(bright music) (pensive music) - Antisemitism is rising in Connecticut and nationwide.

Last year saw a record high number of antisemitic incidents in our state, up more than 40% over 2020.

What's happening?

How do we respond?

I'm Diane Orson.

This is "CUTLINE."

As we move away farther in time from the Holocaust, we're reminded to never forget.

But surveys show the problem is deeper.

Many people lack basic knowledge of what happened.

Throughout this hour, we'll hear from Holocaust survivors in our state and meet people experiencing contemporary antisemitism in our schools, in online spaces.

We'll explore links with racism and extremism, visit a classroom teaching genocide history, and learn the story of Sobibor.

How can lessons of the Holocaust help us combat hate and protect democracy?

Stay with us.

(pensive music) - When I was 11 years old, the Nazis came to our town and they burned the whole town.

Then we were put in a ghetto.

Within a few weeks, the first massacre occurred.

I saw a woman holding a baby and breastfeeding while everybody was pushing around.

And I saw a Nazi came in with a bayonet and pushed the baby from the bosom of the mother and threw it like a football.

I couldn't believe my eyes what I see.

And then next to me was standing man.

They shoot him right in front of me.

I didn't...

I didn't know what to do with myself.

- Well, my name is Leon Chameides, and I'm, I will be, in a month, 87 years of age.

And I was born in southwestern Poland, a very large city by the name of Katowice.

I was four years of age when the Second World War broke out on September 1st, 1939.

And of course, there was tremendous antisemitism and tremendous anti-Jewish riots.

And then my first and clearest memory of that era is an anti-Jewish pogrom.

And I remember distinctly the Jews being forced to wash the cobblestones with toothbrushes.

At the end of the day, we found our grandmother had been beaten and face was all bloodied, teeth were knocked out.

I was hidden with my mother in a cellar.

And I remember that as a frightening time because we could hear shots and screams.

- I was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1935, but in 1936, my family, as well as two sets of grandparents, moved from Cologne to Amsterdam, Holland.

At that time, I was five years old and things started to change.

We had to wear the yellow star on the left side on our outer clothing, I had to go to a Jewish school, Jews couldn't go out of the house after eight o'clock, and life became restricted.

(gentle piano music) - My name is Jessica Koyner, and I'm 18 years old.

My first experience with antisemitism was my freshman year.

It was a magnet program focused on global studies.

I was gonna learn Arabic.

It was an hour away from my house, and I really, really loved the school.

For the first time in my life, I was happy to wake up at 5:00 a.m.

I was in the pit orchestra for "Mamma Mia!"

I was really, really excited and happy to be there and learning.

And then it was assessment day, so the teacher was outside in the hallway personally assessing students on Arabic speaking skills.

And another student came up to me and started saying things that hurt me.

He called me a kike.

And in the moment, I don't think he knew what the word meant or even the magnitude of it.

- I was in a club for my school.

No teacher was present.

No more than seven kids in the classroom.

And two students had suggested we play an online game.

So I logged on to my phone and I started typing in my username that I would use.

And I thought nothing of the unusual names that started popping up on my screen, as people often use unusual names online.

And then two usernames popped up on my screen that shocked me.

I was at a loss for words.

I saw two usernames that read, Jews Suck and Evil Jews.

- And then he followed up with statements of Holocaust denial, saying things like, "If it was really 6 million, then it wasn't enough," and started saying things that hurt me.

And he drew a swastika on my notebook.

And then over the following weeks, the harassment continued, escalated to more verbal and physical harassment as well.

And I finally cracked and I told administration.

- I knew I needed to do something.

And I stood up and I said, "Whose usernames are these?"

And two hands shot immediately into the air and laughter rang out in the room.

And I said, "Do you think this is some kind of joke?"

And they did.

And they laughed.

And I so valued my Jewish identity.

I was nervous to tell my parents because I thought that I had not done enough.

And it would appear that I wasn't as strong of a Jewish person that they had raised me to be, and I was nervous to tell them.

But I decided I needed to tell them.

I needed their support.

- He received a two-day in-school suspension.

It was at that time that he then posted on one of his social media stories that he had a gun and that he could and would kill me.

I couldn't talk to any of my friends because he would corner me.

I had to always be in a room with teachers.

And everything I once loved about the school, everything I once loved about learning seemed kinda gone for me.

And that included my religion and who I was.

It felt very, very scary.

And although I know that I'm a proud Jewish woman today, in the moment, I felt like I was absolutely nothing.

And as soon as I let those words lose power over me, I became a lot happier.

