Heritage: Civilization and the Jews #108; No. 108; Out Of the Ashes

<v Narrator 1>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H. <v Narrator 1>Revson Foundation, Petrie Stores Corporation and the National <v Narrator 1>Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding has been provided by the following <v Narrator 1>contributors. <v Narrator 1>A complete donor list is available at WNET. <v Abba Eban>[ominous music] Who could these men be?

<v Abba Eban>What authority did they represent? <v Abba Eban>K lived in a country with a legal constitution. <v Abba Eban>There was universal peace. <v Abba Eban>All the laws were enforced. <v Abba Eban>Who dared to seize him in his own dwelling? <v Abba Eban>Where was the judge he had never seen? <v Abba Eban>Where was the high court? <v Abba Eban>He raised his hands, but the hands of one of the partners were already <v Abba Eban>at Kay's throat while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it <v Abba Eban>there twice. <v Abba Eban>Joseph K, the hero of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial, <v Abba Eban>goes to his death without ever knowing what his offense might have been. <v Abba Eban>His enemy is the unbridled, irrational, emotionless power of a modern <v Abba Eban>totalitarian state. <v Abba Eban>We have in this century, uh too often seen this legalized nightmare occur in reality, <v Abba Eban>a nightmare that we now call Kafkaesque with its street policeman, <v Abba Eban>street thugs and concentration camps where death can become an industry <v Abba Eban>of the state.

<v Abba Eban>It is fitting that Kafka, the prophet of this horror, should have been born a Jew. <v Abba Eban>For the Jews of Europe were to experience the first half of the twentieth century as <v Abba Eban>a Kafkaesque ordeal. <v Abba Eban>A time which promised them freedom and equality, but which brought them to the brink <v Abba Eban>of annihilation. [erruption sounds] <v Abba Eban>[cork pops] [jazz music plays] At first in the 1920s, the mood was optimistic. <v Abba Eban>19th century stuffiness was dispelled. <v Abba Eban>There was dance of liberty and even of excess. <v Abba Eban>Profound changes in how we thought of ourselves, of the world, even if the universe

<v Abba Eban>were working down into popular consciousness. <v Abba Eban>In 1921, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel laureate. <v Abba Eban>He came to symbolize not [audio cuts] ?only? <v Abba Eban>intellectual order, but also the final and complete emancipation <v Abba Eban>of West European Jewry. <v Abba Eban>Like Freud, he became one of the Jewish patriarchs of the modern world. <v Abba Eban>The numbers of Jews in scientific, artistic and public life increased as formal <v Abba Eban>barriers against them fell away. <v Abba Eban>The sting of modernism in art and its roaring sophistication is symbolized <v Abba Eban>general license and decadence to those who needed stability and certainty in their lives. <v Abba Eban>[aggressive music] They found the modern world confused, tense, frenzied. <v Abba Eban>Appeals to order and traditional morality were in vogue.

<v Abba Eban>In Italy, the journalist Mussolini seized power. <v Abba Eban>Hundreds of political opponents were murdered. <v Abba Eban>Believing in the disciplines of a vanished past, he adopted the sticks and axes <v Abba Eban>of ancient Roman authority as the symbol of his regime. <v Abba Eban>The fasces, fascists, fascism. <v Abba Eban>It was an age without consensus, an age of extremes, individualism <v Abba Eban>versus conformity, liberty versus subservience to the state. <v Abba Eban>And for the Jews inevitably caught up in this conflict, the consequences <v Abba Eban>were to be tragic. <v Speaker>The vast majority of Jews lived in Eastern Europe, far from the world of the few <v Speaker>privileged Jewish artists, scientists and businessmen of the West. <v Speaker>Visitors taking home movies in the 20s would notice few signs of modern times

<v Speaker>in the shtetl the market town. <v Speaker>But the appearance of tradition was, to a certain extent, deceptive. <v Speaker>By the early thirties, there were nine and a half million Jews in Europe, mostly Yiddish <v Speaker>speaking, they were increasingly secular and increasingly urban, living <v Speaker>in the cities of Poland, Lithuania, Romania and Hungary. <v Speaker>Communities poor in worldly goods, but rich in vitality and diversity. <v Speaker>Some support it to traditional religious life.

