Did your parents ever talk to you about the Holocaust?

Not really, not much, but they would watch films on television and sit there in front of the TV in front of what we call the tube and just sob.

You can see people getting killed and put into crematoriums and piles of bodies.

This is what they showed on television back in the day.

They don't show that anymore.

However, that's how we learned about the Holocaust, by watching them react to it.

We knew that they survived the Holocaust, but they refused to tell us too many stories.

I think we were too young for them to tell.

They didn't want to traumatize us.

They wanted to get past it.

They wanted to move on.

But they did start talking to us about it decades later when films came out like the Shoah and other films that Spielberg produced.

They started talking, they started opening up and realizing that they're not here forever.

If they don't tell the stories, they're going to disappear.

The one word I think about when I think of my childhood is the word "loved."

When did you realize your parents were different than other parents?

You know, I realized that my parents were a little different than other parents.

I think when I was around sixth grade, because I started visiting my friends' homes, and I see different things going on.

I see that the parents really weren't fussing over their kids.

They weren't pushing them to do their homework and to do well in school.

My parents, I think, were a little bit more anxious, maybe a little bit more paranoid.

They were very generous and kind people, but they had less faith in humanity, I would say, based on the kind of trauma they experienced, and they weren't as trusting of situations.

So I remember them behaving certain ways.

When they entered a building, they would look for exit signs.

I thought it was normal, but then I realized it wasn't normal.

I also realized that they kept cash, that they were prepared with food stored in certain places in case something happens.

Whatever that thing that's going to happen, I had no clue.

I didn't know that anything could happen.

I didn't realize what they went through.

I had no idea the horrors that they experienced until I got older.

I must have been in high school when my mother started spilling the beans.

He couldn't really vocalize the pain that he kept inside all those years.

So during the pandemic I had a lot of free time on my hands.

And the more I delved into my father's story, the angrier I got.

I know the Holocaust was bad.

I knew some stories.

I did some reading.

I knew the history.

I didn't really delve into my father's story that deep that I can really understand what my family went through and what my dad went through.

I was really so angry that not only the Nazis did these horrendous and atrocious actions, but the collaborators, their locals that lived with my father's family, also participated.

The neighbors participated in eliminating, exterminating, killing Jews in the local small towns called "Shtetls."

So 1,500 people in my father's village.

I was so angry.

I wanted to go there and, you know, let them have it, basically.

But I was told, "You can't go there and do that.

They'll kill you."

There's still anti-Semitism in Europe, so you gotta be careful.

My sister-in-law, who was a guidance counselor in a high school here in Long Island, said, "You know, there's a Holocaust museum in Glen Cove.

Maybe you should talk to them.

It might be a good outlet for you if you talk to young people about your father's story."

They have a program where people educate, you know, students about the Holocaust and tell their stories, tell their family story.

So I didn't know this place existed.

And so I went there and I spoke to the Department of Education at the time.

It took a while and then they finally said, "Listen, why don't you give a lecture about your father's story and tell a little bit about our center, learn a little bit about it."

The director at the time literally just threw me in front of the students, and I do have public speaking experience, so it was a little easier for me than it would have been for somebody else.

So I kind of like fumbled a little bit, but I kind of figured my way through it.

And then he said, "You know, you did pretty good.

Now I want you to give a tour."

So this is how you give a tour.

Okay, these are their galleries.

This is what you say.

I took notes, copious notes, and I kind of infused it with my father's story, my mother's story to make it more personal, to make it more real.

And that's how I got involved.

Welcome.

Good morning.

How are you guys doing today?

We talked to you guys to learn the lessons of the Holocaust because apparently, since the Holocaust, this is a fact, over 55 million people have been killed in genocides.

Therefore, we learn nothing.

So the lessons of the Holocaust have to be taught over and over again until we get it.

Because there's a lot of lessons that we never learned.

Hitler was not only cruel to Jews and his ideology to purify his people to one type, one brand of people, but anything that was different he considered, or a minority considered, subhuman.

And so the disabled citizens of Germany, over 200,000, were euthanized.

And we're talking about German citizens.

That was the first group of people that he eliminated.

And so he corrupted medicine, he corrupted the government, he corrupted the military, he corrupted education, he corrupted everything with his ideology.

I mean, he corrupted doctors and nurses who were willing to euthanize people.

They gave an oath never to harm an individual.

And so they were all brainwashed.

And that's one of the lessons of the Holocaust, is that society is so fragile that you can mislead people, you can, with words and propaganda, you can actually move in a direction towards hate.

And once you have hate, you have violence, and violence can lead to massacres and even genocides.

Now, Germany was an incredible society.

They were ordinary people like you and I, under extraordinary circumstances, did awful things.

That's one of the lessons of the Holocaust, is good people can actually be manipulated, lied to, misled, and coerced to do bad things.

This is one of the most famous of the photographs of the Holocaust because it begs a very important question.

How much brainwashing does it take to make a 17-year-old soldier shoot a mother holding her child?

How much brainwashing?

A lot.

And it starts in youth.

And you saw the books, the elementary school books depicting Jews as poisonous mushrooms, rats.

And so this hatred of words and pictures starts at a very young age and it's hard to get it out of their minds.

Now for them, it's they're like robots.

So this is like not human.

This person is not human.

They're subhuman.

It's easy to kill.

It's not somebody that they can relate to.

That's a very powerful thing.

Listen, I'll be back later.

Have a great day.

Love you.

Bye honey.

So what are we doing today, Bernie?

Well, today we're going to be speaking to about 80 or 90 students in a middle school on Long Island.

How many schools do I go to in a week?

It ranges.

It depends on the time of the year.

From January to June, we are busy.

And so they'll send me to schools because we cannot accommodate the schools at the museum.

So now they have to send people out.

And I get sent out a lot.

About two, three, four times a week.

And in some instances, I'll do seven classes in one school.

A Long Island school district is fighting back against the spread of anti-Semitism.

I'm here to shake you up, to wake you up.

Vice-chair of the Holocaust Memorial Intolerance Center, Nassau County, Dr.

Bernie Furshpan is constantly spraying the idea, "Love trumps hate."

Hate has no discrimination.

They're inheriting this broken world.

They don't have to inherit hate.

Many students saying the lecture resonated with them.

It's helpful to hear a story like this.

There's only so much you can learn in history books.

The middle schools are really my favorite group of students because they're more inquisitive, they participate more, they're curious, and they really want to know.

You know, they really want to know the stories.

The point is to arouse an emotion, empathy, a feeling.

So that's our goal is to make people more empathetic to other human beings because we're all related, bottom line, you know, and we shouldn't be treating each other like this on this tiny little pebble in the middle of nowhere.

But this is an old story and it's an old mission and for some reason it's an, you know, sometimes it feels like an uphill battle.

So it's the good against the evil, Good generally wins.

Hate campaigns generally crash and burn in the long run.

