This week on Arizona Illustrated, AZPM interviews Holocaust Survivors living in Southern Arizona.

In our society right now, there's a resurgence of a lot of ideas that were popular when Hitler came to power.

A new take on an old recipe with Tucson's Chinese Chorizo Festival.

The Chinese chorizo is an actual historic sausage that was made here in Tucson, an evening under the stars in the Chiricahua Mountains.

When I'm doing astronomy and looking up at the night sky is just the inspiring nature of all that vastness out there.

Wow.

And our desert plants series returns with creosote, by biomass this is the most abundant plant in the Sonoran Desert.

Hello and welcome to another all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

Friday, January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

And this week, we're coming to you from in front of this beautiful building constructed back in 1910.

This is the first synagogue in the Arizona territory, and today it's home to the Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center.

Their goals are to educate people about the Holocaust and other genocides, collaborate with Tucson's diverse community to promote human rights and explore the legacy of Jewish experiences in Southern Arizona.

Now, recently, AZPM embarked on a project with similar goals called Children of the Holocaust.

Inspired by Ken Burns' U.S. and the Holocaust documentary series.

We enlisted contributing producer Laura Markowitz and videographer Martin Rubio to do personal and in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors to preserve them and make them available to everyone as a community resource [Somber music] My name is Laura Markowitz.

I've been a contributing producer for Arizona Public Media for about 13 years.

The Children of the Holocaust Stories of Survival Project was inspired by the Ken Burns documentary, The US and the Holocaust, and that first aired in September.

Arizona Public Media sponsored two live public events in which Holocaust survivors were invited to speak.

And that kind of got the ball rolling.

So when this opportunity came up, I was extremely, you know, interested, because I also feel like in our society right now, there's a resurgence of a lot of ideas that were popular when Hitler came to power.

So, you know, the old saying that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

(Paula) I just, hope that if children are going to listen to this or watch this.

That they would think about how life can change on a drop of a pin.

(Valentina) Not a lot people in Tucson know about what a holocaust mean.

(Wanda) You don't have a country if you don't have history.

And if you don't teach history and it seems that this is what is happening over here today.

“That's an incredible picture.

” (Laura) My task was to reach out to Jewish family and Children's Services.

They're, a local nonprofit agency here in Tucson.

I went to their support group, introduced myself and introduced the project and asked if anybody wanted to tell their stories and be recorded for Arizona Public Media.

Every hand in the room went up.

(Chris)I think it's important for people everywhere to know about that extreme genocide.

(Laura) What we're interested in is recording the details, the memories.

What did it feel like when bombs were falling and you were not allowed to go into a bomb shelter because you were a Jew and you were hiding in an attic?

What did it feel like to starve?

What did it feel like to watch your mother walk away, you know, and never see her again?

The reason we want that isn't prurient interest.

It's because that's what touches us.

Then we can really understand the impact of something as horrific as an attempted genocide.

[Somber music] And we should convey that message to the people that they they remember with what happened.

The Holocaust.

So they know.

What happens there in that period.

You know, this was never even in the old times and oh, they never did that kind of a massacre, you know, for a specific reason to be wiped out.

This was really unbelievable.

This is, hmm.

I mean, it is so many, so many things.

I can write a book about this, the times, but this is no way to explain.

(Laura)So what we do is we really focus on what was their family life like before the war.

And then the war starts and we really talk about their experiences and then liberation.

That's kind of the scope.

(Wanda)The first time my daughter hear my story is when I went to Ft. Huachuca and I was talking to the soldiers over there.

I didn't tell this to anybody and to my children, to anybody.

I didn't want anybody to know.

I tell nobody I didn't because people at the time didn't believe that.

People don't believe.

What would you tell?

He is not going to believe you.

One of the first groups.

I was addressing.

And all of a sudden I realize in the back way in the back was my grandson.

He had never heard about this before, and neither had his dad.

You know, nobody knew about it.

I've kept it complete to myself.

(Laura)We have to ask ourselves, who do we want to be in this story?

