Hello, I'm Carlton Wing, executive director here at Arkansas TV.

For the next 90 minutes, we are honored to present a special screening of the powerful documentary dignity.

It's produced by Babb Productions, and this film is the latest installment in the award winning Generation to Generation documentary series, which focuses on passing the torch of remembrance to the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

Dignity tells the incredible and harrowing survival story of Harry Bromberg, a Polish Jew born in 1919, whose trade as a shoemaker ultimately helped keep him alive during the horrors of the Holocaust.

Told by his son, Paragould resident Al Bromberg, this film chronicles Harry's journey through nine different Nazi work, concentration and death camps.

It's a profound testament to a man who, despite enduring starvation and unspeakable brutality, refused to relinquish his humanity.

Please make sure to stick around.

After the film concludes, we will be hosting a special, exclusive question and answer session with the people behind this documentary.

We will be joined remotely from California by the film's director, writer and executive producer, Thomas Beavers, and we will be thrilled to have Harry Bromberg son, al joining us right here in the studio for the conversation.

Thank you for joining us for this important broadcast.

Now, we are grateful to present to you dignity.

To me, it's most important that you know that Jews were not the docile, easy to attack people that that they're portrayed to be.

And this was definitely true of my family, my father and uncle similar were probably more opposite than than any two people that I knew.

My father was very strategic, was very aware of where he was at.

He was physically imposing and he was a man who.

Maintained his temper until it was necessary to react.

My uncle, similar would walk up to you and cold cock you if he thought you were thinking something negative about him.

I mean, it didn't take any action, so between the two of them they really made a very.

A very strong man.

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews between 1939 and 1945, across German occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and their collaborators systematically murdered 6 million Jews, around two thirds of Europe's Jewish population, 1.5 million were children.

As time passes, those who survive the Final Solution are quickly fading into history.

Soon, there will no longer be eyewitness testimony of the evil of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

Generation to generation is a documentary series in which the torch of remembrance is passed to the children and grandchildren of survivors, whose turn it is to share the subsequent generations painful stories to share, but testimony that needs to be passed on.

Otherwise history can and will repeat itself.

If that happens, the lessons passed on by the survivors will extinguish like the flame on a candle.

My name is Al Bromberg.

I was born of Bromberg, which was named.

I was named after my grandfather.

I am the proud son of two survivors of death camps, and as such, I'm also the titular patriarch of this family.

The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1000 years.

For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world.

My father, Hirsch live Bromberg Harry Bromberg was born in on May 8th, 1919, and Stanislav of Poland.

He was the 10th of 13 children, and his father, Avraham Bromberg, and his mother, Haya Pinkus Bromberg, were just regular people.

They were very nice, very well regarded by both Jews and.

Non-Jews in silence.

Slava, which was actually, I can't even call it a town.

I'd have to say it was a village.

So it's important to me that even in this situation where they had lived there for 400 years and everybody know that they were very productive.

I mean, they went from being tanners to establishing a factory that made the tops of shoes, and they became the largest employer in Volvic.

So which is a county.

So I was very proud of my family.

They all worked in the in the business.

They were all involved and they were, as I say, nonsectarian.

But they did believe in Judaism.

They did keep the Sabbath and they attended services on the holidays.

Let me say that Poland was a country that was an enigma.

We were invited there by customary, so great to form their middle class.

We flourished.

We did well.

Of course, it always fluctuated depending on who was the king in charge, who the nobles were.

But mostly Poland was a haven for Jews.

When they were being slaughtered during the Crusades.

Casimir allowed them to come there and become, you know, an important part of society that continued on for 600 years.

My mother used to say that Polish children learned anti-Semitism at their mother's breasts.

It was an inherent attribute.

There was something that they absolutely learned from from a very young age.

Now, let me also say there were some wonderful Polish people, and there were some a lot of people that didn't buy into that, you know, of the of all the people that were granted Righteous Among the Nations, 7200 of them were poles.

That's the most of any nation in the world.

Now, you got to remember, that was representative of 31 million people.

In 1935.

My grandfather, who was a very well respected man in in that part of Poland, died suddenly.

He actually contracted tuberculosis from a friend who didn't have a family who he administered to and helped through his sickness.

So as you can see imagine, it was a terrible loss to the family personally, but also to the to the business.

The strongest person in my family was an aunt who assumed control of the business and the family structure.

Problem with that was that she was insane.

Today she would be categorized as bipolar and schizophrenic.

Then she was just kind of mean, hateful and moody.

So basically she reduced the rest of the family to slave status.

They still worked in the in the business, but they worked as laborers as opposed to, you know, running the business.

She actually, without even consulting with them or with my grandmother, indentured my father and his younger brother to a shoe repair man in Warsaw.

So they were shipped off to Warsaw to work.

And they did.

They worked every single day, including Sunday.

He allowed them time on on Saturday, the Sabbath.

But other than that, they worked, and that's all they did.

So with World War Two approaching, they were located there in Warsaw.

They really had no life.

And they did flourish because they learned that aspect of of the business before they had been manufacturers.

Now they were actually making students.

They were actually repairing students.

So that would end up helping them in the end.

But the sad thing is that the business also suffered because she was kind of crazy, and she actually offended and insulted customers.

So they lost market share.

For months prior to the beginning of World War Two, German newspapers and leaders had carried out a national and international propaganda campaign accusing Polish authorities of organizing or tolerating violent ethnic cleansing of Germans living in Poland.

I have to say to you that there was no doubt in Jewish minds that Hitler would invade Poland.

I mean, Poland was a fertile flatland.

It absolutely had everything to Hitler wanted to embellish his Labin drought round program room to live.

It was a great producer of agricultural products, and Germany had never been self-sufficient.

So they needed that.

In addition to that, Hitler looked at the Polish populace and saw 30 million slave laborers.

He had every intention of eliminating them or reducing them to a manageable herd of laborers, just as he was going to eliminate the Jews altogether.

So they knew what had happened in Germany.

They knew what happened in Austria.

They knew what happened in Czechoslovakia, and they knew that they were going to be invaded.

Poland made all kinds of noises.

How they were going to strike back with a hell bent for leather cavalry charge.

And they were better suited for war in the century beforehand than they were now.

In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi Soviet pact.

Pact was signed on the 23rd of August 1939 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Stalin saw the pact as a way to keep the Soviet Union at peace with Germany, and to give him time to build up the military, while Hitler wanted to invade Poland without opposition from a major power.

On September 1st, 1939, one week after the pack was signed, Germany invaded Poland.

On the 3rd of September 1939, Great Britain and France would declare war on Germany, and two weeks later the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east.

World War Two had begun.

When Germany attacked Poland.

My father and his brother similar were in Warsaw.

Two of their older brothers were also living in Warsaw with their families.

Two of their older brothers were living in Lodge, which was a huge industrial complex, and his mother, his youngest brother Noah, and his youngest sister by Mendel and her baby were in Sonja Slovo.

After almost 30 days of heavy bombing and shelling of Warsaw, Poland surrendered on the 28th of September 1939, the day before 140,000 Polish troops were taken prisoner.

When it was obvious that Poland was going to fall.

My father and uncle left Warsaw to go to Sonja Slovo to take care of their their mother, sister and youngest brother.