And good generally wins and prevails.

I watched last year's fantastic presenter, and he will be talking about family and the history during the Holocaust.

Thank you so much for inviting me back.

Well, good morning.

My name is Dr.

Bernie Furshpan.

I'm retired.

Yeah, I've been retired for quite a number of years.

I don't have to be here.

That's the point.

My wife keeps telling me we could be down in Florida.

You could be golfing every day.

I said, you know, honey, it's not meaningful to me to chase a ball around all day.

I'd rather talk to you guys and look in your eyes and tell you the story of my father, teach you some of the lessons of the Holocaust that apparently we haven't learned, but also to inspire you.

My goal today is to inspire you to do better, to reach higher for yourselves.

You see guys, you're inheriting our broken world.

You see us adults here in this room?

We're trying to fix it.

We're trying to fix it by educating you.

But we're not going to be here forever.

It's going to be on your plate.

What direction are you going to steer this society is the question.

That's why we talk about these things.

Will you take leadership roles and make a difference?

When you do these presentations with the students, how much of your father is with you on those days?

Oh, totally.

He's totally with me.

I have a very personal story to share with you.

It's about my father.

That's my dad at age 13.

The only photograph I have when he was 13, nothing younger than that.

I have no other family photos of my grandparents, uncles, cousins.

How many here still have grandparents?

How many here tell them that you love them almost every day?

That's nice, I like that.

Good.

I would pay anything to have five minutes with my grandmother.

Just five minutes over a cup of coffee to hear her voice.

Know what she liked, what she didn't like.

Something.

I hope you tell your grandparents that you love them because I don't have that opportunity.

My four-year-old uncle was shot in the head.

They were all shot in the head.

That's how they kill them.

So, like that, people can turn on each other.

That's just the reality.

You guys are old enough to handle this.

August, I think it was 25, 1942, is when they marched my grandmother, my grandfather, my four-year-old uncle, my aunt, and my other uncles to a huge ditch that was dug out in the forest, ten at a time.

They would walk them out naked, shoot them in the head, and pile them inside like sardines.

And then they buried them.

They buried them that way.

Guys, Hitler was a plagiarist.

Not only was he evil, but he was also a plagiarist.

The swastika is a Hindu symbol.

It means good fortune, but he turned it into a symbol of hate and evil.

He also plagiarized the Jim Crow laws here in the United States, laws of segregation, where Jews were segregated from the rest of society.

He also stole a concept, a pseudoscience called eugenics, which professes that there are races amongst humanity.

There are no races.

But he believed it.

I'm going to tell you something right now.

This is probably the most important message right here.

We forgot something.

As a humanity.

We forgot one story.

Did you know that we all came from the same original mother 200,000 years ago?

That's right.

According to Ancestry.com and 23andMe, they show this chart that the inherited by females and it converges to one woman called Mitochondrial Eve.

You can look her up.

She was somewhere in the eastern Africa about 200,000 years ago and she gave birth to humanity.

It's a fact.

It's a scientific fact.

It's not a religion thing.

It's a total scientific fact.

And so we all carry this one mitochondria that she had.

You understand?

Every person in this room is somewhere between your 15th and 50th cousin.

Look around the room.

I challenge you to look around the room at your cousins.

High five, fist pumps.

It's all cool.

There you go.

It's all cool.

Yeah, when you walk down the hallway and you see other people, other students, they're your cousins.

In your head you can do that.

That's my cousin.

That's my cousin.

You may not be crazy about that person, but that's my cousin.

Okay?

I got to respect them.

They're my cousin.

But even though you look for differences in people, deep down inside we're all the same.

You see that?

That's the point.

That's the message today.

But Hitler, he wanted to separate Jews because of the shape of the nose, the size of the skull, whatever.

He wanted everybody to be tall, blonde, and blue-eyed.

How boring is that?

Check this out.

Nature is beautiful.

Nature diversifies.

You never see the same leaf, cloud, butterfly, human being.

We diversify.

Yet he wanted to go against nature and force everybody to look the same, so to eliminate those that don't look like an Aryan person.

And by the way, what's ironic is that he didn't look anything like an Aryan person.

And none of his generals did either.

It's a joke.

But yet he wanted all Germans to be Aryan.

Tall, blonde, blue eyed.

How boring is that?

Imagine having to sing the same national anthem and eat bratwurst for breakfast.

This is what he wanted from everybody.

I like my Asian food.

I like my Mexican food.

I like my Middle Eastern food.

I love all that stuff.

That's why my wife and I travel.

We've been to every continent on this planet except Antarctica.

That's still on my bucket list.

Anybody want to join me when I go to Antarctica?

Feel free.

Feel free.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

I think there's a lot of people telling this story.

I don't think I'm the only one, obviously.

Everybody has their own perspective of this story.

Some religions have this story.

History professors have this story.

Scientists have this story.

They want to know, you know, how did all of this start?

Why are we in this situation?

But there are groups out there who hate, obviously, and don't want to know anything else.

They just want to hate.

So how do you get to them?

How do you penetrate that group?

That's a good question.

It's hard to do that.

I think anything can be done.

I love a good challenge.

I think anything can be done, and it is being done.

In fact, let's use Israel as an example.

So there are organizations in Israel that bring Palestinian and Jewish kids together.

And they have programs.

They travel together, they learn together, they grow up together, and they learn to love each other almost immediately.

And they realize that they are one.

You know?

So it's the politics, it's books, propaganda that continue and perpetuate eternally, as long as they keep doing it, this level of hate.

And that's where it has to be stopped.

If everybody does a little bit something, maybe we'll have an impact.

You know, they say that a butterfly can cause a thunderstorm.

Flapping its wings can somehow, someway, trigger a thunderstorm down the road.

So in this section of this particular gallery, we talk about the height of anti-Semitism in Germany, the height, the fever pitch height where Jews at this point wanted to leave.

His first intention was not to kill Jews but to drive them out of Germany.

So about 50% left.

The other half didn't get visas, they didn't have money because they had to leave all their belongings behind.

What are they going to do?

Where are they going to go?

And so this led up to the Kristallnacht event where he sends out his SA troops, his brown shirts to destroy every synagogue because that was the center of Jewish community life.

So he burned all the Jewish synagogues and temples and destroyed the businesses.

It was called Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, but it was more than broken glass.

They broke hearts and lives and even killed people and arrested Jewish business people.

And so he figured if he destroys the center, now they really want to leave.

But now nobody wants the Jewish refugees.

So there's this Évian conference of 31 countries deciding who's going to take the refugees.

Only one country agrees, you know, the Dominican Republic.

You would think the United States, you would think England, but no, it was the Dominican Republic that takes in thousands of Jews to work in their farms.

Guys, all it takes is one cell to kill the body.

Do you know how many cells your body produces in a lifetime?

You ready for this?

25 to 40 quadrillion cells.

