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Hello, I'm Bill Miller

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and you're watching “Conversation Piece.”

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It seems strange, almost unreal,

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that I'm going to introduce you
to a guest today

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who survived one of the worst chapters
in World War II history

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when she was a prisoner
in the Auschwitz camp,

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one of the worst of the Nazi
concentration camps.

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And as you know, the attempt of Hitler
was to exterminate the Jewish race.

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So it's a pleasure to have Alice and talk
about certain phases of her life.

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–Alice, nice to have you.
–Thank you, Bill.

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With what you've been through, you're not
nervous talking to me for a few minutes?

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No, I won’t.  I’ll calm down.

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Is it hard for you to talk about

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the really rugged times in your life,
starting when you were a teenager?

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Yes, it is.

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It's getting better
as we’re getting older, I think. And

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think about what happened and where we are now.

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But it's still very difficult.

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Well, my idea when I invited you over

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was to get a few facts so we could know
what did happen to you first.

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And then I want our audience to know
and I want to know

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about your trip
back to your homeland of Hungary

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about eight months ago,
why you went and what you found.

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And if we have any time left,
maybe we can talk about a couple of views

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of the world situation...

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What I remember about my grandma is simple.

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Waking up in PJs and making pancakes...

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her way of winking at us, like

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we were in together on a secret.

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She was a big part of my life
when everything in the world was new.

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When I was first

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learning about its feelings
and sensations.

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I remember the way her skin felt.

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The way she smelled.

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Just the feeling of being around her.

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(Grandma Lici: “Oh, look at that, Michael!”)

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It seemed like she arrived in my life

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fully formed.

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And even looking back,

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it's hard for me
to see how she got to that point.

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How she kept changing

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and growing.

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(Grandma: “What are you going to say?”)

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(”Oh, I remember her.”)

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(”What’re you going to say, Michael?”)

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(”Oh, I remember her.”)

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I wish I could go back and talk to her

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and have her tell me the story herself.

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But when she died,

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something got lost that

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couldn't be retrieved.

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Conversations
I'm not able to have with her

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now that I'm old enough.

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So I've started putting together

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the pieces I have.

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My grandma Lici was born
in a small town in Hungary

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called Sárvár.

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Her father operated
the town's kosher bakery

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in the front of their apartment.

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When she was 16, her family was rounded up

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with the rest of Sárvár’s Jewish,
community,

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interned in a ghetto

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and taken to Auschwitz,

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where her parents and youngest sister

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were killed.

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Probably the Hungarian pronunciation is different,
but your hometown was spelled S-A-R-

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V-A-R, “Sarvar?”
–Sárvár. (Shar-var)

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I could not face going back.

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My husband always asked me every time
he took a trip, business trip to Europe,

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if I wanted to go
and I could not go back to Europe.

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I just couldn't face it.

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And last year I said, okay, I want to go.

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And I did go. And we went to Hungary and

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we went to my hometown

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and I could not remember anything.

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I did not remember the streets.

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There was a castle there.

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I remember the castle being there.

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I couldn't do it.

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I had to leave.

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I spent about an hour,
not even that long in town, and I had

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my husband just drive me out of there.

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But now I want to go back.

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–Oh, you think you'll go again?
–Yes, I want to go.

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I want to make some kind of memorial.

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I have to do it because

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of my daughter, of my grandchildren.

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They have to know.

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You have to tell the story

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(My mom, off camera:
“Well here we all are, walking down the streets in Budapest.”)

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(”There's grandma! Say hi, Grandma.”)

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(”Should we go this way?”)

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I’d like to do something in my hometown,
I don't know what.

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Maybe even just a headstone in the cemetery.

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If nothing else, just have a headstone
for... just one

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for everybody.

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I came to Hungary to see a monument
that my grandma

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had created in her hometown
25 years earlier

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when I was still a kid.

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I told them that I want to have a
monument on the palace grounds

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because I figure
they'll always take care of it.

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So I got permission.

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I raised money and two years ago
we put it down

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and we had a dedication

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and it was incredible.

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After that trip,

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we always had a picture of it on our wall.

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But as a 12 year old,

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I didn't get it.

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It was strange, abstract,

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a reminder of everything
I couldn't access in my grandma.

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What I wanted was for her to

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sit me down and tell me her story.

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But that talk never came.

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It was only after she died
that I began thinking

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that maybe what she left me was enough.

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I wanted to finally see her monument

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to represent our family there

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for its 25th anniversary

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and see what she had left for me to find.

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András?

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–Hey, Mike.
–Hey.

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Hi, nice to meet you.

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There's a protein bar for you, and a water.
And this is something really good

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if you feel like eating it.

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This is coffee.

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Heritage tours

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have a tendency
to take you to a lot of places.

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I mean, you can find some information
here, but most of the information

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is either in Israel
or in some other archives.

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Here, most of the people
just want to actually go to the place

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where their grandparents, great-

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grandparents or ancestors actually lived
and try to, you know,

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they might have a picture, a faded picture
with a number of a house on it.

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So they say, okay, how can we find that

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that house?

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Or do you think we can find the school

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that they went to, or find a photo

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or a class photo from the 1820s?

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In some ways,
they're disappointed at the fact that

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they can't really find anything
there anymore.

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The young people

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they're basically trying to find their way in this.

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András specialized in Jewish heritage tours,

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an industry I hadn’t known existed,

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and we connected over the fragments

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we'd collected of our family stories.

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His parents were Holocaust survivors

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who also never talked to their children
about what happened.

