(ominous music) (crowd screams) - [Raymond] Nazism, neo-Nazism is still a very alive and a very active and a very present danger within our culture.

- [Reporter] A hate crime in Spokane.

This morning a man painted two swastikas on the temple Beth Shalom on Spokane's South Hill, and also damaged the Temple's Holocaust Memorial with red paint.

- [Tamar] I don't think most people really understood the symbolism of swastika, which is really a death threat for Jews.

- [Reporter] Racist flyers found on cars, tossed into people's yards and posted online.

- [Man] White supremacism, and neo-Nazism have become much more visible, much more lethal.

- [Reporter] It's just been 24 hours since Robert Bower stormed into this synagogue and said, "I just want to kill Jews."

- [Jim] In 2019, an annual audit by the Anti-Defamation League showed a record number of anti-Semitic incidents in the US, more than any year since the civil rights group started tracking them four decades ago.

- [Crowd] Jews do not replace us.

- [Jim] To better understand hatred's migration toward the mainstream, we have to look to the past to one of humanity's greatest tragedies and moral failings.

And listen to Spokane's voices of the Holocaust.

Today, in parts of Germany and Poland, tourists walk on the same paths that led millions to their death in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

"Arbeit macht frei," "work will free you," mocks the sign above a gate at Auschwitz in Poland.

1.6 million people were killed in this camp alone.

Many were worked to death.

Smoke stacks identify the crematoriums, where their bodies were turned to ash.

The complete destruction by fire on such a large scale that the word Holocaust would become synonymous for the mass slaughter of 11 million Europeans, 6 million of them Jewish men, women, and children.

In a small cemetery on the edge of Spokane Washington, 5,000 miles from the atrocities of World War II, one can find the graves of Holocaust survivors and a memorial to some who did not survive.

The grave of Eva Lassman bears silent witness to a woman who spoke out against hatred and bigotry, driven to share her message of tolerance.

- I hope that my sad story will awaken everybody to action to stand up for each other and stand up against tyranny here and elsewhere.

I think the world needs to know what happened.

(film reel rattling) (gentle solemn music) - Before the rise of the Nazi regime and World War II, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture of over 9 million.

In Germany, the Jewish population was only about half a million people, less than 1% of the total German population.

- I think that's important to stress because the Nazis made the Jews out to be this enormously threatening internal enemy, which was justification for eventually segregating them and then attempting to eliminate them.

- [Jim] In pre-war Poland Jews were the largest minority.

- [Raymond] There's a very vibrant Jewish culture in Warsaw, which is the single largest Jewish community.

About 30% of the entire city's population.

There's just a rich, vibrant urban cosmopolitan culture there.

And that ranges from that to very traditional Jewish communities in the small villages in the countryside.

There's also quite a range of Jewish identity and Jewishness in Poland and in Eastern Europe in general.

(artillery booming) - [Jim] The First World War set the stage for the policies and actions that would destroy all of that and more.

- So Germany, obviously, loses the First World War.

They suffer a great deal.

The propaganda of the war was such that Germans were stunned by the surrender.

It came as a shock.

There's an immediate search for scapegoats.

And very soon Jews get thrown into that mix.

And this was a revival of longstanding anti-Semitic beliefs in Germany.

There was also a revolution in Germany in 1918.

The imperial government was overthrown by a socialist-led revolution.

These are moderate socialists.

So thy establish a Western style Republic.

- [Jim] In 1919, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, which forced the country to cede part of its territory and largely dismantle its military.

- [Raymond] This discredits democracy to a great extent, and many conservative groups and nationalist groups are attacking the democratic regime.

Among them are the Nazis.

- [Jim] The Nazi party remained marginal until the late 1920s.

That's when they capitalized on the disastrous effects of the Great Depression.

- [Raymond] People were desperate.

And so they get very simplistic solutions.

(man speaks in foreign language) They campaign as the law and order party, as the party of German pride.