<v Speaker>Others denied it. <v Speaker>Some stressed Jewish difference. <v Speaker>Others sought assimilation. <v Speaker>Whatever road they took, the Jews paid for the freedom, creativity and prominant, <v Speaker>which some are very few of them achieved. <v Speaker>This limited success fueled traditional hatred of the Jews as aliens <v Speaker>and competitors. <v Speaker>Nevertheless, Jewish cultural life of all kinds flourished. <v Speaker>Oslo Yiddish produced a popular literature, <v Speaker>a tradition of stage plays and now a small movie industry. <v Speaker>Oy, oy, oy vey. <v Speaker>Yay! Yay! This one

<v Speaker>again in Hebrew and Polish as well as in Yiddish. <v Speaker>The Jewish press thrived. <v Speaker>There was a vigorous debate about what being Jewish meant from the traditionalists <v Speaker>to the socialists to the Zionists. <v Speaker>Scientism was taken up by minority who felt increasingly the constraints <v Speaker>of anti-Semitism all around the. <v Speaker>I did not see any prospects for a future after I finished school in this <v Speaker>terrible situation, I took to Zionism. <v Speaker>Like a drowning person to a board, the one aim <v Speaker>is to go to Palestine. <v Speaker>These Polish youngsters were smitten by a dream Jewish resettlement of Palestine <v Speaker>had begun. It was progressing slowly, but it was underway. <v Speaker>Another road into the modern world. <v Speaker>A road away from the centuries old traditions of European Jewry. <v Speaker>Traditional Jewish life, face to challenge, is everywhere in Russia

<v Speaker>after the revolution. Jews who had little enough reason to support the old order <v Speaker>were found among the communist leaders. <v Speaker>The revolution reached into every corner of life. <v Speaker>And although it broke the walls of czarist oppression, it also directly threatened <v Speaker>Jewish traditions. <v Speaker>But the central threat to traditional Jewish life in Europe developed in the West, <v Speaker>in the states with the most modern, most assimilated Jewish community, Germany <v Speaker>in the 1840s. <v Speaker>The Jewish poet Hiner had called this land a modern Palestine, <v Speaker>the home of philosophy, the mother soil of prophecy and the citadel of pure <v Speaker>spirituality. <v Speaker>Defeated in the World War, Germany was now embodied in a faltering democracy.

<v Speaker>The Weimar Republic. <v Speaker>Inflation and then depression destroyed the value of people's savings and wages. <v Speaker>The bread lines lengthened as jobs vanished. <v Speaker>I got to say. <v Speaker>Famer's politics constantly slipped into extremism. <v Speaker>On the far right, the National Socialists, the Nazis made a bid to <v Speaker>turn all of Germany's discontents to their advantage. <v Speaker>Although the Nazi platform might have been deranged, it was as coherent in its way <v Speaker>as any other political program of the day. <v Speaker>It promised bread and work and was seen by many as a clear alternative <v Speaker>to the chaos of Famer. <v Speaker>Big, big.

<v Speaker>Nuremberg, a symbol of the glories of Germany's past. <v Speaker>The Nazis were to turn this vision into a dark romance of blood, soil, <v Speaker>race and honor. <v Speaker>By appropriating and distorting all of German history, they mounted a successful <v Speaker>appeal across the deep divisions of fine ofsociety. <v Speaker>The Nazi Party began as a revolutionary gang, terrorizing all opponents, <v Speaker>but by the late twenties, Hitler himself was leaving these tactics behind to seek <v Speaker>office through the ballot. <v Speaker>The party became so popular that one out of every three Germans without compulsion <v Speaker>was regularly voting Nazi. <v Speaker>After the election of January 1933, Hitler became famous last

<v Speaker>chancellor. His contempt for the democracy he had manipulated was total. <v Speaker>He rapidly silenced all opposition within six months of the <v Speaker>election. <v Speaker>Gestures of protest such as this became impossible. <v Speaker>Democracy was banned. Hitler was dictator. <v Speaker>Mussolini said fascism is a religion. <v Speaker>The 20th century will be known in history as the century of fascism. <v Speaker>Hitler was proclaimed the father of the nation, the son of the race. <v Speaker>The spirit of the folk. <v Speaker>A fantasy of total conformity and subjugation fed to the Nazis doctrine, <v Speaker>all the liberal ideals of the modern world were to be cauterise, burned out, <v Speaker>put to the flame. <v Speaker>Sigmund Freud, who had in 1924 received the Gerta Prize not for

<v Speaker>his science, but for the purity and elegance of his German prose, wrote <v Speaker>what progress we are making in the Middle Ages. <v Speaker>They would have burned me. Nowadays they are content with burning my books. <v Speaker>But Freud was wrong. <v Speaker>The Nazis were not to be content with the burning of books. <v Speaker>That's right. <v Speaker>I just gave a fifth judicial intellectualise move to end <v Speaker>the ideas in the books were to be destroyed and all who persisted in believing <v Speaker>those ideas were to be destroyed as well. <v Speaker>I meant that by. <v Speaker>Dufault. <v Speaker>A quiet community a few miles from Eunick noted only for the ferocity