They had to travel through the countryside, not use the roads, because both sides, the poles and the Germans were killing.

Everybody that came into contact with the poles would claim that young men who were traveling through through Poland were deserters.

The Germans would would kill them because they, you know, they make them drop their pants and see they were circumcised and say, you're Jews by.

So basically, it took them quite a while to actually get to Sonja.

Slava, even though it's not that that much of a distance.

The German occupation of Poland was exceptionally brutal.

After defeating the Polish Army in September 1939, German authorities ruthlessly suppressed the poles.

German policies sought to destroy the Polish nation and culture and exploit poles for forced labor.

Life began to change significantly before the capitulation.

Lodge, which was where my mother grew up, was in, in large context, a German town.

There were four hours from Berlin by car.

There was a huge number of ethnic Germans in in Lodge, and they actually worked in conjunction with the Nazis to overcome the city and to identify wealthy Jews, Polish intelligentsia, where the military facilities were, and everything about a life in lodge that would help the German army to ever come them.

They and they did.

Lodge was taken in on September the 8th.

Again.

Germany invaded on September the 1st.

The eighth they had dominion over lodge.

They instituted the same reprehensible directives that they had on the German Jews and the Austrian Jews.

The limitations were immediately put into effect, which was, you know, Jews couldn't ride public transportation, Jews couldn't utilize public parks, Jews couldn't go to public schools, Jews couldn't shop in in Aryan stores areas, couldn't be treated by Jewish professional doctors or psychiatrists or lawyers.

All these things became a reality immediately.

Now, Warsaw actually didn't surrender until the 28th of September, and by that point, the rest of Poland was pretty well, you know, consumed and actually started to change.

Now central Poland really.

Started to feel the the oppressors boot.

After the after mayor starts, he surrendered.

I think that the most important thing to remember is that Poland really was not prepared for the onslaught that they, they faced, and the Jews thought they were prepared, but in large part they weren't.

They really, you know, it's difficult to fathom what that kind of of demeaning action will, will, you know, to create.

Because the thing that that to me would have been the most difficult, you know, all all these directives about what you can't do is one thing, but to be treated with such disregard, with such despicable hatred is something that would that I really could not fathom.

And I'm sure they couldn't either.

My uncle and my father and uncle had gone to the bug River to try to to cross.

They were young men.

They were.

They were, you know, healthy and they were, you know, substantial specimens they actually couldn't cross.

So they joined a group of young men that were trying to find a way to get across.

In the interim, my father got a job working for a local shoemaker and was able to buy food for he and his brother while there waiting.

They lived in fields.

They lived hand them out day to day, constantly looking for a way to cross.

One day while my father was working, my uncle and a friend found a way to cross.

The ultimate goal was to get away.

So regrettably, he went.

He went and my father was was alone.

However, he harbored no harsh feeling because he was glad that his brother was able to get away.

And the good thing about it was that from that point on, he didn't have to worry about his brother's safety.

He just had to worry about himself.

On the 22nd of June, 1941, Nazi Germany lost the surprise attack against the Soviet Union, its ally in the war against Poland.

By the end of the year, German troops had advanced hundreds of miles to the outskirts of Moscow.

My father ended up in Russia because, as the German, when the Germans first invaded Russia in June.

On June 21st, 1941.

The invasion was incredibly successful.

They made huge advancements.

They actually took over Ukraine in no time.

They were driving towards Moscow.

They were obliterating everything in sight, including murdering people at an incredible rate.

I mean, they would, of course, shoot every Jew they ran into, but they were also massacring Russian people because, again, in their estimation, Slavs, anyone who wasn't what they call Aryan was actually a subhuman, really wasn't of any consequence.

The only thing they were good for was for slave labor, so they would keep a pool of them for that.

But other than that, they had no use for them.

They didn't want to feed them.

They didn't want them breathing their air.

They felt like that was a travesty against the noble German purpose.

So they brought the work commandos from Poland, because when summer turned to fall and the rains came, the roads became mud and I mean deep mud.

And of course, when when the freezing came, they turned to ice.

But when they were mud, they needed these Jewish slaves to push the tanks, the armaments and the trucks of the mud and get them rolling towards towards Moscow.

So they were in Belarus.

And that's how he ended up coming to Russia.

Let me say that most of that commando, when they were no longer a value, were murdered.

My father again was blessed to have learned how to repair and make shoes, which was a critical profession for him.

That was something that really saved his life.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 further heightened demands on the war economy and in turn for labor.

At the same time, this invasion brought thousands of potential new workers from Nazi occupied Europe.

I want to say right now that before I tell you about the labor camps and the conditions, I want to say that the insanity, the hatred of the Germans for the Jews was insatiable.

There were over 44,000 labor camps, transit camps, bordellos, children's camps, concentration camps, death camps, 44,000.

And they devoted 500,000 German soldiers, SS and various others to administer these.

In addition to that, they recruited almost a million Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians to act as concentration camp guards, and all these resources and the cost were detracting from their war effort.

Had they not done that, who knows what could have happened?

So my Jewish brethren saved the world in one respect.

My father was in nine different camps, and that doesn't include the initial camp or that was a commando, because basically anything, any task they had to do was considered a commando.

There was no physical camp for that.

That particular camp, when it was over, they killed everybody.

My father, because of his ability to fix Jews, was sent to a hellhole called blazing.

Blizzard was an actual work camp, and it was commanded by an insane man who actually developed different methods of more efficiently killing Jews.

He was the one who actually toyed with the idea of killing multiple Jews with one bullet, which actually was finally realized by in the place of concentration camp.

The whole place was like an insane asylum.

It was torture.

It was brutality.

It was degradation.

But more important than anything that my father expressed was hunger.

He said, you just don't have any idea what hunger can do to you.

People absolutely do things that they never would have considered when they're starving.

Hunger is a terrible thing that would drive a man to do things he would never normally do.

But dignity and humanity are more important when you can't help your fellow man than life has no meaning.

Harry Bromberg As in most Nazi camps, conditions and forced labor camps were inadequate.

Inmates were only seen as temporary, and then the Nazis view could always be replaced with others.

There was a complete disregard for the health of prisoners.

They were subject to insufficiency of food, equipment, medicine and clothing whilst working long hours.

There was little to no time for rest or breaks, and as a result of these conditions, death rates in labor camps were extremely high.

Also, while in Blizzard they were being fed rotten turnip soup and bread largely composed of sawdust, so they certainly weren't being fed enough to keep up with the the workload.

My father spied some potato peels at the edge of a cesspool.

So he gathered them up and he he ate them because, again, starvation and hunger is something that we have no concept of.

But to them, it was it was real.

It was actual.

It was ever present.

He also succumbed to typhus in that camp because of the unsanitary conditions.

There was a massive typhus epidemic.

This man had an incredible will to live, had a mission, and he was not going to be denied that mission.

They had a pile of dead in each barrack that were were taken away every morning to be cremated and buried.

He was thrown into the pile three times.

Twice he crawled out the third time.

He didn't have the energy to even crawl out, but he lifted his arm.

And there was a man, a large man.

And.

He didn't know who he was.

He didn't know how he got there.

He didn't know what purpose there was for him to be there, other than the man took his hand and drug him out of the pile of dead, took him to the infirmary and nursed him back to semi health, gave him part of his rations, and told him that if he would come back that he would give him other rations.