Antisemitism is part of their platform, but it's also one of several points along with anti-communism and extreme nationalism.

So you could become a Nazi supporter without necessarily hating Jews.

(Adolf speaks in foreign language) The Nazis are able to propel themselves to become the leading party in Germany.

It's part because of Hitler and his oratory, his rhetoric.

(intense cheerful music) But it's also because the Nazis harnessed the imagery of militarism.

They know how to use symbols, the swastika, the music, the uniforms, and the sort of an intoxicating message that they give in a time of extreme hopelessness.

- [Jim] Support for Hitler and his Nazi party grew through the early 1930s.

But even at the party's height, it never won the popular vote.

- So they never get the majority in Germany.

They never get over 50% 'cause there's like six major parties.

But they have a plurality.

The traditional conservatives realized they can't rule without the Nazis.

So they come up with the scheme that, well, we will make Hitler the chancellor in a coalition government.

But they really underestimated Hitler.

- [Jim] Not long after Hitler became chancellor, Nazis forced the German parliament to pass the Enabling Act.

The legislation allowed the government to issue laws without the consent of Germany's parliament.

It became the cornerstone of Hitler's dictatorship.

This law solidified the Nazi belief that Jews were inferior and posed the deadliest threat to Germany.

- People wanted an easy answer to why Germany was in such a bad place when 30 years before it had been in a remarkably good shape.

And this was a really easy, obvious answer.

And it drew on centuries upon centuries of antisemitism that was already embedded in the culture of Europe in so many ways.

And so I think it was a very easy jump for people to make, and they had a place to let out their fear and anger and frustration.

And it was a very obviously, concrete, directed, it's all because of the Jews.

If we can get rid of the Jews, then everything will be better.

And what a lovely thing to have an easy answer to all of the world's problems.

- [Jim] The Nazis began to push Jews out of day-to-day life.

- [Raymond] Jews were kicked out of the civil service.

Jews could not serve as university professors or as public school teachers in the law, or as doctors.

They were kicked out of the media.

We start to see the pressure for Jews to give up their private businesses, to sell out to German partners, what the Nazis call Aryans, which are pure blooded, pure race Germans.

- [Jim] Hitler's mythical Aryan race had so-called superior traits that made it ideal to rule the European continent, such as pale skin, blonde hairm and blue eyes.

Racist ideas were taught in schools.

Some groups like Jews were labeled racially inferior.

Pseudo scientific theories were applied to measure and value racial characteristics.

(trumpets blaring) At their annual rally in 1935, party leaders announced new laws that institutionalized many of the Nazis' racial theories.

The so-called Nuremberg Laws were the cornerstone of the legalized persecution of Jews in Germany.

Citizenship was now determined by your racial identity.

And Jews could not be German citizens.

(man speaks in foreign language) - [Interpreter] German citizens are only those of German or related blood willing to serve the German Reich and people.

Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are prohibited.

(crowd cheers) - [Raymond] The Nazis both believe these dehumanized images of the Jews, and they also manipulated them to scare and indoctrinate the population into believing that Jews were what I call an existential danger to the German race.

- [Jim] These anti-Jewish sentiments spread.

In 1938, the Nazis organized a nationwide Night of Terror.

It became known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass for the shattered glass left in the streets.

- [Raymond] They attack Jewish businesses, Jewish synagogues.

In every way, it's a desecration and it's a full scale assault.

- [Jim] Many Jews were harassed, beaten, and killed.

Up to 30,000 more were arrested and sent to forced labor camps the Nazis had built to imprison their political enemies.

Camps like Dachau held not just Jews, but other populations the Nazis called undesirable: gypsies or Roma, homosexuals, disabled people, Jehovah's witnesses, even clergy that opposed them.

- [Raymond] The Nazis were not yet set on genocide at that point.

They're still trying to force Jews to emigrate.