Now, if you take quadrillion, now listen to this, if you take all the cells and you stack them one on top of the other, quadrillion, right?

It goes to the moon, that's how many cells one body makes, your body, makes that many cells in a lifetime.

It goes to the moon, twice around the moon and back to the earth.

That's how many cells, it's a fact, your body produces in a lifetime.

Crazy number.

But all it takes is one cell, a cancer cell, to radicalize other cells.

And then they, as a mob, will kill the body.

And that's what happens with hate.

Hate is like cancer.

It spreads like cancer.

And it spreads quickly today.

Whereas Hitler took him 12 years to spread his propaganda, back then to convince people that he was the guy to lead them, today it can take minutes on social media to spread lies, misinformation, and convince people of something that's not true.

You see?

So the Holocaust was a genocide.

The word "holo" means "universal."

"Caustic" means "to destroy."

It was Hitler's intention to destroy.

It was a genocide, not only within his government boundaries, but all the other countries on the planet.

That was his goal.

Crazy ideology.

Six million people is the entire population of Brooklyn, plus Queens, plus Nassau County.

That's how many people were killed methodically, systematically, on an industrial scale.

And of the six million, one and a half million children, the entire population of Nassau County.

Let that sink for a second.

Imagine every person in Nassau County, a child, from the west to the east, from the north to the south, they were all eliminated.

This is how cruel people can be.

A little bit about myself.

Who am I?

I was born in Israel, actually in a hospital in Jaffa, right south of Tel Aviv, the old city.

It was a hospital.

And I grew up in a little village called Azor.

Tiny little village.

And I have some very fond memories growing up in this little village.

But at age six, my life in Israel stopped.

And my parents brought us, my twin brother and me, Mark, to Brooklyn, New York.

And that's where I grew up.

Why did your parents leave Israel for Brooklyn?

They never really were transparent with me about why they left, but I have my theories.

One of which is they suffered greatly in the Holocaust.

They had enough with wars.

They immigrated to Israel, and then they had to deal with the Independence War.

My father fought in the Independence War.

And then it looked like there was going to be plenty more wars to come, and there were.

I think they didn't want to raise their kids in the same environment that they grew up.

Secondly, Israel was a brand new country.

When I was born, I was only nine years old.

So, there was a lot of chaos.

It wasn't that organized.

People were poor.

There was food rationing.

But the country was trying to build itself.

And so it was a struggle raising your kids.

And I think that could have been paired up with the wars that my parents said, "Enough is enough.

We want to raise our kids to have a good future, a successful future without wars, without struggle."

And I think that's why they did it.

But they never really vocalized it that way to us.

-This next gentleman and his wife, Joanne, and they enjoyed many wonderful times together.

Here is Bernie Furshpan.

-Thank you.

Best friend or not, he made each of us feel like we were the star.

Who is Bernie?

Bernie did a lot of things.

It's almost like I'm talking about another person, quite honestly.

I can't believe some of the things I did.

I mean, I had a lot of chutzpah to get into businesses in areas that I had no business in.

But Joanne keeps telling me, "Well, you've made it your business.

That's what you did."

And so I think I learned this chutzpah thing from my dad.

My mom, too, actually.

I think a lot of Holocaust survivors that came to the United States became very successful business people because they knew how bad it can get and they appreciated everything.

And you know, to be grateful and give great customer service, you know what I'm saying, and give good quality care or good quality products, great things, is because you appreciate the simple things.

In 1939, September 1st, this bully gets the green light because the world is looking the other way.

He gets the green light, he wants more land for his people.

So that's what he said, he wants more land for his people.

So he moves into France and Belgium and the Netherlands, he gets, he takes back Austria and Czechoslovakia, goes into Poland.

Goes into Poland.

All right, and now this is World War II.

This is the beginning of World War II.

As he's crossing into these countries and entering them, and he's occupying them, he implements the same edicts he had in Germany.

Jews.

No civil or human rights for Now my father came from a little village called Ludwipol.

A very tiny little village.

I said, "Dad, how small was this village?"

He said, "Oh, it's so small that if a horse and wagon would come in, the tip of the nose was on one end of the village, the back wheel was on the other end of the village."

I said, "Dad, you're exaggerating."

He says, "No, it felt like it when I was a kid because it was such a tiny little village, everybody was crammed in like there was eight people in our family, like a one room, you know shack, they lived in a shack.

In 1941 when the Nazis crossed the border and occupied his little village of 1500 people, 99% Jewish in his tiny little village, somewhere in Poland, they entered the village.

They rounded up all the Jews, put them in a cage, kind of like a cage, it's called a ghetto, a tall fence around two blocks, and everybody had to live together.

Four or five families in one house, and all you ate was two slices of bread a day.

You can't survive on that.

But there was a warrant for his arrest.

A ten-year-old boy, what did he do wrong?

What law did he break?

Anybody?

Yes.

That's right, being Jewish.

Good answer.

Ten years old, being Jewish, a warrant for his arrest because he ran away.

He ran into the forest.

So they were hunting him down like a hunted animal.

Whenever there are extraordinary circumstances like this, people have choices.

People have choices Anybody here ever see somebody get bullied?

Anybody?

Yeah, okay.

How many here have ever been bullied?

It's okay, you don't have to raise your hand.

Okay, I've been bullied.

I'll raise my hand.

I've been bullied.

When the Nazis occupied this little village, many people hid inside their homes because every day they had to come out and work.

And many of them couldn't work.

They were too tired.

They were too young.

They were exhausted because many of them, unfortunately, I don't want to make anybody upset here, but they were killed.

They were eliminated if they didn't work or they couldn't work.

They gave them gold.

They gave the Nazis gold to soften them up.

Please be kinder to us.

Please.

Why do we have to put people in positions where they have to beg for other people to be kind to them?

1,500 Jewish people living in this little village, but there were also Christians and Protestants living amongst them.

And they got along beautifully.

Beautifully.

They traded together.

They did business together.

They went to school together.

But the majority of the village was Jewish.

Jews assimilated wherever they lived.

I did some research in the 1930s.

There was an old map of my father's village.

I superimposed it with a Google map.

I love Google.

How many here love Google maps?

I'm crazy about Google maps.

What used to be the synagogue is now a pharmacy.

And there is my father's house.

And I found it based on the old map, superimposed on the Google map.

And can I be honest with you guys?

I started to cry.

I started to cry.

Because before it was just a story.

Just a story like I'm telling you.

But for the first time I felt the pain.

I'm looking at the house where my father grew up.

I looked at the house where my grandparents raised my dad.

Where my dad had brothers and a sister.

And now it's just a shack.

Who knows what it's being used for, but that's where they lived.

And that's the house that had the little cellar that my father would store my grandmother's food.

That's the house that I don't know.

But now I know.

I see it.

It's like I'm standing looking right at it.

This is my father's village map.

It was a memorial created by the 30 people that survived from the 1500.

