
that skinheads are quick to violence
and quick to defend their own.
Not too far from here in Prague, there was a, you know,
basically an interment camp
where the Czech Republic funneled, you know,
several hundred thousand of their Jews through,
sent them off to further Eastern Europe to be.
- Eradicated? - Exactly.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- I wanted to go and pay my respects
to all those who lost their lives
at the hands of the Third Reich.
And I wouldn't want to do it with anybody
other than John, honestly.
You know, horrible atrocities
that affected millions and millions of people.
And this is the ideology
that I live by for four years of my life.
- His journey, in a sense, is harder than mine.
Being Jewish, I had something to turn to.
He didn't.
He left something that was like a family-type relationship
and moved back into the real world.
- Living in Israel,
he finally feels at home and he feels
like he's with his people
and leading with this,
I know that, that's something I'd like to feel in life.
You know, I'd like to feel that I do belong to something
and I have something to look forward to
and have something to believe in.
I'm not sure what it's going to be.
I used to consider myself to be a real American Patriot,
but I don't like the direction
that my country is going, a whole lot.
- And I will wear my Yarmulke,
my Kippah, as we call it in Hebrew.
- Kippah? - Kippah.
Yarmulke is Yiddish, Kippah is Hebrew.
- Well earlier, as we pulled in,
I kind of became overwhelmed with emotion.
I started shaking and then, as I went into the laboratory,
a few moments ago, I did get sick.
- Wow.
- Going into the camp, it makes it,
it's like putting a face with a name.
It's no longer, you know,
old reels that you see on TV programs and documentaries,
you know, written by some guy who wasn't there.
It's not a page from a history book, it's real.
Tikkun Olam is doing what you can to fix the world,
to the best of your ability.
And that just starts with you
and the way that you live your life and who you are,
which what you're doing now is,
Tikkun Olam, you're going back
and fixing some of the wrongs.
- Trying to.
- You can at one point, stop it and say,
that's enough.
Things need to be different. - And they do.
- More than 1500 Jews were in prison in this small fortress.
Their destiny was worst of all, the groups of prisoners.
About 500 from them were tortured to death here.
Most others perished,
after the deportations to the concentration camps.
- 1500 people of the Jewish faith died there?
I find that hard to believe.
The Nazis were really avid and real go-getters.
This was a transit camp as well,
where people were coming,
merely coming in to wait for the train
to go off to the East- - Take 'em somewhere else.
- To Auschwitz and Ireland.
This was just merely a stop on their voyage.
- What you wrote in the book,
the guest book,
what did you write? - I'm sorry.
- I wanted to come to room 18
because 18 in Judaism means life.
It's playing with the,
the way that we count the numbers-
- The letters of the alphabet? - Exactly.
- So I wanted to see where room 18 was.
It says, the mortuary where the bodies
of prisoners tortured to death, were stored.
Starting at the end of 42,
dead bodies were cremated in Terrace's Crematorium
of the Jewish ghetto.
But for skinheads, this is also has a-
- Yeah, they've kind of stolen it and made it their own.
- Yeah. - First letter is A.
- For Adolph? - And the second letter.
- H. - For Hitler.
- Is the H letter, H is the eight letter of the alphabet.
- With the skinheads, we do it with the blood,
have a red circle around it.
- Adolph Hitler.
- I mean, I'm still, not gonna lie.
I'm still afraid of a large group of black people.
And I know that's still a little bit crazy,
but I'm still very hypervigilant, as well.
There's just certain things that
I don't feel that I can turn my back on
because I mean,
if it's happened more than a couple of times,
you should learn from your mistakes.
- I'll admit that I do have certain animosity within me,
but when I would be asked,
if I've forgiven the skinhead guys
that tried to take my life,
I would say, it's the best thing that happened to me
because it gave me life.
It taught me to value life and the sanctity of life.
- We walked through a 500 meter long tunnel.
There were several spots as we walked through
where the temperature seemed to drop
and get very, very cold.
It was almost like there was electricity in the air.
All the hair on my body would stand up
and just to take it in and to know
that almost everyone that walked through that tunnel,
didn't walk back.
It was a lot to take in.
- You all right, Kevin? - Yeah.
I don't even know what's happening inside of me.
- If you were going to die
and you knew it,
there's something known as the Mortars Prayer, okay.
Here is what the Lord, your God, the Lord is one.
And that is something that
I'm sure this hallway's heard more than once.
- It would be torture, just to be led down this,
not knowing what was going to happen.
- Your brain tries to rationalize
how what's happening, isn't happening.
- Right.
- That somehow I'm going to live,
that somehow I'm going to survive.
And from fights you've been in
and attacks you've gone through,
I'm sure your brain is saying the exact same thing.
