- [Announcer] This is a production of PBS Charlotte.

- When Hitler came to power in 1933, my father knew that we would eventually have to get out.

- And that was the beginning of the nightmare.

- Nearly 80 years have passed since the end of World War II and the Holocaust, but in and around Charlotte, organizations are doing what they can to make sure people never forget.

- We believe the Butterfly Project is fantastic because it helps the children to be able to make a connection to the children who were living during this time.

A program like ours doesn't exist anywhere else.

If you forget history, it repeats itself.

- This one here has as a story too.

- Two local Holocaust survivors, only children at the time, share their harrowing stories of surviving the Nazis.

- Harboring a Jew was punishable by death.

Not only to you, but to your entire family.

- Musical instruments actually played during the Holocaust also tell a story.

- Violins of Hope tells a story of six violins and what they and their owners went through together during the Holocaust.

Their sounds bringing hope at exhibits around the country.

- And they were often the thing that saved people's lives.

- The music, the survivors, and honoring those that lost their lives.

The Holocaust.

Carolina Stories of Remembrance.

Bright blue, pink, and yellow.

Jkhia Walker paints a ceramic butterfly.

Although she's not doing it for a school art class, she's doing it voluntarily on a Sunday afternoon.

- I've been reading multiple books.

And then when she brought up this opportunity, I felt that it was really great that we would come and learn more about it.

- It's all part of the Levine Jewish Community Center's program called the Butterfly Project.

- So the Butterfly Project began in 2006 in San Diego, California, and they wanted a way to be able to memorialize the children who were victims of the Holocaust, to be able to help children today relate better to the history of the Holocaust.

- Lori Semel has served as the Butterfly Project's coordinator for the last eight years.

- They started with the idea of butterflies, which came from a poem that many people are familiar with called "Not the Last Butterfly".

And it was written by a gentleman in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

And he was eventually taken to Auschwitz and killed.

But the poem was found later.

- During the genocide of World War II, some 6 million European Jews were systematically murdered, including 1.5 million children.

To give students a better sense of just how large a number that is, presenters compare it to filling 75,000 seat Bank of America Stadium.

- I want you to imagine every seat is filled.

How many stadiums do I need of 75,000 to get to 1.5 million?

- 20.

- 20.

Thank you.

Right now imagine 20 stadiums, okay.

Each stadium, 75,000 super, super, super noisy.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now go the other way.

Think of the silence, okay.

Because now every seat is empty.

- Remembrance is something that, it's a difficult concept, especially for children.

Why should I remember something that happened so long ago?

It's hard to remember something that we can't relate to.

- Roughly 6,000 students take part in the Butterfly Project each year with one butterfly being painted for every child who died in the Holocaust.

- We do talk about butterflies being chosen to represent the children because not only do they signify hope and peace, but they also transform just like children do.

They don't start out as butterflies.

They have to go through a transformation first.

- So far, the Levine JCC has accounted for 54,000 of the 300,000 butterflies painted worldwide.

- And each butterfly that is painted, the students have a certificate with the name of the child that they are remembering.

So they're all remembering someone different.

- The two and a half hour workshop also teaches students about the pyramid of hate, which shows how biased attitudes and acts if left unchecked, can ultimately lead to discrimination, bias motivated violence, and genocide.

- Sometimes they have a hard time understanding how people can be so evil because they're not.

They're good kids.

And so we talk about that.

You know, guys don't understand it, 'cause you're not, you know, don't do that to other people, but you have to be careful to know where it starts.

- When not doing school visits during the week, the Butterfly Project is open to the public on weekends.

Shannon Deese drove nearly two hours from her home in Pinehurst with her family.

- And I wanted my children to be able to hear firsthand about the Holocaust.

I'm thankful that they continue to teach the history here so that it won't be forgotten.

- Most of these butterflies were actually made in the ceramic studio that is behind you.

- Participants also go outside, visiting the Margaret and Lou Schwartz butterfly garden Holocaust Memorial, which was created by local artist Paul Russo.

- He had family members who were killed in the Holocaust so it was a personal experience for him.

