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"My father was an extremely smart man. In the cattle car, sitting there, I talked to him. 'Daddy, what's going to happen?' And he always assured me, 'Don't worry. This is the twentieth century. They're not going to kill us.'"
-Fred Bloch

Survivors of the Holocaust documents the effect the Adolf Hitler and his followers had as they applied their ideas about "race" to the Jews of Europe. Almost from the start, the Nazis waged two wars. One was fought openly on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa. The other took place in secret and its victims were not soldiers, but civilians - children, women, and men whose only "crime" was their "race."

The stories of the survivors provide a glimpse into the death camps, where as Professor Lawrence Langer reminds us, moral choices as we know them did not exist and "the inmates were left with the task of redefining decency in an atmosphere that could not support it." The survivors who tell their story in this documentary were children or young teenagers when the war began.

• What do they remember of their childhood before the world changed for them? How important do you think it was to them that they "belong"? How vulnerable were they to the violence around them?
One survivor describes his bar mitzvah in 1938. A bar mitzvah is a religious ceremony that marks a boy's coming of age. He reads a portion from the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, to celebrate his becoming a full member of the Jewish community with all of the privileges and responsibilities of membership.
• Why did his rabbi beg him "never to forget"? What does he remember?
In the documentary, a survivor reads aloud a poem he wrote:

How can I forget Auschwitz, Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, Buchenwald...and so many others? How can I forget Moshe, Yankel, and Rivka...and so many names? And I hear so many "Sh'ma Yisroels, Adonai Elohenus, Adnoi Echnods." How can I forget the sound of Shabbos in the wind that carried the endless sound of "Yisgadal, Ve'yiskadash Sh'mey Rabbo"? It is so much pain to remember, so much pain, but it's so hard to forget.

The places he lists are places where Jews were murdered. The names represent individuals who died there. He also recites passages from two prayers. The first is said twice each day by religious Jews to affirm their faith in God. The prayer begins with these words: "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one." The second prayer is recited in memory of loved ones. It too praises God and reaffirms a belief in our God.
• What words do other survivors use to describe the pain they remember because "it's so hard to forget"?
Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, fought the Nazis until he was captured and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, an extermination camp. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered there; others were kept alive until they were no longer useful as slave labor. After the war, Levi wrote a book called Survival at Auschwitz. In it, he states:

Then for the first time, we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower that this: no human condition is more miserable, than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage so that behind the name something of us, of us, as we were, remains...

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced in suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death will be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp," and it is now clear what we seek to express in the phrase: "to lie on the bottom."

Levi believed the Holocaust altered the very meaning of even everyday words:

Just as our hunger is not the feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say "hunger," we say "tiredness," "fear," "pain," we say "winter" and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and without suffering in their homes. If the [camps] had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind with the temperature below freezing, and wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, hunger, and knowledge of the end drawing near.

Among the words that took on a new meaning was the word bread. One survivor describes a son who killed his father over a piece of bread. Another recalls the tiny slivers of bread he and his father saved to keep themselves alive on an upcoming death march. He says that he cried the day he learned that his father had traded the bread for a prayer book. A few days later, the father used the prayer book to hold a Passover seder. A seder is a ceremony held in Jewish homes to remember a time when Jews were slaves in Egypt and recall how they acquired their freedom.
• Was the seder the survivor describes an act of resistance or an act of faith? Can it be both?
Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author, writes, "Ask any survivor, he will tell you, he who has not lived the event will never know it. And he who went through it will not relate it, not really, not entirely. Between his memory and his reflection there is a wall - and it cannot be pierced."
• What is the wall to which Wiesel refers? Why can't it be pierced? How do the testimonies of the survivors affect that wall?
Historian Deborah Dwork writes that survival was a matter of luck. In her view, the choices Jews made were "so alien, so different from anything Jews experienced personally, or had learned through education that they could not apply their knowledge to it."

Professor Lawrence Langer refers to those decisions as choices made in the "absence of humanly significant alternatives-that is, alternatives enabling an individual to make a decision, act on it, and accept the consequences, all within a framework that supports personal integrity and self-esteem." He calls them "choiceless choices."

• What examples of choiceless choices do the survivors describe? What distinguishes those choices from other decisions?
Langer believes that the moral turmoil in the camps silences judgment of the behavior of the victims. Elie Wiesel agrees. He says of kapos-prisoners forced to oversee other prisoners:

"Of course, in the camps I saw men conquered, weak, cruel. I do not hesitate to admit I hated them, they frightened me; for me, they represented a danger greater than the Germans...But, though they played the executioner's game, they died as victims...What would have become of me had I stayed in the camps longer, five years, or seven, or twelve? I have been trying to answer that question for more than twenty years and at times, after a sleepless night, I am afraid of the answer."

• Why did the kapos represent for Wiesel a "danger greater than the Germans"? How does he help us understand why it is difficult to judge them?
One survivor recalls screaming as she was pulled from her mother. Another speaks of the hug he gave his grandfather at Auschwitz as "the biggest satisfaction of my life." Still another tells of the crying as she listened to the Yiddish song, "My Yiddishe Mama."

My Yiddishe Mama
O, how terrible when she is gone.
How beautiful and bright is the house
When my mother is there.
How sad and dark
When God takes her from the world.

• What does the mother in the song represent? Why did family connections become so important that a hug is still recalled as an individual's "biggest satisfaction"?
In the documentary, one survivor remembers: "They sang the Hatikvah in the gas chamber, and we heard it because that camp was not far from the crematorium. And so it was so cold and it was so lonely, you could hear a pin fall..." The Hebrew word Hatikvah means "the hope." At the time, the song was the anthem of the Zionists, those who hoped to some day build a Jewish state in what was then Palestine.
• How do you explain a song of hope in a gas chamber?
When the war ended, few survivors could return to their homes. Most had become refugees or DPs-displaced persons. Some would spend years in DP camps waiting to find a new home in a new land. A Yiddish song popular after the war reflects the feelings of these survivors:

Where shall I go?
Who can answer me?
All doors are closed.
To the left, to the right.
It's the same in every land.

• How do the words confirm Elie Wiesel's belief that "the victims suffered more, and more profoundly, from the indifference of the onlookers than from the brutality of the executioner"?
He writes: "The cruelty of the enemy would have been incapable of breaking the prisoner; it was the silence of those he believed to be his friends-cruelty more cowardly, more subtle-which broke his heart."

How do the words also explain the feelings of another survivor? She says: "I shelter in my heart any little thing that was done for me, and I don't mean materially or financially or anything. A kind word meant so much to me. They're so nice to me. And that's something that stays with you all the time."

On the fortieth anniversary of World War II, President Richard von Weisaecker, of the former West Germany, said of the Holocaust: "It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or made not to have happened. Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection."

• Why does Weisaecker argue against "letting bygones be bygones"? What does he suggest about the way education and memory are linked? What do the survivors want us to remember and why? What can we learn from their stories about the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism in the world today? About the power of old myths and misinformation?