But they would strip the Jews of their assets before they emigrated, which made it very hard for Jews to immigrate 'cause no one wanted poor Jews coming into their country right after the Great Depression, including the United States.

(tense music) - [Jim] On September 1st, 1939, Hitler ordered German forces to invade Poland, triggering World War II.

Just one week after invading the country, armed forces conquered the Polish city of Lodz.

Eva Lassman, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, was 20 years old.

- They came in, they put their heavy foot down.

(foreboding music) They rounded up people in the street and took them to various places.

They caught women and made 'em take off their lingerie and washed the floors in the street.

My father had a beard and they caught him in the street and cut his beard.

The big shop and the stores were closed.

Life became very hard.

- [Jim] Not long after Germans marched down the streets of her home town, Eva fled to Warsaw.

- My father was coming to follow me, but right afterwards they established a ghetto of Lodz and nobody could get in or out.

So my father and my younger brother were in Lodz in the ghetto, and I was in Warsaw with my older brother.

- [Jim] The Nazis created ghettos to control the Jewish community.

The inhumane conditions caused widespread disease and starvation.

- [Raymond] Are numerous ghettos around Polish cities but the Warsaw ghetto, I think has about 450,000 Jews from Warsaw and surrounding areas stuffed into about a one and a half square miles.

- I am the daughter of two Holocaust survivors.

Both my parents came from really small villages in Poland.

- [Jim] Mary Noble's mother Sheffra Noodleman, was 16 when her village was burned and her family fled for sanctuary in the city of Czestochowa.

The Jews living there were eventually compacted into a large ghetto, where the Nazis life and death decisions were public spectacle.

- [Mary] Everybody would be herded into the marketplace or something and they would either randomly or specifically send people here or there.

Some of them to be shipped off to Treblinka actually, some to work and some just left for until the next time.

They were always living in fear for like, what was next.

- Sheffra's parents and four youngest siblings were selected to go to the Treblinka death camp.

Sheffra, her older sister and two brothers were assigned to slave labor at a munitions factory.

Forced labor became more common during the conflict.

War related industries required supplies, but workers were scarce.

So Nazis, enslaved millions of Jews and other victims.

Plants and factories were placed within ghettos.

There were 96 in Lodz alone, and near slave labor camps being rapidly built in captured territories.

- I remember asking her about, "Did you talk about the future?"

And she said, "We didn't think we'd have a future.

You couldn't sort of plan for a month ahead or a week ahead.

You kind of took it hour by hour, because really at any time, somebody could just decide to kill you."

- [Jim] By the end of the war, Sheffra and her sister were the only survivors in their family of 10.

Like Eva Lassman, Mary's father, Nahemia was in Lodz when the war began, but he was a among the 300,000 Jews who fled German occupied Poland and crossed into the Soviet zone, escaping almost certain death but spending years in and out of labor camps.

- [Mary] Sometimes a camp would be shut down and they'd be transported somewhere else.

At some point he was released because he was a Polish citizen.

Earlier he'd been arrested because he was a Polish citizen.

- [Jim] Nahemia was a tailor by trade, but he was forced into strenuous manual labor.

- And I know that they lived on, you know, starvation rations.

I mean, he talked about the 400 grams of bread for the day and the soup, which was water sometimes with grass in it.

Sometimes there'd be a dirty potato in it, just enough to stay alive, but not really enough to live.

- [Jim] Nazis stole Nahemia's freedom and his health.

They stole the lives of his family too.

- [Mary] His two brothers and their families were killed.

My father's first wife and daughter died in Auschwitz, and the other siblings on the move.

You know, there were many Jews who hid in forests.

I mean, there's stories of people, you know, digging holes, digging caves, and hiding out in the forest and going out at night to try and get some food or whatever.

- [Jim] Even some of the most secure hiding spots were discovered, often with the aid of informants.

In Warsaw, Eva stowed away for more than three years.

- There was a curfew, we had no heat or food.

In one room, 10 people and lived from day to day.