It's a steel sculpture covered in cement and the original sculpture was created in 2011.

- About 6,500 ceramic butterflies created on site adorn the sculpture.

- The sculpture was designed sort of for you to see it as you will.

Some people see a butterfly, some people see a heart, some people see a peace sign.

It just sort of depends on how you look at it.

- The Butterfly Project focuses not only on the history of the Holocaust, but also the long-term impact of hate and bigotry.

But the most impactful part of the program is hearing firsthand accounts from local Holocaust survivors.

Charlotte resident Suly Chenkin survive the unthinkable.

- My name is Suly Chenkin, but I was born Shulamit Alexandra Bykovich in what was then the provisional capital of Lithuania.

- She wasn't born in Germany.

She was born in Lithuania.

And for many students, their idea of the Holocaust is Germany and only Germany.

So it already opens up a whole new world of victims for them.

- Suly's story begins with a prophecy uttered by her grandmother on the day she was born, which also happened to be the first day of the Jewish new year in 1940.

- Oh, that's my grandmother.

That's my grandmother Minda, the one who made the prophecy that I would be lucky my entire life.

- That luck would be put to the test just a few months later.

- The Lithuanian people who were not Jewish did not like that they were taken over by the Russians.

And they said that a lot of Jewish people were communist.

Not so, but that's what they figured.

When I was eight months old, the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with the Russians and they invaded my hometown.

Everything changed for us from that moment on.

(crowd chants) All kinds of rules and regulations were posted in the newspaper and all over the street.

No Jewish person should come to work.

No Jewish child should go to school.

Jews are not allowed to sit on park benches or take public transportation or even walk on the sidewalks.

Only on the curb.

- Suly's grandfather and other family members were arrested.

- I don't know if it was a day later or 10 days later, but they shot them all dead.

And that was the beginning of the nightmare.

- To keep track of the Jewish population, ghettos were established throughout the region.

At just 10 months old, Suly and her family became prisoners in what was known as the Kovno ghetto.

- Up until then, so maybe 8,000 people lived there.

There were a lot of shacks and this is where some 38,000 of us were put in.

You go to the right and you go to the left.

And in this manner, he picked out 10,000 people, mostly the elderly, the handicapped, the sick and children under the age of 12.

And they were taken out and they were shot.

- Young Suly survived that round.

But for those still there in the ghetto, disease and famine took over.

Everything was in short supply.

- People died on the streets because between not enough food disease, the fright, it was terrible.

Everybody had to work for the Nazis.

You didn't work, you didn't eat.

You didn't get a ration card.

- Two years later in 1943, the ghetto was declared a concentration camp.

And when words spread that all children under the age of 12 were being killed in other ghettos, Suly's parents made the toughest decision of their lives, to give her away and hopefully save her life.

- And this picture is the one that my, that was taken in the ghetto.

It was taken a few weeks before my third birthday.

It was taken with the purpose to show people outside the ghetto, Christian people, the little girl that they could save.

- The first step, keeping her away from the Nazis, which began by hiding in a secret bunker, dug out under the stairs.

- And then I remember my mother's hand over my mouth and her mouth in my ear whispering, begging me not to cry, 'cause if I cried, they would hear us and they would come and kill us.

- For two full days and nights Suly and her mother laid still in the bunker while Nazi officials ransacked the house looking for them.

- I remember when they came on the second day and I remember their steps and they're yelling and screaming at my father and he had a hatchet and he said lifted it.

And he said to my father, if you don't take me to your hiding place, we know you Jews have hiding bunkers all over the place, I'm gonna cut your head off.

- The officers eventually left, but it was now a race against time.

- But from that day on, I was not allowed to leave the house because there were no children left in the ghetto.

- At just three and a half years old, Suly's parents told her it was time for her to go and that they weren't going with her.

- So my parents told me they loved me.

They said they had to send me away because bad people were trying to kill us, that I could never ask for them, because if I did, I would put their life and mine in danger and that if they could, they would come back for me.

But I had to behave with the people that I was being sent to.