<v Speaker>of its local brownshirts. <v Speaker>It was here that the Nazis set up their first concentration camp to test the <v Speaker>limits of their new power. <v Speaker>They rounded up communists and churchmen, liberals and Social Democrats, all who <v Speaker>opposed them. German society and the German courts turned <v Speaker>a blind eye. <v Speaker>The Nazis. A small band of determined extremists had successfully overturned <v Speaker>the central balance of government. <v Speaker>At first, most Jews bystanders in fine arts, extremist politics <v Speaker>were not subjected to the concentration camp unless they were politically active <v Speaker>against the regime. But this was not long to remain the case on <v Speaker>the street. The Nazis presented the Jew as the enemy who moved on other enemies. <v Speaker>They used the radicalism of a few Jews and the wealth of a few more <v Speaker>as sticks with which to beat the whole community. <v Speaker>Nazi hatred had no rational basis.

<v Speaker>It was, in essence, an amalgam of racial hysteria and prejudice, a dangerous <v Speaker>paranoia. <v Speaker>The early phase of Nazi rule was one of humiliation and public vilification, <v Speaker>intermittent street violence, boycotts and of signs saying Jews <v Speaker>not wanted. <v Speaker>Did she? <v Speaker>I had walked the streets in Berlin and so many <v Speaker>crowds in front of various stores with Jewish names. <v Speaker>I felt completely lost. I didn't know what it's all about until I came <v Speaker>to the back on this. <v Speaker>And I saw a very large crowd standing in front yelling on top <v Speaker>of their voices. McCaul's shooting out and suddenly my <v Speaker>blood boiled over and I made my way through.

<v Speaker>This crowd went into the shop. <v Speaker>I felt this overwhelming anger at being considered <v Speaker>by these people as a Jewish voters. <v Speaker>I myself considered myself a German. <v Speaker>I was as German as they were. <v Speaker>As I left the shop, the crowd outside had made for me a very narrow <v Speaker>lead. I could barely walk through. <v Speaker>I remember I kept on thinking in my head, Just show dignity. <v Speaker>Just don't be afraid. Just show dignity. <v Speaker>And they were yelling, Go to Palestine. <v Speaker>Youdon zo, get out. <v Speaker>This haphazard persecution was not to be the shape that Nazi repression would <v Speaker>take. <v Speaker>Right. Right. <v Speaker>What you did back to the.

<v Speaker>Throughout the years, when Hitler ruled in peace and Germany prospered, the Jewish <v Speaker>community was devastated by law after law. <v Speaker>Legislation denied the Jews all those rights, which normally only the <v Speaker>law can guarantee. The Nazis twisted every institution of government <v Speaker>regarded then and still seen today as vital to the protection of the citizen. <v Speaker>It happened in three phases. <v Speaker>First, from 1933, <v Speaker>Jews excluded from the practice of law. <v Speaker>No Jews allowed to work as civil servants, including teachers, professors <v Speaker>and doctors in public practice.

<v Speaker>No Jewish newspaper editors in schools and universities. <v Speaker>A quota system for Jewish students. <v Speaker>Then in 1935, the Nuremberg decrees Jews are declared <v Speaker>second class citizens with virtually no rights. <v Speaker>All further, social and sexual contact with their neighbors is prohibited. <v Speaker>Then a third wave by 1939, Jews would be totally <v Speaker>excluded from any economic activity. <v Speaker>Special identity cards would be required and passports stamped with a J. <v Speaker>Jews would be excluded completely from universities, beaches, sleeping <v Speaker>cars and dining cars on trains. <v Speaker>Forbidden to drive private vehicles. <v Speaker>Subject to arbitrary eviction by landlords or divorce by non-Jewish partners <v Speaker>restricted to certain shopping hours, gradually the

<v Speaker>modern totalitarian state was taking shape and within it the Jew was <v Speaker>becoming the ultimate outcast. <v Speaker>All this was for less than one in 100 of the population. <v Speaker>There were only some five hundred and twenty thousand Jews in a race of sixty <v Speaker>million. <v Speaker>Yet for most of the others, life for the first time since the First World War was good. <v Speaker>There were jobs again. Not least because Germany was rearming and Germany <v Speaker>was once more respected in the world. <v Speaker>In 1936, as a mark of this renewed stature as she hosted the Olympic <v Speaker>Games. <v Speaker>The country was cleaned up for the occasion.

