What would you do for love? Would you be willing to risk getting your heart broken? Most of us would. But would you risk getting killed? Years Later We Would Remember is the unforgettable true story of Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Kent’s parents, and how his Catholic father stood up to the Nazis to protect the Jewish girl who stole his heart.

Here’s a preview:

Years Later We Would Remember Clip from Martin Kent on Vimeo.

What would you do for love? Would you be willing to risk getting your heart broken? Most of us would. But would you risk getting killed? Years Later We Would Remember is the unforgettable true story of Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Kent’s parents, and how his Catholic father stood up to the Nazis to protect the Jewish girl who stole his heart.

We are pleased to report that we recently completed on-camera studio interviews with three important figures in the world of Holocaust history, as well as the post-war history of Holocaust survivors. For more info, scroll past the video clips below, excerpted from the film. Visit us often, as we will continually be adding more and more clips and outtakes from our interviews. We are sure you will find our experts’ comments of great interest.

Michael Berenbaum is widely considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the Holocaust. The author of 14 books on the subject, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He was Project Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for 10 years, leading to its creation, and then Director of its Holocaust Research Institute.

Darlene Basch LCSW has been counseling patients dealing with Holocaust issues in workshops and private practice for more than 20 years. Ms. Basch worked for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, where she developed and facilitated a worldwide debriefing program that trained people to interview survivors of the Holocaust, and traveled around the world training those interviewers.

Beth Cohen is the author of Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (Rutgers University Press, 2007). Case Closed challenges the prevailing optimistic perception of the lives of Holocaust survivors in postwar America by scrutinizing their first years through the eyes of those who lived it. Cohen uncovers the heretofore-untold stories of survivors’ early years in America and reveals the complexity of their lives as new Americans. Ms. Cohen received her Ph.D. in Holocaust history from Clark University, and was a “Life Reborn” fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. No grandparents. No aunts and uncles around. In their place – big black holes. While my parents tried to shield me from the details of the horrors they experienced in Poland during the 1930s and ’40s, they couldn’t protect me from them. No one goes through something like that and leaves it behind. Misery, sorrow and pain are such clever hitchhikers.

Growing up in New York City during the ’50s and ’60s, my childhood outside my home was exciting, interesting, stimulating. But inside those four walls, I felt like I was living within a box – one that contained a giant jigsaw puzzle. Many of the pieces were not exactly missing; some were faded, or frayed, and hard to discern; others were locked away – on purpose. My mother Roza (her American name) had a great capacity for joy, but she could also quickly slip into a state of melancholy. My father Jack (also his American name) was remote, quiet, off at work all the time, and had little patience for the precocious, artistic, curious child I was. I had an older brother, Joseph, who found his own coping mechanism for our dysfunctional family. He was never home. We were four people living under the same roof. But we really weren’t a family. Our home was full of secrets. Full of walls. Full of feelings that were alternately repressed – or suddenly, explosively – released.

For most of my life, my parents’ story remained shrouded in mystery. It was something they just couldn’t bring themselves to talk about. At the age of nine, I was shocked to learn my father was Catholic. And yet, my mother was Jewish, and all the cousins we knew – all Holocaust survivors – were also Jewish. So not only was our refugee family different from most Americans, we were different from all our relatives. How did that happen? No explanations. Shhhhhh! Don’t ask questions. My mother and father were unknowable. So… if I couldn’t know my parents, how could I ever hope to truly know myself?

In 1963, when I was 12 years old, I got a glimpse into the mystery of my identity. After much talk and planning, my mother and I boarded an El Al jet and flew to Israel – to spend a summer with her surviving brother and sister, who’d emigrated to the Promised Land after surviving the ravages of Nazi-occupied Poland. We split our time between visits with her brother Jacob, who delivered baked goods in Tel Aviv, and her sister Clara, who ran a small farm with her husband Herman in Nahariya.

Two things struck me immediately about Israel: It felt like a frontier, a work in progress, lacking some of the conveniences we took for granted in America; and yet, everyone seemed happy. Really happy. Passionate. Excited. Hopeful. I never witnessed emotions like that before. But the most incredible aspect of this experience was that at last, after feeling like an olive in a dish of cherries my whole life, I suddenly felt a sense of belonging. Not just with my aunt and uncle and their families – with whom I experienced an immediate bond of love – but with the whole country. Everywhere I went, I felt like I was with family. A taxi driver wasn’t just someone hired to take us from point A to point B. For a brief moment in time, he was a part of our journey. He wanted to know all about us. And he wanted to share things about himself as well. My big black holes of the Holocaust were now being bombarded with millions of sparks of light.

Until we left.