She had to send him back to work, because otherwise they would have killed him as a malingering.

My father did go back to find the man, and nobody knew who he was talking about.

Nobody acknowledged that they they knew that such a man existed and he wasn't there.

My father was always a man who took up for the the underdog in this camp, in every hut there would be a person they called a couple.

And again, this was taken from the Roman Empire.

A would be a man who was in charge in this particular hut there was a huge Ukrainian man named eager, who was had been a criminal and who.

Had a penchant for beating people.

He decided to take the lowest common denominator, and he started beating this young Jewish boy from from Warsaw.

And he absolutely brutalized the kid.

And everybody stood around.

And finally my father said, Egor, stop.

It's enough.

And of course, he didn't stop.

So my father took off his wooden shoe and cracked Eggers skull open for that.

He he was.

They didn't kill him because they really needed his his ability.

So they whipped him until he passed out.

And he had those scars till the day he died.

But the boy that lived, the boy managed to live.

So that was one measure of his humanity he would not allow.

Some innocent person to be beaten to death.

So my dad was in several camps, several world camps and death camps and concentration camps.

And the ones that are most prominent in my mind, of course, were Blizzard and Krasny.

Boards were camps, and my neck and a subcamp of Auschwitz as death camps.

And then, of course, of place was a terrible place because again, there was a lunatic and insane man running it, and they absolutely were in constant fear of sudden death.

This man would just shoot somebody just to see which way they fell.

On the 6th of June, 1944, nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed along the 50 mile stretch of a heavily fortified French coastline to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France.

More than 5000 ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion.

By the 30th of June, over 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles and 570,000 tons of supplies had landed on Normandy shores.

The allies had gained a foothold on continental Europe, with the Soviet Union advancing from the east, the German Third Reich began to crumble.

Yet as the Germans knew they were going to lose the war, their main objective was to finish off the Jews and hide their evidence.

When Plowshare was scheduled to be closed, my father was transferred by rail and cattle cars with excrement up to his ankles, Cadillacs up to his ankles, to my toes.

And in Austria, the trip was grueling.

At least a third of the people on the train died from he this fixation thirst because they could only travel at night because the allies were bombing the rail lines.

Also, the troop transports for the Eastern Front had priority, so a lot of times they would have to sit for a day in the grueling heat, without water, without air.

You can imagine how disgusting it was.

And people just perished just from being in that that environment.

When they got to Matoran in Austria, most of the people that transport were sent to a subcamp called Melk.

MLK milk was unique because it was one of the first camps that was built strictly for the attrition of Jews.

It was built to make their lives as difficult as it could be, so they would just perish.

While they were working, there was a camp that they would carry rocks from one place to another.

No rhyme or reason, no benefit.

Just did it.

Supposedly they were going to build underground munitions, but that wasn't going to happen at that point in the war.

So a lot of them did die.

Fortunately, they found out that my dad was a shoemaker.

So again, he was saved by the the need for that profession.

And he was sent to a camp in the south of Austria, which is part of Salzburg.

ABC Lensing all the areas around there that even included Birches Garden and.

He he got there and it was a camp with about 16,000 prisoners.

My dad said that when he got there, he just couldn't believe the countryside around him.

And he said the mountains were so high that even God couldn't couldn't see him there.

Even God didn't know what they were going through.

And it was a hellhole again.

Starvation, deprivation, beatings, torture, every camp, no matter how small, had facilities for cremation and most of them had some form of gas chamber every camp.

With allies closing in from the west and the Soviets fully entrenched in Berlin.

Adolf Hitler killed himself on the 30th of April, 1945.

On the 7th of May 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender.

The war in Europe was over.

The day before liberation, before the American troops liberated them, the Germans had received instructions from Heinrich Himmler to destroy every inmate, to kill every one of them.

Not one of them were to be taken alive.

The commandant of ABC attempted to do that.

They tried to get they didn't have enough ammunition, so they tried to get the the prisoners to go into the tunnels under the camp.

And they were used to make armaments.

And they for their own safety because they were going to be bombed.

They didn't want them to to die, you know, which was insanity.

And everybody knew it.

So they refused.

They absolutely refused.

You hear these stories about Jews succumbing and just walking quietly into gas chambers.

Who?

That didn't happen.

There were all kinds of of small revolts.

There were all kinds of people who said, no, I'm not going to do it and and fought them.

But what do you do against machine guns?

How do you manage to to overcome that, when all you have is this and when you're emaciated?

And that's what the inmates of Avonside did.

They refused.

They were ready to fight.

So the German said, well, we'll take you down there tomorrow, but you're going to go well overnight.

They all disappeared, all the Nazis disappeared.

And the next day the American soldiers came in and they were liberated.

Now, that date was made the sixth.

The official liberation date for ABC was made the eighth.

And that was my father's birthday.

At the end of World War two, the allies liberated thousands of prisoners from Nazi camps across the territories previously occupied by the Third Reich.

When my father was liberated from Avon's, they were actually kept there.

The the environs were cleaned up, the hospital in town.

Several of the institutions in town were used to house the terminally sick.

I mean, most of them were actually dying of starvation.

The Americans, thanks to their wonderful disposition and humanity, did everything they could to make these inmates feel like they were worthwhile and human.

They gave them an abundance of food.

Now, these were people who hadn't had food.

Real food in years.

And you can't just just like you can't starve somebody in a day.

You can't teach them to eat again in a day.

So many of them died from the richness of the of the food.

They were they were given.

Many of them couldn't absorb it, couldn't digest it.

And of course, they stuffed themselves.

You know, if you haven't eaten and you were, you know, a fraction.

I mean, my dad, when the war broke out, weighed 183 pounds.

It was the equivalent of 183 pounds.

When he was liberated, he weighed 82 pounds.

The allies wanted to return the Jews, whom they'd liberated from the Nazi concentration and death camps, to their countries of origin.

Most of the liberated Jews from Western European countries and from Czechoslovakia, in fact, went back to their former homes and renewed their lives there.

The wonderful thing about it is through the the help and the mentoring of the American medics with the food, with the normal regimen, many of them started to to flourish and do well.

Within a month, my dad was up to 120 pounds.

But the main thing that is important is that now was the time for recognition.

The Americans needed the assistance of some of the prisoners to administer law and and normality.

My father, because of his integrity, was chosen by his fellow inmates to be the liaison to the American Army for the distribution of food, clothing, medicine, and some of the vital things that they needed.

One for that region, for the South Commerce.

So he had to travel to several camps in order to do this job.

He had one problem.

There was one caveat.

He didn't know how to drive a car, so they recruited one of the other guys.

I knew how to drive, so he had a chauffeur and he did drive.

One of the camps he went to was a women's camp, told lensing.

And in lensing, there were 500 young women and Jewish women who had managed to survive.

One of them was my mother.

Now here was this young, nice looking guy with a lot of authority who showed up and remember, he was a country Jew.

He really wasn't sophisticated.

He didn't really understand the art of wooing a woman.

And he was stricken.

My mother was like her.

Her mother.

She was beautiful.

Even after the deprivation she had suffered.

And of course, he really was taken to her.

So he went to her and asked her, would you like to take a ride?

