(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to Cutline in the Community.

I'm Eric Marcus host of today's program when we'll be exploring the impact of family separation as seen through the lens of the Holocaust.

First, we'll be screening a new short documentary that I co-produced for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust testimonies called "The Last Time I Saw Them."

That will be followed by a conversation with our special guests, about how past experiences of family separation relate to the present day.

Before we get to the film, I'd like to introduce our guests.

First, Marcy Shore is an author, translator and associate professor of history at Yale University.

She's a member of the Fortunoff Video Archives Faculty Advisors Council.

Timothy Snyder is also a Fortunoff Archive Faculty advisor and he's a best-selling author, public intellectual and the Richard C Levin professor of history at Yale.

His scholarship has been recently focused on the rise of illiberal forces on both sides of the Atlantic.

Efren Olivares is a lawyer, advocate and the deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project.

He's been working with immigration advocacy organizations on the Southern border of the United States for the past several years.

Welcome.

Marci, since you commissioned the 22 minute documentary we're about to watch, can you tell me briefly before we watch the film, what inspired you to ask the archive to produce it?

- Yes, I'm happy to tell that story.

It came about in the Spring of 2018, when I first read the news one morning about the children being taken away from their parents on the American border.

And I know very little about matters of immigration into America.

I'm a historian of Eastern Europe, I work on a different time, a different place.

I know very little about Latin America, about central American refugees.

But my visceral reaction was that something horrific was happening.

Something that resonated with me as a historian of Eastern Europe and that as scholars, as historians, as Americans, as human beings, we needed to intervene in some way.

And it was a spontaneous idea, I emailed Stephen Naron at the Fortunoff Archive because I know that archive and I've worked on the Holocaust myself and I know that there's extraordinary material there and of course, this is something that happened very often during Holocaust, the children were taken away from their parents and thrown in camps.

And I said, Stephen, we have to do something.

This has to be some moment where we can use this material to make an intervention.

I didn't know how.

I don't know anything about making a film.

I'm not a very visually oriented person.

It was a very spontaneous idea, but Stephen didn't say you're crazy, Stephen listened to me and said, "Okay, let's think about how we can do this."

- Oh, great.

And what happened then was that Stephen called me and said, "Can we do this?"

And I said, "Sure, we can do this."

Not knowing exactly what we were going to do.

And then I decided to call one of my friends who I'd worked with on a previous documentary and we figured out how to do it.

So great, thank you for explaining.

We'll have plenty of time to talk more about this after the film.

So, now here's "The Last Time I Saw Them."

(piano music) - [Sylvia] I come from a family of six children.

- [Frances] And I was the oldest.

- Yeah, in between us there was a brother, Chaim.

And after me, my mother had twins, but one of them died, her name was Freda.

Then is Judith and a little brother Yankov.

- [Frances] And we lived a very happy life.

My father was a businessman and we were educated in Czechchit and in Yiddish, we had the Yeshiva in the town that we supported.

- [Sylvia] We never experienced any anti-Semitism under the Czech government.

We associated, my friends were Czech, so we had a very happy home life.

(soft music) - [Frances] The Hungarian army came in and they occupied the Karpath.

- [Sylvia] They took our business away.

- [Frances] They just plain-blind came in- - [Sylvia] And they occupied it.

- [Frances] And they told you, "get out," and that was it.

(guitar music) - It was like rumbling, rows of tanks were coming through the town and they parked those tanks in the center and we heard those noises during the night.

In the morning, there was a knock on our door and they were two SS and he said, "Let's go."

(gentle music) - [Sylvia] Towards the end, they started to liquidate the ghetto.

They started to ship people out.

- We went like they ship animals, you know those open trains?

- They never opened up the cars.

It never stopped.

It just constantly was going.

And we were suffocated practically there.

And because there were so many people crammed into a small place, there was no water, people were fainting, elderly people were dying.

And finally, after three days of traveling, the train suddenly stopped, they suddenly opened up the doors.

- And I heard they say that man here, this goes here.

The people started panicking- - [Sylvia] Everybody started coming- - [Frances] They didn't know and there was going with those rubber sticks, you know here, there.

And we were very scared and didn't know nothing.

I remember my father was grabbing my brother, and my mother, the five kids.

My mother and me and my sister, we were holding together.

And as we come down, they were the SS push my father here.

- They announced it.

- And we go here and my mother was going with me then my sister, and there was eight, 10, eleven.

They pushed her here.

And I remember my mother, the kids started crying, "Mommy, mommy, you know?

And my mother pulled herself away from me and she says (speaks in Yiddish) "You should take care of your sister like of - - I know Frances.

The minute we stepped off the freight trains, we were separated right there and then.

My father and my older brother went on one side.

My sister, she was a tall girl, so they made her go to one side and I went with my mother and with the younger children.

And my mother looked around and she says, "Well, where's your sister?"

I said, "They made her go over there."

So she tells me, "You run after her because she only has one dress on her."

And they pushed her one side, and I was running from one place to another and I don't know how.

Because in Auschwitz you just does not run from one place to another.