The first night away, I began to cry, and couldn’t help myself. When my mother asked me why I was suddenly so sad, I told her how much I missed my family in Israel. But my tears weren’t only for them. My mother had told me there were two other siblings – her older brothers Salo and Muno – resistance fighters murdered by the Nazis. I had never emotionally connected to them. They were just names. But now, having spent time with my mother’s surviving brother and sister, I suddenly felt the full weight of the loss of the two other brothers. My brave, beautiful uncles. How can you miss something you never had? You can’t. But somehow, I did. I missed Salo and Muno. I felt them. I loved them. I would never stop cherishing them.

The echoes of my summer in Israel never subsided. The door that had opened prompted me to become a person who would open as many doors as possible. I was fearless. I was determined to explore the world. To dig into the past. To uncover the motivations of people who shaped history. To just know things. I carved out a satisfying career as a journalist, an occasional university instructor and a documentary filmmaker (returning to Israel to make King David, and King Herod’s Lost City) – sharing my passions, telling other people’s stories.

Then in 1999, my life took an irrevocable turn. After the 1993 release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book (originally entitled Schindler’s Ark), Hearst Entertainment hired me to write, produce and direct an A&E Biography of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi who saved over 1,200 Jews from certain death at the hands of his fellow Nazis. Was this by coincidence? Nothing happens by coincidence. This was my gateway to the dark days of the Holocaust. In the process of making this film, I interviewed survivors, Thomas Keneally, world-renowned Holocaust historian Dr. Michael Berenbaum, did all the necessary research and legwork, and looked at all the horrific film footage. When I told my mother about this project, she showed no surprise at all. “Oh, Oskar Schindler?

Yes, I knew all about him. You remember my friend Sally Huppert? She was one of the people he saved.” I considered the irony that one of the greatest stories of the 20th century had been right under my nose for all those years.

“MOM,” I said, “what other stories haven’t you told me about? Isn’t it finally time for you and dad to tell me what happened back in Poland?” My mother took some time to consider what I had said, and the fact that I had been adequately inoculated by all my work on the Schindler documentary. One morning, she phoned me and said, “Okay, I’ve thought about it. I’m appointing you family historian.” We had had a historian in our family. The late Dr. Philip Friedman, widely considered the father of Holocaust history, was our cousin. Could I walk in his giant footsteps?

At long last my mother felt I was ready to face the demons and ghosts she and my father had tried to tamp down in that jigsaw box for a lifetime. They too had to face them. It was difficult for both of them to delve into their tragic past, but they did it, and they did it for me. Often with tears. Often with self-imposed interruptions, when the burden of memory threatened to crush them.

I spent a year interviewing my parents and doing background research. The story was revealed gradually. Like some sacred, mystical text, it required study, meditation and a pilgrimage. I felt compelled to make a trip to Poland, a place I’d never wanted to visit. I needed to experience total immersion in this process. But by this time, my mother was too frail to make the trip. Still, there was no turning back. I packed a video camera and embarked on a journey to spend nearly a month on the road with a stranger – a man I hardly knew – my father. I had to learn the true story of my parents’ survival and unravel the personas of the two people whom I’d sought to know and understand my whole life.

In Poland, as I walked on ground that held the blood and ashes of millions of murdered souls, I pointed my camera at my father and all the places he wanted to show me. I found out that over half a century ago, my father Olek (his Polish name), a brash Polish Catholic boy of 19, had met my mother Ziuta (as she was known back then), a terrified Jewish girl of 20, when she was on the run after she’d survived two Nazi massacres of 6,500 Jews in her village, some 400 kilometers away from his. The Nazis had murdered her two older brothers, Salo and Muno, shortly after they’d gotten my mother out of the Jewish ghetto.

One day, she walked into the tavern that my father and his father Antoni ran, asking for a job. She was hired on the spot. Olek took an immediate liking to her. A few months later, in a private moment, he confessed to Ziuta the feelings that had grown and overwhelmed him. He told her he’d fallen in love with her.

She was shocked. “Well, I have a shock for you,” she replied. “I’m Jewish.” My father considered the full weight of what she’d said. And then, as only a 19-year-old with stars in his eyes and love in his heart could respond, he said: “You’re Jewish? That’s great! Now I can prove my love for you. I can lay my life on the line.” And he did just that. For two and a half years, they were on the run, with the Nazis at their heels. With bravado, with cunning, he protected her every step of that perilous journey. Or did his love for my mother create an ever-expanding state of grace? One that produced miracle after miracle. In any case, this is why I’m here today. My brother Joseph, too, who was born during that time.

In the course of my research, interviews and journey to Poland, I finally got to know and truly appreciate the wonderful, albeit strange people who’d raised me and made me who I am. When I returned to the United States, I sent a detailed account of this story, along with supporting documentary evidence, to Yad Vashem in Israel. About a year and a half later, they came to a decision. On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, 2003, in a packed ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles – before the mayor, and diplomats from Poland and Israel – Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center, bestowed my father with Israel’s highest honor, the Righteous Among the Nations award – the very same medal of heroism Oskar Schindler had received. The story had come full circle.