(chuckles) - My guidance counselor said that no further action could be taken because the usernames were not tied to any student identity, even though I had seen them, the students, acknowledge and own up to their usage of those names.

That was the only evidence they had.

So no further action could be taken besides speaking to the students.

Seeing a friend of mine drop a quarter on the ground and I've heard another student say, "Oh, well, let the Jew pick it up."

I've heard, "What's the difference between a Boy Scout and a Jew?

The Boy Scouts come back from the camps."

It is incredibly hard to stand up to peers and friends, but something that I've learned is if we want anything to change, we need to seek discomfort because culture doesn't change when we are comfortable.

So my advice would be to not be afraid of discomfort because that's ultimately how we create change.

- A study released in 2020 by the Claims Conference found a worrying lack of knowledge of Holocaust across the US.

About one in 10 adults and one in five millennials weren't even sure they'd ever heard of it.

Connecticut law requires public schools to provide Holocaust and genocide education.

It's usually folded into a social studies curriculum, but some schools have developed specialized genocide classes.

- And then in 1938, we have Kristallnacht.

So we see the acceleration of violence against the Jewish population in Germany taking place in 1938.

And on September 1st, 1939, World War II begins with the invasion of Poland.

- [Diane] Teacher, Joe Goldman, is beginning the Holocaust unit.

It's part of a genocide elective offered at E.O.

Smith High School in Storrs.

Goldman guides students through the stages, thousands of small steps, that led to the systematic persecution and murder of 6 million Jews and others targeted by the Nazi regime.

- And so certainly some of the people who were relocated out of the ghettos would've felt a sense of relief that they were not the main targets, right?

- Right.

- So it's clear now the Jewish population is gonna be targeted.

- [Diane] One of the most powerful ways to help students begin to grasp the context of genocide is by hearing from a survivor.

- First, I just wanted to say I appreciate your time.

- [Diane] Goldman invited Leon Chameides to tell his story.

- At any rate, today, I will try to share with you a little bit of my story, of my survival story.

Last week, we commemorated this very special day called Yom HaShoah.

This is a Hebrew word, two Hebrew words.

Yom means day, and shoah means destruction.

And it is a day that is commemorated throughout the world, particularly by Jews, but by everyone as a day to remember the almost between 6 and 7 million Jews who were murdered during the Second World War only for one reason, and that is because they were Jewish.

- Not long after I met with students in the high school courtyard.

We talked about the genocide class and how their understanding of the Holocaust had changed after hearing from someone who lived through it.

- For me, it helped me like put a face to the atrocities 'cause with 6 million people, when you're given that number, it's just a statistic at this point.

You don't have faces, you don't have names, you don't have anything like that.

And just seeing a real survivor talk about their experience just puts things more in perspective, I feel.

Yeah, we often hear stories about Auschwitz and other concentration camps, but we don't really think about what choices people had to make.

So in Leon Chameides' case, his parents had to send him and his brother to different monasteries.

And that's such a tough choice to make because, at some point, you want your family together, but you also wanna be able to at least see somebody in your family survive and keep the bloodline going and sort of be able to survive some sort of atrocity.

- Yeah, there's something about reading about this enormous scale of tragedy and then hearing from an individual and the particulars of their experience surviving it that is so powerful.

- So he was seven when he had to go through a whole new identity.

He had to pick up a new language.

And for him, as a seven-year-old, that was normal.

That was what was his life.

That's what his life was gonna be.

And for him to just pick that up is something that I can't imagine I'd be able to do.

And for him to just expect his parents to be dead, that kind of situation, that kind of scenario was just shocking to me.

- What also struck me was just how he noted that even in his early childhood, he just felt this constant fear of being found out by the community or by German soldiers.

And I had never considered just how living under this fear for so long just crushes you and just isolates you into this manufactured identity.

- Yeah, I was surprised by his willingness to tell this story.

It's a extremely tragic story, so I wouldn't put it against him or blame him if he wasn't comfortable to share the story.

But it seems to me that it was very important for him to at least educate younger people, the next generation of people who will become leaders of the world about history so that history doesn't repeat itself and we don't have to go through something like this ever again.

- And I wanna talk about that.

He called his story a warning to us all.

What do you think he meant by that?

- What I think is really important is that you have to know that the Holocaust didn't just happen.

No one woke up one morning and decided that that's what they wanted to do.

There were so many events that led to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

And if you don't learn about how something like this could happen, you will fail to recognize the warning signs when it comes up again.

And it could happen again.

- Preventing any food coming into the ghettos.

And we were focusing on how that dehumanized the population by making it so that they had to fight to survive.