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Before his mom died,

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she left behind a series of cassette tapes
with her story

00:12:59.528 --> 00:13:03.073
that he had only now started to listen to.

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He took me to an old apartment

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that he and his family use as a storage unit.

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On the first set of cassettes,

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she wrote, I guess, stuff:

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‘This is the war and what happened after,’ so–

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Wow.  I didn't know she actually wrote stuff on it.

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Wow.

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Well, basically she told us, you know,
I mean,

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she wanted the whole thing
to be in one place.

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I guess.

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For it to be one story.

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So.

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Here goes nothing.

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Andras understood why I was here.

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Whole generations of Jewish

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people came here trying to uncover
what happened to our families.

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But he warned me that memorializing the
Holocaust could be complicated in Hungary.

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Countries don't like being implicated

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in their past mistakes.

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He took me to a new monument
erected by the government

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to show me what he was talking about.

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An angel representing Hungary

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is being attacked by an eagle

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representing Nazi Germany.

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But Hungary wasn't attacked by Germany.

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They were allies

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and it was Hungary that committed
some of the most horrible crimes

00:15:45.402 --> 00:15:47.112
of the Holocaust.

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Many people see this monument

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as the government
trying to rewrite history,

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covering up its role in what happened,

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including a woman we met there
named Maria Heller,

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who had helped organize the
counter memorial in front of it.

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So immediately

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when we heard that the government
had this plan

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of erecting this monument,
we decided to protest against it.

00:16:22.064 --> 00:16:26.902
And our protest was first
that we occupied the place

00:16:26.902 --> 00:16:30.823
where the monument
would have been constructed.

00:16:30.823 --> 00:16:36.161
And we started to put objects there
and told people to come here

00:16:36.161 --> 00:16:41.166
and take with them objects that
reminded them of the Second World War.

00:16:41.375 --> 00:16:45.129
And in this way, we wanted to somehow,
symbolically at least,

00:16:45.379 --> 00:16:50.509
occupy the place, and
not to let the monument be built.

00:16:50.592 --> 00:16:52.136
But what's happened is that

00:16:52.136 --> 00:16:57.057
we continue to have what we call
the living memorial, because the

00:16:57.099 --> 00:17:01.478
falsifying one we call the dead monument,
it doesn't show anything.

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It just tells you lies.

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So what we decided to do
is to put against it or in front of it

00:17:09.111 --> 00:17:14.783
a real monument where people could take
everything that they think is important

00:17:14.783 --> 00:17:18.454
and which reminds them of those
who have been killed

00:17:18.454 --> 00:17:20.706
during the Second World War.

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You also have a lot of small white stones

00:17:28.255 --> 00:17:32.634
because in a way it's also to

00:17:32.718 --> 00:17:35.888
remind about the Jewish custom

00:17:35.888 --> 00:17:40.392
of putting pieces of stone
on a relative’s tombstone.

00:17:40.392 --> 00:17:43.645
And most of these people,
of course, don't have a tombstone

00:17:43.645 --> 00:17:48.442
because they have been killed
in the of concentration camps.

00:17:48.484 --> 00:17:52.196
And as you see now, the living monument

00:17:52.196 --> 00:17:57.034
is rather long
and it's becoming even and even longer,

00:17:57.117 --> 00:17:58.410
depending on the new

00:17:58.410 --> 00:18:01.914
objects that people take here
to remember their

00:18:02.164 --> 00:18:03.665
their people

00:18:14.927 --> 00:18:16.595
This place opened up the idea

00:18:16.595 --> 00:18:18.764
of what a monument could be:

00:18:21.183 --> 00:18:23.018
a letter,

00:18:23.018 --> 00:18:24.978
a photo,

00:18:25.562 --> 00:18:27.481
a pair of shoes,

00:18:35.531 --> 00:18:41.245
Something else that I found, because all of this
I knew by my mother, she always told me

00:18:41.245 --> 00:18:45.374
I saw the numbers on her arm.

00:18:45.374 --> 00:18:49.253
And so it was never a secret in my family.

00:18:49.294 --> 00:18:51.880
So I knew everything about that.

00:18:51.880 --> 00:18:55.425
Just one thing that I found after

00:18:55.509 --> 00:19:00.013
my mother's death,
she died at the age of 92 last year,

00:19:00.097 --> 00:19:04.768
and while I was emptying her cupboards

00:19:04.810 --> 00:19:09.022
and drawers, I found something
that she never told me about.

00:19:09.064 --> 00:19:12.067
And these are three small

00:19:12.317 --> 00:19:16.697
booklets of ‘44, ’45 and ‘46.

00:19:16.780 --> 00:19:23.954
And I can't understand
how she was able to keep this little

00:19:24.037 --> 00:19:26.331
notebook with her in Auschwitz,

00:19:26.331 --> 00:19:30.502
because there are also inscriptions
that were made in Auschwitz.

00:19:30.544 --> 00:19:33.130
So I can't understand that.

00:19:33.130 --> 00:19:36.216
And now I cannot ask her
because she is not there anymore, but

00:19:36.216 --> 00:19:41.346
she never told me about this.
Where did she hide it,

00:19:41.346 --> 00:19:42.848
and how did she hide it?

00:19:42.848 --> 00:19:44.558
I don't know.

00:19:56.069 --> 00:19:59.156
The next morning
we drove 3 hours west of Budapest

00:19:59.156 --> 00:20:01.533
into the countryside.