Yeah.
- That way you close off the outside world
and you turn in.
You know it. - This, isn't happening to me.
- This isn't real.
- I'm going to live through this.
- I'm gonna wake up and I'm going to be fine.
- That your brain is so arrogant,
the one thing that it can't say is
I'm not going to survive this. - Yeah.
- And the moment, a peace that hit me
when I was attacked by the skins, was just,
when I came to the ultimate understanding
and conclusion that I wasn't gonna make it out of it.
And then it was just like my brain just relaxed.
Really, you know how it is. - Yeah, I mean-
- A situation like that, you just want to go home.
- Right, you just want your bed and your mom.
- Yeah and when you go,
you want to go to where you feel safe.
And at that moment, I did not feel safe.
And I knew enough cops that were involved
in the white power movement that-
- They're not the best people to go to
in that kind of situation. - No.
- I mean that whole part of central Florida,
as we know,
most of the sheriff's department
were in the Ku Klux Klan
and probably still are. - I wouldn't doubt it.
- At one time,
after I was out of the skinheads,
for quite a while,
I was arrested and thrown in jail for what Kevin does best,
being a smart ass and drunk
and not listening to authority.
I've always had a problem with authority.
And I wound up in jail for,
not a long time, but enough time.
And I still had not covered up all of my tattoos.
And one of the tattoos I had was quite vulgar
and quite hateful.
And there are symbols that anybody
in the white supremacist world knows
and instantly sees and instantly knows what it means.
And it was not anything I still believed in, of course,
but it was still tattooed on me
and I couldn't make it go away.
And I wound up in a cell block
with someone from the Aryan brotherhood
who had just violated parole and was about to be
before the judge to be re-sentenced,
to go back to prison, most likely.
And I've never been more afraid
for myself because I knew
that I was going to tell the truth.
And that I was going to say my peace
and let him know that, that's not who I am any longer.
And I don't agree with you.
It was honestly, probably,
the scariest 48 hours
until I was moved and became a trustee
and was moved to a different cell block
since I was a skinhead.
I'd never been, I hadn't been that scared in
15 years.
It brought it home to know that,
I didn't cover up the tattoos 'cause I wanted to remember,
you know, how stupid I was
and I wore them
so that I didn't forget,
not about anybody else, but so I didn't forget.
But after that experience, I felt it was time
to not hurt anybody else
with the images that I had on my body.
And it wasn't even about me.
It was about other people
and about sending a message that I didn't believe in.
So it can be very hard to walk away from your past.
And that really hit home.
And that was when I truly
started thinking about the future,
which was something I had really never thought about.
I kept living in the past
and that was like one of the clarifying moments,
knowing that moving forward, I still have to have a life.
Oh my God.
When we went all the way through the tunnel
and around to the corner
and headed down the little hill and I saw three crosses
and there was a tour group
and the woman was speaking in English.
They had mentioned that this is where the soldiers lied
when this was still just a military installation
and used this embankment for target practice.
But after the Third Reich had taken over it
and occupied and was using the camp
as a transit camp
and a death camp,
that's where these people have walked and been executed
or walked and be hung.
It was emptying.
I don't know how else to describe it.
It took what little bit of
okay feeling I had inside of me and stripped it out
and let me know that it's real.
None of those people came back.
And this is where they met their end.
It was very real, very real.
Those who weren't tortured, of course, were executed here?
- Hmm hmm.
I don't know if you'd like to come over here, as well.
- I mean, every person that wound up there,
wasn't there for anything they did
besides for being themselves,
being people of the Earth,
living their lives.
It's a heavy burden to carry, you know,
knowing that I preached the same nonsense
to a lot of people
and convinced a lot of people that it was right.
I should feel ashamed.
I'm gonna try to do right from this point on.
- Oh, this is a huge, huge step.
- There are a few places that John and I had stopped.
And John brought some stones that I'd asked him to bring me
from Jerusalem
because I thought Jerusalem, being the Holy city,
and the Holiest place to the Jewish faith,
and none of these people made it there.
You know, it was right around the corner.
- May the memories be for a blessing.
May they always be remembered.
- And I walked through all of the gravestones
and I found only one gravestone that didn't have a rock on.
And I made sure I put a rock there.
So everybody knows that they're not alone now.
And the thing that really hit me is
about a third of them were just numbers.
They didn't have names.
So there was just bodies in the ground.
And it makes you think about their entire communities
and entire families and entire villages
that were completely wiped out.
And there was nobody to remember.
And nobody to tell anybody that it happened.
- Yeah, a little light serve as a reminder
of all the lights that were snuffed out,
at this horrible place,
near the horrible camps around Europe.
Another stone from Jerusalem?
- I want a rock, for home.