They had to- - The truth is I felt a lot of hesitation about teaching it at first.

I was asked by my department to take on the genocide course, and I immediately felt some of the weight of the responsibility.

It feels like the sorta class you can't get wrong.

This needs to be a meaningful course and it needs to help students understand the world around them.

So what I have in mind right now is like the essence of genocide is essentially hate.

If you look at any of the genocides that occurred in history, there's an element of hate there.

And students see that all around them.

They don't always make that connection.

But I think when they take the class, they start to see how their individual choices are part of something bigger than they are as individuals, right?

This builds into something that they can understand better and apply better.

They were sort of alluding to that when they were talking to you, right?

There's like a vein of anti-LGBTQ sentiment.

There's a lot of anti-immigration sentiment in the country today.

Antisemitism is on the rise not only in the United States, but in Europe.

And I think the class should help them not only see that, but think about the individual choices we each have to make when we're confronted with hate.

- [Diane] Alan Marcus trains teachers like Joe Goldman to teach difficult history.

- Much of his work centers around Holocaust education.

We hear that large numbers of young people really know very little about the Holocaust.

So how do you teach the Holocaust in a way that connects?

- It's funny, I've seen the surveys that have been done, and in some ways, I understand the concern that that raises when people say they don't know much about the Holocaust, or have they heard of it, or can they name Auschwitz?

On the other hand, teaching the Holocaust is not about memorizing information.

I would say there are some core elements as a Holocaust educator that are important to think about.

And one of them is gonna be that a modern democratic society can do evil things, right?

No one thought Germany could do what they did.

A second would be that individual choices make a difference in what happens.

And a third one would be that both individuals and nations need to not be bystanders when human rights are being violated.

- [Diane] I asked students if they see connections between what they learned in class and the world around them.

- I do.

I see a lot of connections today in that the beginning of the Holocaust came in the 1930s, the early 1930s, when groups of people took power, and people would say things like, "Well, they say these bad things, but they're probably not gonna do them.

It'll be fine.

It's just for political reasons, that sort of thing."

What they are doing is they are saying these extreme things to get attention.

And we are becoming numb to that in the same way that the Germans did, right?

You would see all these political parties campaigning for different things during the German Republic period.

And now we have our political parties that are campaigning for things.

And over time, those things will just have to get more and more extreme to keep getting attention.

And eventually, when things start happening, we might not notice.

- At the beginning of our genocide unit, we looked at antisemitism by watching, I don't think it was a full title, but the documentary called "Meeting the Enemy."

And we looked at the rise of hate groups in America.

And that was...

I think the antisemitism they displayed was pretty similar to the ones that happened in Germany.

They had swastikas on shields and marched around in rallies.

So obviously, antisemitism is still around today, which is... That's why studying something like the Holocaust is important 'cause it learns it would root out antisemitism.

- Yeah, I think today there are efforts to sort of reconstruct history, pick and choose what we want to remember and what we don't want to remember.

And I think that's just a very foolish thing to do because by rewriting these historical narratives, we hide what we truly are as a human species.

We need to understand what we are capable of and what patterns lead us to these things.

And I think it is just wrong to deny that these things exist and deny that these things do exist in our hearts.

(gentle piano music) - We were not so lucky.

In 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, and Holland capitulated.

They were not prepared.

I spent nine months in Theresienstadt.

Theresienstadt was a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

We were transported by cattle car from Westerbork to Theresienstadt.

We were two to three days in that car, in the cattle car.

Maybe a little water, but basically it was pretty bad.

There was no food.

And in the middle of the cattle car was an old beer crate, or wine barrel, which had to be used as a toilet.

Theresienstadt was much, much more severe than Westerbork.

I stayed with my younger brother and my mother in the one barrack and my father was at the other end of the camp in the men's barrack.

- And at some point, the cellar door opened, the shaft of light came in, and there were boots on the cellar stairs, and we were found and we were hauled out, and that there was really no chance of survival.

And children were particularly vulnerable because children were mouths to feed and nonproductive.

- One was standing on a little podium, a Nazi dressed in a, some sort of a special guy with his finger pointing like this to the left and to the right.

And I watched them that all the elderly and the children were sent one way, which means to death.

I realized the only way that I can survive was to ask somebody to take me as their son.

Then at the end, I saw a lady with two children.

One girl was five years old and one was seven years old.

And I went over.

I saw that she's holding a certificate.

She's a nurse.

So I came to this lady and I said, "Would you take me as your son?"

And she looked at me with some charitable face, and she said, "If they let me live with two children, maybe they'll let me live with three children.