But somehow I caught up with her and I found her and we were marching.

They took us into a section where all the women arrivals came in.

And that was a big, long barrack.

And you stay there.

We were in Auschwitz for three days in barracks.

And outside, all that going on, there was a big band playing music constantly, day and night.

There was smoke, heavy smoke.

There were babies screaming You were looking where it's come from but you couldn't see where it's come from.

- Everybody was screaming and crying and running, and they says, "Don't cry, you'll be after they go shower in there, you'll meet them in the afternoon to meet again."

Since then... - That was the last time we saw my father - My brother, my grandmother, my mother and the four younger brothers.

- That was the last time I seen them.

- I have never heard anything about my rest of the family.

Until one day I was sitting by the window, I was mending the socks and this friend of mine walks into the room and he said to me, "Sylvia, what are you going to give me?

I have a surprise for you."

And I picked up my head and I saw my sister standing in the yard, in the courtyard.

So first I thought I was seeing things.

And then she gave a yell and I ran out in the courtyard and we both fainted right there in the spot.

(piano music) - I attended a Jewish school, Adass Yisroel in Berlin, as did my sister.

Most of the time, we were very aware of the fact that we live in dangerous times.

On Kol Nidre before we went to synagogue, it's the custom for father to bless his children.

And I remember all the years that I can think back that when my father blessed my sister and me, he always cried.

And I assume that it was because they knew.

Small as you were, you realized that.

And of course, we were confronted daily, daily with the swastika and the hordes and, in the glass cases on the street corners the display of the sturmer.

My father would sometimes pick one up in a train and bring it home.

So there was this feeling of an impending doom.

He was taken away very early in the morning.

My mother was crying and there was such to do that my sister and I woke up and we went to see what was going on.

And I remember the policemen saying as far as he knows, that they're being deported to Poland.

And that's the last time I saw my father.

When Kristallnacht came, it was a disaster.

And it became clear that life for Jews in Germany was all over.

Decisions had to be made as to who should go and who should not go.

For example, one of my uncles and aunt decided not to send both of their children.

They would send one child to test the waters and keep one child with them to see if this would work, because there was no certainty.

It was actually fraught with danger.

And we were made aware of the fact that we will be carrying a luggage tag on our lapel, and all it would say is the name and the district in Berlin which we lived.

No street, nothing else, no identity.

And that we were to act as though we didn't know from where we came.

We left in the morning, early in the morning.

It was timed so that we would get to the border at night because we needed the cover of darkness, of course.

I remember leaving from Bahnhof Zoo, and I remember that not, about a minute or two out of Bahnhof Zoo on the elevator tracks of the railroad came into view the hull of this burned and destroyed famous synagogue of Berlin, Fasanenstrasse.

And that was the last stab in the heart for a little Jewish boy, to see the burnt hulk of this famous synagogue.

I also remember very well that my mother took me into a corner in this railroad compartment.

I remember well what she said to me, in order to make sure I understood because of course I was a little boy, very attached to my mother.

It was a good love relationship.

In that a little speech in the train, I always say I became bar mitzvah.

I have not been formally bar mitzvahed.

When I was 13 I was not bar mitzvahed.

I was bar mitzvahed when I was 11 by my mother, no minyan, no rabbi.

I was given my oldest, my commandment as to what to do.

And I remember that.

I was to be the hero of the family, tapfer zu sein, to be courageous.

And so the journey took its last hour or two.

At the station, as we got off the train, my mother said to me, you must not cry, you must not turn around and look back and you must not cry.

And she did not kiss me good luck, goodbye, because there was just no time.

We went to the left, we children.

And I remember my mother and the other lady turned to the right.

And that was the last we saw of them.

That was December the 6th, 1938, in the middle of the night.

I remember having to go to a photographer in Hoogeveen to have pictures taken.

I still have those pictures in the little Dutch folder at home.

And we got to England.

And there was, of course, the last I saw of my sister, who fortunately perished in Bergen-Belsen.

(gentle music) (piano music) - I was living with my family, my father, mother and a brother, who was five years younger.

I went to school.

We were living a life of wonderful affluence and happiness.

We went skiing in the winter, swimming in the summer.

This is my brother and myself.

My Jewishness was more mostly combined with the sports.

And we went Friday night sometimes into the synagogue but it was more of an Oneg Shabbat kind of thing.

I know we drove with the car to the synagogue.

You lost your childhood, I think at that moment.

You suddenly were wearing a star, and you were not allowed to be in a tram, sitting with other people.

You had to be standing on one of the outside places.

Very similar to discrimination in this country, where the blacks were pushed to the side.

- In Theresienstadt, at one point, they were testing some vaccine against Scarlet fever.

So people are sick.

Then they were trying to get some vaccine for jaundice.

I was laying in bed with my brother that had an enormous jaundice and my mother had very dangerous Scarlet fever.

She was burning up with enormous fever.

It was freezing, it was muddy.

They didn't let people go to the bathroom and people had to relieve themselves while they were standing with tears in their eyes.