And she said, I'll tell you where you can take a ride.

She said, I'm not interested in any of your B.S.

substantially so.

He was rebuked, but he wasn't going to give up.

I mean, he made several unnecessary trips to Lansing to try to win her over, and he finally did.

He finally did.

Many liberated Jews from Poland, Hungary, Romania and other Eastern European countries did not want to go back there.

And between 1945 and 1952, more than 250,000 Jews lived in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy till they were able to resettle into other countries, with the bulk eventually making their way to the United States.

My parents, my father especially, had a burning desire to go to Palestine and fight and help redeem our nation of Israel.

Of course, at that time it was called Palestine.

It was a English protectorate.

First, he wanted to go back to Poland to see if they could find any living relatives.

I mean, we had a huge family.

We had a family of over 200 people.

My mother was an emotional wreck.

There was no way that she could contemplate stepping foot into Poland again.

And that was the caveat.

She wouldn't marry him if he insisted on going back to Poland.

So love one over.

He he said, no, we won't go to Poland, we're going to Israel, we're going to Israel.

And so two weeks later, they were moved to what was called a kibbutz.

It was actually a DP camp on the Adriatic in Barletta that was made into a. The same conditions as a kibbutz in Israel.

They worked the land, they had cattle, they had sheep, they had chickens.

They learned to become farmers.

They learned to live together in a commune, if you will.

And they were so enthused.

They were so thrilled.

My father was beside himself, because that was really one of the dreams he had.

If I ever lived through this, I'm going to Harrods.

He didn't get that dream because she became pregnant with me after experiencing the atrocities of the Holocaust and after the loss of 6 million European Jews, with almost 2 million of those being children, it is hard to believe that anyone would have the capability to have any semblance of a normal life.

Let me tell you about my my life in the DP camp.

Now.

Again, I didn't know what luxury was.

I didn't know what poverty was.

I didn't know what anything was.

I was just a child.

The DP camp was actually a converted insane asylum that was made into a residence for survivors of the Holocaust.

I do remember some things about it that were kind of strange at the time, although not strange because I really didn't know any better.

One thing was we didn't have any teenagers or pre-pubescent children.

There were no old people.

Now, again, we were a insular place and we came into contact with each other and not really the general public at first.

So I didn't think there were old people.

I mean, I didn't know what old people were.

I didn't think there were teenagers, but there were families, you know, a man and a woman.

Generally in their late teens to mid 20s, there was a harvest of babies.

Everybody had a baby.

And they were all the same age.

I mean, they were all born within a month or two of each other.

We lived in one room with one window, with one cot was a communal toilet shared by eight other families.

A communal kitchen and a hot plate.

My parents felt like it was the Taj Mahal compared to what they had endured for the past six years, I remember that.

Everyone was talking about going to Israel or going to America, and we of course we're going to America.

I mean, there was no if Andrew buts about it.

I remember people sitting around speaking in whispers about America, America, what a wonderful place.

And, you know, the example we had were the American GIS who were just the most humane people that that we'd ever met.

We thought any place that that developed, young people like that had to be heaven.

And they would sit around and talk about how the streets were paved with gold, how the abundance of food was there.

And remember, these are people.

That food was important to them because they'd been starved.

How nobody had to like you, but they couldn't kill you.

I mean, that was a real benefit.

And it was a very, very unique situation.

I mean, I've remembered it, thought about it all my life.

We didn't, as I mentioned, have grandparents, old people.

Hence we didn't have grandparents.

I didn't even understand the concept of grandparents until I came to America and everybody else had them.

The last DP camp was finally closed in 1957, 12 years after the end of the war.

We arrived at Ellis Island on two days before Thanksgiving in 1949.

Actually, we were sponsored by my grandfather's youngest brother, who emigrated to the United States in 1919 because he had fallen hopelessly in love with a first cousin.

Of course, that was never going to come to fruition, so he brought his broken heart to the United States.

He lived in New York City for a while, ended up in Newport News, Virginia with a pushcart, and ultimately opened up Bromberg Department Store on Jefferson Avenue in Newport News.

At any rate, he found out that we had survived, and he sponsored us to come to the United States.

So we initially went to Newport News, where he lived, and shortly after that moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, where my father got a job and we lived there for 31 years.

There is a Jewish proverb that goes as follows A little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness.

My dad refused to be denigrated and not for for the classical.

He really did walk the walk as well as talking to talk.

He was a man who.

Commanded respect because of the way he lived.

He absolutely was exceptional in the in the respect that he could find in his heart at a time that nobody cared about anybody to care about everybody.

He truly lives his entire life that way.

Before the war, during the war, after the war.

To me, he was that unattainable person that I wanted to be when I was in the service, when I was.

In anything that I ever did, anytime I felt fear or danger, I asked myself, what would my dad have done?

And he always brought me through those moments.

I. Really feel like I could never have the courage to he had.

I had the temerity one time to ask him, why didn't you all fight back?

Why didn't you all do do more?

Why did you allow them to march people into the gas chambers?

And he looked at me and he said, you know, you seem to have a lot of courage and yet you've never lived through this kind of thing.

He said, I could have wasted my life.

I could have attacked one Nazi and been shot right there on the spot and died.

But as it was, I was able to help a lot of people.

And it's all because I practiced humility and because I believe there was a greater responsibility than just myself.

And, you know, I looked at him.

It felt so small.

I felt like you have just learned the most important lesson in life.

And from that, I know that the one thing that my dad would never relinquish was his dignity.

It's interesting how I came to little Rock.

Basically, I was freshly divorced from a really bad relationship, and I was really thrilled about that.

But I was kind of at loose ends.

I went to work for new company.

They gave me an elevated position, but they said that I had two choices.

I could either go to an opening in Huntsville, Alabama or little Rock, Arkansas.

So I said, flip a coin.

And they did.

And little Rock one.

Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you.

Show me the way I should go for you I entrust my life.

Psalm 143, verse eight.

My name is Nelda Bromberg and I am the wife of Al Bromberg.

I like to tell the story of how I met al because it's really kind of interesting.

I think I really didn't meet him except on a blind date, and it was interesting that a secretary who worked at the ad agency where I work also lived at the complex where al lived, and she kept telling al that he should call this woman at the agency for a date.

And my daughter was working at the same club, and she kept telling al that he should call her mother for a date, and he had no idea that this person was the same person, you know?

And finally, he did decide to call me.

And we I really asked for a rain check because I didn't know him at all.

I had never met him, didn't know anything about him.

And when my daughter got home that night, I asked her about him and she said, oh mom, she said he is a nice guy.

And she went on and on about him.

And then she and exasperation said, mom, you don't have to marry him.

It's just a date.

It's just a dinner date.

And so anyway, I we made arrangements to go out and al got a half dozen roses and I had those, and I thought that I was really impressed with that.

And he was such a gentleman, and I really did like him a lot and was hoping that he would ask me out again.

And he did.

And I was just so happened that that weekend I was flying to Kansas City for a focus group that I was conducting for a client.

And so I get to Kansas City and I check into the hotel, and there's a half dozen roses on the dresser, and the card said, here's the other half.

Now, who who wouldn't love a man like that?

Well, know that I became in love, and it was obvious we were going to want to spend the rest of our lives together.