My mother passed away on the night of January 16, 2009, at the age of 87. My father and I were at her bedside, holding her hands, telling her how much she was loved. She’d led a full and incredible life. I know I was blessed to have her as a mother. But twice blessed to have had the opportunity to discover the truth and meaning of the life she and my father had led before I came into this world. They were together for 67 years.

As for my father and I – we are no longer strangers. I won’t sugarcoat this – we can still get under each other’s skin. But I see him with greater clarity now. I have more compassion for the man. Love doesn’t even begin to describe my feelings for him.

The ghosts and demons my parents tried to keep from me for nearly a lifetime are still there. But they’re no longer a gnawing mystery. I’ve shared a vodka with them. I’ve looked into their eyes. They no longer have power over me. As difficult as my experiences were, I have no regrets about the doors I chose to open and enter. I hope our family story inspires others to open some new doors – to look inside, to fathom the mysteries of the heart, family, and discover stories never known. I hope it inspires tolerance of those who pray to a different deity, look different or look at the world differently. And lastly, I hope it inspires unconditional love – not just romantic love, but the love of fellow human beings. We needed that so much back then. We certainly need it now.

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53 Million Schoolchildren recite the Pledge daily.

We say it without thinking. We say it without question. Over and over, we recite the Pledge of Allegiance, learned in childhood. Every morning, Monday through Friday, 53 million schoolchildren, a new generation of Americans, place their hands on their hearts and utter these words: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Inspiring words. A beautiful ode to patriotism. But if we were to think about it, if we were to question it, we’d realize something’s missing. Our pledge lacks one powerful word: Equality.

Did you know the word equality was originally intended as part of the pledge? And then discarded?

In 1892, when Baptist minister Francis Bellamy (1855-1931) wrote the first version for schoolchildren to recite at a commemoration of the 400^th Anniversary of Columbus landing in the New World, it read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands — one nation, indivisible — with liberty and justice for all.” It was an abridged version.

Bellamy was inspired by the ideas of his cousin, Edward Bellamy, author of the American socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897). He strongly considered placing the word equality at the end of the Pledge. But deliberately left it out. Besides being a man of the cloth, Bellamy was also chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education in the National Education Association. He knew that his colleagues were, for the most part, against equality — for women and African Americans. The word equality would never fly.

One man wasn’t about to slip in a concept that had so long been denied in America. For hundreds of years the American economy had been based on slavery. Even our first President, George Washington, owned slaves. And yet, our Declaration of Independence proclaimed: “All men are created equal.” What of the slaves? Oh yes – the fine print, so to speak. They weren’t considered men. They were considered property.

Surely, after the Civil War, when the slaves were freed, when men were no longer property, they were equal, were they not? Not really. For another 100 years, until the Civil Rights Act was passed, African-Americans suffered through segregation, humiliation, violence and lynchings.  They lived in a society that in many, many ways refused to allow them the right of equality. This was a right that was jealously guarded by white men. Women weren’t given the vote until 1920. Equal pay for the same job as a man — that’s still at issue. Native Americans, the indigenous people who preceded European colonization by 10,000 years, were not granted citizenship until 1924. The reason? They weren’t considered equal.

America is a nation of reinvention. It’s practically a national pastime. Think of the many amendments made to our Constitution for over 200 years. The Pledge of Allegiance has also been altered — four times in fact — since Bellamy’s composition.  Thus, the inclusion of the full name of our country, “the United States of America.” The phrase “under God” was added by an act of Congress in 1954, at the urging of then President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And yet, the revolutionary concept of equality, pondered and discarded by Bellamy over 100 years ago, is still not part of our Pledge. Bellamy, who quit the ministry in protest of the bigotry he encountered there, died a disappointed man, grappling to understand the painful contradictions in the country he loved.

Today we have a different culture, or so we aspire. America has searched its soul and legislated equality – for women, African-Americans, Native Americans and others. Scattered across the 50 states we are seeing legislation for equality for gay Americans. Equality for people who love one another, want to marry and enjoy equal protection under the law. It’s a slow process. But it’s happening.

Tolerance, the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or racial or ethnic differences of others, is an ideal, but most assuredly still not practiced universally. That’s because on a fundamental level, the right of equality is still questioned. When one group denies another group these rights it can set off a dangerous sequence. Hitler brainwashed a nation to believe that Jews were not equal to the so-called Aryans. First, the Jews lost all rights accorded to other Germans. Finally, horrifically, they even lost the right to live. In recent times we are still seeing the same ugly progression of prejudice, hatred, violence and ultimately genocide, in places like Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda.

Still, in America, ask anyone on the street if they believe in the right of equality, especially if you point a television camera or microphone at them, and they’ll probably say yes. It’s because we really have come very far since 1892. We have elected the first African-American President, after all. That’s really far. But…not far enough. Equality is still a moving target.