Hold on to my dress."

I hold on to her dress.

She went over to the guy with the finger, to the Nazi, and he pointed, which means to life.

- My father was sent as a part of a delegation of, I think, two rabbis to meet with Sheptytski in order to see whether that he would be willing to hide the Torah scrolls.

In the course of that discussion, he asked about the families of the two rabbis, and my father asked him whether he would be willing to hide his two sons.

I remember distinctly the moment I realized that I was gonna be left there.

And you have to understand that when we entered the premises of the archbishop, we entered a different world.

It was a world with carpets, clean, a smell of incense in the air, icons on the wall.

It was a totally foreign world.

(pensive music) - Antisemitism, for me personally, was pretty from the outset.

Interesting enough, I came to Judaism by conversion.

And it was choice, not through marriage.

It was solely a decision on how I felt about the faith and what it meant to me.

Initially, in my conversion, when individuals that I knew heard I converted, some of the dim lights, if you will, well, one was a woman saying to me, "Well, I heard you converted to Judaism."

And I said, "Yeah, that's correct."

I said, "Yeah, it was for spiritual decision, no pressure.

It's something I really feel comfortable with."

And she, "Well, even though you're a Jew now, I'll still love you."

And she says, "Well, you know what I mean."

And I said, "Yeah, okay, I guess I do."

Some of the other ones were among people that I considered as friends.

The jokes started piling out.

"Dean, now that you're a Jew, so you won't be paying for anything."

Or, "I'm gonna buy a car.

I wanna bring you along 'cause you're a Jew and I'll get a better deal."

And at that point in time, this was all new to me.

But I still felt there was an element of seriousness behind it.

It was just...

It was as if suddenly the fact that I became a Jew, there was a shift.

Dean Festa, Italian.

This is a story I tell all the time.

I'm on elevator at work.

We're not talking ancient history here, all right?

I'm on the phone, rudimentary Hebrew, "Shalom, shalom.

(speaking in foreign language)," blah, blah, blah.

Woman on the elevator with me.

"Dean, what was that?"

"Hebrew."

"You speak Hebrew?

That's the Jewish language, right?"

I said, "Yeah."

I said, "I'm Jewish."

"You're a Jew?"

"Yeah."

"Italians are Jews?"

"Yeah, Italians can be Jews.

There's all kinds of Jews."

Walks to the end of the elevator, before it closed, turns around and points her finger and says, "You people killed Christ.

You people killed Christ," and walks away.

I'm at a road race and I'm talking to a guy and we run the race, he did great.

And I said, I'm go up to him, "Hey," I think he came at fifth or sixth, and I said, "Great job."

And I wear a Star of David and it came out.

And he looked at it and he said, "Oh, you're Jewish."

I said, "Yeah."

He said, "So am I, but that's between us."

And that breaks my heart.

When I talk to someone about antisemitism and they say, "Well, you know, I think you're over exaggerating a little bit," a fellow Jew.

And then in the same sentence, he'll say, "Yeah, but well, well, kinda.

I guess when my daughter goes out, I tell her not to wear a Jewish, anything that identifies her as Jewish."

2022 in America.

Don't identify yourself 'cause you're Jewish.

You could be at risk.

And this isn't high-risk areas.

These are suburban Connecticut.

- Let's learn what's happening now and why.

I'm so pleased to welcome our three guests here to help unpack these questions.

Stacey Sobel is director of the Anti-Defamation League's Connecticut Regional Office.

Megan Black works with Western States Center.

It's based in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain States and works nationwide building movements, developing leaders, shifting culture, and defending democracy.

And Avinoam Patt is professor and director of Judaic Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Thanks to all of you for being here.

Avi, we know that Jews make up just about 2% of the US population, yet they account for 60% of religious-based hate crimes.

What's going on?

- Yeah, so this is something that is, the data is quite alarming, but at the same time, this conforms to our understanding of how antisemitism functions throughout history, which is that Jews historically are a very small minority of larger populations, and yet they are the targets of a disproportionately large number of ethnic, racial, religious discrimination and violence.

And this goes back to the origins of antisemitism, which is often defined as the oldest hatred, but really functions as a type of a conspiracy theory which often goes hand in hand with other forms of racism, xenophobia, discrimination, persecution.

and Jews are often labeled and targeted as the other, as the outsiders, as parts of a conspiracy theory that are meant to undermine our democracy and other forms of life.

And so we see this over time where Jews are targeted, even though it's not sort of a rational belief system, but antisemitism is not a rational ideology.