When you hear these stories, like, who would you want to be?

And I think that's the desired impact from my perspective.

I would like people, just as I have been thinking about who would I be now?

And I think this is the great ethical question, moral question that that we humans in every generation have to ask ourselves.

And what kind of world do we want to live in?

What do we mean to one another?

You know, I personally believe we're all connected.

And, you know, racism is our biggest tragedy.

Please stay tuned to Arizona Public Media as this ambitious project continues to take shape.

We'll be adding interviews and more to the page.

azpm.org/ childrenoftheHolocaust as they're completed As Tucson grew from the 1880s to the 1960s.

Most of the grocery stores here were owned by Chinese immigrants.

Now there are an important but often overlooked part of our collective history.

And one product that was common in their markets but unique to Tucson, was Chinese Chorizo Well, last year, Chef and Artist Feng-Feng Yeh invited restaurants from around southern Arizona to take part in the first annual Chinese Chorizo Festival My name is Feng-Feng Yeh And it's "Fun-Fun" like you're having fun twice.

and I am the creator and brainchild of the Tucson Chinese Chorizo Festival.

It's really laborious to create the chorizo.

You know, bringing out all the best in every single ingredient, and then you bring it all together, making sure the grind is right, making sure the fat ratio is right.

And you're just like, Wow, this is why it's so worth it to go through all these steps.

The Chinese Chorizo is an actual historic sausage that was made here in Tucson.

So it's specific to this city, and it was developed in Chinese grocery stores that were all located here on Tucson's South Side and in the barrios.

It was a really important place where they spoke Spanish.

They spoke indigenous languages and they really catered to their community.

I was surprised to hear that most Tucsonans don't know about this story.

I think it's just like a good symbol because they used end cuts like meat that was going to go to spoil things that were going to be destined for the trash.

And they transformed it into a product that was in high demand.

So you have a pig that you're cutting up and you have all these trimmings and what are you going to do with it?

It's not a perfect round steak.

So you have these little chunks.

And that's the cool thing about sausage.

It might be just this little link, but there's so much history behind it.

And I think it's a nice metaphor for kind of the struggle that these people went through to kind of build a life in America because they didn't have such a great experience When you're a person of color or a person of mixed race in America, it's really hard to kind of like place your identity and today there's only like about 3% of the population is Asian.

And growing up, I was like one of the few and so I kind of thought about that time all through school that I felt really like, you know, alone and alienated.

And I was thinking like, what would I want at that age?

And I was like, OK, what if I do something for the, like, little Feng-Fengs that are out there and that want to see their identity reflected in the culture?

And, you know, we were just name Tucson City of Gastronomy, and I wondered why like as a food person, I was like, why?

If we had such a presence in the past with Chinese culture why are we not talking about that?

You know, Feng-Feng was just like, hey, I heard about you.

I know what you do.

I think you're the perfect guy to help us out.

Will you please help?

And I was like, Absolutely Yeah.

We're producing everything here at Forbes Meat Company with sustainable and ethical meats, and bringing modernity to this recipe was also offering the vegan plant based version just because I wanted the story and the food to be really accessible At the end here, I think we're going to be a little under 600 lbs.

of chorizo Because there's 20 different restaurants participating in this festival, and we are giving each restaurant, you know, 15 lbs.

of the pork and 15 lbs.

of the mushroom Everyone seems to be really just so excited for this.

And the really cool part of this project is that it interjects something new and fun for chefs and restaurants and for their customers to experience.

And I've been loving the kind of very intentional execution done by these incredible chefs that we have here in Tucson.

There is a branding that I use for the festival and for the project, and it's called, "Ask How the Sausage Gets Made" And I don't know, I just remember the references of like Upton Sinclair's like, you know, The Jungle and like how immigrant life was how actually meat production really is.

And you don't want to see that or know that because it takes away from, like, your experience at the end and I think that that's a really important thing to kind of like pay attention to But also if you ignore how things are made and where they come from, you miss a lot of beautiful stories.

You miss the humanity of things and why things came to be.