<v Speaker>The Jewish athletes were allowed to attend. <v Speaker>Jana Falana wrote in The New Yorker for Germany, <v Speaker>1936 has been an Olympian season only. <v Speaker>A determined, deaf and blind visitor to any corner of this land could fail <v Speaker>to see and hear the sight and the sound of Germany's forward march. <v Speaker>It was a forward march. That's within five years was to engulf the whole of Europe. <v Speaker>In every state bordering the RIF lived ancient German speaking communities.

<v Speaker>Each one now became a pretext for Nazi intervention. <v Speaker>Austria was first. <v Speaker>But as the greater RIF grew to contain more Germans, it also expanded <v Speaker>to absorb more Jews. <v Speaker>They were dealt with swiftly. The process of humiliation, expropriation <v Speaker>and terror, which had taken five years to develop in Germany, was unleashed <v Speaker>in days and weeks. <v Speaker>There were protests, as there had been from the very beginning, Mayor <v Speaker>LaGuardia had proclaimed. <v Speaker>I am here this evening to join <v Speaker>the five fellow New Yorkers in a great <v Speaker>growth path. Not again. <v Speaker>The German people, but again, the present German government. <v Speaker>But all the voices of protest were buried. <v Speaker>The 30s were a time of depression, political violence and outright

<v Speaker>armed conflict. <v Speaker>Far from being the most civilized of centuries, the 20th had begun <v Speaker>to reveal the terrifying effects of new technologies. <v Speaker>Wars raged around the globe from China and Ethiopia to Spain. <v Speaker>To contain the flood of war, Germany's neighbors developed a policy of appeasement. <v Speaker>After Austria, Germany wanted and was given the German speaking area <v Speaker>of Czechoslovakia. <v Speaker>Czechoslovakia was dismembered. <v Speaker>In such a world, it is not surprising that the Jews were being left to their fate. <v Speaker>In the courts and on the street, the Jews were constantly threatened. <v Speaker>On November the 9th, 1938, gerbils turned out the brownshirts for

<v Speaker>an orgy of burning and looting Kristallnacht the night of breaking <v Speaker>glass, every synagogue in Germany was attacked by the Nazis. <v Speaker>Ninety one Jews died. <v Speaker>I stood there for probably half an hour. <v Speaker>There was not one attempt to put out the fire in the synagogue. <v Speaker>My father was not there. He came back late that morning. <v Speaker>He was in bad shape. <v Speaker>We talk together. What's going to happen now? <v Speaker>And one thing he did and he's just he says, we got to get you out. <v Speaker>The truth was unambiguously clear after Kristallnacht. <v Speaker>The Nazis had legally written the Jews out of society. <v Speaker>Now they would physically expel them from the Reich. <v Speaker>But where were the Jews to go

<v Speaker>in 1938? <v Speaker>The world was still suffering from depression and high unemployment. <v Speaker>It was a world of visas, immigration quotas and affidavits. <v Speaker>There was a family, non-Jewish family living in Wilmington, Delaware, <v Speaker>who had offered an affidavit for myself to get out. <v Speaker>That affidavit unfortunately had a number next to it. <v Speaker>That number was somewhere 18000. <v Speaker>And when we went to the American consulate to try to find out when I would be able to <v Speaker>leave the to leave Germany to emigrate to the United States, I <v Speaker>was told that the year was 1942. <v Speaker>Yet some doors were ajar, Palestine was there as a haven. <v Speaker>The Zionist dream was still alive, a virtual British colony <v Speaker>since 1918. <v Speaker>Palestine presented a most un-European face.

<v Speaker>It was an undeveloped, multi-ethnic Middle Eastern land. <v Speaker>And for most immigrants, it offered a vivid contrast to the Europe that they had fled. <v Speaker>Above all, it was so completely different to anything I had known back home. <v Speaker>The sharpness of the colors, the sense, the smells and the variety of the people. <v Speaker>Outside the cities, there were no trees, no woods, no rivers, no brooks. <v Speaker>Just here and there, oasis of dazzling flowers and citrus groves <v Speaker>and then unremitting sand. <v Speaker>Well, I mean, have. <v Speaker>Despite hardships, the dream was being closed in reality. <v Speaker>The Jewish community was more than 200000 strong. <v Speaker>It had begun to remake the land. <v Speaker>And with an effort every bit as hard, it had reestablished Hebrew as an everyday

<v Speaker>language. <v Speaker>A whole new Jewish city, Tel Aviv, was being built, <v Speaker>a new society, a new culture was being fashioned. <v Speaker>That's the Hebrew University was founded, <v Speaker>a national symphony orchestra was established at Toscanini, conducted it <v Speaker>as a protest against the European fascists. <v Speaker>As more Jews arrived, relations with the Arab majority worsened. <v Speaker>In 1939, the British responded to Arab unrest by limiting <v Speaker>Jewish immigration to a total of seventy five thousand over five years and <v Speaker>then no more Jews at all. <v Speaker>The door was to be slammed. <v Speaker>The community protested, but the policy remained unchanged.