- [Jim] Jews in the ghetto had to wear identification, a white arm band with a blue Star of David.

Hunger and death were daily companions.

People died in the street from malnutrition and freezing temperatures.

The cemetery committee was kept busy picking up bodies for mass graves.

This situation got so terrible that the Germans could lure people out of hiding by promising them bread and jam.

In the summer of 1942, the Germans decided to clear out the Warsaw ghetto entirely.

In less than two months, 265,000 people were deported to the Treblinka death camp.

35,000 more were killed in the ghetto.

Realizing that their likely death was inevitable without a fight, youth leaders formed the Jewish fighting organization and began preparing their resistance.

♪ Never say this is the final road for you ♪ - [Jim] The Warsaw ghetto uprising began in April of 1943 on the first night of Passover.

As the SS prepared to liquidate the ghetto, they were confronted by guerilla fighters, shooting street to street and from doorways and hidden shelters.

The heroic but poorly armed Jewish resistance lasted four weeks until the Germans crushed it with overwhelming force.

♪ As the hour that we longed for is so near ♪ ♪ Our step beats out the message: we are here ♪ (explosion booming) - After the uprising, the Germans did not see anybody in the street, but they knew that some people are there.

So they said the houses on fire.

When we smelled the smoke, we had no choice but to leave.

- [Jim] They took her to Majdanek concentration camp by cattle car.

- Three days and three nights, we were not given any food or anything.

Consequently people died of starvation.

They took us out and marched us under the watchful eye of soldiers to camp, to Majdanek.

Anybody who was unable to keep up with the speed was shot.

They make work for us.

They took a pile of racks from the south and moved it to the north one day.

And then they took a pile of racks on the west and moved it to the east and vice versa.

That's the way the work was.

The work was very heavy without food, without proper clothes, because they took everything away from us.

It was very hard.

- [Jim] In January, 1942, a conference was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.

High ranking Nazi party and German government officials met to implement a plan they call "the final solution of the Jewish question."

It is a euphemism for the systematic deportation of Jews from all over Europe to six extermination camps established in former Polish territory.

These were killing centers designed to carry out genocide.

- As of March '42, a 75% of the Jews of Europe are still alive, and a roughly a year or so later, the proportion's reversed about 75% are dead, you know, and that is through the introduction of the death camps, which allow killing at literally on industrial capacity.

- [Jim] Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, names in history synonymous with the murder of millions of Jewish men, women, and children.

Majdanek was another.

- I was there for two months.

Every morning during that time, the commandant from the camp came and his assistant with a baton.

He told you to go left or right.

And if you went left you will never go back to the camp to the barracks again.

They took you away.

- [Jim] There were those who risked torture and death to protect their Jewish friends, family and neighbors from those camps and other horrifying conditions.

Carla Peperzak is among them.

- I was born and raised in Amsterdam.

So when I grew up there and went school there.

- [Jim] Carla was born into a Jewish family.

She was a teenager when the German onslaught overtook Holland.

- My final exams was done.

The invasion was taking place in May 1940.

- [Retro Commentator] To the now familiar recipe of the blitz were added parachute troops who swarmed down upon Dutch cities and airfields.

Towns and villages were in flames as the invaders rolled on at a breathless pace encircling the defendless and slashing their armies.

Destroying in the name of the new order, the homes and shops of those who had dared to resist.

(somber music) - [Jim] But before that, Carla's father was taking steps to protect his family.

During work trips for his clothing business he saw the changes gripping Germany.

He moved his family into a smaller, more discreet home.

- He knew that was happening.

And so he did, I guess, put a lot of money under the mattress.

- [Jim] That was critical because Nazis succeeded in forcibly transferring most Jewish owned businesses to non-Jewish residents.

Carla's father lost his clothing enterprise, but he kept on working to protect his family and obstruct the Nazis.

Jews in all the lands Germany occupied had to wear a Star of David patch anytime they left their home, no matter the occasion.