America is a great nation. For most Americans, it’s the greatest country in the world. But one of things that makes America so great is its ability to look inward, to shine a light on its dark places. And make changes. And yet, in the course of 100 years, despite several modifications, the Pledge of Allegiance has never been restored to its true and most powerful form.

What if for the last 100 years while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, we had as a nation voiced the concept of equality? Imagine how that might have influenced our collective mindset. Imagine what might have been if we had not been cheated out of Bellamy’s original concept and vision. We might have embraced equality generations ago and avoided many heartaches as a nation.

It’s time for the Pledge of Allegiance to be changed once again. Let it live up to and embody the promise of the founding fathers, who proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” No fine print this time. Our Pledge should follow suit, and conclude with the words: “with liberty, justice and equality for all.” Maybe if we say it enough, we might actually one day fully believe it. And it might actually come to be.

What do you think? If you agree, it’s time to shout it from the mountaintops. Let’s make history together. Send us your comments. I will take this message to legislators in Washington. Let America once again be a beacon of hope to the world. It’s time we stopped committing, on a daily basis, the sin of omission.

(Excerpt from “Years Later We Would Remember,” a forthcoming memoir about going to Poland and discovering the horrors of the past)

Warsaw, June 2, 2001 — When I awaken on my first full day in Poland, I look out the window and take in a gloomy, grey, rainy day. Ordinarily, this kind of weather depresses me. But here, now, it seems to fit the moment perfectly. Grey on grey, I can just blend in.

My father, Jack Kent (AKA Olek Glazewski), and I get ourselves ready and head down to a large, elegantly appointed, old world-style dining hall, where I find myself salivating over an expansive and sumptuous breakfast buffet. Like everyone else, we proceed to gorge ourselves on a cornucopia of delicious hams, bolognas, salamis, cheeses, smoked fish, fruit, pickled vegetables, rolls, breads and desserts – all part of the full European breakfast that is included with our room. But unlike everyone else, I consider the story I have come here to uncover, and afterwards feel tremendous guilt over my descent into gluttony. I think of those poor souls over half a century ago, who would have done anything for just one mouthful of what we had here. I walk out feeling pangs of shame and survivor guilt, what many survivors said they felt, knowing their family and friends didn’t make it out of hell alive.

My father and I have one more day here, before catching a flight to the next city on our itinerary. We head out to the only synagogue in Warsaw that survived the war, the century-old, restored Nozyk Synagogue, at number 6 Twarda Street. I’m eager to see it, as is my father.

Ordinarily, I am not a synagogue-goer. When I was 13 years old, after three years of religious studies in Hebrew school, I had my bar mitzvah — which, as an adult, I came to realize meant little more to me than participating in a social convention; I did not experience a religious awakening or feel I was taking part in a true rite of passage — entry into the “tribe,” as a full-fledged Jew. Instead, I absorbed it as a graduation, and I was done. Afterwards, for most of my life, I rarely went inside a synagogue. Until I had sons. Then, I sent them to Hebrew school and gave them bar mitzvahs, hoping they would somehow feel more at home in a synagogue than I did. It wasn’t out of any sense of religiosity; it was because of the Holocaust: six million of my people had been murdered. I wanted to make sure I put two more Jews into the world.

Despite my ambivalence toward synagogues, now, here, I am absolutely eager to enter the Nozyk synagogue. Like my parents, this synagogue is also a survivor. As with the Royal Castle, I see it as another victory over Hitler. I’m beginning to feel like I’m fighting the war all over, and yet, for the first time.

After talking to the office administration and explaining the purpose of my visit, they are happy to oblige us, allowing my father and me entry into the sanctuary. They hand us yarmulkes, the traditional Jewish skullcaps. For a second, I don’t comprehend, because religious services aren’t being conducted. But then it hits me: this a holy place. It doesn’t matter if I’m shooting video or praying — I, as a Jew, certainly have to acknowledge the sanctity of where I am.

Like every Jew and everything Jewish, the Nozyk synagogue suffered withering wave upon wave of humiliation during the war. It endured some damage during an air raid, but it was still standing afterwards. The Nazis didn’t attempt to dynamite what was left. They found it much more useful to utilize it as a stable and barn for their horses. The desecration of this sacred place, and all synagogues, was a valuable tool for the Nazis to not only viscerally demonstrate their hatred of Jews, but to demoralize them.
Inside the sanctuary, as I shoot footage of the ark, where the torah is held, and the colorful, stain-glassed windows, the ornate balcony railings, the exquisitely-carved pews, and the renaissance arches and columns, my father and I do not speak a word. We are simply in awe. This is quite unlike the lack of connection or feeling I had in synagogues in the past. I definitely feel something here. It is a quiet, understated sense of glory. Of peace. And hope. A powerful emotion comes over me: I stop rolling tape, and — almost in a whisper, with my right hand forming a canopy over my closed eyes — I chant the most fundamental Jewish prayer of all: “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echad.” Hear oh Israel! The Lord is God. The Lord is One.