<v Speaker>It was a policy to be repeated by nation after nation nearly everywhere. <v Speaker>The refugees were to be refused entry. <v Speaker>This was a time of an exodus by every available route. <v Speaker>A time of a wandering. As tragic as any ever suffered by the Jews. <v Speaker>907 German Jews boarded the steamship, the St.. <v Speaker>Lewis heading for Cuba. <v Speaker>They came within feet of safety but were turned away. <v Speaker>Pleading was useless. <v Speaker>Next, they approached Miami, but the US Coast Guard denied them entry. <v Abba Eban>Unable to land in the new world, they were forced to return to the old. <v Abba Eban>The escape had failed. The opportunities for further escape attempts <v Abba Eban>were fast disappearing. <v Abba Eban>Throughout Europe, tensions were mounting.

<v Abba Eban>Once more, the world was on the brink. <v Abba Eban>The Reich wanted western Poland. <v Abba Eban>September 1939, the Nazis crossed the Polish border <v Abba Eban>and the world was at war. [explosions] The world lightning, <v Abba Eban>in German blitz, acquired for all the peoples who lived between the North <v Abba Eban>Sea and the Urals, a frightful new meaning. <v Abba Eban>The Nazis waged lightning war, Blitzkrieg, across an entire continent. <v Abba Eban>Nation after nation was struck down. <v Abba Eban>Total war involved people, ordinary people in unprecedented numbers. <v Abba Eban>[sobbing] [emotional music] Millions of families were split up under the Nazi guns.

<v Abba Eban>Many would never see each other again. <v Speaker>Each conquest, and for three years there was little else, each conquest, <v Speaker>especially in the east of Europe, added to the number of Jews within the Reich. <v Speaker>For every Jew within his grasp, in 1933, Hitler had nearly <v Speaker>20 in 1941.

<v Speaker>So to contain and control them in all the cities of the east, the Nazis <v Speaker>confined the Jews to what they termed ghettos. <v Speaker>From kazimir, a suburb of the Polish city of Krakow, the Jews were <v Speaker>herded together across the river into the poorer sections of the town. <v Speaker>Facing the all encompassing power of the Nazis, the Jews were doubly imprisoned, <v Speaker>held in the ghettos and surrounded by occupying armies. <v Speaker>Physical resistance was futile, but moral resistance was everywhere. <v Speaker>Forbidden public prayer. They prayed in secret. <v Speaker>In back rooms, on drunk benches near a table, little schoolchildren sat and

<v Speaker>learned in secret. <v Speaker>Jews worked, the Jews believed needed to believe that if the work was <v Speaker>required, then so was the worker. <v Speaker>Above all, there was a sense of foreboding. <v Speaker>However hellish, the ghetto families were still intact. <v Speaker>There was a semblance of order. <v Speaker>But the Jews feared that worst was yet to come. <v Speaker>God, please let us stay here. <v Speaker>Show us you are merciful. <v Speaker>If my census are accurate, this is the last paradise we will <v Speaker>ever know. <v Speaker>Please let us stay in this heavenly hell forever. <v Speaker>We are tightly packed in the ghetto, but that must be a fine way to

<v Speaker>live in comparison to deportation. <v Speaker>They got the leave of his senses. <v Speaker>Something terrible is coming. <v Speaker>There are seven of us in nine feet of space. <v Speaker>Let them put 14 together. <v Speaker>Twenty eight. <v Speaker>We will sleep on top of each other. <v Speaker>We will get up at 3 a.m., not four. <v Speaker>Stand in line for 10 hours. <v Speaker>Anything. <v Speaker>Anything just let our family stay together. <v Speaker>5000 a month were dying of starvation and disease in Warsaw Ghetto. <v Speaker>But this was not enough for the Germans. <v Speaker>And now the Nazis made their unique contribution to the annals of European

<v Speaker>anti-Semitism. <v Speaker>They no longer said has had their medieval forebears. <v Speaker>You cannot live amongst us as Jews. <v Speaker>They no longer said, as they themselves had for nearly a decade, you cannot live <v Speaker>amongst us. <v Speaker>Now, they said something new. They said you cannot live. <v Speaker>As the Germans swept into the heart of the Jewish communities of western Russia in <v Speaker>1941, close behind the frontlines came the mobile <v Speaker>killing squads of the SS. <v Speaker>In the 16 months to the autumn of 1942, they and other members <v Speaker>of the German army, as well as Ukrainian and Baltic pro Nazis, shot <v Speaker>nearly one and a half million Jews. <v Speaker>Human beings a minute for every hour of every day. <v Speaker>For nearly 500 days. <v Speaker>About the problem, as the Nazis termed it, persisted.