Food kind of was something that tied them all together and working together, not just with their ingredients but with local Hispanic culture and just bringing that that symbiotic relationship between all cultures.

Why not, like, renovate our narrative too?

And like, let's bring back this story because this story actually helps Tucson to get where it is today, economically and culturally.

It's about what the mission of this project is.

And that's, I think, what's cool with our community.

It wasn't about each individual, it was about what we can do for one another.

I felt really touched because a lot of people, you know, came up to me, you know, and said, oh, I'm Mexican and Chinese.

I'm a product of this.

And like, thank you for seeing me.

It's just really nice to kind of like tick-off my mission and say like, OK, yeah, these people are being seen.

Like, that's all that we're looking for, I think is some sort of validation.

Twice a year, the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association opens up their Chiricahua complex to the public for an evening under the stars, a chance for members of the community to see the night sky and the Milky Way in detail they probably haven't seen before.

When we want to get outside of the Tucson light dome We need to go to a dark site.

So we're we're out here We're out near the Chiricahua mountains.

We're the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association.

We refer to ourselves as T-triple-A.

We have this the Chiricahua Astronomy Complex out here is our club owned site, but we don't typically open it up to the public.

But what we want to do to be good neighbors around the community is we twice a year, we open up the site to what we call "evening under the stars."

It's ideally intended for our neighbors to be able to see what we do here, to see the site, and then to actually get some really incredible observing through some fantastic telescopes.

We have a great array of telescopes.

T triple A has no employees.

So all of our 650 members, we consider to be volunteers.

And many of us spend 40 hours a week doing things for the purpose of this club to to help promote science education.

We will have hopefully on the order of about 50 people here tonight.

And we have our staff here opening the telescopes on site.

And tonight, we're going to use a 40 inch telescope.

So that means the mirror is 40 inches in diameter.

So it's huge.

And then we're going to have a nine inch refractor, which is pretty good size.

Another 14 inch telescope in one of our observatories and then several personal telescopes.

We're going to have about six telescopes operating tonight.

[Woman] Okay.

Yeah.

You go look at the little hole Our first time.

We never saw a telescope before [Jim] So when people look in our telescopes, especially if they're looking at something that should elicit a response, we're looking for something like an, oh, wow, or, you know, oh, my God.

Or something like that.

[Woman] Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

[Jim] We have two fabulous planets up tonight.

And I tell people whenever we do an astronomy event, if you only look at two things through a telescope, it needs to be Jupiter and Saturn.

Ohh.

It's so cute.

[Man] Looks cute.

The biggest planet in the solar system is cute.

[John] The moon is fascinating to look at when you see it through a telescope and close up the craters and the mountains and the features on the moon just really pop.

A lot of our members image these objects.

You can see detail that you just can't see with the naked eye.

[Voices] Pretty cool isn't it?

See it looks like an hourglass?

Yeah it does.

That's what's awesome about this.

If you look at something like that and you think, what am I looking at?

[Jim] What really affects me when I'm doing astronomy and looking up at the night sky is just the inspiring nature of all that vastness out there.

We are just a small, small, little piece of the of the big cosmos.

[Voices] 5 billion years and our Sun will look like that Wow.

That's so beautiful.

That is so clear.

Look at all the stuff in the gazillion stars around it.

That's so beautiful.

[Mae] Being able to see the sky really can transform people's lives.

[Boy] That's pretty amazing.

I never knew The sky could be so beautiful.

And I never knew it could be so complicated.

And I see so much in the sky.

It's just full of things and it's just a total wonder to me.

[voices] [Jim] When you look at that little glow, that glow is hundreds of billions of stars and billions and billions of planets.

And quite possibly somebody up there looking back through something that looks like a telescope back at our Milky Way, wondering the same thing we are.

Are we alone or not?

[voices] [Mae] One of the things that you can do is you can connect with people that way.

And what questions that we have.

And sometimes we have similar questions so that you start realizing the depth of connections that we have with people everywhere.

[Voices] Interesting Yeah.

Thank you so much.

Very good.