00:20:04.828 --> 00:20:09.541
There weren't any Jews left in Sárvár,
my grandmother's hometown,

00:20:09.625 --> 00:20:11.501
so we made a stop on our way

00:20:11.501 --> 00:20:15.589
at the bigger city
nearby, called Szombathely,

00:20:15.672 --> 00:20:18.592
where my grandma’s mother came from.

00:20:59.091 --> 00:21:03.136
We met the president of the
local Jewish community here

00:21:03.136 --> 00:21:05.389
named Sándor Márkus,

00:21:06.473 --> 00:21:07.808
whose parents, like

00:21:07.808 --> 00:21:14.231
András’, had been Holocaust survivors.

00:21:23.824 --> 00:21:27.828
It felt like we were three
versions of the same story–

00:21:28.578 --> 00:21:31.581
children who were piecing together
a family conversation

00:21:31.748 --> 00:21:33.583
we'd only overheard.

00:22:03.655 --> 00:22:07.576
Do you know the exact date
when your grandma was born?

00:22:08.410 --> 00:22:10.746
April 6th, 1928.

00:22:33.810 --> 00:22:37.189
I don’t know if you know what happened to the the birth

00:22:37.272 --> 00:22:40.150
records and death records of the Jews.

00:22:40.150 --> 00:22:43.945
The Germans systematically burned
all of them.

00:22:44.029 --> 00:22:46.948
So whatever is left is really a

00:22:47.032 --> 00:22:48.367
a treasure.

00:25:23.522 --> 00:25:25.398
There is an exhibit here

00:25:25.398 --> 00:25:31.446
made in anticipation of the day
when no Jews will be left in Szombathely.

00:25:35.200 --> 00:25:38.745
The everyday things I had grown up with,

00:25:38.828 --> 00:25:41.289
that were so familiar to me,

00:25:41.289 --> 00:25:43.166
were here behind glass.

00:25:45.001 --> 00:25:48.463
A museum exhibit to a lost culture.

00:25:54.636 --> 00:25:55.720
It reminded me of learning

00:25:55.720 --> 00:25:59.933
about the Native Americans
when I was in school,

00:26:00.016 --> 00:26:04.020
as if they didn't still exist,

00:26:04.104 --> 00:26:07.065
as if no one was alive to tell the story.

00:26:11.194 --> 00:26:12.612
And here,

00:26:12.612 --> 00:26:16.908
after Sándor and the few others are gone,

00:26:16.992 --> 00:26:20.537
there might not be.

00:27:34.069 --> 00:27:35.445
Sándor introduced us to

00:27:35.445 --> 00:27:38.406
a historian named Krisztína Kelbert,

00:27:38.531 --> 00:27:43.161
who worked at a local museum.

00:27:43.244 --> 00:27:44.746
She'd spent the last few years

00:27:44.746 --> 00:27:47.749
investigating an archive of photographs

00:27:47.832 --> 00:27:50.794
she'd found in the basement.

00:27:50.919 --> 00:27:56.633
Hundreds of pictures taken of Jewish
people before the Holocaust.

00:31:07.532 --> 00:31:10.118
Krisztína was not Jewish

00:31:10.118 --> 00:31:13.621
but these stories began to sink into her

00:31:13.705 --> 00:31:17.500
and effect the way she saw her hometown.

00:32:06.257 --> 00:32:09.761
She took us back to the Jewish Community Center

00:32:09.969 --> 00:32:11.471
to show us what she'd been working on

00:32:11.471 --> 00:32:13.431
with the photographs.

00:32:49.092 --> 00:32:51.260
She'd created a kind of shrine

00:32:51.260 --> 00:32:54.681
to the Jewish people of Szombathely

00:32:54.764 --> 00:32:57.976
whose photos she found in that basement

00:32:58.059 --> 00:33:23.042
and whose stories she had uncovered.

00:33:23.126 --> 00:33:28.464
It was like looking at a family album.

00:33:28.548 --> 00:33:31.009
A giant family album.

00:34:08.296 --> 00:34:11.924
I’d found this one picture of my great-grandmother

00:34:12.008 --> 00:34:14.802
as a young woman in Szombathely

00:34:14.802 --> 00:34:18.389
in my grandma's photo album.

00:34:19.348 --> 00:34:23.061
Was she a model?  An actress?

00:34:23.144 --> 00:34:26.522
The story behind
that picture was long gone.

00:34:29.233 --> 00:34:30.318
But seeing this exhibit

00:34:30.318 --> 00:34:34.072
put her right with her people.

00:34:34.155 --> 00:34:37.033
It was what they did for fun,

00:34:37.033 --> 00:34:40.036
dress up and take pictures.

00:34:48.044 --> 00:34:50.379
And it's beautiful in a way

00:34:50.379 --> 00:34:53.341
that these were
the pictures that were saved.

00:35:34.507 --> 00:35:38.928
It felt like we were getting
closer to my grandma,

00:35:39.011 --> 00:35:43.808
to this part of her that she'd buried.

00:35:43.891 --> 00:35:45.393
It was somewhere in the burned

00:35:45.393 --> 00:35:49.355
records, the objects behind glass

00:35:49.438 --> 00:35:54.610
and the picture of her mom.

00:35:54.694 --> 00:35:58.489
We took a walk to process
everything we'd seen

00:35:58.573 --> 00:36:02.118
and to look for something
that Sándor told us about.

00:36:05.121 --> 00:36:06.747
And there

00:36:06.747 --> 00:36:09.250
in the middle of a shopping center

00:36:09.250 --> 00:36:12.545
we saw it– a monument

00:36:12.545 --> 00:36:14.881
I would have walked right by.