It's often irrational and based in conspiracy theories to other more modern components that have to do with Holocaust denial or sort of labeling all Jews as sort of responsible for the acts of the state of Israel.

- Does this rise in antisemitism surprise you?

- Sadly, it's not a surprise.

I think the polarization right now in our country and the dramatic increase in hate has really, really raised a level, the heat and the level.

We've seen a series of mass shootings in the United States, some targeting Jews, some targeting the African American community, the Hispanic community.

It's been the deadliest for the trans community.

And this hate is just boiling over.

It's from the edges of society throughout society.

- I wanna dig into that in a moment, but I'd like to invite Megan into our conversation.

You come to this through the world of racial justice and faith-based organizing.

How did you find your way to your work in antisemitism and awareness?

- Yeah, it was thanks to some really persistent rabbis and pastors who I was working with several years ago who really wanted to work together on racial justice issues but had a hard time building bridges across some of their biases and assumptions and prejudices and some key differences.

And some of those biases and prejudices were based on things like skin color, or assumptions about class, or religious differences.

And fortunately, we had some language and frameworks to help people navigate through those particular tensions, but others were rooted in what I would now describe as unexamined antisemitic bias.

And we didn't have a shared language or a shared understanding or framework that would help us make sense of the way that antisemitism was showing up, even in these progressive, racial-justice-minded, inclusive, or inclusively oriented coalitions, that I started getting really curious about what was going on, and I started to investigate the assumptions behind these comments and discovered that these seemingly mild comments were rooted in deeply harmful conspiracy theories, as Avi mentioned earlier, that assert something along the lines of a nefarious kind of global Jewish plot to take over Western Christendom.

It sounds crazy to us, but it manifests in lots of different ways.

And these conspiracy theories flourish in extremist, neofascist, authoritarian spaces, and in fact are directly connected to acts of extreme violence and recent acts against Jews and racial and religious minorities, the Tree of Life shooting in 2018, the El Paso shooter at Walmart in 2019, the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, also in 2019, and very recently, the shooter in Buffalo.

And so as I started to understand the connection between these very seemingly inoffensive comments made by my colleagues in the racial justice movement to these conspiracy thinkings, I realized that these comments, traced back to their original roots, are actively costing Jews, Muslims, Black people, people of color, their lives.

And it became really clear that we had to find a way to deal with antisemitism as part of the racial justice movement.

- Think it points to sort of the intersections that we can see here between antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, as Megan just alluded to.

All of these forms of hatred are interconnected.

And for us to effectively counter them, we have to build alliances and work together because we can see that if we don't respond to a form of hate speech or antisemitism in one space, it's gonna rear its ugly head in forms of extremist rhetoric and violence in other places.

And so they are all directly connected to one another.

- And if I could just add to that, in Connecticut in the last four years, we have seen a twentyfold increase in white supremacist propaganda that includes stickers, flyers, and banners, and that is spreading hate throughout Connecticut.

We have a list of over 12 towns that were flyered with white supremacist propaganda in just the last three months.

- I mean, antisemitism has been around for a long time, but it feels like there's something different happening now where it's tied to white nationalism and to a threat to democracy.

Any thoughts, any of you?

- I'm happy to start.

There's a lot to say on this topic.

I'll just start off by saying that there is, and we can see it sort of, for those of us who were paying attention to what insurrectionists on January 6th were wearing and saying, we could see this overlap between extreme white nationalism and Holocaust denial.

Same thing that we could see at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017, the sort of chanting of, "Jews will not replace us," which alluded directly to what Megan was talking about about conspiracy theories that Jews were behind some sort of global conspiracy to replace and undermine the white race by sort of supporting both people of color and immigrants to take over and undermine the white nation.

- I would add that one shift that has been made in how antisemitism manifests currently is people tend to think of antisemitism as a primarily religious form of bigotry that had its apex in the Holocaust and in World War II, and that has since kinda faded away.

But actually, the 20th century saw a real pivot to antisemitism as a really racialized form of bigotry.

Didn't totally erase the religious history of this, but it certainly started to identify and classify Jews as a racialized people, as a distinct people.

And has fed kind of over time into this white Christian racial anxiety that I think is behind the Great Replacement theory, this idea that the white Christian majority in this country is being displaced by non-Christians and by Black people and by brown people, and that Jews are actually the ones who are responsible for that replacement, that it's a plot by a global cabal or there is some kind of secretive Jewish conspiracy group that is pulling the strings on these puppets.

And so it boils down, ultimately, to this act of having to share power in a democracy and this experience of feeling extraordinarily threatened by that in this society right now.

- Can we talk for a minute about hate speech online?