<v Speaker>Early in 1942, here at a villa in Van, say, outside <v Speaker>Berlin, the leaders of the German government met in order to refine <v Speaker>the plan already underway in the east of systematically murdering <v Speaker>every last two in its control. <v Speaker>By spring, the logistics of death were in place. <v Speaker>Bureaucratic processes down to the last in my new detail of costing <v Speaker>supplies and scheduling were put to the service of murder. <v Speaker>We drag ourselves to the railroad station. <v Speaker>The sun is mercilessly hot. <v Speaker>People are fainting, babies screaming. <v Speaker>We, the young and healthy teenagers are totally spent. <v Speaker>What must the old the sick feel? <v Speaker>Totally stripped of our dignity.

<v Speaker>Leaving the town we were born in grew up in. <v Speaker>What happens after this long wait? <v Speaker>Where are we off to? <v Speaker>Seventy five to a car, no toilets, no <v Speaker>doctors, no medication. <v Speaker>Rescreen my mother into a sitting position on the backpack. <v Speaker>Her face has an otherworldly look. <v Speaker>She knows she will not laugh, but she wants us <v Speaker>to live desperately. <v Speaker>All these years, I have carried with me her face of resignation <v Speaker>and hope and love. <v Speaker>Stay alive, my darlings.

<v Speaker>All six of you. <v Speaker>We started the journey of ugliness on May 29. <v Speaker>We headed for Auschwitz. <v Speaker>We arrived on May 30 first. <v Speaker>Our line moved slowly forward until we came face <v Speaker>to face with an elegant Essman <v Speaker>leather coat, gloves. <v Speaker>Young man and the thumb went up and the sun went down. <v Speaker>Up you lift down your died. <v Speaker>You didn't know what it meant. We had an idea. <v Speaker>The scent of spring wasn't delicious.

<v Speaker>The earth didn't smile. <v Speaker>It shriek in pain. <v Speaker>The air was filled with the stench of death. <v Speaker>Unnatural that the smoke was thick. <v Speaker>The sun couldn't crack through. <v Speaker>The scent was the smell of burning flesh. <v Speaker>The burning flesh. <v Speaker>Was your mother. <v Speaker>I am condemned to walk the earth for all my these <v Speaker>with the stench of burning flesh in my nostrils. <v Speaker>My nostrils are damned. <v Speaker>Maise, theymade may should be abolished. <v Speaker>Me. It's. <v Speaker>There should be only eleven months in a year. <v Speaker>Me should be set aside for this. <v Speaker>For six million years to cleanse

<v Speaker>the earth. <v Speaker>Millions died, but contrary to the records made by the Nazis, <v Speaker>they did not all die without protest before, despite the starvation <v Speaker>and brutality and the unbridled power of their gods, some rebelled <v Speaker>in Auschwitz in the lowest circle of hell. <v Speaker>The special squads charged with the disposal of the dead attempted a revolt <v Speaker>in Treblinka. The underground blew up the arsenal and 200 inmates <v Speaker>escaped in Sobibor. <v Speaker>The entire surviving population rebelled. <v Speaker>Conrads forward? <v Speaker>I shouted. The cries echoed through the camp as six 600 of <v Speaker>us, pain wracked and tormented, surged forward to life and freedom.

<v Speaker>The grass has grown over many concentration camps, outfits. <v Speaker>My Dansk Treblinka, Tracy interestand Bergen-Belsen. <v Speaker>Perhaps the word monument is the best way of describing their significance today. <v Speaker>There are across the world monuments to man's gift of beauty. <v Speaker>There are monuments to man's creativity. <v Speaker>There are monuments to man's wealth. <v Speaker>Here, scattered over Europe, there are these monuments, monuments to human <v Speaker>cruelty, suffering, anguish and resistance. <v Speaker>The ghettos are not preserved.