00:36:24.307 --> 00:36:26.851
A child's jacket

00:36:26.851 --> 00:36:28.603
for the 613 children

00:36:28.603 --> 00:36:32.190
that were sent from Szombathely to Auschwitz,

00:36:32.273 --> 00:36:34.525
hanging on a door

00:36:34.525 --> 00:36:37.862
as if she was coming back for it.

00:36:41.866 --> 00:36:46.162
The door marked the entrance of the
Szombathely ghetto

00:36:46.204 --> 00:36:49.373
where the Jews of this town
had been interned.

00:36:57.882 --> 00:37:02.929
I saw my daughter in that jacket.

00:37:03.012 --> 00:37:05.306
I saw Anna, too,

00:37:05.306 --> 00:37:07.475
my grandmother's little sister,
who never came back

00:37:07.475 --> 00:37:09.477
from Auschwitz.

00:37:12.605 --> 00:37:14.774
And thinking of her,

00:37:14.774 --> 00:37:16.776
I felt like I got to know
my great-grandparents

00:37:16.776 --> 00:37:18.611
for the first time.

00:37:22.114 --> 00:37:26.452
They'd always been dusty, black-and-white
pictures on my grandma's wall.

00:37:26.535 --> 00:37:29.038
But really, they were young parents

00:37:29.038 --> 00:37:31.916
only few years older than I am now,

00:37:33.251 --> 00:37:36.420
trying to keep their kids safe.

00:37:48.808 --> 00:37:54.063
I remember walking in with
my wife for an ultrasound,

00:37:54.146 --> 00:37:57.108
seeing our baby moving her tiny arms
and legs on the screen

00:37:57.108 --> 00:37:59.026
for the first time,

00:38:01.946 --> 00:38:06.158
and it hitting me that there was
a real human being in there.

00:38:09.954 --> 00:38:11.998
I'd crossed a line into a world

00:38:11.998 --> 00:38:15.001
in which someone else would be in my care

00:38:15.126 --> 00:38:17.378
for as long as we both lived.

00:38:27.555 --> 00:38:29.598
After she was born,

00:38:29.682 --> 00:38:30.975
I started having nightmares

00:38:30.975 --> 00:38:33.311
about something coming for us.

00:38:35.771 --> 00:38:36.772
I would go on walks

00:38:36.772 --> 00:38:39.025
and suddenly feel claustrophobic.

00:38:42.069 --> 00:38:43.738
A man walked into a synagogue

00:38:43.738 --> 00:38:45.656
and killed 11 people.

00:38:46.449 --> 00:38:49.785
[Radio coverage of Tree of Life shooting]

00:38:50.036 --> 00:38:55.374
[Audio of “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville]

00:38:56.167 --> 00:38:59.920
A leftover childhood
fear gripped me–

00:39:00.004 --> 00:39:03.799
that my family would be targeted for being

00:39:03.883 --> 00:39:05.926
different.

00:39:05.926 --> 00:39:08.971
Like my grandma's family was.

00:39:10.973 --> 00:39:13.726
That the same thing could happen again.

00:39:17.563 --> 00:39:20.816
I started to think that being
in my grandma's presence

00:39:20.900 --> 00:39:22.985
and in the presence of her story

00:39:22.985 --> 00:39:26.447
would be some kind of guidance.

00:39:28.282 --> 00:39:32.703
She had taken all these feelings
that I'd been too young to understand

00:39:32.787 --> 00:39:35.790
and put them into a memorial

00:39:35.873 --> 00:39:39.043
that would be waiting for me
when I was ready.

00:39:43.506 --> 00:39:46.217
I knew it might be irrational,

00:39:46.300 --> 00:39:49.261
but I was looking for some kind of message

00:39:49.261 --> 00:39:53.349
about how to live with this fear,

00:39:53.432 --> 00:39:57.311
about how to explain this world

00:39:57.395 --> 00:39:59.355
to my daughter.

00:40:11.242 --> 00:40:14.328
I'd like to begin
with talking about Sárvár.

00:40:14.453 --> 00:40:17.289
What kind of a town is it,

00:40:17.289 --> 00:40:19.083
was it when you were small?

00:40:19.083 --> 00:40:24.630
It was about 10,000 people
and it was a very mixed area

00:40:24.713 --> 00:40:27.633
with about a thousand Jewish people there.

00:40:27.675 --> 00:40:30.636
And we had a temple, a couple of them,

00:40:30.678 --> 00:40:35.641
and it was a very nice community,
very quiet, very nice.

00:40:35.724 --> 00:40:37.893
We had a bakery

00:40:37.893 --> 00:40:43.065
and that's where my father made his living

00:40:43.149 --> 00:40:46.652
and my mother was there to raise us.

00:40:46.735 --> 00:40:49.738
Never thought we were going to leave it.

00:40:49.738 --> 00:40:53.451
We went to school there and we lived there

00:40:53.534 --> 00:40:57.663
until we were forced to move out of there.

00:41:06.672 --> 00:41:09.675
The location of the old synagogue

00:41:09.758 --> 00:41:13.304
of the old Orthodox
synagogue in Sárvár

00:41:13.387 --> 00:41:19.935
it was converted into a storage house
or whatever

00:41:20.019 --> 00:41:21.979
and...

00:41:21.979 --> 00:41:23.314
a fabric warehouse,

00:41:23.314 --> 00:41:26.817
if I if I remember correctly.

00:41:26.901 --> 00:41:29.528
Whatever happened to it, I don't know.