I was given a sleeping potion.

I was put in a potato sack.

I was loaded right in front of the Nazi officers onto a cart that had lots of sacks that had potatoes.

The cart made an unscheduled stop along the barbed wire in the outskirts of the ghetto.

On the other side, there were two women.

My sack was gently tossed over the barbed wire.

And this two women ran towards it.

They picked it up, tore the sack open, took me out, put me in a carriage and wheeled me away to what everybody hoped was a chance to live.

- Jewish herself, Miriam Schulman went undercover, placing her own and other people's children with the few Lithuanian families who were willing to take them in.

- Because you see, harboring a Jew was punishable by death.

Not only to you, but to your entire family.

- Just weeks later, the 6,000 people left in the ghetto, including Suly's parents, were sent to other concentration camps.

And the Kovno ghetto was liquidated.

(bombs exploding) - The ghetto was dynamited cause there were people hiding, still hiding there, and burned to the ground and nothing was left.

That was it.

- Miriam took her own children as well as Suly and fled to Israel.

Believing she was now an orphan, Suly cried the entire way to Jerusalem.

Two years later, a photograph arrived in the mail.

- This is the actual picture that I was shown by Miriam.

And she said, do you know this, anybody in this photograph?

And I said, this was my mother.

And if the man here had red hair, this was my father.

And then Miriam said they still are, they're alive.

My mother had survived.

She Stutthof concentration camp and the death march in which they were taken for miles to another sub camp.

- A month before her sixth birthday, the reunion with her mother finally happened.

- And then this lady came out and she stopped in her tracks.

And I stopped in mine.

She opened her arms and I flew into hers in full recognition of my mom.

So then I froze because I hadn't seen her in two and a half years.

My dad had survived by a hair Dachau concentration camp.

When he was liberated by Eisenhower's army, he weighed on a frame of about 5'10", 80 pounds.

He would not have made it another week.

- Suly's father fled Germany and made his way to Cuba where other family members lived.

Six months later, after getting the necessary paperwork, Suly and her mom went across the Atlantic to join him.

Three full years had gone by since she'd last seen him.

- This is my father and I in Cuba once we were reunited.

This is me a few months after I arrived in Cuba, I was a flower girl at my cousin's wedding.

- But other family members, including the grandmother who had made the prophecy for Suly, wasn't as fortunate.

- My grandmother didn't make it.

This are two of my cousins who didn't make it.

Miriam also had found somebody to take him in, but he was like six years old and they don't know what happened.

Maybe he cried a lot.

Maybe these people didn't mean to save him in the first place, but they took him to the Gestapo and he didn't make it.

And this little girl, she went with her mother to the concentration camp.

And I guess she was sent to the gas chamber.

Out of the some 40,000 Jewish people that had lived in Kovno, Lithuania in 1940, only 2000 people remained alive, 5%.

My mother, my father and I, one family left intact.

That was a miracle.

- When talking about Holocaust survivors, it's almost always about the people like Suly, but there are other survivors, if you will, whether it be mugs, keys, pocket watches, prison uniforms, luggage, kids' toys, game pieces, or even musical instruments.

And thanks to restoration, a book and a concert series, some of those instruments are coming back to life.

"Violins of Hope" tells a story of six violins and what they and their owners went through together during the Holocaust.

The Violins of Hope first went on exhibit in Charlotte 10 years ago.

UNC Charlotte musicology professor Jay Grimes, was so moved by it, he traveled to Europe to learn more.

- I took a trip out to Tel Aviv and met with Amnon Weinstein.

He's the patriarch of the Violins of Hope project.

He's the ones who started to collect these violins and restore them with his son Abshalom.

And I spent about a week with the Weinsteins in their workshop and I learned their stories.

And it was during that trip that I became inspired to write this book about the Violins of Hope.

- Jay's book, released in 2014, chronicles the stories of six Jewish violinists and their instruments in and around the time of the Holocaust.

- The violins come to the Weinsteins usually through either these children of the survivors or their grandchildren.