<v Speaker>Nevertheless, they offer witness to the strength of the human spirit for here to <v Speaker>resistance when weapons could be found and preparations made, but came the <v Speaker>rebellion in Bialystok, in Vilna, in 105 ghettos, <v Speaker>and there was armed resistance. <v Speaker>In Warsaw, the young Jews, the under-20s, the radicals ambushed the Nazis. <v Speaker>We were young boys and girls. <v Speaker>We had no military training before. <v Speaker>We prepared quite a big mine to do it. <v Speaker>Well, the Germans marched in and we switched <v Speaker>on and the mine exploded. <v Speaker>This was the the first time I saw dead Germans. <v Speaker>The Germans, of course, were astonished when they <v Speaker>came near to us. <v Speaker>We swarns them and made grenade. <v Speaker>We had a lot of bottles.

<v Speaker>And then again, we thought our gentlemans burning like <v Speaker>a torch. <v Speaker>We just wanted to die with dignity. <v Speaker>Therefore, what we wanted and to take revenge. <v Speaker>After weeks of fighting, the Germans retook the ghetto building by building <v Speaker>elsewhere. <v Speaker>Resistance continued. <v Speaker>Do you know where <v Speaker>the endless forests were in reach of the ghettos? <v Speaker>Thousands escaped to join the Soviet partisans, harassing the Nazis behind <v Speaker>the lines. <v Speaker>From the ghetto of Minsk alone, 10000 fled to reinforce the fighters <v Speaker>in the forests. <v Speaker>All in all, one estimate says as many as 40000 Jews were under <v Speaker>arms in the east. <v Speaker>Although these episodes had limited strategic significance for the Jews, they

<v Speaker>were a crucial step away from their traditional behavior. <v Speaker>The responses of European Jewry to this persecution had been to no avail. <v Speaker>Obedience to every last whim of their persecutors had brought them no respite. <v Speaker>They faced the ultimate barbarity. <v Speaker>It understood only power. <v Speaker>So Jewish communities, however few, however futile their resistance, <v Speaker>rose in arms against their oppressors. <v Speaker>Beyond heroism, beyond the search for dignity in death, Jews <v Speaker>came to understand the necessity of power. <v Speaker>This was a crucial lesson. <v Speaker>There is a lesson also in remembering the righteousness of ordinary people in every <v Speaker>European nation. <v Speaker>Denmark until the fall of 1943, the quietest of Nazi <v Speaker>occupations. <v Speaker>The seven thousand five hundred Danish Jews lived in peace under the Nazis. <v Speaker>Unmarked hand and enslaved orders were drawn up to begin

<v Speaker>deportations. <v Speaker>The Danes refused to cooperate. <v Speaker>Among the protests, a pastor cried from the pulpit. <v Speaker>I would rather die with the Jews than live with the Nazis. <v Speaker>The Nazis planned the roundup for the Jewish New Year. <v Speaker>September 1943, the Danes hid all but <v Speaker>477 Jews in factories, in hospitals, in private homes. <v Speaker>Over the next several nights, the Jews were placed in boats. <v Speaker>Any boats and ferried over the narrow waters to safe and neutral Sweden <v Speaker>and the Danish Jews were blessed with neighbors who abhorred persecution of any <v Speaker>kind. Others across Europe also found ways of protecting <v Speaker>their Jewish neighbors. <v Speaker>There were public demonstrations in Bulgaria, Swiss and Swedish visas

<v Speaker>were issued in Budapest. <v Speaker>Everywhere at great risk, single Jews or more often Jewish children <v Speaker>were hidden. <v Speaker>Very few were saved. But each life is a testament to what might be called <v Speaker>the Danish spirit. <v Speaker>In contrast, the governments of the UN enslaved world witnessed the genocide <v Speaker>of the Jews almost in silence. <v Speaker>And they did witness it. <v Speaker>By the spring of 1944, the allies knew the exact nature <v Speaker>of the camps from Auschwitz escapees. <v Speaker>But although allied bombers flew over rail lines to the camp, the death trains were <v Speaker>never disrupted. <v Speaker>The Jews were not alone in their agony in the camps, the Nazis murdered millions <v Speaker>of Russians, Serbs, Poles, one out of three of Europe's Romani gypsies,

<v Speaker>all opposition the mentally ill and the chronically sick. <v Speaker>Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals. <v Speaker>Elsewhere, the innocent were also dying, sometimes in atrocities as bad as the camps. <v Speaker>Here in order doored in central France on the morning of the 10th of June, 1944, <v Speaker>the Nazis murdered the entire population. <v Speaker>They shot the men and then killed 500 children and women in the village church. <v Speaker>Be specific reason for the massacre was not announced and has never been discovered. <v Speaker>Or outdoor sewer glan has never been rebuilt. <v Speaker>The Nazis were fighting two wars, one without rules against the Jews