- I'll just say that during the pandemic, there was something quite alarming that I was paying a lot of attention to, which was the use of Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion in the sort of anti-vaxxer/anti-masker movement.

And I think we've all seen those images of people who were protesting masking or vaccination mandates by putting on yellow stars.

And so calling government officials the Gestapo, or, as happened here in the state of Connecticut, labeling our governor, Ned Lamont, as Hitler, right?

These were all forms of extremist rhetoric which brought up politicians, elevated sort of the number of clicks which they could receive and the level of attention which they could receive, but was also very clearly a form of Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion, which was both trivializing the memory of the Holocaust, minimizing its historical significance, and claiming that people who were trying to be protected by their government were in fact victims of their government.

But there was something else going on, Diane, at the same time that I think was quite interesting and that we're seeing pay, we're seeing its outcomes today, which was that we had white supremacist groups that were entering this space at the same time and using the anti-masker/anti-vaxxer movement to try to both use Holocaust denial Nazi imagery to recruit followers, to recruit movement members.

- Yeah, Avi is right.

I mean, the internet is really remains a 24/7 white supremacist rally.

And why in Connecticut would middle school children raise their hands in a Heil Hitler salute at a teacher of color?

Where are these young people learning this?

So hate is online.

It's promulgated online.

It's actually in the background of video games that our children are playing.

- So in the few minutes we have left, can we talk about what we can do about this?

Where do we begin?

What can individuals do to start to address some of these problems?

- The really powerful question.

One thing I'll offer is to report incidents of hate and incidents of hate crimes to the ADL, to law enforcement, because data is really crucial in the fight against hate.

- White nationalism and antisemitism flourishes as a form of division, as a way of dividing communities who otherwise have actually quite a bit in common, who share space and share values, dividing them from each other.

And so one of the most important things we can do is to seek to be in relationship and partnership with each other.

- And I think education is key.

Education is fundamental.

Listening to one another, hearing about one another, and knowing when it is time for us to speak out against all forms of hate speech when we encounter it.

- Well, we'll have to end it there.

We could talk a lot longer, but I wanna thank you so much, all three of you, for your really thoughtful insights into this important question.

Thanks.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for having us, Diane.

- My father worked in a root cellar.

Root cellar being where the vegetables which were grown were stored underground to keep fresh.

One day, the officer who was in charge of that told my father and said, "Why don't you help yourself?

I'm gonna go get a cigarette."

And at that point, my father wore old-fashioned ski pants which were very bulgy at the bottom.

And he stuffed potatoes, turnips, and what have you in his pants, walked that way through the camp, and delivered it to my mother.

The amazing part is that soldier knew my father.

He used to be, before the war, the head waiter in a hotel in Germany.

My father loved good food and often went to the hotel to eat and left a very good tip, and this soldier remembered my father.

So that I find a very, very stirring moment.

We were liberated by the Russians.

And my father who was always very careful said, "No, you're not going out."

And we went into the cellar of the barracks and waited until we didn't hear any more screaming and guns shooting, and only came out after it was quiet.

- So I was taken to a monastery, very famous monastery, which actually was built I think in the 14th century.

We went by tram car and then by train.

And on the way in the tram car, a German Gestapo officer sat down next to me and he thought I was very cute.

And he started to pinch my cheeks and talk to me.

And of course, Reverend Marco, Brother Marco, was terribly scared because I spoke German.

And if I had indicated in any way that I understood what he said, he would know I was not a Ukrainian child.

But I didn't.

I pretended I didn't understand him.

And so we made our way and we walked the last about 1 1/2 miles and came to the monastery.

And I spent the next two years in that monastery until we were liberated by the Soviets in 1944.

Then the first thing I was taught was a new name.

I was given the name of Levko Chaminsky, and I had to repeat it over and over again to myself in order to remember it.

So that if I was suddenly woken up in the middle of the night and I was asked my name, I wouldn't give my real name.

And then I had to learn how to be a seven-year-old Ukrainian Catholic.

I had to learn how to cross myself.

And instead of saying the prayers that I was familiar with, the Shema prayer and other prayers, I suddenly had to learn the "Otche Nash," which is "Our Father," or (speaking in foreign language) which is the Ukrainian version of "Ava Maria."

- You have to learn how to deal with the situation, especially when you're by yourself.

And that is our problem.

The problem is if people are united together, they can do many things.

When you're by yourself, you're very little.

It reminds me if one person faces a lion, he has no chance.

But when 10 people face a lion, we have a chance.

And that is the little story about how we people can survive with antisemitism.