I called my parents to tell them that I had met a woman that meant the world to me, and that I was going to to marry her, and that she wasn't Jewish.

And at that time, that was not yet Jewish.

Kids didn't marry out of the faith.

If they did, there was a ritual that most parents would follow, and that was to declare them dead.

Tear their their clothing, cover all the mirrors, sit on uncomfortable stools and sit shiva.

What morning?

Basically for seven days.

And I fully expected that to happen.

And it didn't.

I mean, apparently they loved me more than the tradition.

And as they met Nelda and came to know her, they loved her more than they did me.

I mean, I can say that with with the sureness and they really my mother used to call her the righteous Christian.

I didn't really know anything about Al's parents being involved in the in the Holocaust.

It was just something that actually, we didn't really discuss anything about our heritage or backgrounds or anything very much when we first started dating, about the time that I guess it was about the time that al had started talking about me to his parents.

His mother paid a visit to little Rock to check me out, I think.

And and during one of our conversations, she made some comment about the fact that she was Jewish and I said, oh, so al is Jewish?

And she said, yes, you didn't know.

And then she turned to him and she said, Alfie, I think there are some things you haven't talked about that you need to tell her.

You need to tell her about your family.

Well, I we did have those discussions then, but it had really been too early in our relationship for him to get into that kind of a story or involvement until we really knew that we were serious.

And so at that point, we did.

He did tell me about his family, and I'll tell you, it was it was heavy for me.

I didn't know that much about the Holocaust.

I knew, actually, I knew very, very little about the Holocaust at that time.

And the tears just streamed down my face.

I had never heard anything so horrible, so awful as the first accounts that I heard from al about his family.

My name is Tammy Johnson, Nelda Bromberg is my mom, and Al Bromberg is my stepdad for the last 45 years.

My name is Wendell Brown.

Al Bromberg is my stepfather, married to my mother and elder.

My name is Spencer Johnson.

My relationship to Alice is my grandfather.

My name is Noah Bromberg, and al is my grandfather.

On my father's side, I really wasn't aware of their Holocaust past for really quite some time.

They didn't discuss that with with us, and I think it took a while for them to open up.

Even, you know, to mom, I know that that al did discuss it with my mother, you know, privately.

But it wasn't something that that they shared openly.

They were very kept that close to their vest.

And later on, when I did understand what had happened.

It was very shocking.

So I know a decent amount about the Holocaust through history class and stuff.

I didn't have the opportunity to meet Al's parents as much as I wish I would have, but I do know the pain and what it put his people through, and I would never want to ever see that happen again.

My first real understanding of my cultural heritage was probably when I was about nine years old.

I visited my great grandmother, who I had only really talked to on the phone from at this point, and I had visited her when I was very young, but I don't remember it.

This is like my first real interaction that I remember with her, and I remember knowing what the Holocaust was, just not knowing the significance, because my emotional maturity at nine years old was not really capable of understanding something like that.

And I kept asking what it was like.

I kept poking at it, and eventually she told me the way she had to survive.

She told me that there were people that would dump hot coffee grounds on the floor because they had just brewed coffee, and they were starving and so hungry because they weren't being fed in this concentration camp that she would eat coffee grounds off the floor, and that it would burn her throat and esophagus, and it would just hurt so bad.

But it was better than the pain from starving to death because there was no food.

And at nine years old, that was my first real understanding of the suffering that my family had to go through.

I had never had to process anything like that before.

It was a complete shock.

Baba came aware of the Holocaust through the Seder dinners that we would have.

They were all really prepared those and had so much about the history, what his parents went through, what his uncles went through.

It was very it just felt a solemn time to wear it.

It made you think about what the things that they went through, the horrors that they that they experienced.

And it was it just really hurt.

It just really hurts your heart that human beings could be that mean to each other.

I want you to know, my dad was the ultimate pragmatist.

He really and truly had a great set of ideals and principles they lived by.

He had a very narrow set of rules, but I always complained about how expensive it was to raise a family and to survive and to supply everything that everybody needed.

And he looked at me and said, you know, if the only problem you have is money, you don't have a problem at all.

So basically, he was saying to me that there are things that are more important in this world than than money.

There was life itself, safety, security, and more important than anything, love.

I think that family is extremely important to my grandparents.

They're almost obsessed with it, because I feel like that's the only thing that truly matters in this world is family.

The Holocaust absolutely affected al.

There's there's no doubt about it.

And how could it have not?

He wanted a good life for his son, Aaron.

And I think, given that his father was hard on him for the same reason that that's he parented kind of like his father did and could be harsh, but he loved him so much, and I think it was very difficult to walk that balance of being a really good father, but being so afraid to lose something, he just wanted him to be and grow up to be the very best person that he could be.

And so he was a little hard on him, and I saw that.

And I'm sure it's from the way that he was raised.

Family was very important to to Harry Bromberg pop.

I think probably family would be maybe more important to people like them.

And the displaced persons persons camp in Italy where al was born.

I was told that all of the survivors were having children.

They were trying to recapture the families that they had lost to build new families for the future.

So family was probably more important to them than it is even to most people.

My father was a very stoic, strict man.

He lived by an ethic that is almost impossible to emulate.

He had impeccable integrity.

He had strength of character.

He had a soul that was one of the kindest I've ever met.

You know, if he had something and somebody admired it, he'd give it to him.

He was that generous.

He also was a man who had an incredible work ethic.

And that's one of the things that that I learned from him.

I didn't know there was any other way to work than full out.

And to the best of your ability, and to be the best at what you do, not necessarily for advancement, but because that's what you're supposed to do.

So he taught me the tenets of being a man.

He taught me that my responsibility is not only to my immediate family, but also to my world family.

That to.

To really be a man, you had to care about others.

And that was kind of the theme of his life.

He really did.

He really did.

He sacrificed the times for others.

And, you know, I learned that humility because he never boasted about the things he did.

And decency are things that you have to have.

And the one thing that he taught me that he learned in the camps was that you can be the man, you can curse him, you can gas him, but you can't kill the spirit of a man who refuses to be dehumanized.

Ending up in Paragould is kind of anticlimactic.

You know, when Nelson I met, she brought me home to meet her family, and it was a quaint little town.

Very, very provincial.

At that time, there was not even a McDonald's here.

It was just a small town.

Less than 10,000 people.

It was nice and quiet, mostly agrarian.

So, you know, there was a lot of farming and there were a couple of factories, but that was pretty much it.

We we came here and I met them.

They were all lovely people, very caring, very nice, very, very much protective of Nelda, you know, they didn't know who I was or what I was about and at any rate.

But they were very, very nice and accommodating.

I liked the town, but I never visualized myself living here, you know, again, I came from a very small town in Virginia, Portsmouth, and I couldn't wait to get out of there.

But later on in life, my values reverted, and I really did relish the quiet, the closeness, the ambiance of of a small town.

We retired and moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, had a beautiful place on Lake Hamilton, and when we moved there it was very quiet, pastoral and, beautiful.

And as we lived there, things got a little bit more hectic.

We'd have people that would come out and dock overnight by our boat dock and play rap music all night and and drink beer and raise cane.

And then we lived in a gated community.

And finally I had a car stolen out of my garage.

So and then in addition to that, crime started to, to accelerate.