“That’s beautiful, Martin,” murmurs my father, who puts his arm around my shoulder. I cannot speak.

This synagogue is alive. Jews still come here to tap into that — to pray every Friday night, at the start of the Jewish Sabbath. There are perhaps a few hundred Jews in all of Warsaw, a few thousand in all of Poland. No one knows for sure. I think these people are either very brave and strong — or very foolish. I can’t decide.

Our next stop is the Jewish Historical Institute, a 5-minute taxi ride away, where we will look at exhibitions chronicling the lives and contributions of the millions of Jews who once comprised ten percent of Poland’s population. My father and I pack up the gear, return the Yarmulkes, and I make a promise to myself that I will send a donation to the synagogue after I return to Los Angeles. At the institute, we look at displays holding photos, passports, maps, newspapers, historical documents, memorabilia, and artwork and Judaica, such as torahs and prayer shawls – giving us a tantalizing glimpse into a culture that once thrived, and was ultimately destroyed. I find it interesting, illuminating and very sad.

In 1939, there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland, 375,000 in Warsaw alone. The story of the origin of these huge numbers began some 900 years earlier, when there was a mass migration of Jews here; many were escaping persecution in Western Europe. They came from Lithuania in the north, Germany in the West, and Crimea, in the southeast. It had only recently taken on Catholicism as its primary religion. Poland had comparably less influence of religion in its politics and social structure, so Jews found a safe haven here. In 1264, King Boleslaus of Poland granted the Kalisz Statute, a charter of Jewish liberties, with dozens of statutes that guaranteed the safety and personal liberties, including freedom of religion, to all Jews in Poland. Three subsequent Polish Kings ratified this. But Jews had been mistreated since the time of the Roman Empire — why were the Polish royals so nice to them?

Forget what the history books say. I believe I know why this happened: Every Jewish kid comes from a Jewish mother. That mother – because it’s in her DNA! – makes damn sure her sons will grow up to be educated – and eventually will become a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, an academic or a businessman. (The rebels become artisans, poets and musicians.) So, if you were a king ruling over a relatively young, up-and-coming nation-state emerging from feudalism, which Poland was at the time, you would want an educated, motivated class of citizens who could help your country grow. Hence, the Jews. (In the last 100 years, over 20% of the Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish, and yet Jews comprise a mere 1/24 of a percent of the world’s population. Why? Jewish mothers.)

But while Jewish mothers held up their end of the bargain in all respects, and the Jewish population multiplied greatly in Poland, the welcome wagon didn’t last for long. Anti-Semitism sprang up from the murky waters of superstition. The plague, called the Black Death, was seen by some as a metaphysical, wrath of God-type phenomenon. With the church fanning the flames, the Jews – those wicked killers of Christ — were easy targets, and they were blamed. There were anti-Jewish riots in 1348-49 and again in 1407 and 1494; Jews were expelled from the city of Krakow in 1495. Historians estimate some 10,000 Jews were massacred in the process. When the plague subsided, this raging climate of fear and revenge eventually burned itself out. Though intermittent and virulent waves of anti-Semitism continued through the centuries, the Jewish population nonetheless continued to thrive in Poland; by 1939 it held the largest number of Jews in Europe.

Adolf Hitler perceived this as a problem – “The Jewish Problem,” requiring a solution. With the lethal might of Germany at his disposal, he implemented a comprehensive plan aimed at eradicating the world of all its Jews. He called it “The Final Solution.” The world now calls it the Holocaust. In Poland, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania and other countries with Jewish populations, Hitler commanded his minions to cruelly uproot Jews from their homes and herd them into over-crowded ghettos, where thousands died of typhus, starvation and street executions; in towns out in the countryside, Nazi killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen, perpetrated massacres on thousands at a time; and finally with the industrialization of death, Jews were transported by train in cattle and box cars into concentration camps, where millions were gassed, and then cremated. The ashes, sold as fertilizer, helped pay for the enterprise. In 1945, at war’s end, six million had perished, and all that was left of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews was the point three. Most of the survivors soon departed – to other parts of Europe, to Palestine (now Israel), to North America, to South America. Those who wanted to get as far away as possible from the horrors of the Holocaust went to Australia.

While most survivors were trying to forget the past and rebuild their lives, a Polish history professor named Dr. Philip Friedman, a survivor himself, was determined that nothing would be forgotten. Even before the war was officially over, in cities where the Nazis had already abandoned, he sprang into action, gathering documentation of how the Jews had suffered and perished during the Holocaust. He was the first cousin of my mother’s mother, and I recall meeting him on several occasions as a child. Out of respect, we always called him Dr. Friedman. I remember him as a very serious man, someone who seemed to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders. But since no one was talking about the Holocaust to me, I had no idea at the time about the important work in which he was engaged.