Only 30 survived.

They got together after the war to draw a map and tell the stories of the families because nobody would believe that it existed because it's completely wiped out and occupied by other people who took over their homes gladly.

They're neighbors.

By the way, my father's house was right here, right there.

And this is the ghetto, this thing here.

So everybody in the community had to move in to this ghetto.

And living in a ghetto was very harsh.

Have you ever gone there?

I have not gone there.

My father did not want me to go there when he was alive.

The surviving few went back there.

You want to listen to this?

The Chutzpah?

They went back there to unearth the remains of the several hundred remaining.

Those that survived the year of hell and torture there and forced labor, maybe 1,200 survived.

They were all shot in the woods, in a ditch, and so in the 1980s and 90s, the remaining few, very few, maybe 30, they went back to unearth the remains to give them a decent burial.

They put them in coffins and they built a fence around it and turned it into a cemetery, a grave site, a memorial grave site.

And I wanted to go back and I've been told you can't go back, it's very dangerous.

If they find out that you are, you know, one of the kids of the survivors, they may think that you want your home back.

So it's risky.

If your father were here right now, sitting where I am, what would you say to him?

Wow.

First of all, I learned so much more about his story that I knew when he was alive.

I think I would hug him a lot longer and tighter, knowing all the things he went through, because I did a lot of research about the inhabitants of his village and my family went through.

You go to this little village right now, you wouldn't even know it was a Jewish community some 80 years ago.

My dad, one time, went to steal some potatoes from a farm, and the farming family recognized my father.

They were upstanders.

They took him into the house, they let him bathe, changed his clothes, they fed him.

And after a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, word got out that they were harboring a Jewish kid.

This was a kind act.

They took a huge risk.

Anybody who stood up to injustice, upstanders, took a huge risk.

And they risked not only themselves, but their entire family.

So the Nazi soldiers and their collaborators come to the house and start surrounding it as my father runs out back to the forest.

They surround the house.

They light it on fire and the entire family is wiped out.

Good people paid the ultimate sacrifice.

This is how he slept.

He had to dig a ditch and cover himself with branches and leaves.

He got frostbite.

This is an actual photograph because I wanted to see how he lived.

I wanted to see where my dad lived.

What kind of accommodations did he have?

This is the kind of accommodations he had.

These kind of trees, this is the kind of snow, imagine living like that.

And he ran into the forest.

Can I tell you guys something really crazy?

I don't know how he did it.

He ran into the forest in the middle of summer.

He had only summer clothes.

I don't know where he got other cloth to wrap his feet.

I had to find out who the bad guys are.

You know whenever you watch like a movie, like a suspense movie, a mystery, you want to know who's the bad guy.

And you think it's this person but it's really that person.

I found out that these, the leaders, the commanders of the Gestapo and the Nazis in this village were criminals.

So they took the criminals out of jail and they put them in charge because they knew they'd be cold-blooded.

But I did find out something very good.

I found out in my research that there were a lot of good people trying to rescue the Jews.

What was it like living in a forest?

What kind of dangers do you think lurk in a European forest?

Snakes, bears, poisonous plants, poisonous berries, wolves, fox, coyotes, poisonous spiders.

He said all these things existed.

I said, "What did you eat?"

He said, "I ate tree bark."

You can live off tree bark.

It's not pleasant, but you can survive on it.

There's a lot of nutrients in it.

He learned to eat that and he ate berries and mushrooms.

That's what he lived on.

So the trees in this forest are not like in Eisenhower Park.

You have maple trees, you have oak trees in Eisenhower Park.

Over here, it's just birch trees, very skinny trees.

You can't hide behind them.

How did he hide in a forest?

I said, "What was the most dangerous animal?"

He says, "The most dangerous animal was the Nazi soldier with their collaborators coming in through the forest at night looking for us, hunting us down."

Why at night?

Because they knew that the Jews were sleeping and they knew the German shepherds would find them.

I asked them, "Did you stay with anybody in the forest?"

Because there were like about 60, 70 people in the forest from other villages hiding.

"Yeah."

"So it's hard for me to tell this story.

It's hard for you to hear it.

But could you imagine?

It's hard, obviously, from the first person I met.

He couldn't tell the story.

My mom could tell me the story, now I'm telling you the story.

So now you're a witness to the story.

He was with his mother, and it was at night, and because he brought food to her during the day, she let him stay.

Could you imagine, you're 10 years old, you're scared to death.

10 years old!

Do you remember when you were 10?

It's scary at night when it's dark and there's animals out there.

You want to be with somebody.

So she had an infant in her arm.

The worst situation we can put women in is to take their babies and try to survive with a baby.

To bring them into a forest where it's minus 20 degrees.

Why do we do that to other people?

There's no diaper changes, no hygiene, no sanitation, no food.

How do you feed a child in a situation like that?

So she's trying to survive and keep her child alive.

One night they're sleeping in this big ditch, and the Germans are coming through with their German shepherds and flashlights, cutting through the darkness.

The baby starts to cry.

Why do we put mothers in situations where they have to make choices?

You're probably wondering what kind of choices.

So many people had to silence their children during the war in order to survive.

It was either the baby or all of us.

So the baby starts to cry and so that she wouldn't feel the guilt, carry the burden of the guilt.

She took my father's hand so it wasn't her hand and forced him to silence the child.

She made a child silence a child.

And he had to live with this his entire life.

And he couldn't even tell me this story.

He couldn't tell me this story because it's too hard to tell a story like this.

My mother told me this story.

She didn't want me not to know this story.

She wanted me to know what my dad went through.

So this is one of the stories she told me that he couldn't voice, he couldn't talk about.

And so he had to live with this horror.

He was haunted by this, I'm sure, his entire life.

How can anybody be okay with something like that?

What happened to the woman?

Did he ever see her again?

Do you know?

I don't know if he ever saw that mother again.

I don't know the rest of that story.

Whether she survived, I don't know how she lived on.

I don't know how people moved on.

But somehow they had to.

Not everybody came out okay.

The thing is that he was traumatized as a 10-year-old to 13-year-old boy.

He was traumatized.

He had to live with a lot of guilt because he saw a lot of awful things.

He was haunted, my dad.

He had PTSD.

You guys know what PTSD?

He had PTSD.

My dad did.

I had front row seats to somebody with PTSD.

One of the lessons of the Holocaust is not to take anything for granted.

We all do.

We all take things for granted.

You know, dead people get more flowers than living people.

Because regret is much more powerful than gratitude.

Why am I doing this?

Because I don't take life for granted.

I don't take the United States of America for granted.

This is the greatest country in the world.

You can do so many different things.

You don't have to have just one career, I found out.

I learned a lesson from my father who survived three years in the forest.

You've got to be pretty creative.

You ever watch that show Survivor?

That's a joke compared to this.

It's a joke.

This is truly surviving.

But I had a wonderful life here in the United States.