00:41:48.130 --> 00:41:51.675
Using my grandma's interviews as a sort of map,

00:41:51.759 --> 00:41:55.179
we packed up to head into Sárvár

00:41:55.262 --> 00:41:58.098
to find the places she talked about

00:42:01.310 --> 00:42:04.313
to stand there
and mark them with my camera

00:42:04.313 --> 00:42:06.607
if nothing else.

00:42:13.781 --> 00:42:17.826
So what were some of the signs
of antisemitism you experienced?

00:42:17.826 --> 00:42:21.747
Well, the first thing that I remember is

00:42:21.830 --> 00:42:24.708
in school, in high school,

00:42:24.708 --> 00:42:27.127
we had to sit in the back

00:42:27.127 --> 00:42:28.420
of the class

00:42:29.755 --> 00:42:31.382
because we were Jewish.

00:42:31.382 --> 00:42:35.970
That’s first time I really remember

00:42:36.053 --> 00:42:38.639
people say we were Jewish
and we were different.

00:42:38.639 --> 00:42:41.934
I never felt I was different.

00:42:41.976 --> 00:42:43.811
And then

00:42:43.811 --> 00:42:47.064
we couldn't go to the high school anymore.

00:42:47.147 --> 00:42:52.194
We had to... we just went to our Jewish school.

00:42:52.278 --> 00:42:57.074
And I remember my father
said, ‘That's okay, it'll be alright.’

00:42:57.157 --> 00:43:00.119
‘They'll change their mind.’

00:43:00.119 --> 00:43:04.915
And then we had to wear a yellow star.

00:43:04.999 --> 00:43:06.875
So everybody knew we were Jewish.

00:43:06.875 --> 00:43:09.753
Not that we ever denied it,

00:43:09.753 --> 00:43:12.965
but there was like a stigma
that you had to have that

00:43:12.965 --> 00:43:17.303
and people would look at you
and the kids started to throw rocks.

00:43:17.386 --> 00:43:22.099
And then it came time that we couldn't
even go to school anymore.

00:43:22.182 --> 00:43:25.936
Can you describe what you remember
how the Germans came in?

00:43:26.020 --> 00:43:29.273
Yes, I remember we were all at home

00:43:29.356 --> 00:43:32.359
and all of a sudden we just heard

00:43:32.443 --> 00:43:36.238
gunshots and a lot of people
just running and screaming.

00:43:36.238 --> 00:43:40.326
And they just walked
into the city, to the town.

00:43:40.409 --> 00:43:43.787
We could still stay in the house, but

00:43:43.871 --> 00:43:46.832
my father said, ‘Oh,
they just going through the town.’

00:43:46.832 --> 00:43:51.295
I think my father knew
they weren't just going through the town.

00:43:51.378 --> 00:43:55.132
And then I remember
the next thing we had to do

00:43:55.132 --> 00:44:01.555
is we all had to gather a suitcase
and we went into

00:44:01.555 --> 00:44:04.642
they made us go into a certain house,
a building.

00:44:04.642 --> 00:44:06.644
It was like a factory.

00:44:06.644 --> 00:44:12.274
And we could not leave
unless with their permission.

00:44:31.752 --> 00:44:35.422
So probably the ghetto sort of started from here

00:44:35.547 --> 00:44:37.675
and went all the way to the other end.

00:44:56.860 --> 00:45:01.156
I knew there wouldn't be markers
or memorials or plaques,

00:45:01.240 --> 00:45:04.368
but it was still jarring to see
that there wasn't anything.

00:45:08.455 --> 00:45:12.584
This yellow house beside the factory lot,

00:45:12.668 --> 00:45:15.587
which had been
seized from a Jewish family,

00:45:15.671 --> 00:45:18.340
was where the town's Jews had to register

00:45:18.340 --> 00:45:20.801
before they were taken to Auschwitz.

00:45:24.054 --> 00:45:26.932
Now it was being turned into a hotel.

00:45:30.519 --> 00:45:33.147
And like

00:45:33.147 --> 00:45:36.942
people who are going to be at the hotel
at some point are going to be

00:45:36.942 --> 00:45:40.154
sitting there sipping their drinks
or drinking their coffee

00:45:40.237 --> 00:45:44.408
and probably not knowing that the place
that they're doing

00:45:44.408 --> 00:45:47.661
all these things was originally a ghetto.

00:45:49.121 --> 00:45:51.248
So it's like

00:45:52.082 --> 00:45:55.502
like totally no remembrance
in this respect.

00:46:02.259 --> 00:46:02.843
And like,

00:46:02.843 --> 00:46:07.765
I guess ten, 15 years from now, nobody's

00:46:07.806 --> 00:46:09.183
unless they do the research,

00:46:09.183 --> 00:46:12.561
nobody's going to remember anything.

00:46:14.313 --> 00:46:17.566
It's just going to be a fancy house.

00:46:24.072 --> 00:46:25.908
I remember going to Auschwitz.

00:46:25.908 --> 00:46:31.163
I think it took about three or four days
and with no water, no food.

00:46:31.205 --> 00:46:35.042
By the time we got there,
half the train, half the people were dead.

00:46:35.042 --> 00:46:37.085
By the time we arrived.

00:46:39.379 --> 00:46:41.340
They starved or they didn't have water.

00:46:41.340 --> 00:46:45.594
And I remember it was raining one day
and I had a little teaspoon

00:46:45.594 --> 00:46:47.304
and I put it through the window.

00:46:47.304 --> 00:46:49.932
I would get water to put it in my father’s mouth

00:46:49.932 --> 00:46:53.769
because he was getting very sick
and I figured he's going to die, too.

00:46:53.852 --> 00:46:59.233
And that's how I gave him water to live.