It's been quite the day, John. - It has.
- Once you realize that hatred is just fear of the unknown
and fear of yourself,
it doesn't take long
to want to see the truth
and want to see humanity for what it's worth.
Along this voyage, I've also come to the conclusion
that there are more bad people
than there are good people in the world.
And I was one of them.
I can't undo what I've done.
I can't undo what I've said.
But I can try to stop it.
And I can do my best
to try to educate people to the truths,
that ignorance and fear breed hatred.
And we don't have to be afraid.
- I noticed that Kevin kept some of his,
the stones that he had.
And I asked him, as we discussed it,
what to do with those stones.
He said that if you ever visit a place like this, again,
he wanted to have some.
- I was thinking to go to Auschwitz.
- Why exactly Auschwitz, of all places?
- Over a million people died there, that I know of.
- One million, one hundred thousand.
- Yeah, that they know of. - They know of.
Would you be willing to be awake
at quarter to five in the morning tomorrow?
- Four?
- Four.
You said, of all the places you could visit,
you'd like to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- My body doesn't want me to go.
I'm serious.
- I had to take a moment in the parking lot just to sit
and try and catch my breath,
from breaking down, realizing where I was.
Going into brain surgery was easier than this.
As soon as we crossed through the entryway,
to Auschwitz,
Kevin fell on my shoulder.
Crying.
He kept repeating, I'm sorry.
I'm so, so sorry.
Just the thought that I had raised my arm
and that a cursed symbol,
of the Sieg Heil.
As we were walking through Auschwitz,
and we came to the destroyed gas chambers
and it was quite literally the end of the line.
That was where the railroad tracks stopped.
But coming to the end of that line was
part of a spiritual journey
that I've been on for over 20 years.
And that Kevin's been on for 20 years.
It's part of our national Anthem,
singing about the Jerusalem or dream of 2000 years.
If you go down here and walk down,
there's one building standing.
It's the last building remaining
from those, from Terezin,
which is where we were yesterday.
Everything you see up and down this road
on both sides are people that sent here, from there.
And so when you said yesterday
that you felt like the numbers were off.
- They came here? - I would say you were right.
What bothers me, is this place just goes on for,
forever and ever.
You're entering a courtyard
where the Auschwitz murdered thousands of people.
Please maintain silence here.
Remember their suffering and show respect for their memory.
I often wonder if,
if God chose wisely with me.
Why did I, a punk little 17-year-old kid
deserve an extra chance?
I want to go to the gas chambers.
- Very inspiring, for real, thanks man.
- What are you thank you me for?
You made this happen.
- It was probably one of the most life changing events
of my life, I'm not going to lie.
It's going to take a long time to take all this in.
I feel a little cleaner inside.
Then again, I have all this emotion, all this hate,
and I don't want it to be hate
'cause I don't have anybody to hate.
I was angry.
I had no place to project it.
I've never in my life had to process something
and I've always, it's always,
hey, okay, let's move on, next thing.
This is something that's bigger than me, beyond me.
It's going to take me a long time to understand.
I think more people should come.
- Thank you.
Without you, this wouldn't have happened.
- When I think about going through the trial
and how friends, so-called friends,
because you all were tight,
you believed the same thing.
You had each other's backs. - Like brothers.
- All of you were brainwashed,
but they were brainwashed
where they were ready to kill a brother
because he was a Jew.
I don't whether education would make a difference,
but most of them would drop out from school.
They weren't interested in education.
And the end result was you dying,
and winding up at your own end of the line.
And it was an end of the line for you.
But it was the end of the line for us too,
your mom and dad
and your brothers and what we went through.
Our lives were turned upside down.
I don't want to go through that ever again.
I can't think of anything worse
than a family to have to go through something like that.
- Have I ever apologized to you?
- No , no.
- I'm sorry.
- John's story is a story of hope,
a story of victory,
the whole story of his life.
This is just one little segment of his life.
The whole story of John's life is amazing.
And I think people need to know
what a great man and how many great things he's done
from where he came and to where he is.
And whatever I can do to help him,
I would do.
- The families I've met that are either going through,
that have a child like I was,
not only a Jewish family, but say like, like Kevin.
We have a child that's involved in a racist organization.
What do I do?
The answer is always love them.
Make them feel like they have a place to come back to.
Many times over the years, people have asked me,
why do you think you survived?
And I definitely know that I survived
because God decided it wasn't my time to go.
And I've tried ever since then
to try and improve myself as a human being.
And when I came back to society
and be ready and available,
just to talk to people about the ability
and the power of change.
It is possible to change.
It as possible to become somebody else.
And I know some of the people that were involved
in my attack have changed for the better.
I know some have more or less stayed the same.
You can't really expect society to change.
It begins with you.