We heard heard sirens all night long.

So I said, you know, it's probably time for us to to look around.

And she wanted to go back to little Rock.

And I said, you know, I think little Rock is at least as bad as this or even worse, let's let's explore some other possibilities.

So we thought about Ecuador and we had lived in Florida and that was beautiful.

But then we had the the tension and the worry about hurricanes and that sort of thing.

So we came to Paragould to look around.

She has a brother and a sister here.

And.

She really didn't want to, but she sacrificed for me.

I really, I liked it.

I thought it was really a very, you know, worthwhile place to live.

So before we left, we bought a house, this house, and went back and sold our place there on the lake, moved up here and and I love it.

I mean, I love the fact that I know the mayor and I just say that because everybody does.

Yeah.

I'm Josh Agee, a mayor of Périgord, Arkansas.

I think the thing that jumps out most when you come into our community is the people.

The people are always kind and welcoming, and we have a community spirit here that, you know, I always say that our slogan in Paragould is we're the one and only.

And sometimes we get to thinking that that makes us unique because of our name.

But there are towns all over the United States that are 30,000 people.

But what makes us unique is the community spirit.

Even though we're a town of 30, 35,000 people, we still have a small community feel.

You go downtown to a festival and it seems like everyone knows everyone, and we all get along with each other, and we've been able to really move things forward because we work together and don't have egos in our community.

So it's a really good it's a good place to live, work and play.

Raise a family.

I've met al through recently through his story and I didn't I didn't know al before then, but his story and what he's trying to accomplish here have been out for, I think, our entire community.

Dwight Designer, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, wrote, I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify firsthand about these things in case there ever grew up at home.

The belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.

Back in 2011, I had the opportunity to take my oldest daughter at the time to Washington, D.C.

we visited the Holocaust Museum.

We were out there, and I'll never forget taking her through there.

She had just turned 16 and taken her through there at a young, impressionable age, not much older than Anne Frank was when she wrote, you know, her diaries and going through that Holocaust museum, it affected us.

It affected me and my wife.

My wife was pregnant at the time, and it affected my oldest daughter and let her know that things like this can happen.

And I think that one thing that really jumps out to me the most and, you know, over in Memphis, we have the Lorraine, the Civil Rights Museum over there where Doctor King was killed.

And when you visit the Civil Rights Museum or you visit the Holocaust Museum, you realize that it wasn't that long ago that this happened, you know, to make it personal for me, it's been about 30 years since I graduated high school.

And I look back and when I graduated high school, the things that happened in Memphis in the 60s were 30 years before then.

So I look at, you know, even though a lot of times we go to these museums, you go to the Holocaust Museum, you go to the Civil Rights Museum, and you see these photos.

And because they're in black and white, there's a disconnect.

But when you think about this, during the 60s, my mother was a young a young girl during the 30s and 40s when we were dealing with the the German invasion and all of that, my grandparents, who were still alive and still have those stories, they lived through that.

So just because history puts it in a different format doesn't mean that it was such a long time ago.

There are still people here like al that have personal connections.

And, you know, we have to be vigilant and make sure that we don't let those things happen again, because I think you can see easily through, through the eyes of history that it doesn't take very much.

That old saying, all it takes is for for bad to win is for good people to stand by and do nothing.

And I think that's one of the things that really jumped out to us when we visited the the Holocaust Museum.

I try to be optimistic about the future.

I think that we have a lot of potential to be understanding, and I think we've made a lot of progressive steps in the right direction.

But part of me is very worried because we're losing a generation of people that experience this, people that have actually experienced the Holocaust, that survived the concentration camps, they're gone.

And the only people that really know what happened were the daughters and sons of people that actually survived the Holocaust.

So we need to learn as much as possible from these people, and history will repeat itself.

We need to be very aware of that.

I will not allow the world to forget that this happened, and conversely, I won't allow the world to revise history.

And that's why I'm speaking to various colleges and in high schools.

I have come out of retirement to teach world history, and I absolutely will do.

I've started a. A heritage remembrance group with 5100 members so far, and I'm dedicating myself to the memory of my 200 family members.

For decades after the end of World War Two, the Holocaust conjured up horrific images of people starving in the ghettos.

Train cars full of people heading to concentration camps became ingrained in the pages of history.

The heart wrenching images of children being pulled away from their parents were stinging reminders of a genocide that sought to eliminate the Jewish people, as well as others deemed unfit by the Nazis.

But now, 80 years after the end of the war, memories of the Holocaust are fading.

Sadly, there are troubling signs that its lessons are being forgotten, even in parts of the United States.

Well, I experience a lot of anti-Semitism in school, both from my collegiate professors as well as students in school.

I'm in a lecture class right now, and I just we had a discussion on leadership, and one of the topics we had was good versus bad leadership.

And my professor was comparing Gandhi to Hitler, and he said that Gandhi was a really good example of good leadership.

But then we have Hitler, who was able to persuade a group of people.

And while he did very terrible things and the Holocaust is a terrible thing, he said that Hitler displayed great leadership on his country.

And he wrote this in his book that we're discussing as well.

And I felt very frustrated when I heard this.

So I raised my hand and I said, I don't think that that's leadership.

I said, I think that's brainwashing.

There's a difference.

Manipulation is not leadership.

You're just controlling people.

And there was this girl that I know very well.

She was sitting next to me in class and she says.

Of course, the Jew has something to say about it.

And she looked at me like it was a joke, like it was funny.

I couldn't have had a better role model or role models.

My mother did the very best she could.

She was so affected by what she endured that she never really recovered.

My father told me the story of shortly after, after they were married, that she collapsed in his arms and cried and sobbed and talked about her family.

She knew at that point at that time that there were no survivors.

She couldn't find anybody.

And she sobbed because she didn't feel like she deserved to be the sole survivor.

She said there were such beautiful people in her family who could have given so much more to humanity that she didn't feel worthy of being the standard bearer, and he held her in his arms and told her, you know, you survived because you were the strongest one.

You were the one that was going to carry your family's legacy forward.

Look at this son that you produced.

He's going to grow to be a fine man, and he will cherish your legacy.

And this is truly what life is about caring.

Helping, and being a fine person.

Their story cannot die.

Has it to be missing in its mouth and whatever it is in my lane as it soon.

Light in life.

You is life in to give I is an indoor.

We are here because of you will tell your story.

Live your free to sing your song with courage, faith and hope with horses proud and song.

Love and I see there is to be remembered you.

You're with us.

Everywhere we go.

We hold you safely in our hearts.

We share with you.

Generation.

All the lessons of your was also real.

Since all this you went through will never be forgotten.

Has this true?

Will tell your story to your dreams?

The singular song with his courage, faith and hope.

The Lord is proud and strong.

The world will know your life, your love, your legacy lives on x2.

We will remember you.

We cried until the shadow of the darkest year.

But the joy in your survival gives us the life.

I came only, for instance, you and I, shading today in our failures of Indians to leave us.

List of your stories in your dreams.

I see your soul with courage, faith and hope.

With is Christ on the world will know your life.

Your love is on.

And since two we will remember you.

And since you we will remember.

Everyone has a story that is yet to be told.

Every life is a journey with many chapters to unfold.

Moments filled with joy.

Moments full of pain.

