[piano intro] - [Zev] You know, what will be here in Greensboro, an emphasis on the survival of women and the evil things that women have experienced.

Obviously, 6 million Jewish person lost their lives, and among them a million and a half children - Have to tell their story.

I have, we have to make sure that we remember them, that their stories are not forgotten.

- [Victoria] I've always felt it was my responsibility for those who couldn't speak, that I had to do it.

It's not an easy thing for the two of us to talk about it, But we do it because we feel the responsibility.

And like I said, we're lucky, we survived.

(dramatic violin music) ♪ - [Victoria] My mother's family was from the Ukraine.

They left the Ukraine during the pogrom, so they didn't pass away in the Holocaust.

My mother's side was definitely affected by the pogroms and the Holocaust living here in the United States in New York.

They were Jews that were really fearful and and scarred by our history.

And so Judaism to them was not this wonderful, joyous thing.

Being a Jew was something that they kept more quiet.

When I learned in depth about what happened.

And then when I went to high school in Israel and met Holocaust survivors, I thought, me as a person, as a Jew, I have to do something.

I have to be a part of this.

- [Shelly] I was born in the town of Rovno.

It's now called Rivne, and it's in the Western Ukraine.

At the time I was born it was Poland.

- I was born in the same city.

To begin with, we lived separately.

She lived in the city of Rovno, and I lived close by in a village with my parents.

- When the Nazis came in, we were somehow together in town, and they wanted all the men to report for relocation duty.

But my grandfather, he kind of knew that that's not where they were taking them.

And so he made a hiding place in my mother's house where the men stayed during the day and they would hide in the hiding place.

And then they would come out for the midday meal.

Rachel and I would, our job was to sit outside and play and look to see when the Nazis were coming, 'cause they would go to Jewish houses and round up the men who didn't report.

- We were playing outside.

And the brown shirts we called them, the Nazis, they came over and they walked into the house.

All men were gone.

I guess they went into hiding, but my father, and they started beating on him.

They beat him up so badly, and I was crying and screaming and whatnot.

So they threw me out from that room into the kitchen, and they squeezed me in between a cabinet.

I was really crying.

And after they almost beat my father to death, they left.

And that was the first bad encounter with the Germans.

- Jews were not permitted to go into the market.

You know, those days in town where you did all your shopping and all Jews were supposed to wear a yellow star of David on their clothes.

But my mother, who did not look like a typical Jewish woman, would put on her raincoat over her clothes and go to the market and shop.

And I kind of knew that if somebody recognized her, they would turn her in and, you know, I would never see her again.

My mother went out to work and one of her Polish neighbors told her that this was going to happen.

And that night, somehow she got us, the two of us, to the village where Rachel and her mother lived, and a farmer who was a friend of theirs.

And that's the day the massacre happened.

- My name is now Zev Harel.

Well, I was born in a small village called Bârg in what was then Transylvania.

It was part of Romania at the time.

In 1940, the Hungarians decided to join the Nazis, and then the area that was called before Transylvania what's called now Erdely and became part of the Hungarian statehood.

The Hungarian government decided when they aligned themselves with the Nazis, and they became one of the entities that were collaborators of the Nazis with all they wanted to do, that they will do most of the things that the Nazis have done to Jews.

And the first thing that they have done, what I remember when I was 10 years old, that they put restrictions on Jews as to how much time you can be out of your home.

They set the time, mostly around two hours a day.

And what that meant is, like, I had to attend school, but they closed the school for Jews to be out of their home for more than two hours.

So I couldn't go to school.

The principal would just call and invite us there in order to throw all kind of insults at us.

Jews don't deserve this, Jews don't deserve that, and Jews should not attend school.

And we would be thrown away, go back home.

But that was it for four years until 1944.

And we were taken to the getto in January.

It was cold, cold, cold.

And we were there until the end of April.

And you didn't do anything there.

Well, the only thing that you could have with you in that building was a suitcase that you, you left everything else at your home.

There were four of us, no five of us, my father rest peace, my mother rest in peace, my brother and I, and my grandfather.

What they did is when they, cattle cars arrived for people that were like seven year younger, get on the cattle cars, those that were eight, seven year older, they put them in an adjacent building, lit fire to it.

And my last memory of my grandfather, that they burned him alive.

(Lt. Col. Shai singing) - [Victoria] So we were, I think 2019 on the March of the Living, we went with a Greensboro adult and child group with Rabbi Fred Guttman, I can't even tell you, changed my life.

We were 10,000 people, 10,000 Jews, and also non-Jews who came, you know, our group was mainly Jewish children and adults.

We were going to go from the camps to march to Israel.

We had Israeli flags and we were walking through the camps and I walked through the women's section of the camp and we had just heard about how the women were used and physically, emotionally, I mean, the stories, they never end.

How hideous the journey is and what happened to their children.

And as I walked through the woman's camp, I literally was as if time stopped.