I still do.

My brother and I, we joined a program at Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn that was a pre-med program.

Really an incredible program.

We were able to do CPR on patients and take blood pressures, take EKGs.

But why did I even end up there?

And did my mother push me to become a doctor?

In so many ways, yes.

But in so many ways, no.

I always wanted to be a pilot.

I loved planes.

I told my mom I'd like to go to aviation high school in Queens when I was in junior high school.

She says, "Why?"

I said, "I want to be a pilot."

I said, "I want to fly a plane."

I love planes.

I want to fly a plane.

I want to lift off.

I want to land it.

It's just something I wanted to do.

It was in my core.

She says, "What kind of a husband are you going to be?

You're going to be flying around.

Your kids, your wife, they're going to be home.

You won't see them for days."

This is the kind of values that she put inside of me.

This is very traditional but I understand where it came from and I get it.

So I said, "Okay, alright."

I loved my mom so much.

I really did.

She was a special person.

She had the most incredible sense of humor but she didn't physically push me into medicine.

I mean, I could have done something else but there were certain things that she didn't think I should do.

She wanted me to be a good husband.

That's what was important to her.

I love that about her.

And so I wanted to be a medical doctor.

I love cardiology.

But as a student at the university that I was in, the undergrad university, I had these headaches and somebody suggested I go see a chiropractor.

I went to see a chiropractor and that's when it happened.

That's when the magic happened.

I said, "Oh my God, I love this."

I didn't like the gore and guts and all that stuff.

The more I looked into it, I said, "I think this is what I want to do."

When I was young, I realized that I had potential to do things that I actually either had no training in or no business in.

But I realized that I can learn fast, and I can be as good as anybody else.

So I did some cartooning at the university that I went to.

And then when I entered the chiropractic college, I then created posters for the profession.

I was getting into the idea that I could do some marketing for the profession, because it needed a voice, a really good voice, because it was being attacked by the medical profession, and we needed to have a stronger voice and have better quality marketing material.

I also had stage fright, believe it or not.

I had awful stage fright when I was in junior high school.

But when I got into college, in chiropractic school, I joined Toastmasters International and that launched my public speaking career, and then I felt really comfortable in front of people.

In this room here, I talk about how the Jews and other minorities are brought to the camps.

There were 44,000 forced labor camps, but only six death camps.

Thank God there weren't 44,000 death camps, but that's enough, let me tell you, because they killed 3 million people this way, through the camps.

The other half they killed in villages and forests, like my father's village.

And this is horrific to look at, because they were treated like cattle in the camps, literally like cattle.

Your hair is first of all shaven, it's used to make mattresses, and you're branded like a cow, you know, with a tattoo with a number.

You no longer have a name, you have a number, let's go in here.

You're treated like cattle.

They were put in barns.

These are the stalls, like a barn, and this is how they were treated.

Diseases spread like wildfire.

You're lucky.

Even if you weren't shot, you're lucky that you survived this.

You're lucky.

They were beaten, abused, murdered, and just like cattle they were herded to the latrine, bathroom.

They were herded.

If you had to go to the bathroom, there's no hallway pass to go to the bathroom.

You had to wait until your barracks had its turn to go to the bathroom.

So like twice a day you were herded like cattle to this barn, the latrines, and everybody had to do their business in front of everybody no dignity, no human dignity, completely dehumanized, treated like animals it said that humanity can descend to this level of health all of this, the Jewish stars, the yellow star the Jews had to wear, every country had their own version in the Netherlands it's spelled J-O-O-D, in Germany it was J-U-D-E, in France it was J-U-I-F every country had their own version of the star and they were gated in like animals listen Bernie, there's only three professions in our religion doctor, lawyer, rabbi, that's it you're a little slow, you're a politician when I was a chiropractor I loved making my patients laugh and I always loved stand-up comedy I had favorites and I wanted to emulate them So when I basically packed everything in I decided to go into stand-up comedy That's right, stand-up comedy My mother's going, "What are you doing, buddy?

I sent you to school to be a doctor What are you doing?

You're getting up there and you're telling jokes to perfect strangers and you're talking about your family?"

She says, "Let me see some of the videos" It took a while and I finally showed her the videos My mom buys me two shirts last week I put this one on.

She says... "What's wrong?

You don't like the other one?"

[Laughter] She was dying laughing.

She was plus and she says “you know what you're right it's all true” She says “Everything you talk about is true.” She was dying laughing but do me a favor don't show your father because he's going to take it personally.

She loved what I was doing and she couldn't believe I was doing it but she knew that I can jump from one thing to another so I got to say this about that so far that I learned these skills from my dad to survive.

This is really survival skills.

In the forest if it's dangerous over here you go there.

You know, you got to find a way to survive.

And these skills are survival skills, changing careers.

Here we have something called a death march.

So as the camps were getting liberated, but before they were getting liberated, the Nazis had to kill the rest of the Jews.

And so what they did was, they may have not had enough Zyklon or whatever it was to kill them, so they just walked them to death in the cold.

They just marched them from one camp back and forth so that they would just fall by the wayside alongside the roads.

You're going to hear this story today by the testimony that you're going to hear.

The father of this gentleman was in two death marches and survived.

He's a second generation Holocaust survivor just like me.

And now we pass the stories on.

So that we don't keep repeating this.

It's been 80 years.

It's time that we make sure that everybody remembers the earliest of the next 180 years.

Exactly.

You escaped two times at the end of the war.

And I used to tell people, Leo, if you escaped from the Nazis' place, you'd be telling people as often as you could.

They were marched to their death.

Unfortunately, from the six million people, three million were killed this way in little villages.

The other three were killed in the gas chambers of the death camps where they forced, they exploited the Jews and forced them to build tanks, guns, uniforms.

There's a movie called Schindler's List, and Schindler was a Nazi party member that had a factory and he had a camp around his factory where the Jews were working.

But Schindler stood up for justice and he hid the Jews and he rescued a lot of Jewish people.

Even though he was a Nazi member, it didn't matter.

All kinds of people rescued Jews.

Muslims, Japanese, Chinese.

It didn't matter.

People from all walks of life rescued Jews as best as they could, because it was unjust to try to eliminate a group of people in this way.

There are 2,000 of these little villages.

To this day, the grave site still exists.

Why do you think they had the dead camps where they killed 10,000 to 20,000 people a day?

Why do you think they had them here and not in Germany?

Because they didn't want them to smell the burning bodies.

They wanted to keep it a secret.

The word got out, but people didn't believe it.

There's no such thing.

Nobody could kill people like that.

That's impossible.

Even the Jews that went to these camps didn't believe that it was true.

They see the smokestacks, they smell burning flesh, and yet they said, "Ah, that's it.

We're human beings.

Nobody treats each other like this.

It's impossible."

You know the story of Anne Frank.

Brilliant girl, but there were a lot of brilliant people, right?