Lessons to be learned.

Sometimes over and over again.

So before you leave.

Before you go.

There's so much more of you I need to know.

So share with me your legacy.

Every memory you oh, don't hold back for fear of tears.

Share the wisdom of your years.

Let us honor who you are and what you seem.

Let us honor all you've done and who you bring.

For the loving relation is waiting.

Let the silence fall away.

Your life is worth celebrating.

Tell your story every day.

Don't hold back for fear of tears.

Share the wisdom of your years.

All the whispers of your past will sing out loud.

Bearing witness to your heart will make you proud.

And you will live forever.

In the hearts and in the minds of those you leave behind as a smile.

Leave your legacy of life, your legacy of love.

And we will smile.

Hello again.

As promised, we are back here in our Arkansas TV studios to dig a little deeper on this important film.

Harry Bromberg story is a stark reminder of the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.

But more importantly, it's a beautiful testament to the strength of the human spirit and the refusal to relinquish one's humanity.

Now, it's my great privilege to introduce our guests for an exclusive question and answer session into the making of this documentary and the enduring legacy of the Bromberg family.

Joining us remotely from California is the film's director, writer and executive producer, Thomas Beavers, and we are honored to be joined by the man who shared his father's story with us all.

Al Bromberg, the son of Harry Bromberg.

Thank you very much both for joining us here.

And if it's all right, let's start with you.

You established from the very beginning that there was a strength and a dignity to what was going on.

Talk a little bit about how your father's character was able to stand through all of the horrors that he was about to experience, when the whole world turned upside down for him?

Let me tell you about my dad.

My dad was a member of a family that had 13 children, so immediately he had to practice patience and be able to deal with so many different personalities.

So that helped him in developing his character.

He was a very strategic kind of guy.

Thomas will tell you that in Poland there were three kinds of Jews, the urban Jews who were very much tradesmen and also industrialists.

The other two types, one is was the Hasidim or the ultra-Orthodox.

And you've seen pictures of them.

They actually are the caricature and the misrepresentation of what Polish Jews were like.

They had the long side curls, wore strange garb, and they lived a life of not working, but of devotion to to prayer.

They found joy and fulfillment and prayer, and that's all they did.

We didn't have a lot in common with them.

The third type would be like my family, and they were from a rural area, and they had lived there in that particular area for 400 years.

They actually.

Live by their wit and realized that the only way they could make a living was to practice a worthwhile trade, something that would that could support the whole family.

The whole family could work.

Helped him.

It did.

It helped him survive what was unimaginable.

And, Thomas, I want to go to you and let's talk about how you connected with the Bromberg family and heard about this story, because your Generations Degeneration series is dedicated to being able to tell these stories of strength and dignity.

Talk a little bit about how you got together with al and the Bromberg family.

Well, I'm second generation, too, so my father is a Holocaust survivor.

And actually I got Ahold of of the Bromberg via my wife.

She had belonged to this a group called the Holocaust grandchild of Holocaust survivors, which I had no idea.

Even existed.

And from there we started communicating back and forth.

He learned about my father's story.

I learned about his story.

And the one thing we do when we make these films is we want something unique, something different.

One thing my father did not like was the Hollywood's portrayal of the Jews in in in the Hollywood portrayal of Jews is not all that accurate.

He said, if you're going to make a films, make sure you do them that are not the typical concentration camp movies.

Make sure they're not on the cattle cars off to the death of the, you know, death march as they go.

I mean, there's some truth to that, but there's so much more to it.

There was so much more going on.

The resistance, the rebellions, the fight.

And that would make Alice story and his father's story unique kind of fell within.

The framework that I'm trying to accomplish is not showing the Jews as a typical, you know, what, you know, lambs of the fodder, but just regular, regular folks who were in a difficult time and did extraordinary things to survive.

And that's kind of how I viewed al and his his father.

And now let's talk about that, because some of the nuances that make this story so interesting and compelling was it was your father's skill set as a shoemaker that ultimately provided the path for him to be kept alive through multiple concentration camps.

He went to nine different camps.

Talk a little bit about what that skill set, how that skill set brought him a path.

And then also, did he ever talk about the psychological toll that all of this had to have had on his soul?

You know, my father showed me nothing but steel at the destruction of his family and the horrors that he went through.

He was not a man to to look for sympathy or or understanding.

He he lived through it, and he decided he was going to be a man and do do everything that he would have done.

Had it not happened.

But I got to tell you that the, the main thing that that being able to make shoes did for him has made him realize the weaknesses that the Nazis had.

He was always amazed they would take doctors, scientists, lawyers, politicians, you know, people that were involved in media and put them to shoveling ditches, you know, digging ditches to.

Making latrines, working, doing work on roads and on airstrips and that sort of thing.

Anything that was backbreaking that they could use to make these professionals feel unworthy and make them feel demeaned.

And, you know, as a subhuman.

Conversely, he had a trade, you know, I mean, they they made shoes.

So he absolutely had a trade that was invaluable to them.

Those guys and tailors, jewelers, people that could, could contribute to the benefit of the Third Reich were all treated with a little bit more decency.

The the main thing is that he got a little bit better rations, which enabled him to help some of his his friends.

But the other thing is that he could look them in the eye.

One of the things that they wouldn't allow is for you to look them in the eye.

And he invariably looked them in the eye.

They.

Didn't like it, but they needed a shoemaker.

So anyway, it did open up some some possibilities to him.

You know, there were a lot of good things that came from from that he got information about how the war was going that he wouldn't have got, as I mentioned, you know, a better, better rations.

Actually, he actually had the opportunity to save some lives.

And we'll talk about that or we do talk about it in the film.

But the the main thing is that he saw that as a benefit.

He never, never looked at it as a privilege.

He looked at it as a benefit to being able to be who he was, which was a good human being.

He refused to be dehumanized.

Thomas, let's talk about as a filmmaker, you tell these stories and you've told multiple stories from the Holocaust.

Do you know this in great detail?

When you hear details like what al just shared and others, how do you process this and be able to convey it in a way that has such a powerful impact on those who watch your films?

Well, I'll take a page out of my father's playbook.

And he was very outgoing.

He told me a lot of the stories that he went through, and he was in the resistance, and so he didn't really talk too much about the Holocaust per se.

But he talked to more about the the military aspect that he particularly partook in.

So when I do these type of films, that's what I want to harp on.

I don't really make them so much of a Holocaust films as they are of films about survival, unique stories about a specific survivor as told to their children.

If I'm lucky to have a survivor to speak, but if not, I have the the the children's speak, the grandchildren speak, and then I kind of mold that into a motion picture to keep the audience glued to what we're talking about.

That's why we have the music we have.

I don't I don't do a typical documentaries where we just sit and have a conversation back and forth.

I want to make it more of a motion picture, more of something that's going to capture the imagination and the mind and educate as well.

There are some details in any story that's long form.

There are going to be some little details, some little nuggets that are going to stick with the viewer just because of the powerful visual image that they create.

And I wanted to talk about a couple of those.

One of them was the the impact of the mystery man when your father, al was had been thrown onto a pile of dead bodies and he was still alive.

And in the past he'd been able to get up, but he only had the strength to move his arm.

And a who he described as a large man, came and pulled him out of that and gave him some food and promised him some further rations.