00:46:59.316 --> 00:47:01.735
And we got there.

00:47:01.735 --> 00:47:05.948
And my mother and my little sister

00:47:06.031 --> 00:47:08.659
disappeared the first day.

00:47:08.659 --> 00:47:14.915
My mother,
who was holding my sister's hand

00:47:14.998 --> 00:47:18.627
and I never saw them again.

00:47:39.982 --> 00:47:42.401
This was the last place in Sárvár

00:47:42.401 --> 00:47:49.533
that my grandma's family
had all been together.

00:47:49.616 --> 00:47:54.746
It was probably the same
for all the town’s Jewish families.

00:47:56.290 --> 00:47:58.125
There's no sign,

00:47:58.125 --> 00:48:01.753
no place to collect
flowers or leave stones.

00:48:01.837 --> 00:48:04.423
Nothing special about it at all.

00:48:07.175 --> 00:48:10.679
It's just a train station now.

00:48:12.639 --> 00:48:14.766
People come and go

00:48:14.766 --> 00:48:16.852
looking at their phones.

00:48:48.091 --> 00:48:52.554
Most of the people that survived from Sárvár

00:48:52.638 --> 00:48:56.808
would come back to Sárvár, most of them

00:48:56.892 --> 00:49:01.688
after the war, because we all thought
that everybody's going to come back.

00:49:01.772 --> 00:49:06.902
And we were there for months
and we realized that this is it.

00:49:06.985 --> 00:49:09.821
I don't remember people ever asking,
Do you need anything?

00:49:09.821 --> 00:49:11.406
You want to go home, You want this?

00:49:11.406 --> 00:49:12.574
You want that?

00:49:15.702 --> 00:49:20.374
I just remember, you know, we had a place
I don't know, one of the cousins

00:49:20.582 --> 00:49:23.418
or one of the boys
that we knew, they had a apartment.

00:49:23.418 --> 00:49:26.421
I don't know how they got it
or whose place it was.

00:49:26.505 --> 00:49:29.549
– And we all kind of slept there.
– What about your old house?

00:49:29.549 --> 00:49:31.510
What happened to your old house?

00:49:31.510 --> 00:49:33.679
The baker lived there.

00:49:33.762 --> 00:49:35.347
Never even thought of going back.

00:49:35.347 --> 00:49:38.308
I don't remember ever thinking
about going back there.

00:49:44.982 --> 00:49:46.274
Yeah,

00:49:46.274 --> 00:49:48.819
that's the house.

00:49:48.819 --> 00:49:52.155
Yep, that's the house. Mike!

00:49:52.239 --> 00:49:55.492
It's right over there.

00:49:58.912 --> 00:50:01.748
[Counting in Hungarian]

00:50:01.748 --> 00:50:02.749
Oh, my gosh.

00:50:02.749 --> 00:50:05.961
I counted the windows.

00:50:06.044 --> 00:50:08.005
It has 9 windows.

00:50:17.097 --> 00:50:20.934
The house where my grandma grew up
had been a bakery

00:50:20.976 --> 00:50:24.271
with a small apartment attached.

00:50:27.232 --> 00:50:30.902
We didn't know if anyone would
be home who could talk to us.

00:50:33.739 --> 00:50:37.576
I half expected to find it like
the room in the museum

00:50:37.784 --> 00:50:40.203
with the dinner table still set.

00:50:44.750 --> 00:50:46.960
But now, of course,

00:50:46.960 --> 00:50:50.255
it was someone else's home.

00:50:51.048 --> 00:50:59.014
[Dog barking.]

00:51:11.318 --> 00:51:13.403
It was strange

00:51:13.403 --> 00:51:17.074
being in a place that lived in my mind
for so long.

00:51:18.909 --> 00:51:20.702
This was where my grandma

00:51:20.702 --> 00:51:27.084
slept in a bread basket
as a baby while her father worked,

00:51:27.125 --> 00:51:28.752
where the Jewish community

00:51:28.752 --> 00:51:34.549
brought their Shabbat meals
to stay warm overnight in the big oven.

00:51:38.220 --> 00:51:43.475
[Dog barking.  Apartment occupant calling her back in.]

00:51:44.309 --> 00:51:48.021
After András told them a little
about my family history,

00:51:48.105 --> 00:51:50.023
the people here were kind
enough to talk to us.

00:51:53.276 --> 00:51:54.528
You have the picture of them?

00:51:54.528 --> 00:51:55.946
Oh, yeah.

00:51:57.364 --> 00:52:02.285
I’d brought a photo of my grandma's sister
with the man

00:52:02.285 --> 00:52:06.832
my great-grandfather had entrusted
the bakery to

00:52:06.915 --> 00:52:10.460
when Sárvár’s Jews were taken away.

00:52:11.878 --> 00:52:16.007
I didn't know if anyone here
would have remembered him,

00:52:16.091 --> 00:52:19.094
but it turned out
the same family had lived here ever since.

00:53:58.777 --> 00:54:02.656
Part of me wanted to see the
inside of the house

00:54:02.739 --> 00:54:07.369
to go inside where the bakery was.

00:54:07.452 --> 00:54:09.204
But when I wasn't invited,

00:54:09.204 --> 00:54:10.622
I didn't press it.

00:54:15.710 --> 00:54:20.924
It felt momentous
being there in that courtyard.

00:54:21.007 --> 00:54:22.592
But there was something bothering me

00:54:22.592 --> 00:54:25.262
I couldn't articulate at the time.