A lot of brilliant kids.

Brilliant girl, wise, beautiful story.

She wrote in her diary, she called it Kitty.

It was turned into a book, you know, reproduced in every language.

Here's the problem.

There were one and a half million children that didn't have a piece of paper or a pencil to tell their story.

We missed out on so much wisdom, so many inventions, medical contributions, social contributions.

Every child has an incredible amount of potential.

Most people are good inside.

You guys are all good.

We all have this potential to do bad things.

But deep down inside, that good will always want to fight evil.

My work ethic came from my dad.

He had incredible work ethics.

He had integrity.

If he said he was going to be there at 9 o'clock, he was there at 855.

If he said he was going to be done by Friday, he was done by Thursday.

That's my dad up there, working in the Puck building, doing plaster work.

In the city, he was like a magician when it came to plaster.

He would throw the color orange, which was the exterior color of this beautiful building, very famous building, into the plaster.

And when he would schmear, you know, he would call it, "I'm going to schmear it” on the wall, you would see these explosive colors that, they were stunned and they never painted the walls.

So they left it like that, like works of art.

He was hired even by John Lennon of the Beatles to do his bathroom and kitchen.

He was like a private contractor, so he would do tile work, cement work, but I mean really meticulous, beautiful, clean, old world craftsmanship.

And he wanted me to work with him in the summers.

I said, "Dad, you know, I want to be a doctor.

I want to work in a hospital or something.

Spend a little time with me.

It's free lunch, free transportation, and you'll make good money.

So, alright, he talked me into doing some summers with him, and it was not easy work.

I think he wanted me to see that it was not easy work, that I shouldn't do the kind of work that he's doing.

But he also taught me a lot of lessons while working for him.

He would make me wash his tools with the brush over and over again until it was absolutely perfect like brand new.

After several years, his tools, like the spatulas, actually shrunk in size from all the washing.

And he kept it, you know, like when you sharpen a pencil, it becomes so tiny.

He kept using them even if they were smaller.

What he learned from the Holocaust is not to take anything for granted, not his tools, not his family, not his friends, not his clientele.

He appreciated everything, even toilet paper.

Like if as a kid, you know, as a teenager, he used up toilet paper.

He would come and he says, "Well, what happened to half the toilet paper?"

is gone because he didn't have toilet paper in the forest.

He appreciated every square in that toilet paper.

And so working with him, I appreciated later on in life the values that I learned.

And it went back to that time and I said, "Ah, that's where I learned it from."

Not everybody has the same level of work ethics, but mine are really sharp because of my dad.

I had a wonderful practice, probably one of the largest practices in the country.

In 1982, there was a girl, Janet Longo, who had hiccups for about nine months.

And somebody brought her to my office.

And I said, "All right, let's give it a try."

You know, I'll give her an adjustment, a chiropractic adjustment.

And it made a difference.

Her hiccups stopped.

I had to keep adjusting her a few times.

As far as I knew at that time, she did great.

The hiccups were gone.

I was on television as a result of that because somebody picked up the story and put it in the New York Post.

And then I had CBS, ABC, NBC all in my office with their cameras.

And that was headline news that day.

Chuck Scarborough was saying, "Film at 11.

Chiropractor saves this girl's life."

Because she was going to have surgery.

They were going to crush the phrenic nerve.

The phrenic nerve controls the diaphragm.

It does the hiccups, right?

So they were going to crush it or something along those lines.

And so I helped this girl.

And then before I know it, because of this news broadcast, I had a symphony of hiccup patients in my waiting room the next day.

It was unbelievable.

My regular patient is going, "What is going on here?"

And so I was only able to help one more person because it had to do that he had a pinched nerve.

You see, and that's how I was able to help.

The others had other issues that I couldn't help.

And you wouldn't believe how many people actually suffer with hiccups who stay in their homes for years with hiccups, non-stop.

One guy had hiccups for 20 years straight.

He had a belly like this.

He never went out of the house.

His wife would get him the food.

He would never leave the house because he was embarrassed.

You wonder about the people that stay home because they have ailments that you don't even know about.

It's really an incredible story.

So basically hiccups launched my media career.

Because I was interviewed, in my mind I was saying, "I could be on the other side of the microphone and do the interviews."

So I approached CableVision, which was relatively new at the time.

And I said, "You know, I'd like to host a show about alternative medicine, new things in medicine, new discoveries, inventions."

So they gave me an opportunity to do a show once a month for a year, and it lasted 12 years.

I had a big following actually, and people would come to my practice as a result of that too.

I just want to say clearly that I'm still the same person no matter what career I did.

It's almost like a painter being creative and doing impressionist work, and then one day they want to do abstract.

They're still the same painter, they're still the same creator, but it's just a different style.

So all my careers are just different styles of me.

They're not really careers in my mind, they're just different styles.

Different circumstances, different people, different lingo, it doesn't matter.

I'm still the same person doing the same thing with the same values and the same ethics.

That's all.

It's just being creative in another area.

That's all it is.

And by the way, you have a lovely apartment.

Is there anything you can't do?

You know what?

I don't know what I can't do.

Because so far, the things that I've attempted to do, I've been able to do.

I have yet to figure out what I can't do, but I don't want to test myself that far, quite honestly.

There's some things that maybe I don't want to do, okay?

And if I had to do it, maybe I could do it.

Like, you know, climb up the side of a mountain.

You ever see these people, you know, with their fingernails?

I don't know if I can do that, but if it was a matter of life and death, I would have to learn how to do it.

So I would at least try.

Let's put it that way.

I would at least try to learn how to do it.

But what I can't and I shouldn't do is give up.

Like most people very much give up almost right away when they try something and they don't succeed and they don't try to figure out how to solve this problem, which is something that is inherent in me that I learned from my dad, to find a way to solve the problem.

Did you ever see your dad cry?

My brother and I, if we would ever show any weakness, like crying, he would tell us to man up.

I mean, that's based on his experience.

I can't wrong him for that.

That was his experience.

And he had to man it up in the forest, you know.

And maybe he cried and they told him to man it up, those who were also living in the forest with him.

But the only times I saw him crying, which really moves me, I've got to tell you.

That's a good question.

The only time I saw him cry was when my brother and I would graduate.

So when we graduated James Madison High School in Brooklyn, it was 1975 and I saw my dad crying.

And it was like he succeeded.

He survived, but we are the fruits of that survival.

And we succeeded and then he cried again in my college and in the chiropractic college.

Every time there was like a success, he was rewarded.

And that's when he just let loose and cried.

So the experiences that both my parents had kind of created me and my brother to become the people that we are today.

But if they weren't around, if I grew up with another family or they didn't experience the Holocaust, my parents, would I be the same person?

Would be a really good question.

I think I would be the same person for the most part under different circumstances.

I'd probably be doing something else.

I remember as a kid, I loved kids.

And I grew up loving kids.