So it's my job as historian to sort of flesh those stories out, do some fact checking and put everything in the correct historical perspective.

- In certain cases, the violins themselves may have saved their owners' lives in the form of preferential treatment from Nazi guards.

- I was really fascinated by these stories.

This idea that music, this art form that I love and that I've dedicated my life and career to , in certain circumstances could actually make the difference between whether someone lived, whether they died.

- Five of the roughly 95 restored violins recently came back to Charlotte as part of a national tour.

New music was written and performed by an ensemble of faculty and students from UNC Charlotte, Queens University and central Piedmont.

INTONATIONS also featured two of the Violins of Hope.

- And there were times in practicing when I was watching the words while I was playing that I would just start crying because the stories were so incredibly sad and I would just have to stop.

- Dr. McKayla Meyers serves as the assistant Dean and professor of violin at West Virginia University.

She drove the six plus hours to be a soloist in the performances, playing a violin that dates back to 1871.

- It's a gorgeous instrument and it's considered one of the really most playable and beautiful instruments in the collection.

- The violin that Dr. Myers will be playing on tonight was once owned by Henrich Z Haftel.

He was a promising young violinist who was dismissed from his orchestra positions in Germany, simply for being Jewish.

And he might have perished in Nazi occupied Europe had he not been offered a position as one of the first concert masters of the Palestine orchestra.

- The music for INTONATIONS was written from the perspective of what if the violins themselves could talk, what would they say about their past and the people who played them?

With Audrey Babcock singing soprano and the words appearing on screen, the stories of resilience and survival came to life.

- She is giving voice to the violin that I'm playing.

- The seventh and final movement of the piece is called "Liberation", representing the liberation of the Jewish people when the concentration camps were finally shut down.

That's when the second Violin of Hope appeared on stage played by 15 year old David Karpov.

- My part is when the young performer walks in is passing from generation to generation.

So you'll see, I'll walk out slowly playing my part while miss McKayla is still playing her part.

- These violins have passed from one person to the next, and this music will live on from one musician to the next.

- The atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust will never be forgotten.

Thanks to Violins of Hope, the music and the instruments of the time.

Won't be forgotten either.

- I think it says a lot that even in the worst of times, even in mankind's darkest hours, people held onto their music.

They held onto their violins.

And that's what gave them hope.

- To know that these violins were in the circumstances that they were in and they were often the thing that saved people's lives makes the exhibit very, very special and (indistinct).

- This is a family picture.

My name is Irving Bienstock.

I don't know how old I was.

I maybe three or four years old.

And I was born in Dortmund, Germany.

- Born in 1926, 96 years ago.

- My name at that time, I was named Erish Bienstock.

- Irving Bienstock's story is in some ways similar to Suly Chenkin's and in others, quite different.

- My father was an accountant and my mother was a homemaker.

We lived in a small apartment house, which was owned by my grandparents.

Life was good for us.

That is until 1933 when Hitler came to power.

- Irving was just six and a half years old at the time.

- When Hitler came to power, my father knew that we would eventually have to get out.

(Hitler speaks, crowd cheers) - German laws quickly changed, permitting the mistreatment of Jews.

Nazi officers were everywhere.

- And they would grab any Jewish men that they found on the streets and they beat them up and beat 'em up simply because, simply because they were Jewish.

In 1938, they passed the law that Jewish people could no longer own any businesses.

- Irving's grandmother, aunts and uncles were deported to Poland and fearing what the Nazis might do to him, Irving's father fled to Belgium.

- And that evening, my mother took all the photos that we had of my father and she burned them.

Matter of fact, I have one photo of a family picture where my mother had cut out my father's head.

And we still have that.

And what's missing is my father.

You see that?

- Yep.

- Things only went from bad to worse when a Jewish man protesting the mistreatment.

shot and killed an official at a German embassy.

- There with thousands of people in the street.

And they were going from house to house wherever there were Jewish people left and the destroying their homes.

That night about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested.

One day, a man comes in and told us that he was the new owner of our house that we would have to get out.

Where do we go?