00:54:28.306 --> 00:54:30.934
That apartment was sacred to me

00:54:30.934 --> 00:54:34.521
in some distant way,

00:54:34.604 --> 00:54:37.565
but it was full of other people's
private lives now,

00:54:37.732 --> 00:54:40.151
and it didn't feel right
to point a camera at it.

00:54:43.321 --> 00:54:44.864
What made it special to our family

00:54:44.864 --> 00:54:47.075
have been gone for years.

00:54:51.871 --> 00:54:56.334
I wondered if they ever thought
about the story of that house,

00:54:56.376 --> 00:54:59.045
the family that grew up there

00:54:59.129 --> 00:55:01.339
and who were taken away.

00:55:11.599 --> 00:55:13.727
But on the other hand,

00:55:13.727 --> 00:55:16.521
who was I to insist that they remember?

00:55:18.690 --> 00:55:22.485
I also lived on land back in the U.S.

00:55:22.569 --> 00:55:25.238
that was forcibly evacuated generations

00:55:25.238 --> 00:55:27.365
before my time.

00:55:29.784 --> 00:55:32.037
How often do I think

00:55:32.037 --> 00:55:35.332
about the families, friends,

00:55:35.415 --> 00:55:37.292
communities

00:55:37.292 --> 00:55:39.419
that are no longer there?

00:55:43.673 --> 00:55:45.091
At home

00:55:45.091 --> 00:55:47.552
there are no pictures of them,

00:55:47.552 --> 00:55:49.304
no memorials.

00:55:53.767 --> 00:55:56.269
It was all very unsettling.

00:56:17.165 --> 00:56:22.420
But we were on our way to the one place
in Sárvár that remembered.

00:56:31.596 --> 00:56:34.099
For a little while

00:56:34.099 --> 00:56:36.601
the past met up with us.

00:56:55.203 --> 00:56:59.290
Well, here we are
at the Sárvár castle

00:57:00.542 --> 00:57:02.752
on our day when the

00:57:02.752 --> 00:57:04.963
monument will be dedicated.

00:57:04.963 --> 00:57:07.465
It’s a beautiful, sunny day.

00:57:07.549 --> 00:57:10.093
Here's a pathway leading down

00:57:10.093 --> 00:57:13.721
to the park on the castle grounds.

00:57:13.805 --> 00:57:17.767
It’s really very beautiful.

00:57:21.146 --> 00:57:24.774
We used to go around the park and

00:57:24.858 --> 00:57:27.193
around the castle,

00:57:27.193 --> 00:57:29.654
and that park
was open to the public.

00:57:29.654 --> 00:57:31.573
And that's what
we used to do on Saturdays.

00:57:31.573 --> 00:57:35.243
We walked around after lunch,
after the temple...

00:57:46.296 --> 00:57:48.465
And here we are approaching a memorial.

00:57:48.465 --> 00:57:51.968
Some people are already starting
to gather.

00:57:52.051 --> 00:57:56.473
They are testing
the sound system now.

00:57:56.556 --> 00:58:00.727
This is a big deal for Sárvár.

00:58:00.810 --> 00:58:03.688
A very important occasion.

00:59:17.845 --> 00:59:21.349
To me, it's like a casket.

00:59:22.725 --> 00:59:24.310
And the other piece, to me,

00:59:24.310 --> 00:59:28.606
it looks like a headstone.

00:59:28.690 --> 00:59:32.902
And that's the way I feel about it.

00:59:32.902 --> 00:59:35.113
It's kind of a

00:59:35.113 --> 00:59:38.116
something I feel I owed
to the people that died.

00:59:38.324 --> 00:59:42.245
I owed it to the people that are alive
and they should see it.

00:59:46.541 --> 00:59:48.668
We weren't at anybody's funeral, you know.

00:59:48.668 --> 00:59:53.715
We couldn't
put them away and pray for them.

00:59:53.798 --> 00:59:56.259
I thought, this is– this is my funeral.

00:59:56.259 --> 00:59:58.636
This is the funeral for everybody.

01:00:55.902 --> 01:00:58.071
It was like a dream.

01:01:00.615 --> 01:01:02.367
I was there

01:01:02.367 --> 01:01:04.744
up close

01:01:04.744 --> 01:01:06.704
inside these images that I'd watched

01:01:06.704 --> 01:01:08.373
100 times.

01:01:18.257 --> 01:01:22.095
It was like being at a family cemetery

01:01:22.178 --> 01:01:25.431
as if our ancestors were buried here

01:01:25.515 --> 01:01:28.976
or their spirits were lingering here.

01:01:37.068 --> 01:01:40.988
It was like being in synagogue as a kid,

01:01:41.072 --> 01:01:45.243
listening to a song in a language
I couldn't understand.

01:02:00.425 --> 01:02:03.594
I stayed around the monument
until into the evening.

01:02:07.181 --> 01:02:09.851
I could tell that part of me
was waiting for something

01:02:09.851 --> 01:02:12.228
miraculous to happen here,

01:02:15.773 --> 01:02:19.861
but it just couldn't do so many things
that somewhere in my heart,

01:02:19.944 --> 01:02:25.992
I had secretly, naively wanted it to do.

01:02:27.994 --> 01:02:30.997
It couldn't bring people back.

01:02:30.997 --> 01:02:33.541
It couldn't change the past.

01:02:34.625 --> 01:02:38.171
It couldn't tell me what my grandma was thinking.

01:02:43.342 --> 01:02:45.845
I expected that coming here,

01:02:45.845 --> 01:02:48.765
I'd feel a sense of completion

01:02:48.765 --> 01:02:51.976
of closure.