Historians devoted to chronicling the Holocaust widely acknowledge Philip Friedman as the father of Holocaust history. Before the war, based in Lvov, (which was then part of Poland, but today is part of the Ukraine) he had already become well established as a historian of Polish Jewry. After the war, Friedman was the first to organize the collecting of records about Jewish life and death under German wartime occupation. He wrote the first book about Auschwitz, the infamous death camp. Friedman founded the first Jewish historical committee in Lublin, which eventually became the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, relocated to Warsaw, (the second stop on our itinerary today.) Its primary mission was to create a record of the horrific events of the Holocaust through research, documentation, collection of evidence, and publications. Friedman was tireless in his efforts: he urged survivors in Poland to write memoirs and to gather letters, photographs, relics and any other documentary evidence that would serve future historians. He traveled to displaced persons camps in Germany, where he encouraged survivors to form historical societies, and provided instructions for the assembling and publishing of the details of the terrible events they had endured. He went to France, where he helped establish a French archive for the study of the Holocaust.

In 1948 he immigrated to New York City, where he continued to aid historical societies. My mother told me that it was Dr. Friedman who urged her to go to Manhattan one day in 1953, and visit the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where she told the story of her family’s Holocaust experiences, while the memories were still fresh. The subsequent transcript of her interview, conducted in and written in Yiddish, is the document that I waited to unlock for my entire life. A year before this journey began, my mother finally had the transcript translated and gave it to me. I marvel now at the vision of Dr. Friedman and others engaged in the same work; they knew how vital it was to record these testimonies – chronicles of the truth about this dark chapter of history.

He lived on the upper west side of Manhattan and taught history at Columbia University. During his time in New York, he wrote and published two seminal works. Martyrs and Fighters, about the Warsaw Uprising, and Their Brother’s Keepers, about non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. But he drove himself too hard and neglected his health; his life’s work was unfortunately cut short. Dr. Philip Friedman died in 1960 at the much too young age of 59, leaving behind a considerable quantity of material still in progress. In 1980, his widow, Ada Junia Friedman, completed her editing of his essays, and published Roads to Extinction, considered indispensable by scholars of the Holocaust. I own a copy of all three volumes, gifted to me and inscribed by Junia, who has since died. I cherish these books.

And now I feel compelled to proceed as best as can, in Dr. Friedman’s giant footsteps, documenting the history of my family, following that phone call I received years ago from my mother, when she appointed me “family historian.” How am I doing, Mom? I wish you were here. I started off my first full day in Poland as a glutton, eating 57 varieties of pig meat. But I ended up in a synagogue, paying my respects with my camera, saying a prayer. This journey is supposed to lead me to my true self. So who am I? Right now, all I know is that I’m a man who will fly out tomorrow, together with my father, to the Ukraine, to the city of Lviv. We will look for the village where you grew up, and the little town where destiny forced you down a hall, to decide if you would open and walk through an extraordinary door.

Please Note: This article first appeared on Wired.com Jan. 20, 2007.

1942: A malignant but unfocused policy of persecution turns into one of outright mass extermination at the Wannsee Conference. In a meeting lasting a little over six hours at a villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Wannsee, Nazi bureaucrats agree on a plan to implement the “final solution to the Jewish question.”

No formal plan for dealing with the Jews existed prior to the Wannsee Conference, and many Nazis favored the deportation or forced emigration of those they considered racial enemies. But with Germany’s conquest of Poland and western Russia, the Nazis found themselves with 11 million Jews to deal with. Deportation, they decided, was no longer practical.

There had already been mass killings of Jews, with mobile killing units — the Einsatzgruppen — shooting most of the victims. Shooting was deemed inefficient, however, because the number of people killed was relatively small while the men who did the shooting often suffered from depression or shattered nerves.

After the Wannsee Conference the method of killing was refined and expanded with assembly-line precision as the Nazis began employing both engine exhaust and Zyklon B, a commercial pesticide, to gas the Jews in their thousands. It was mass murder on an unprecedented scale, carried out in camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

These camps, run by the SS under Heinrich Himmler, employed the most efficient technology available for accomplishing their task. Camps were situated near key railheads to facilitate the transportation of large numbers of people.

At the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in southern Poland, gas chambers capable of processing up to 5,000 people per hour were built. After gassing, which could take as long as 15 minutes to complete, gold fillings were extracted from victims’ teeth, their body cavities searched for hidden valuables and the corpses incinerated in ovens.

Between 5 and 6 million Jews are estimated to have died in what is now known as the Holocaust. Another 1 million people — including German opponents of the Nazi regime — were killed as well.