- Irving's mother knew it was time for them to go, but didn't have the necessary paperwork to cross international borders.

- See there was no country that would take us in.

- So she boarded a train bound for Holland, convincing a stranger to take Irving's younger sister Sylvia and she went through without any problem as the daughter of that woman.

And when she got to Amsterdam, the woman turned her over to a Jewish population there.

Two weeks later, my mother did with me the same thing, and nobody would help us.

- He's 12 years old being put on a train to a country that he's never been to, that he doesn't speak the language.

And he has $10 in his pocket and nowhere to go.

He has no idea what's going to happen to him.

- And the Dutch police came on board.

When they asked for my passport, I showed him my passport.

Of course I did not have a visa.

He asked me, where you're going.

I said, I'm going to visit my uncle in Amsterdam.

He said, you're lying.

And he took me off the train.

And I thought that he was gonna send me back to Germany.

- But the Dutch officer didn't send Irving back, taking pity on the boy.

He sent him to a children's home with hundreds of other kids, many of them the only surviving members of their families.

Who did he run into there?

- I found my sister there.

- His sister, Sylvia.

From there, Irving and Sylvia were sent to an orphanage in Amsterdam.

- While I was there, there was a woman that used to come in there.

She was a Dutch woman.

I did not know who she was.

She was very friendly.

And she was the one that made the arranges for us to go to the consulate.

She took my sister and me to the ship and there we met my mother, but I never knew who this woman was.

- This mystery woman had reunited Irving and Sylvia with their mother in 1940 and sent them all off to the United States to reunite with their father, who had arrived the year before.

- We settled in New York Four weeks later, the German invaded Holland and Belgium.

Had we not gone four weeks earlier, we would never have made it.

I wouldn't be here today.

- Just like Suly's family, Irving's family was broken up by the Holocaust, but somehow through sheer luck, each family member survived.

And just a few years later, 18 year old Irving found himself serving in the United States Army.

- This is when I was in the Army, basic training.

- Irving's work brought him and wife Lily into Charlotte.

After retiring in 2000, Irving used the internet's new search engine Google to finally figure out who the mystery lady was, who had helped him so many years before.

(foreign language) - Gertrude Weissmueller was a Dutch resistance fighter who arranged the transportation and reunification efforts for thousands of Jewish children, including Irving.

- Two years ago, I went to Israel and I went to (indistinct), and I found a monument there of what she had did, she had done.

And I saw all the documents that they had about her.

She was Dutch woman who took upon herself to save 10,000 children.

She saved me.

- A memorial now stands in Weissmueller's hometown in the Netherlands, honoring her and all the children that she saved.

For all the horrors of the Holocaust, there were heroes.

People like Gertrude Weissmueller and Miriam Schulman who saved the lives of Irving Beanstalk, Suly Chenkin and so many others.

But now nearly 80 years after their liberation, hate, antisemitism and racism are still in all corners of the world.

- This is not something that has gone away.

It's not something that happened during World War II and then stopped.

We still deal with it today.

- I don't know if it's ever gonna end.

- We tell the kids, if it happens to you, don't be silent.

Don't accept it.

Speak up about it.

Tell your parents about it.

Talk to the principal about it.

Don't allow it to happen here.

- The biggest part of the Butterfly Project is hope, right?

It's in our title.

That's about remembrance and hope so we're remembering the children, but we're hoping that something like this never happens again.

- You can choose who we are gonna be.

You're gonna be the good guy or the bad guy.

And part of being the good guy is to stand up to what's bad.

- We each make choices every day, individually in groups and as nations.

Will we as a global society ever evolve enough to the point of respecting others' religious or political views, even if we don't agree?

The hope for that will always remain.

(lilting music) - I never shared it with anybody.

At home we didn't talk about it.

What happened to us in Germany and how we got out.

And so we never talked about it.

- My mother didn't speak a lot about it.

My father did, especially at the end of his life.

Anybody who had five minutes, he tell them and he always finished the story he was saying, why.

He wanted an answer.

Why had this happened?

- A production of PBS Charlotte.