And I thought, had they known that there was an Israel, had they known, could they have ever imagined in one second that we could be here?

10,000 of us, remembering them.

Remembering them, and then going off to Israel.

And it was like, it changed me.

And I said, I have to tell their story.

We have to make sure that we remember them, that their stories are not forgotten.

That we remember their piles of shoes, the piles of hair that was cut and saved, that we remember their children.

And it was like they were calling to me.

I actually had this big smell of roses.

Now, who smells roses when you are walking through a death camp?

I kept kind of walking around thinking if it was someone's perfume, but to me it was a sign.

They were saying, you're here, you're here today and you are here to tell our story.

You are here so that we don't forget that this can happen again.

And the genocide of women and children has been done by our human species and that it still can happen.

So it was a Brett Stevens article that I saw on the internet.

And the article was, "Tell 'em that we're not afraid".

I can't actually remember exactly the whole article, but the picture, I saw this picture of these women, I mean, right before they were going to be brutally murdered.

And I could not comprehend their strength, the way they looked straight at us in the camera.

And as I read and realized that they were being photographed by a Nazi photographer, I thought, well, they're looking at us through his eyes and I'm seeing them through my eyes.

And then it came to my mind, I'm gonna do a sculpture of this because I want people to see them through their eyes, not through this Nazi soldier.

(piano music) - [Shirley] You know, Victoria Carlin has gone to the soul of social justice system through that monument.

All you have to do is to look at the faces of that monument.

And it tells a lot.

Look at the woman in the middle.

She says, I'm here.

You all can lean on me.

And just imagine how they feel.

And I'm sure that anybody and everybody who looks at that statue will have some kind of emotions and some kind of feeling that will come back to them.

I was four when we started.

You were five?

We were six and seven when it ended.

- Neighbors, they agreed to hide us in their attic - At the barn.

They created a hiding place in back where they put hay up in the front.

And then there was a small space for the four of us where we could sit and lie down.

At night, I had to deal with all the mice and the rats crawling all over me.

- Food was scarce for themselves too.

So whatever they could spare.

And then one day it was a Nazi raid and the Germans came over and they came, one of them went on that ladder to go into the attic.

It was a German that stood there, looked all around.

And here we are sitting behind that hay on the same attic.

- Well, the farmer came up and told us that they know you're here and they're coming and come down.

- Leave the attic.

Leave the house.

We don't want you here.

- And our mother said, give us a few minutes to say goodbye to each other.

And so that's when the two of us said, we knew there were woods, right behind the barn.

And we said, let's just run into the woods.

And that's what we did.

And we spent the night in the woods.

Then he found us.

He said we couldn't go back to the attic.

And he had dug a hole underground, you know, in the woods.

He said, I'll dig another one for you.

- Stayed underground all the time with all the rats and mice, thousands.

This was unbelievable.

- It was very cold.

And there was another farmer that took us in.

He took my mother and me and we were all day up in the attic of his house, which had no heat.

And I froze.

I actually froze.

And when they came to get us, they thought I was dead.

But I couldn't move.

I couldn't do anything.

I was frozen stiff, like you say.

You know, they were only worried about how they're gonna bury me.

'cause the snow was so deep.

The daughter-in-law said, well, let's try something.

Let's rub her with snow and see if we can... - Revive her.

- Revive her and that's what they did.

That I now, many, many years later, still don't understand how they could have lived with that fear of being discovered.

- That's true.

- And because their punishment would've been, you know, death and death for their children, too.

It wasn't just for them.

- [Zev] Cattle cars arrived and we had to get on the cattle cars.

And the cattle cars took us to Auschwitz.

And what they would do is that if you were 15 or younger, 50 or older, you would go one way, after they separated men and women.

So we lost track of my mother who rest in peace.

And we were my father who rest in peace, my brother and I on our way.

And as I was walking, this is now the next morning, as I was walking toward the selection site, one of the assess guard there, I was 14 years old, 1944, looked at me.

And in Russian, he asked me what was my age.

So I told him 14.

And I remembered the words in Russian that he said, (speaking Russian) don't tell anyone you are 14.

Tell him that you are 17.

So being a 14 year old and not knowing much, because you can understand that I didn't have much of an education as I was walking toward the selection site, when they asked me what was my age, instead of telling them I was born January 27th, 1930, I told them I was born 1927, January 27th, 1927.

What that has done, that instead of being sent with the 15 or younger, 50 or older toward the, what looked like shower when we got in and they would turn on then the first thing that happened there that people would be dead and they would be pushed out and burned.

And then their ashes is there.

And I dunno if we have been to Auschwitz, but to this day, the ashes of those that lost their lives there is still there.

May of 1945 where the third cavalry arrived.

And the night before the cavalry arrived, the assess guard disappeared from the concentration camp.

And the next morning, because the assess guard were gone, the inmates there started walking out.