Source: Various

Photo: The villa where the Wannsee Conference was held is now a memorial and museum.
Courtesy Adam Carr

Read More http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/01/0120final-solution/#ixzz0dCVK1xPe

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., like all great visionaries, is remembered not so much for his courage, his determination, and his ability to inspire and lead, but ultimately, for the power of the ideas and things he created – or perhaps, more to the point – illuminated — that continue to outlive him. King is forever linked in a pantheon of visionary leaders like Moses, Ghandi, Bolivar, who took us to the promised land, but didn’t make it themselves. The fact that they didn’t arrive at the destinations that beckoned them, though sad, was somehow right. In a world of opponents and at the very least, naysayers, it was proof that the power of their ideas could survive without them. King knew that. On April 3, 1968, just one day before his death, he gave his famous “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, telling his followers “I’ve seen the promised land,”  and concluded, prophetically, saying “I may not get there with you.”

In the darkest days of the Civil Rights era, militant racists sought to destroy the movement. Their tactic was terror. Leaders and footsoldiers in the battle for equality were assassinated.  Children were sacrificed, because of the color of their skin. Those who marched, and risked their lives, created a new chapter in American history. It was written with the blood of the Civil Rights Martyrs.

It was a time of reckoning for America. By most accounts, it was a war.  The stakes were nothing less than Freedom. In the summer of 1999, I made a documentary about the Civil Rights Movement, traveling across America, walking in the footsteps of those selfless men and women, who marched, spoke, organized and paved the way for equality and freedom — sometimes at the cost of their own lives. I traveled to Chicago and met up with Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with Dr. King when he was cut down. “Those who died in domestic wars, not just foreign wars, they made America better,” he said.

In Montgomery, Alabama, the city where Dr. King had his church, I interviewed Morris Dees, Co-founder and Chief Trial Counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who said, “The Civil Rights Movement was really a struggle to ensure that America live up to its promises of equality, written in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

On one side stood those who sought to abolish a century’s old, state-sanctioned system of segregation. I spoke to Rep. John Lewis, U.S. Congressman for Georgia, who marched and was beaten in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march across the Pettus Bridge to Selma, Alabama. “These people literally put their bodies on the line, to make our country something better. Many of these young people went into the lion’s den. It was very dangerous.”

They clashed with an army of white supremacists desperately clinging to the last vestiges of their belief in white superiority. As in any war, there were casualties. But in this case, on only one side of the battlefield.

“We must never forget,” said Rep. Lewis, “that in our own country, in a short period of time, many of our citizens gave their lives, in another war, in another battle. And these people, these martyrs, didn’t receive any honors or medals. But they were fighting in a war, just as important as any war our country has engaged in abroad.”

As the death toll rose, the oppressed cried out for justice. But the brutality did not destroy the movement’s resolve. It only stoked the fires of freedom.

“Every time the blood of the innocent was spilled,” Rev. Jackson said, “every time a (civil rights) worker was martyred, it exploded interest in our struggle.

On April 4, 1968, a shot rang out in the Memphis night. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The bullet that entered his face and exited his back made King a martyr. A life of flesh and blood, that had taken on mythic proportions, had come to an end.

But while King was the conscience and epicenter of the movement, there were other martyrs to its cause. Men and women who died in defiance. Children who died in innocence. Today, we remember, not just King, but everyone who sacrificed their lives for something many of us in America take for granted today.  Medgar Evers, who preceded King as the first leader of the movement and was assassinated, Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit housewife who drove down to Alabama to march from Selma to Montgomery, and was murdered when racists saw her giving a ride to an African-American who’d been in the march, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson — the four little girls killed in the bomb blast of the 17^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Rev. James Reeb, Jimmy Lee Jackson, Vernon Dahmer – all killed by the Ku Klux Clan for their participation in the movement, and Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, the three Civil Rights workers who lost their lives when Neshoba County (Miss.) deputy sheriff Cecil Price held them until members of Ku Klux Klan arrived and murdered them in cold blood.

“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. Mother earth will swallow you. Lay your body down,” sang Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in 1974.

Sadly, hauntingly, it still rings true today. Let us never forget.

Avatar half-tells a story we would all prefer to forget

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 11th January 2010

Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It’s profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.

But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.

In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced(1). In 1492, some 100m native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th Century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peacable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives’ extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered.

The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly as a result of murder, overwork and starvation.

The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women’s breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted Indians with their dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, around 95% of the population of South and Central America had been destroyed.

In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of “missions”: in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint(2).

While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation’s wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe “is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi”. During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims’ genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt called this event “as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”

The butchery hasn’t yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe(3). Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.

This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a “revisionist western” in which “the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys.”(4) He says it asks the audience “to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as “just … an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable”(5).

But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly(6). It reveals, he says, “a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide – that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see”. But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.