Glad you enjoyed it.

If you'd like to know more about the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association, their president, Mae Smith, has some very helpful advice on how to find them online.

We have a website at tucsonastronomy.org and you can put in HTTP before that if you want to.

And if you don't want to it will still go there.

When you think about how the desert smells when it rains, you're probably thinking creosote.

But this unassuming bush is so much more than it's famous scent it's actually one of the hardiest and longest living plants in the Sonoran Desert and beyond.

[Desert sounds] My name is Jack Dash, and I'm a horticulturist at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

This is Creosote.

The scientific name is Larrea Tridentata.

This plant occurs in the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave Desert.

And there are populations in the same genus Larrea that occur in the deserts of South America, particularly in Argentina.

One interesting thing about creosote is that on a geologic time scale, it's actually somewhat new to this area.

And as the area has become more arid, creosote has been able to spread.

By biomass.

This is the most abundant plant in the Sonoran Desert.

This is an incredibly tough plant that can thrive in a variety of environments.

It's also one of the most arid adapted plants in North America and arguably on the planet.

So there are creosote populations that have been documented, is going two, three years without a drop of rain and they continue to survive.

Not only that, but they can be incredibly long lived because these plants have compounds which are anti-microbial, antibacterial, they're resistant to breaking down.

And in fact, the oldest creosote known is in the Mojave Desert.

It's called King Clone and is estimated to be about 11,700 years old.

They spread clonally.

That is to say that they will shoot up a new plant from the root system.

So King Clone forms this essentially fairy ring that all grew out of a single plant that was in the middle at one time.

So genetically speaking, they're all identical in all clones of that first plant.

[Car passing] One of the great things about creosote, both in habitat and as a landscaping plant, is that it will bloom multiple times throughout the year.

So when humidity spikes, when there's available moisture and enough heat, you're going to get these beautiful yellow flowers.

And the great thing about those is that there are over 100 species of bees that have been documented visiting creosote flowers.

And not just that, there are at least 20 species of bees which have been documented to be specialist pollinators of creosote, meaning that if this plant went extinct or was absent from an area, those bees would completely disappear.

Rather than thorns, This plant has evolved what are called secondary compounds, and additionally, if you feel creosote leaves, they're kind of sticky.

It exudes this substance that makes it incredibly unpalatable to animals.

And additionally, ingesting too much of it will have a negative effect on your gut flora.

And so that long term health of an animal that's eating a lot of creosote can decline.

So pretty much the only Sonoran Desert animal that's really been documented eating these are the antelope jack rabbit and really only under extreme circumstances.

Now, it is interesting because in I want to say the late 1800s, the United States government wanted to experiment with utilizing camels as pack animals in the southwestern United States.

So they brought over camels and it turned out the camels had no problem eating creosote.

So what this suggests is that, you know, 12, 14,000 years ago, when there were camels living in the Sonoran Desert as a native animal, they may have been able to eat creosote just fine.

And that could help explain why creosote has put so much energy into developing these secondary compounds that make them so unpalatable.

[Thunder, raindrops] Immediately following rains or sometimes before rain even falls, you can start smelling that creosote in the air.

It's really one of the most indicative aromas of the Sonoran Desert.

And so it's the glands on the leaves that are emitting that fragrance that carries on the wind.

One of the best things about creosote is that it is one of the easiest plants you could really think of growing.

Now it does benefit from well draining soil.

So if you have a super heavy clay or caliche, that can be detrimental to the growth rate.

However, they require very little water.

If you do provide water, that plant is going to grow substantially quicker.

It's going to bloom more often, which is going to make it more valuable as a landscaping species.

Another nice thing is if these plants aren't starved for water, they're evergreen.

And so they make a really fantastic informal hedge that can screen a view without really taxing your water bill.

I don't have a favorite plant because it changes almost every day as new things come into bloom.

But creosote is an absolutely essential plant to the desert, and I think it's really a must have in any landscape that seeks to utilize native species and any landscape which is aiming to reduce water use.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week for another all new episode.