Antisemitism will always be there unless we teach people how to act to one another with justice.

And that's the problem when there's no justice in the world, people do whatever is convenient for them.

And when you're convenient for yourself and you don't care about others, we have wars like we have now.

(leaves rustling) (branches cracking) - In the beginning, I didn't know what to expect.

Sobibor was in the middle of the forest.

Nobody know what's happening here.

It was a big secret.

- This whole area here should be a cemetery because here 250,000 of our brothers and sisters perished.

(fire crackling) - Let's turn now to an extraordinary story of bravery and resistance during the Holocaust in an effort to erase all trace of a secret Nazi death camp.

My next guests are here because they wanna keep that story alive.

Gary Hochman is managing director of Changing Minds Productions.

For more than 35 years, his work has appeared on PBS, NOVA, and Discovery.

And Tagan Engel is a resident fellow at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment.

She's producer of "The Table Underground" radio program.

And she's also the granddaughter of Chaim and Selma Engel who were part of a mass escape from a top secret Nazi death camp called Sobibor.

Gary, let's begin.

What was Sobibor?

- In 1942, the Nazis created Aktion Reinhardt, and it was to set up three death camps in remote areas of Poland.

And the sole purpose was sending people on trains from across Europe to these places.

The trains would arrive.

People would be taken off the trains.

They would be separated, men, women, and children.

They would then be stripped.

They would be walked down a pathway that was barbed wire woven with vegetation.

You can't see in, can't see out.

And they were sent to the gas chambers.

And by nightfall, all the people that were on the trains that arrived each day were dead unless they were taken off to be a slave laborer.

- Tagan, your grandparents have a remarkable story.

They survived Sobibor.

Can you tell us their story?

- Sure.

My grandfather Chaim Engel was from Poland, and he had just gotten out of military service when he, or at the end of his mandatory military service when he was captured by the Germans and he was sent to Sobibor, which was an extermination camp.

About six months later, my grandmother arrived.

She was Dutch and was brought first to Westerbork, which was a concentration camp, and then moved to Sobibor.

When my grandfather arrived there, he was young and healthy and was one of the very few people who was chosen to work as a slave laborer there.

And his brother and father were sent to the gas chambers.

The first job that he did was to sort clothes because what the Nazis were doing was taking anything of value from the Jews and also the political prisoners who were captured to then send back to Germany.

So jewelry.

They took fillings out of teeth.

They took clothing, shoes, and a lot of Jews brought their valuables with them, like their precious, their Shabbat candlesticks and other things.

And so he was sorting clothes, and he actually found the coat from his brother that had a photo of him, his brother, and his father at his mother's gravestone.

And that is one of the only things I have left from my grandfather's family is that photo.

So he worked there for six months before my grandmother arrived there.

She...

They said, "Is anyone sick?"

And she raised her hand, but she was very beautiful, and one of the guards said, "No, no, no, you come over here" because she was young and beautiful and he saved her life because he told her to go be one of the workers.

On her first day in the camp, the Ukrainian guards who were working under the Nazis, 'cause Sobibor is just at the line of Poland and Ukraine, forced my grandparents to dance together as entertainment for the Nazi guards.

And so they met each other being forced to dance for the Nazis.

And they very quickly fell in love with each other.

I think Yiddish was the only language that they spoke in common.

And they spent six months in the camp together after my grandmother arrived.

And as...

There were some Russian soldiers who were captured, and there had been a group of Jews in the camp who were planning a revolt, an uprising, trying to figure out how to escape.

And when the Russian soldiers arrived, their strategic thinking really helped kind of advance that planning to another level.

And so what they did was they basically bribed the Nazi soldiers.

So there were different barracks where metal work was done, leather work, different things.

And the Jews, the very few Jews who worked there, bribed the Nazis saying, "Oh, I'll make you a special pair of boots or I'll make a ring for your wife, or things."

And they arranged to have them all come pick those things up at the same time early in the morning.

And then they found knives from the sorting sheds and things.

And a few other Jews hid in those work areas.

And so when the Nazis came in to get their thing that they were being bribed with, they were killed by the Jewish prisoners on the spot.

And at the very last moment, one of the people who was supposed to kill one of the Nazis got scared and couldn't do it.

And my grandmother and grandfather knew about the plan.

They were sort of on the outside of the planning, but knew enough.

And my grandmother said, "You have to go."

And my grandfather said...

He said, "It wasn't even a question.

If I don't go, then the whole thing will fall apart and everyone will just be murdered."

So my grandmother ran to get him a knife from the sorting shed, and he went with another person and they killed one of the Nazis.