I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important – and more dangerous – than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. David E Stannard, 1992. American Holocaust. Oxford University Press. Unless stated otherwise, all the historical events mentioned in this column are sourced to the same book.

2. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-miracle28-2009aug28,0,2804203.story

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/09/amazon-man-in-hole-attacked

4.http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/350fozta.asp

5. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2802155/Vatican-hits-out-at-3D-Avatar.html

6. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26sat4.html

When you enter the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and are about to enter the tour, you have a choice of doors. One is marked “Prejudiced.” The other door is marked “Unprejudiced.” But the second door, if one checks, is locked. The point of this is to immediately get you in touch with your own inner bigot. In truth, we all harbor prejudice, to one degree or another. And no matter how nice a person we think we are, we’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.

So when Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, admitted – admitted! – to authors of a book about the last presidential election, that he had thought Barack Obama was a viable candidate, because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect,” he wasn’t referring to his own prejudice. He was referring to the prejudice that all of us have. He was saying that if a black man were going to be president, he would have to be someone who was less black – someone who wouldn’t activate the latent bigotry inherent in white America. (He wasn’t concerned with blatant bigots or racists, as they would have never voted for a black man in the first place.)

Interestingly, Senator Joe Biden, made similar comments, with the same reasoning, early on in the campaign. Mr. Obama understood the context of his remarks, and chose him as his Vice Presidential running mate.

Here’s another wrinkle on the black and white issue. Two years ago, when the light-skinned, non-Negro dialected Mr. Obama was eager to gain the votes of blacks, it was not uncommon for him to alter his dialect and mannerisms, depending upon whether he was addressing black audiences in South Carolina, or white audiences in New Hampshire. He understood that a certain kind of reverse bigotry was inherent in blacks, and needed to convince them that he was one of them.

And now, the Republicans calling for Senator Reid’s removal as majority leader are clearly engaged in playing politics. They point to the fact that the Democrats dethroned Sen. Trent Lott for a similar peccadillo.  The difference is, Mr. Lott said that Sen. Strom Thurmond, who was an avowed segregationist for much of his career, would have made a great president. In other words, he was praising a man who was an acknowledged bigot. A man who would have divided America even further. Given those circumstances, Mr. Lott’s fall from grace was justified.

Mr. Reid is no more bigot than you or I. He simply pointed out that we have a long way to go towards becoming colorblind. President Obama understands that. And that’s the reason he correctly accepted his apology.

So think about it. Are you ready to acknowledge your own inner bigot? Sen. Harry Reid is no more bigoted than you or I. Recognizing the prejudices we all have, great or small, is a first step in the right direction.

The suicide bomber who blew himself up and killed seven C.I.A. officers has been identified as Humam Khalil Mohammed, a Jordanian physician. A double agent, who worked for the Jordanians, but also, it turns out, for Al Qaeda, where his loyalties obviously lay. While everyone is so shocked by the fact that he was, in death, and in terror, exposed as a double agent, to me, the shock is that he was a doctor. To Westerners, who hold life sacred, the notion of killing oneself, whether for a cause or out of despair, is anathema. To practitioners of Judaism, the person who dies of suicide has so betrayed the God-given gift of life, that he or she cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Their soul is stained for eternity. So the idea of a doctor committing a suicidal act of terrorism is even more hard to fathom.

The Hippocratic Oath is an oath historically taken by doctors swearing to ethically practice medicine. It is widely believed to have been written by Hippocrates, the father of western medicine. Among several verses, a physician pledges to prescribe regimens for the good of his or her patients and never to do harm to anyone. Unfortunately, Mohammed was not the first, and probably not the last doctor to become a jihadist and turn away from helping people, in favor of killing others, including himself. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2, whom the C.I.A. was trying to get to through Mohammed, trained as pediatrician. Hamas leader in Gaza George Habash and Mahmoud Zahar also trained as medical doctors.

The great psychologist Carl Jung, father of analytical psychology (also known as Jungian psychology), believed that at the most fundamental level, human beings operate and are motivated by one of two emotions – love or fear. When they endeavor to act out of love, others, as well as themselves, benefit. When they act out of fear, a primary emotion that spawns negative secondary emotions like anger, and ultimately hatred, no one benefits. In the instance of the aforementioned doctors who have eschewed their pledges to do no harm and help others, we are witnessing a profound tragedy on the world stage. They have made a stand, and the message is clear. They have chosen hate over love. For the jihadists, practitioners of radical, fundamental Islam, and would-be soldiers in an unfortunately growing army of haters, they have set the worst example possible.

There is a pearl of wisdom in the Talmud that says, “He who saves a single life, saves the world.” The whole world? Yes. That person sets an example, that can be followed by others, who will continue setting examples. So by extension, everyone plays a role in saving the world. Love begets Love. Hate begets Hate. What kind of world do you want to live in?