They also had to get new government identification cards marked with a J.

- [Carla] All the Jewish people got an ID with a J on it.

And my father got into involved this attorney and it took about a year but he had the J removed from my ID.

- [Jim] With her new ID, Carla was at greater liberty to move around the city, use public transportation, and even go to college, all activities, barred to Jews.

- That was not until August, September, 1942, but that's also the time when they really started the pogroms.

They started to round up Jewish people.

So I was asked by an uncle, my father's brother if I could help him find a place to go into hiding.

And he had two young daughters at the time, I didn't know actually a neighbor very well, who I trusted.

I talked to him and he got me into contact with somebody else.

And we found a place in hiding.

But once the people went into hiding, you tried to get them a new or a false ID.

And that's how I got involved with the underground because they were the ones who could get that.

- [Jim] She went on to stealthily serve the Dutch resistance.

She printed fake documents and the underground newsletters, found safe places for people to hide and helped feed them with stolen ration cards.

- She used very calculatedly her femininity and her feminine identity and the gender norms of the time to be able to go and do her work literally in broad daylight, you know, which is which is what I find a remarkable thing.

- [Jim] She daringly rescued a cousin from under the noses of German soldiers.

- I was able to buy a nurse's uniform because there was a curfew and they would even confiscate bicycles, but with nurses' uniform on the bicycle, they would not confiscate my bicycle.

Sister of my father had five children.

Her husband already had been taken away.

She was on her way from Rotterdam to Westerbork.

And her neighbors told me that she was in that train.

- [Jim] Westerbork was a detention and transit camp where the Nazis assembled over 100,000 Dutch Jews and Roma for transport to other camps.

The majority were sent to Auschwitz.

- The train stopped in Amsterdam.

And I put on my nurse's uniform and I found her in the train.

And I asked if I could take her youngest who was only a little over two years old at the time.

I was stopped but, you know, thanks to the fact that I had the nurse's uniform on, thanks to the fact that I spoke with German.

And they asked me what about the boy.

I said, well, he's sick.

He has to get to the hospital.

I got away with it and so I could save him.

- [Jim] Carla would help to hide 40 people, many of them children, from the Nazis during the war.

Remarkably, all of them survived.

Juliet Barenti's grandparents went into hiding when the Germans invaded Holland and came to a difficult decision.

- They decided that the place that they had found to go into hiding was not safe enough for their daughter, for my mom.

- [Jim] A Dutch family with two young boys took her in and gave her a new identity.

- The story I think they told people was that she was a sickly cousin from the city who needed to get away from the war and pollution and all that.

It's hard to get a four year old to remember a lie.

So they essentially tried to convince her that that was the truth that she was Catholic.

She went to a Catholic school.

I think the only person who knew the truth was the priest.

And she lived with them until the war ended.

Her parents did not survive.

Their hiding spot was found and they were shipped to Sobibor where they were killed.

- [Jim] Marian was reunited with an uncle after the war and grew up in America, always missing her adopted brothers and the brave family who had saved her life.

By the fall of 1944, German forces began to evacuate many camps, forcing prisoners on death marches to locations behind German lines.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews died along the way.

- We were taken to the train station to be loaded again and taken away to Germany.

But the Russians were so very close.

They were shooting in.

The Germans were shooting out.

We didn't know what happened.

We thought for sure we are going be dead, if not from the Germans right away from the bullets that are falling, we didn't know why in the world, we thought that they were shooting at us, and we hugged and kissed each other and cried.

But then all of a sudden somebody came in and said we are free.

The Germans left.

(dramatic music) - [Jim] In 1945, advancing Allied and Soviet troops liberated camps, shocked at what they discovered.

- [Retro Commentator] Most dreadful of all the camps was at Buchenwald, where only 20,000 of the original 80,000 were found alive.

This murder weapon accounted for hundreds of deaths and the disfigurement of thousands of others.