And I still love kids.

And I didn't realize how much involved I am with kids all the time.

When I was a chiropractor, I had a special clinic called Kids Clinic, where kids could come in on a Saturday for free.

I took care of kids.

I protected kids.

Because I don't know why, maybe it's inherited, I don't know why, but I really always cared about children, because they were innocent.

When I went into the comedy business, I had classes for kids.

Comedy for kids.

Comedy is a science.

It's an art for delivering it.

I put together a PowerPoint presentation.

It's about 150 slides.

There's about 5 to 10 classes.

Within each class, there's improv exercises.

We do vocabulary.

Then I teach them how to write comedy.

So each child had between three and five jokes that they wrote and one-liners that they presented in front of the school at the end of the program.

When we, my wife and I, ran the Metropolitan Room, we had on weekends something called "Kids Cabaret."

So we had puppet shows and things like that for kids to get familiar with this term, what a cabaret is.

It's a very intimate kind of entertainment.

It's really, it's a lot of fun.

And so I always somehow managed to get involved with kids and now here I am again, back in the same place with kids, educating them, inspiring them to do better.

You have to be open to the signs that you're on the right path in your life.

And one of the signs that I got was, first of all, when I went to the chiropractic college in the late 70s, I lived in Glen Cove for a year.

And then when I moved down, because I was in school, I said, "Well, I don't think I'll ever live here again."

I mean, I was looking for a practice, to build a practice somewhere else.

But I said, "I'll probably never end up here again."

And here I am, back in Glen Cove.

So that's one sign.

The other sign is I'm telling my father's story, that he worked in the Puck building.

And then when I was telling this story at the museum, which is housed in the Pratt family home, my hair stood up.

I said, "Dad is here because he worked in the Puck building, which housed the Pratt Institute."

So it all came together, and I got this like a hot flash, and my hair stood up.

I said, "Oh my God, my father's here!

He's right here with me."

And I have to continue telling his story.

What do you miss the most about your father?

I miss his smile.

His eyes smiled.

I miss looking at him and talking to him.

But he always had this smile in his eyes.

You know, you would think that somebody who would endure something like what he went through, the hell that he went through, would come out very resentful, bitter, lose hope with society and people, not trust anybody.

He was a kind, generous human being.

I miss those eyes, those smiling eyes.

I rarely saw him depressed, but he was depressed after my mom passed.

For five years he cried, every day for five years.

My father to me was my mentor.

He was my example of what I should be like as a father, as a husband, as a friend, as an uncle.

He was great at all those things.

Everybody loved Moshe.

We called him Moshe.

Everybody loved him.

Everybody loved him.

And so whenever there was a party, he would be dancing, having a great time, but always making people feel good.

Never stealing the stage light, you know, just giving them the stage and making them feel good.

He was like that.

And I think I learned from him.

I was a drummer in a band, a rock and roll band.

I loved drumming.

I produced and promoted concerts at Lincoln Center.

I did three concerts there that were huge.

And they were so successful and I felt so good just standing in the back, not being on the stage, but just being -- I didn't want to be on the stage.

I wanted to be in the back to watch people have a great time.

I grew up in a very Italian neighborhood.

My mom would make food that was Polish.

What you think is Jewish food is not Jewish.

It's Polish.

Bagels, it's not Jewish.

Challah bread is braided Polish bread.

Stuffed cabbage, Polish.

Borscht Polish, Russian.

My mother used to make this food for my dad.

This is one thing that was pretty gross.

It was made from calf hooves, boiled, turned into jelly, and she put garlic and meat and eggs.

And it smelled like a dead body.

Honestly, I would open up my, your age, I would open up the fridge, "Mom, can't you make a spaghetti and meatballs like the Russos next door?"

She says, "I don't know how to make it."

See, she didn't have Instagram then to see all the different recipes.

They brought a piece of paper from the old country and made the food that their families made.

It was passed down from generation to generation.

So she made this food.

It was Polish food, but that's because they grew up in Poland.

Jews that lived in Morocco ate Moroccan food.

Those that lived in China ate Chinese food.

You see what I'm saying?

So they assimilated to the culture and they brought it to the United States.

Why did my mother make this for my father?

Anybody have any ideas?

Yes.

Yes, and that's what he remembered and it reminded him of his mother because he lost his mother at age 10.

So she cooked the food that reminded him of his mother.

Comfort food.

How many here love comfort food?

Yeah.

I used to sneak out to Mrs.

Russo's house and she would make me the best, what she called gravy.

It was like tomato sauce.

It was just wonderful.

And one of the lessons of the Holocaust is to be grateful, as I mentioned before.

I was grateful because I didn't have it.

Her kids were not grateful because they had it.

So I would eat the spaghetti meatballs and say, "Thank you, Mrs.

Russo."

Her kids finished their food, ran out, never put the dishes in the sink, and so ungrateful, and to play stickball.

Me, I was grateful, "Thank you, Mrs."

She loved me because of that.

She just loved me.

So she would make me eggplant parmesan, chicken parmesan, you name it.

It was just fantastic stuff.

My mother took on a maternal role for my dad.

She took care of him, she protected him, she defended him.

He could tell me something outrageous that he saw in the news.

I said, "Dad, I think maybe you misinterpreted.

It's actually blue, not red."

And she would say, "No, he's right.

It's red.

I saw it in the papers, I saw it in the news."

She would defend him tooth and nail.

I'd say, "Okay, whatever you say, Ma."

And so she was like that.

She defended him like her own son, like a cat would defend its kittens.

She would scratch your eyes out.

What did their trauma do to you?

Their trauma impacted me in really unique ways.

For example, my mother learned to suffer in silence.

The Jews during the Holocaust suffered in silence.

They didn't complain much.

They didn't want to make a ruckus.

They didn't want to be pointed out.

And so they suffered greatly in silence.

And I learned that from my mom.

You guys probably have a little pain.

You say, "Oh my God, it hurts."

Me, I can be right now with a knife in my foot and you wouldn't even know it.

I just learned to ignore pain because that's what I learned from my parents.

They ignored, my mother ignored, she had diabetes, she ignored it.

She died from diabetes, but she kind of like ignored it.

Because you see, Jews had to be silent and not create controversy.

Otherwise, they would be abused physically, violence, there was violence against them.

So they learned to be quiet, to be quiet, not to bother anybody, not to complain.

You understand what I'm saying?

This gallery here is very powerful.

Because it talks about what happened after the war or during liberation.

And what was exposed, this mass evil.

You know, Eisenhower, when he entered one of the camps, he called the press and he said, "I don't want you to see necessarily what we fought for, because you already know what we fought for, liberty and democracy and all of that.

But I want you to see what we fought against, and that's evil, pure evil.

So take a look here, videotape it, document it, because nobody's going to believe this ever happened."

In this particular gallery, what affects me the most that I'm always drawn to is this photograph here of the foreign wall displaced persons camp.