<v Speaker>and the other a general war, but the two wars were in fact one <v Speaker>believing that one group of human beings, the Jews were vermin, led the Nazis <v Speaker>to treat all their fellows as such. <v Speaker>It became one war against the value of individual life. <v Speaker>For all free people, the war became something more a crusade against <v Speaker>a terrible evil. <v Speaker>Beyond the usual claims of justice and right the allies. <v Speaker>Roosevelt and Churchill argued that the Nazis were an uncommon breed of evil, <v Speaker>anti humanistic, the very antithesis of civilization. <v Speaker>The costs of the conflict was enormous. <v Speaker>More than 30 million dead. <v Speaker>The majority civilians, the allies ruthlessly pursued

<v Speaker>victory in response to the Nazis total war. <v Speaker>The Reich was to be destroyed as effectively as it had devastated its <v Speaker>neighbors. <v Speaker>Summer, 1944. <v Speaker>D-Day. <v Speaker>Germany careened into defeat, invaded from east and west, <v Speaker>and the RIF that was to have lasted a thousand years, drowned in a sea <v Speaker>of blood. <v Speaker>And so finally it was over. <v Speaker>The particular plague that had tormented the world for 12 years passed away <v Speaker>and was still. <v Speaker>For the millions of soldiers amongthem hundreds of thousands of Jews in the allied

<v Speaker>armies, the time had come to go home. <v Speaker>But in Europe, in the summer of 1945, eleven million prisoners of war <v Speaker>and displaced people were uncertain where home might be. <v Speaker>None more so than the remnant of the death camps. <v Speaker>One hundred thousand Jewish survivors fled into the British and American occupied <v Speaker>areas of Germany from the East. <v Speaker>Some Jews tried returning to the Polish cities, but within a year there was <v Speaker>another pogrom overreach. <v Speaker>Centuries of Jewish life in Poland virtually came to an end. <v Speaker>If this is Krakow, Poland, today, the Jewish community

<v Speaker>still has a warden, but now it numbers a scant seven hundred. <v Speaker>Once it was nearly sixty thousand strong. <v Speaker>The juries of Central Europe were, as the Nazis had desired, very nearly wiped <v Speaker>from the face of the Earth. <v Speaker>And the secular Yiddish culture that flourished here has disappeared forever. <v Speaker>The Jewish presence, which had contributed to the history of these lands for more

<v Speaker>than eight centuries was savagely cut off. <v Speaker>But the Nazis attacked far more than the communities of one small European <v Speaker>ethnic minority. And the significance of the destruction of those communities <v Speaker>is of a moment greater than the limits of Jewish history. <v Speaker>The Nazis challenged the values of civilization. <v Speaker>They offered a grim plan for the future. <v Speaker>A world in which doubt. was forbidden. <v Speaker>A world of absolute truths. <v Speaker>A world of obsessive order and rigid conformity. <v Speaker>A world without human diversity. <v Speaker>And they were willing to go to any lengths to achieve their purpose. <v Speaker>But in the end, at a cost almost too great to bear. <v Speaker>They were defeated. <v Speaker>None can know the meaning of that narrow victory so well as those who witnessed the very <v Speaker>eye of the storm.

<v Elie Wiesel>There is nothing else my generation could do but bear witness and therefore <v Elie Wiesel>bear witness for humanity. <v Elie Wiesel>They thought they could kill six million Jews and and go on as though <v Elie Wiesel>the six million Jews didn't die. <v Elie Wiesel>Well together with the Jew, the image of man <v Elie Wiesel>was destroyed. <v Elie Wiesel>We have all the reasons in the world to despair and to give up on man <v Elie Wiesel>and to give up on culture on civilization or language and even on God. <v Elie Wiesel>We aren't permitted to have. <v Elie Wiesel>We have the reasons to do so, but we will not invoke them. <v Elie Wiesel>And in spite of everything, we shall go on believing. <v Abba Eban>[hopeful music] Out of these ashes comes the understanding that no one's life can be <v Abba Eban>guaranteed without constant struggle. <v Abba Eban>Belief in the ultimate ability of humankind to overcome the darkest, most <v Abba Eban>brutal of forces is the light which must carry us forward. <v Narrator 1>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H.

<v Narrator 1>Revson Foundation, Petrie Stores Corporation, and the National <v Narrator 1>Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding has been provided by the following <v Narrator 1>contributors. <v Narrator 1>A complete donor list is available at WNET. <v Narrator 1>Abba Eban has written a companion book to this series, which is published by Summit <v Narrator 1>Books and is available in bookstores and libraries. <v Narrator 1>[PBS theme plays]