And I started walking out with them.

And that's the last thing I remember about the concentration camp, that I walked out.

Apparently I was watching walking out with typhoid.

And that's what got me to fall into a roadside ditch.

And that's where the African Americans, who then would be in units, one of their soldiers in this attachment picked me up from the roadside ditch that I fell in and took me to this health side.

- [Allen] The African American troops provided a lot of the kindling for the civil rights movement because they fought for a country.

They fought for freedom, they fought for our rights.

And they felt, well, I'm fighting for this country and I'm fighting for the rights and freedom of people in other countries, and I don't enjoy the full rights and freedoms back home in the United States.

There's been a kind of a symbiotic relationship between Jews and African Americans because both groups of people have had some very hard paths to travel and some very painful stories to remember.

And I hope we continue to bear that in mind of those commonalities and those bonds that we have.

- [Victoria] We are taking down monuments, which is art.

We're taking down art that does not communicate what we are as a society.

Let's rise up and put sculptures that communicate who we are as a community.

And Greensboro is a social justice community.

- [Nancy] These monuments in our center city are an opportunity to educate not just our citizens of this city, but the many, many visitors that we had to downtown Greensboro.

- [Victoria] We have a museum called the Civil Rights Museum where we tell about their story.

They started the sit-ins that went all over the United States.

So this fits right into it because yes, it's about Jews, but it's about all of us.

It's about all of the inhumanity that happens when you see people, as others, as different.

Look at these women, they weren't all separated.

They were not even gasping at a potential of what was going to happen to them.

They were arm in arm.

I said that's our people, that's our women.

So in the photograph, the little girl is behind the women.

They had posed the people.

They had a whip.

They posed the children and the women and they put her first, and then they put the women in front of her.

As an artist, I couldn't sculpt the child behind the mother.

So I pushed her forward so that she would be near her mother.

You see the back of the sculpture, she's actually holding her mother's back as if she's comforting her mother.

So the little girl has her head bent and you can't even see her face.

In the sculpture, you'll see a face.

And then her mother's standing there with the other women, the girl on the side.

And she's pushing her hair away.

Like it's a day in Poland that they're photographing her.

And the reality is he's photographing her and then they're gonna end up marching into a pit.

They're going to make them strip, and then they're going to shoot them and kick their bodies into this massive grave, the hideousness of what would happen.

But they don't know, maybe they don't know exactly what will happen.

We know today.

We hold their pain.

We know what's gonna happen next.

So I sort of sculpted them the way they are, that moment with such bravery, integrity, and also the way they might be a second later and a second later.

I changed the girl in the end to look up to the sky.

I changed the child that you can see fear on her face.

So we only saw that one moment.

But we can imagine that this story is a story of how most of the Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

- It was February of 1944.

The war was not over.

The farmer came and told our mothers and he took 'em into town.

They wanted to see if it was safe for us to go back to town.

- Yeah, they left us in that bunker, but the two of them went to town.

- It was a lot of confusion, but he reunited us with our mothers.

I don't have to tell you how sick we were.

- My mother was very sick.

- Your mother was sick.

I was very sick.

I had to have my head shaved.

Did you have your head shaved?

- Sure.

- Oh yeah.

'cause of the lice, it was terrible.

And I couldn't walk for a while.

I had such big sores on my legs from it.

- And then we decided to move out from that city of Rivne to a little town.

- That night, a bump fell on the house.

- This is a resolution, accepting and approving the installation of North Carolina's first Women's Holocaust Monument at LeBauer Park.

- [Nancy] I think it's a perfect location because of the traffic that that park gets and because it will be a teaching moment for many, many people who maybe have never even heard of the Holocaust or if they have, they know nothing about it.

- I think by having it in such a prominent place in the middle of a downtown that was pivotal in the Civil rights movement is extremely important.

- [Victoria] This is something that will affect you differently when you look at it, because you will remember those faces.

You will remember that feeling you get when you walk around that monument.

(music swells) (piano music) - [Woman] "She wouldn't take off her Boots" by Victoria Milstein, dedicated by Shelly Wiener and Rachel Kizhnerman in honor of their brave mothers, Eva Wiener and Sophia Guralnik.

(applause) - [Victoria] What's wonderful about art is that it's interactive.

It'll take the community to kind of finish this story.

The camera is across from the women, and we're asking people to look at the sculpture through this camera lens.

What we're trying to create a practice is that people would look through them and see them through their eyes, not see them as others, not see them as some people that this happened to.

These were our sisters, these were our mothers, and these were our daughters.

And if a child across from the playground says, mom, what's that little girl doing?

And she learns about this history, then you're no longer indifferent.

And I really believe that's how we change the future.

- The project represents the strength of women that even in the moment of death, I look at them, they were able to stand up, with their arms around each other, stand straight, and look in the eye of the camera and say, I am a person.

(piano music) ♪