And he always said, when he killed him, he said "For my mother, for my father, for my brother, and for all the Jewish people," and he cut his hand in the process.

And so once all the Nazis were killed, then the rest of the prisoners went out for roll call, and then it was sort of pandemonium.

People just started running in every direction.

Most of them died, but a lot of them ran out the main gate.

And about 300 people fled of the thousands that were in the camp, and about 60 people made it through the minefield out into the woods without being recaptured, and my grandparents were two of those people.

- Now, Gary, after the uprising and the escape at Sobibor, the Nazis began a process of trying to erase all trace of what had happened.

Why did that happen?

And what have you been documenting in the "Sobibor Documentation Project" over the last few years?

- So once there was a revolt and escape, this destroyed everything that the Nazis believed in.

They were supposed to be the superior race.

To be defeated by Jewish prisoners was not something they could tolerate.

So they burned barracks.

They blew up the gas chamber.

They pulled up fence posts.

They pulled out the barbed wire.

They pulled out everything in sight, and then trees were planted.

'Cause this is an area that, to this day, is still a forestry area.

This is a cover-up story.

This is maybe one of the original examples of Holocaust denial as perpetrated by Nazis to cover up their factory of death at Sobibor.

There was all of this material underground and it hadn't been touched in 80 years.

Anything from coins that abruptly end at 1942, which is when the camp was started, Judaica, rings, some things that are engraved, eyeglasses, hair pins.

All of these things tell a different story.

And the ones that are most revealing are a set of little metal name tags.

So it would have the name of a person, a date, and a place.

The very first one we found was Lea Judith de la Penha.

It had her birth date and Amsterdam.

And that was found out fairly close to where the edge of the camp was, close to the railroad tracks.

We found traces of barracks.

We found traces, the full trace of the pathway that led from the place where people were, men, women, and children were separated and sent to the gas chambers.

We found everything that the Nazis covered up.

- We discovered now truth of the Sobibor.

Not only this history, the testimonies of the survivors, but real artifacts.

- Where's the nail?

You see?

- Yes.

- In the wood.

We have corridor and a room.

See this?

- [Man] Mm-hmm.

(woman speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language), big room.

First time that we have something clear.

(shovels scraping) You see?

(woman laughs) The wood.

Oh, excellent.

(woman speaking in foreign language) - For us, it's very important because it's connect name to the place.

We can prove that this was a death camp, for sure.

- So there are obviously hundreds of thousands of stories to tell.

Your grandparents are among them.

You've continued to tell their story, Tagan.

What's the message you wanna share?

- So I grew up hearing their story, and it had an enormous impact on me.

First of all, to know the reality of what they had lived through and what they had overcome and that they could actually have joy and love in their lives was an incredible message about the human spirit and what's possible.

So I don't play genocide Olympics, like who, (chuckles) whose genocide is worse than whose?

I'm deeply committed to liberation of all people.

And I think that that is my basic message.

And then I am also very aware that as both a Jewish person who's part of a persecuted people but also as a person who has white-presenting skin that I also have privileges that come from that.

My message is both paying testament to the truth of their story in the details for people to understand like, yes, this really happened, and to talk about the importance of all persecuted people standing in solidarity with each other so that it's not only never again for the Jews, it's never again for anyone.

- Right now, I'm 92 years old.

By learning, by studying, by studying the right things, then you'll be able to help others.

- You have to accept everybody.

Just because somebody is Black, or has curly hair, or has eyes on a slant, or speaks a different language, or eat different food, that is no reason not to befriend them.

You have to accept them as they are.

- So all in all, as a Holocaust survivor, I feel that and I pray that this thing should never happen again.

Because if it does happen, I think people, God forbid, should react in every possible way not to happen.

That's why we need people to be united, to be educated, and to act, not just to sit and talk and do nothing about it.

- You only hurt yourself if you be so negative that you can't forget.

Forgive is a different thing, okay?

But forgetting, trying not to think about it, living on in your daily life, I think you have to let go.

(pensive music) - I think we may be more comfortable thinking of antisemitism as something of the past, a part of history that ended after the Holocaust, but hate exists, and we know how hate, all hate, begins.

It starts with otherness, dividing us and them.

Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, once said, "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."

Martin Niemoller put it another way.

He was a Lutheran pastor in Germany, and in the '20s and '30s supported the Nazi rise to power.

He later became an outspoken opponent of Adolf Hitler, was arrested, and spent years in concentration camps.

Niemoller wrote this, "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."

We always have a choice.

Thanks for joining us this hour.

I'm Diane Orson.

(pensive music)