Of the quarter of the prison population left alive when rescued body Americans, thousands were beyond human aid.

Easy death was the most that life could offer them.

Slave laborers worked on the V2 bomb, serial numbers tattooed on their stomachs.

Six furnaces, each holding three bodies, were used in cremating the dead and often the living.

The vile, inhuman beasts took pride in their concentration camp at Nordhausen.

Here a mere handful were found alive when the Americans overran the area.

War is not a pretty thing at best, but no words can express the world's disgust at Germany's organized carnage.

- [Jim] On April 30th, 1945, Adolf Hitler died by suicide in his underground bunker.

One week later, Germany surrendered to Allied forces.

- [Eva] A tremendous relief, hard to believe, but it was such a tremendous relief, like like a big rock fell of the shoulders.

- [Jim] The end of the war marked the start of new difficulties.

More than 2 million Europeans were displaced, including 250,000 Jews.

Many survivors feared postwar violence and antisemitism in the places they once called home.

Occupation authorities placed people into displaced persons camps by nationality until they could resettle.

The camps became flourishing communities with cultural, educational, and vocational programs.

Sheffra and Nahemia, who both survived labor camps, met at the Zeilsheim camp near Frankfurt, Germany.

- They got married in the DP camp in Zeilsheim, and that's where my brother was born.

- [Jim] They dreamed of a life in Palestine together, but achieving that dream meant living through more challenges.

Paul Harari's stories are proof of that.

In 1946, Israel was not yet a state when he boarded a ship in Italy filled with other refugees and sailed for Haifa.

In Romania, Paul had survived multiple pogroms conducted first by the fascist Iron Guard and then the Nazi Allied Romanian army.

He had escaped from jail and a labor camp and wanted desperately to get off the continent and into the promise of a Jewish Homeland.

The boat was intercepted by the British Navy, which was enforcing immigration restrictions to Palestine.

- I was shocked to see the picture of his boat and read the history of the boat.

I was told that that adventure and that trip was eerily similar to the movie "The Exodus."

That boat was indeed turned back and they were interned in a refugee camp in Cyprus and he was given a position there.

I believe he worked in a pharmacy in that camp and he was offered an exit strategy to go to Australia.

The British offered that to him and he declined.

He wanted to go to Palestine.

- [Jim] By family accounts, Paul finally landed in Israel in 1948, where he met his future wife Ruth, working in a British hospital.

They married, lived in a kibbutz, started a family and eventually set their sights on America.

- My father came here with zero, zero money, zero education.

And look how far we've gotten.

Two sons that became doctors, got a house, got a car, a chicken in the pot.

You know, he fulfilled the American dream of immigrants from the previous century.

And this country allowed him to do that.

- [Jim] When Paul Harari finally got to Israel, others were stuck in Romania behind the Iron Curtain.

- [Diana] My mom is a Cora Der Koorkanian.

Her maiden name, she was Cora Clara Moskavich and she was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1934.

- [Jim] Cora was the youngest of nine.

She was seven years old when the war came to Romania.

- [Cora] We were still children.

And we were down in cellars, or we were down in bomb shelters and we were playing there.

We didn't realize how serious that situation.

- [Diana] As they got removed from the schools or the Jewish school got shut down, she went to school in the basement of the synagogue and her teachers were actually often like some of the professors from the university 'cause they were kicked out.

They lost their positions as well.

- [Jim] Her father ran a restaurant and catering business.

- [Diana] They felt very much integrated into society until they weren't.

But he had some really good non-Jewish friends, Christian friends that helped them.

If not the restaurant would've been taken away from him.

- [Jim] Allied with the Nazis, the fascist Romanian government was just as brutal.

- My uncle Isya was one of the brothers that was taken to a labor camp.

The way she always told this to me, like when he came back from the war, he was under 100 pounds and he had malaria.

She barely recognized him.

- [Jim] For many years, Cora kept the horrors of the war confined to her mind.