But yet we never saw that man again.

It's amazing.

You know.

And you've got it.

I mean, it really makes you realize that there is a God and that he does do things that are out of character.

Normally he he believes in giving us free reign.

In this instance, I tend to think maybe my father was one of his instruments and he was not going to let him go.

And I think that large man was God or his representative.

He pulled him out of that pile.

He nursed him back to to health, which in itself was unheard of because it was a time of incredible indifference.

People cared only about themselves.

How am I going to live one more day?

How am I going to get another bite of bread?

How I don't care about about the rest of you?

I it's all about me.

And that was the prevailing thought.

And here a man actually didn't believe in that, you know.

So I think that.

I'm an old man in, in the winter of my life.

And it has always been a point of fascination to me, and a point of making sure that I don't lose my my belief.

Thomas is, as one of the powerful parts of this movie, the fact that we get to know the Bromberg family so well, we get to see some of these details, but then you also are able to weave into it.

The historical context will be seeing the brown bergs, and then we see President Eisenhower and we hear about like the D-Day invasion and things like that.

How does that help you be able to contextualize the the individual story along with the world narrative?

Well, there's a there's a point that al makes in the film where he says there was 500,000 German SS troops assigned to handle the concentration camps, handle the Warsaw Ghetto and things.

Could you imagine if those half a million men were on D-Day, if those half a million men were on the Russian front?

We're probably speaking German today.

They came, and I want to show how close we came to losing the war, how close they came to winning this thing.

And so you want to put it in a historical context.

We get a lot of questions.

Well, how did this happen?

How did pulling false up easily?

What led up to things?

I want to kind of show that.

Also, I want to keep the audience glued to what we're talking about.

I want to put it in context, what Al's father was actually going through at that time, what was going around him in that moment.

And Alan and I always talk about this.

I'm the Beaver Stein.

My father shortened his name when it came to the United States.

I have a real strong belief that the Beaver Stein families and the Bromberg families in Poland, at some, at some point had crossed paths.

And now one of the neat things for me, when I when the when the war came to a conclusion and the US GIS came into the camp and freed the folks there, your father was chosen to be a liaison with the US Army, and that not only spoke to the character that he had, the respect he had from the people that he had been with, but it also led to a very important event.

It allowed him to get to a place where he was able to meet your mother.

Exactly.

And again, I think God interceded because those two were supposed to be together.

She would not have survived without his strength.

My mother was greatly debilitated by her time in the Lodge ghetto and in Auschwitz.

She.

I don't think she ever really recuperated from from the Holocaust.

She.

Loved very deeply.

She was crazy about her grandchildren and great grandchildren.

But I always saw through the laughter and through the smiles, a very deep sadness in her eyes.

And I tried to talk to her.

I did find out quite a bit about her family, but she was a sole survivor.

She spent the rest of her life looking for anybody else that might have survived from her family, and she never was able to reconcile that.

She always felt like she wasn't worthy, like there were other people she she would say there were such beautiful people in my family.

There were people that were so smart that, you know, nobody could have represented her family better than she did.

And to me, she was a gem.

She was a river to her family, you know, her children and and grandchildren.

And she was just a very fine person.

And none of that would have manifested had she not had Harry Bromberg by her side.

That was a touching part of the documentary, when she had that survivor's guilt.

And one of the focal points that helped her was you.

At that point, of course, I was also the reason they couldn't go to Israel, because pregnant women and women with small children could not go to mandated Palestine at that time because they would have to beach the boats and you'd have to fight your way in and to shore.

So that put the the high on that.

But we were so lucky that an uncle who had emigrated in 1916 found out about us through a refugee organization and actually sponsored us to come to the United States.

And my life has been charmed because I am an American citizen and I love this country with all my heart.

I mean, I love it as only an immigrant who.

Face death could have.

Because to me, this is the shining light of the entire world.

And my father felt that way.

Thomas, that's that's powerful.

What al just said right there.

And as history as as this event gets further and further away from our recent memory, how important is it that we continue to tell these stories?

Well, it's extremely important.

One thing I want to emphasize as well, too, is that one, one path that I like to take in these and this kind of answer your question is what happened to the survivors after the Second World War?

Where do they go?

Where did what did they become?

The families they led, the generations that they they were able to, you know, to to expand on.

So as we get further, further away and like I said, I'm second generation.

I'm a little on the younger side of that spectrum.

They're going away.

And if we don't remind the world today, what happened in the past is going to repeat.

Look, what October 7th, you can you turn on the news today.

You turn on read on the internet and there's problems going on all over the world.

There's Christians being massacred.

There's Jews, anti-Semitism on the rise in the United States as we speak.

So it's happening right before our eyes.

And hopefully, if these films can at least remind the world what can happen if we allow this to continue and to and to percolate.

Remember, also in the films, I want to also show that this is just happen overnight.

This Adolf Hitler just walk in one day said, okay, I'm taking over the world.

I'm going to start exterminating Jews.

It was a process.

It started in in early 20s when he became he got radicalized.

Then he had the 30s.

He becomes legally the chancellor of Germany, and then he starts brainwashing the masses of his population.

So and here we are.

Fast forward to World War two.

So it's a process.

It's a steady process.

And if you can see the science now based on what you saw, what we show in the past, hopefully we can prevent it from happening again.

I want to close out with just a couple of comments that really stood out to me about the character of your father.

There was a point in the film where you said you asked your father, why didn't you fight back?

And his response to you was, there's a greater responsibility than just myself.

What did that teach you?

It taught me that dignity itself is being able to care about your fellow human beings.

Because one thing that I really learned from him is that if your whole sole purpose is to gratify yourself, if your sole purpose for for existing is to do for yourself, then you know, it's it's just it's useless.

I mean, if you can't care about your fellow human beings, if you can't feel a need to to act when somebody is being undermined or being treated like a subhuman, you really have no value to the to this world.

And basically I saw that every day.

Every day he lived that that mantra.

And it just made me realize that, you know, I was kind of petty.

I mean, I can't believe that I asked him something like that, you know, I mean, I know I was in war, but I could never muster the courage that he did.

I mean, I just, you know, think that what kind of courage does it take to instinctively act when someone is being beaten to death, knowing that you're going to be killed, too?

And so that that's something that has resonated with me to this day.

I just really realized that because of him, that it's it's a big world and everybody in it is is something that I should care about.

That's a great way to encapsulate what we've experienced here tonight.

Now, I understand I've asked you before, there's a potential book coming from this as well.

Yes, sir.

I'm working on a book.

That's great.

That's great.

Thomas.

Al, thank you so much for spending your time with us here.

Thank you for lending your talents to be able to have this story continue to live on.

For us to be able to show this to our viewers.

It's an incredible story.

We've all been blessed by your ability to share this with us.

Well, thank you for giving the opportunity to show in.

Like I said, we've been doing this for a while.

We have, you know, other episodes that we put out.

We're actually filming.

I'm actually editing two as we speak.

So there's there's more coming.

And thank you for giving us the opportunity to to share.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And thank you to our viewers at home.

Thank you for joining us on this special presentation of dignity.

We hope tonight's conversation has inspired you to seek out these stories of remembrance in your own lives.

For Arkansas TV, I'm Carlton Wing.

Take care.