My father ended up there.

My father ended up there.

Now that's not my dad there, but I feel like maybe they knew him.

Maybe they saw him there.

I'm looking in their eyes and maybe my dad somehow impacted their lives, somehow made them smile in some way.

Because he was a cute guy, you know, at that age, age 14, let's say, 14, 15.

And he had a great personality, so I can only imagine what he was like over there.

Even though he went through absolute hell, he probably was celebrating life and happy to be amongst his people.

And celebrating life and being rehabilitated and ending up in Israel.

So this picture always hits home because it's the camp where my father stayed.

So maybe he was somewhere in this vicinity, maybe walking around, who knows at that time.

I don't know how he did it, but he did, he did great.

And thank God he did because if it wasn't for him, 14 people wouldn't be born today.

It's my obligation, you know, to tell his story.

It's a no-brainer.

Tell me how you found out your father passed away.

So, how I found out how my dad passed away is a crazy story.

I have a colonoscopy appointment.

I'm going under.

Joanne gets a phone call from my brother that my dad passed away while I'm under.

She goes to the receptionist, "Can I see my husband?

He's already under."

So they had to wait.

She calls up my daughter.

Tamera comes over.

I'm looking up.

There they are with tears in their eyes.

And I'm thinking, "Is this a dream?

Am I not... I'm coming out of anesthesia.

What's going on here?

It's got to be a dream.

It's got to be..." "What's my daughter doing here?

like, how did that even happen?"

And then it hit me and I realized, "Oh my God, my dad died."

So my daughter drove us to Long Island and I looked at my dad.

He was cold.

I said, "That's the end of the line for the 10-year-old boy who suffered so much."

That night, Tamara stayed with us.

And before we went to bed, we were down here, Joanna and I were downstairs here, and the lights by the window started flickering.

So I want you to know that they had a ritual.

Both my parents had a ritual.

Whenever we left their home, they would flicker on and off the outside light to say goodbye.

You know, as we're driving away, like, they would flicker.

It was like a signal, "Bye!"

Like a wave.

And so, the lights started to flicker here in the house.

And we're looking at each other, and every time we say, "Did you see that?"

it flickers again.

And it's like, "Wow, this has never happened before."

I want you to know, it's never happened since.

It's the same light bulb.

Never flickered before, never flickered since.

But on the same day that he passed, it was flickering he was telling us goodbye.

And so I told my daughter, I said, "You know, you're going to sleep here tonight, so you're going to stay up late."

We saw the light flicker, and she's like, "Yeah, right, okay."

The next morning, she goes, "The light was flickering all night!"

I said, "That's my dad telling you goodbye.

We're in the car in the morning, all of us."

My daughter goes, "Wouldn't it be funny as we're passing by the house if that lamp would flicker?"

And there it goes.

I couldn't make this up.

It's a crazy story, but it happened.

And so there's got to be something there to it, for sure.

He's still around.

And I know he is, because I feel him when I'm at the center, giving tours.

And so over the last four years, you know, as a docent, that's a tour guide, and an educator and a storyteller about my dad, I got more involved.

And before I knew it, somebody recommended that I get on the board, and they voted me in on the board.

And they made me the marketing director, because they saw I had all these marketing ideas.

And I just literally went gangbusters with upgrading the quality marketing material from brochures to flyers to posters to signage, basic things just to bring it up to industry standard.

The signs on the street to direct people to the museum, signs in the Welwyn preserve as you go through the trail.

We painted gold trimming around the building, painted the white trimming and the portico gold and circles that exist with these moths but they look like butterflies that represent children we painted in gold and then we put words in between that represented kindness and inclusion and support and all the positive words and tolerance and so it looked different right off the top and then the glass panes I said we need children of the Holocaust in those glass panes to welcome today's children into the museum so when they get off the bus they're welcomed by the children of the Holocaust and so it's a powerful approach I did some LED lighting some accent lighting that's important and then I put a monitor and so I have you know continuous ads and promo pieces and educational pieces for people who visit.

My wife and I had installed a light fixture in the grand staircase that have impressions of four different upstanders, rescuers of Jews, one of which is Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler who rescued Jews.

And so we honor these people as you walk up and you ascend the stairs, you reach a higher moral ground like these people did.

And so it's very symbolic and it lights up the space, so we're very proud of that.

I built an exhibit with a prisoner jacket that was lent to the museum, so I built the structure for it to house it.

I really enjoy doing all of this.

It's a lot of work.

It's really labor intensive, very physical work, but I enjoy it because I'm doing this to really continue this education process, but also I have both my parents in my heart and soul, and I feel like they're energizing me with these projects, and they give me the passion, and I'm doing it for them, and what's the big deal, so I spend a few more hours.

My father lived in a forest, again I always go back to, he lived in a forest for three years, how does anybody survive, what I'm doing is nothing compared to that.

And all the way in the back we have this empty space, which used to be the library that we brought upstairs.

Nice space.

And I had this idea.

Let's turn this space into a podcast studio so we can reach out even further.

♪Humanity Matters.

Now we can really reach out if we want to be a center, a hub for tolerance education and Holocaust education.

Visit the German Nazi death camps.

It gets you in a different way.

You have to see these places.

You have to.

I've given this tour so many times and it doesn't get any easier.

It's always powerful.

It's a different group of students each time and so the chemistry is there, they engage and it's very powerful.

There's a couple of places that really bring up this heavy weight inside of me, this emotion, how people suffered.

And there's just a couple of things.

The first one is my grandmother, a photograph of my grandmother right there.

I was named after her.

Her name is Bracha.

My Hebrew name is Baruch.

So I was named after her.

She was, from what I understand, a very generous and kind human being.

My dad was just like her because he was very generous and kind.

She used to feed people who were hungry in the village on Fridays, on Shabbat.

What's your next project?

To follow the trail of my grandmother, Lea Rosenblum, who looked for her children for five years.

So when the Nazis crossed over the border, the Polish border, her village or town was on the other side of the border, just a few miles away.

They knew what was going on in Germany, whereas in my father's village, it was all hearsay.

They heard the Germans were coming, "Eh, we've been through this before."

They had no clue what they were up against.

But those that lived near the German border knew exactly what was going on.

So when they heard that the Germans were crossing it on September 1st, 1939, my grandmother picked up her four little kids, my mother was only two years old, puts them on a train as they're headed to Russia, 1,400 mile journey.

She gets off to get food for her crying babies.

She comes back and the train is gone with the four kids.

And it took my grandmother five years, five years to find everyone.

And I tell kids, your parents would do the same for you.

Your parents love you that much.

You're home.

Mwah.

It went really well.

Yeah?

Yeah, these kids are terrific.

I love them.

They were so attentive.

You got some coffee at home?

Oh yeah.

Okay, good.

For the third time, is there anything you can't do?

I can't do another take.

[laughter] [music]