Eventually, she broke her silence and shared her story with students at West Valley High School.

- At least half of my family in Eastern Romania didn't survive.

There were among those that that were put in a train, went out for a few days with no food, no water.

Whoever didn't survive it, was shot afterwards - [Jim] In her willingness to share her firsthand account of the Holocaust, Cora was following in the footsteps of fellow survivor Eva Lassman who began sharing her story at community events in the 1980s.

Eva was especially driven to deliver her message of tolerance to a younger generation.

- I think the world needs to know what happened because first of all, it didn't stop.

It's still going on in Rwanda, in Sudan.

It's still going on, and hate is a sickness like cancer that's in you and you cannot rise above it.

We have to overcome that.

We have to work towards peace.

- [Jim] Eva Lassman passed away in 2011.

Her inspirational story is continued in many ways, including awards in her honor that are given annually by the Gonzaga Center For the Study of Hate.

Cora Der Koorkanian passed away in 2020, leaving an indelible impression with area students.

- [Diana] She just loved talking to young people and basically her attitude was like, don't ever limit yourself.

Don't think you're limited.

Go make your mark in the world.

- [Jim] The third of these amazing women, Carla Peperzak, was named the state of Washington's person of the year in 2020.

Carla continues to speak in schools and a new Spokane middle school named for her will open in 2023.

- With many of the women and men of the greatest generation, right, we call them that for a reason, there's just this core of inner strength that was really remarkable.

And that was true for Cora, and that's also true for Carla.

You can see when you know her that she's survived amazing things and did incredibly heroic acts during the war, and then continued to live a life of dignity and of community connection, and of really living the values of honoring others for who they are.

(shofar blasting) - [Jim] To honor those who died in the Holocaust, Spokane's Jewish community holds an annual observance called Yom HaShoah.

- It's a Memorial service for our community, but then it's a larger celebration for the whole Spokane community to come together and to learn about the history and to think about its implications.

- [Jim] Middle and high school students are encouraged to submit essays and create art reflecting on a specific topic, such as superheroes of the Holocaust, speaking up for the other, or hate speech, prelude to genocide.

- I see kids wrestling to comprehend the depth of the Holocaust and the historical experience of it and trying to relate it to what is happening today around the world or in their own lives.

To even be thinking about it and connecting to it is a remarkable thing and a wonderful gift to our community and I really think a gift to future generations to have those kids be educated about the Holocaust and willing to respond to this question of how do we make it so it never happens again.

- To carry out genocide, you need to shut off empathy.

Well, we need to create that empathy.

And that's what Holocaust education does.

- This kind of injustice goes on around the world.

And so we can't say it's them and not me.

I mean, it's all of us.

You can't stand idly by, that you have to speak up, you can't ignore other people's suffering.

(gentle somber music) - I came to make this tape that the people are watchful and they will never permit any atrocities like this to happen to any human being.

I do not wish are my worst enemy to have to go through and suffer what I did.

- You know, you tried to forget, and that didn't work.

You tried to forgive and that's very difficult too.

That's very hard.

And somebody asked me, "What about revenge?"

I said, "Yeah, my best revenge is that I have a family now.

If you take them all, without me it's 49 people or something.

- [Jim] These are the generations that could have been lost.

These are voices the Nazis tried to silence.

- [Cora] This history should be kept alive so it'll not repeat itself.

And it's your generation that we rely on.

We tried to do our best.

It seems that it wasn't enough.

So it's your duty from now on.

(gentle uplifting music) (gentle music) ♪ In a rising of the sun, we remember ♪ ♪ In the blowing of the wind, we remember ♪ ♪ In the opening of buds, we remember ♪ ♪ We remember ♪ ♪ In the blueness of the sky, we remember ♪ ♪ In the rustling of the leaves, we remember ♪ ♪ As a years starts and it ends, we remember ♪ ♪ We remember ♪ ♪ We remember ♪