01:02:52.059 --> 01:02:55.062
But after traveling all this way,

01:02:55.104 --> 01:02:57.774
that feeling seemed to elude me.

01:03:05.406 --> 01:03:10.453
Did she feel that, too?

01:03:10.536 --> 01:03:13.122
After the monument was done,

01:03:13.122 --> 01:03:16.042
she must have still felt what was missing.

01:03:19.462 --> 01:03:23.049
As much as I wanted
to see all these places,

01:03:23.132 --> 01:03:26.761
what I really wanted to see

01:03:26.844 --> 01:03:31.557
was my great-grandfather in the bakery.

01:03:31.641 --> 01:03:36.229
The girls playing in the courtyard,

01:03:36.312 --> 01:03:39.232
my grandma looking through family photos,

01:03:39.232 --> 01:03:43.319
telling me stories,

01:03:43.402 --> 01:03:45.071
things that were really,

01:03:45.071 --> 01:03:46.781
truly gone.

01:04:10.930 --> 01:04:13.182
When I was in high school,

01:04:13.182 --> 01:04:16.185
my grandma got me my first camera.

01:04:18.229 --> 01:04:19.689
Since then,

01:04:19.689 --> 01:04:24.527
I filmed thousands of hours of footage,

01:04:24.610 --> 01:04:29.365
some combination of a film
diary and a home movie archive

01:04:29.448 --> 01:04:31.784
with no end product in mind.

01:04:50.636 --> 01:04:52.513
With that camera,

01:04:52.597 --> 01:04:57.435
she gave me a way of processing my life,

01:04:57.476 --> 01:04:58.978
a way to create something

01:04:58.978 --> 01:05:03.107
from my feelings and my experiences.

01:05:07.778 --> 01:05:10.364
When I feel anxious about the world,

01:05:10.448 --> 01:05:13.034
I can make something out of it.

01:05:23.169 --> 01:05:28.674
This film was created out of that process.

01:05:28.758 --> 01:05:33.471
It was something I saw her do.

01:05:33.554 --> 01:05:37.850
She took her feelings and memories

01:05:37.934 --> 01:05:39.852
and made a monument.

01:05:44.774 --> 01:05:46.609
Well, here we are

01:05:46.609 --> 01:05:50.905
at Grandma and Grandpa Craig’s house.

01:05:50.947 --> 01:05:54.992
Grandma’s been very busy gardening.

01:05:58.871 --> 01:06:02.208
I remember a summer morning

01:06:02.291 --> 01:06:06.379
when the Shoah Foundation came to her
house to film an interview with her.

01:06:13.177 --> 01:06:15.054
[”Speed.”]

01:06:15.137 --> 01:06:17.056
it was my first time seeing a real camera

01:06:17.056 --> 01:06:20.810
setup with microphones and lights.

01:06:20.893 --> 01:06:23.896
Today is August 20th, 1998.

01:06:24.063 --> 01:06:27.775
I'm conducting an interview
with Alice Craig.

01:06:27.817 --> 01:06:31.153
Her name at birth was Alice Lichtenstein.

01:06:31.237 --> 01:06:33.781
The language is English.

01:06:38.119 --> 01:06:41.205
It wasn't lost on me
that the camera was allowing her to say

01:06:41.205 --> 01:06:45.001
something that she didn't feel comfortable
talking openly with us about.

01:06:45.084 --> 01:06:47.461
And, you know,
people wanted to know why I did it.

01:06:47.461 --> 01:06:50.381
And I did it because

01:06:50.381 --> 01:06:53.384
I wanted people to know in Sárvár

01:06:53.592 --> 01:06:55.761
and in the whole area

01:06:57.638 --> 01:06:59.140
that we were there once.

01:06:59.140 --> 01:07:02.518
Children in school,
they don't even know we ever lived there.

01:07:02.601 --> 01:07:04.311
It's so hard for me to understand.

01:07:04.311 --> 01:07:06.397
There was a whole

01:07:06.397 --> 01:07:10.401
society,
you know, families that nobody knows

01:07:10.401 --> 01:07:12.028
we were there.

01:07:16.323 --> 01:07:20.536
My grandma had said her
monument was a funeral,

01:07:20.619 --> 01:07:23.372
a headstone,

01:07:23.372 --> 01:07:25.249
but when I was there,

01:07:25.249 --> 01:07:28.002
her family
and her friends and neighbors were alive

01:07:28.002 --> 01:07:29.545
in my mind.

01:07:59.366 --> 01:08:01.118
Talk to the birds.

01:08:01.118 --> 01:08:03.579
Can you talk to them?

01:08:10.127 --> 01:08:15.966
Maybe it's the most we can hope for
when we put our stories into a vessel

01:08:16.050 --> 01:08:18.636
that it brings something to life

01:08:18.636 --> 01:08:25.309
in the imagination of whoever receives it.

01:08:30.189 --> 01:08:32.316
It's like an act of faith.

01:09:14.692 --> 01:09:19.905
On our last morning in Sárvár,
András and Sándor had organized a service

01:09:19.989 --> 01:09:23.409
for the monument's 25th anniversary.

01:09:23.492 --> 01:09:28.998
And a few of the remaining Jews from
Szombathely gathered with us.

01:09:33.586 --> 01:09:37.464
It was a lot smaller than the first ceremony,

01:09:37.548 --> 01:09:40.384
but we were here now

01:09:40.384 --> 01:09:43.095
trying to hear something
before it gets lost

01:09:43.095 --> 01:09:48.058
and remember it for the next person.