I remember one incident, my brother telling my mother that he was hungry.

And she had nothing to give him and she was crying.

And that was certainly enough for me never to mention anything, anything at all.

My mother said now I was at that point almost 14, she said, "You are going to tell them you are 18.

And you volunteer and you go with the rest of the women, I will say with my brother."

And her explanation was that she has to stay with my brother because he would forget his name.

And I must admit that I was very angry at my mother for a very very long time that she didn't save herself for me.

I passed through the selection.

I was now selected to go to Germany to work.

And I suddenly see that there was somebody, they were examining women.

And somebody got up from the table and she was bleeding and I lost it.

I started to cry.

"I want back to my mommy."

And they couldn't quiet me down.

And a German lady, a guard came over to me and asked me, "Why are you crying?"

And I spoke very nicely German.

And I said, "I want to go back to my mommy."

She took me to her room and she gave me cocoa, which I didn't see for years and years and years.

And she says to me now, "I will tell you something and please listen to me.

Don't cry.

And don't try to get back to your parents.

You are better off.

You are here with women that know you.

They speak the same language and you're going out into Germany.

You're going to, you're getting out of here."

She really saved my life.

And then I found out later that my mother with my little brother, they went to the gas chambers.

The next day, the moment we left, the men left, then the women left for hard labor to go to Germany.

- [Interviewer] Mm-Hmm.

- They took the older and the women with children and they gassed them.

(piano music) - My father's name was Irving Bloch, my mother was Marta and I had a brother, Georg.

Both my grandparents were farmers, which was quite unusual for a Jewish family.

Both of my grandparents had farms and my parents grew up there.

I remember my grandmother very well.

She was gorgeous, white hair, very lovely.

And she was killed when she was 86 years old by the Germans.

There was very little food, the work was very dreadfully hard, and then it was completely closed.

It was so claustrophobic and there was absolutely not enough food.

For me, Lodz was especially horrible because of the children.

They cried and cried and then they stopped crying one day.

They executed, I don't know how many people because I never had the courage to go and look, because they let them hang on the square for several days.

And my mother went there because she said someone has to pray for them.

From time to time the Germans came and they took people away.

The Germans went from one place to the other.

And then they let us go in the street.

And there was this always this officer, a German officer, who said, this person go this way, this person goes back.

And they took all the old people and the children, and took them away.

We went out of the train and right there, they started dividing women from men.

And I only could see my father's face.

And he said, "Take care of mother."

And it was all, I didn't see him walking away.

It was just such a crowd, you see?

And we walked hand-in-hand with my mother and there was Mengele and showed my mother the right side and I wanted to go with her.

And there was a soldier and he threw me to the ground and said, "You stay here."

"But where are these people going?

What's going to happen to them?

And he said, "Don't be hysterical.

And if you ask, you aren't going to see them again."

Very vividly, I can see pictures like in a movie.

You know, I can see details but there is no connection.

And the last night...

I don't think I spoke to anybody the whole time I was I Auschwitz.

I just lost all capability of communicating with people.

And I sort of crawled aside.

And I thought my mother, I couldn't think anything except my mother.

Moje mama.

And I remember sitting on the ground and hold up my hand and there was this big, you know the dandelions?

And it came to me and it landed on my hand.

And I thought, my mother, she's here.

I think maybe she just died that moment.

(gentle piano music) - Welcome back.

And if you're just joining us, I'm Eric Marcus host of today's program and co-producer of the documentary, "The Last Time I Saw Them."

We're joined by our special three guests, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Efren Olivares.

Marci and Timothy are both professors of history at Yale.

And Efren is the deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice project.

So Marci, as you explained before we watched "The Last Time I Saw Them," you were inspired to commission the film by what happened with families being separated on the U.S. Southern border.

I have a question for you about whether that's a fair comparison, but I wanted to ask Efren first, to explain what exactly happened on the U.S. Southern border.

For those viewers who might not be familiar with what the Trump administration did.

So Efren what happened?

- In late May, 2018, I was based in McAllen, Texas.

And one afternoon I received a phone call from a federal public defender.

She was an attorney representing individuals who had crossed the border and were being prosecuted criminally for crossing the border.

And she called me to tell me that an increasing number of her clients were telling her that they had been traveling with their children; five-year-olds, seven-year-olds.

And when they came to court, they hadn't seen their children in a few days and they didn't know where their children were, or when they might see them again.

And this was before the issue of family separation at the Southern border received any sort of media attention.

So my reaction was to ask her, if we could talk to these families, and get their information, document, names, names of children and any information we could gather to try to then search for the children.

So the very next morning, one of our paralegals Georgina and I, went to the courthouse to interview the parents who had been separated that morning.

And that day in group of over 90 immigrants, who were being processed, there were five parents who had been separated from their children from Guatemala and El Salvador.

And we started interviewing them.

We only had a few minutes with each of them to take their names, their date of birth, ages of the children and where they might be headed.

That was at the time the only information that was being kept of the children who were separated.

We started doing that in late May and then ended up doing that for the month of June until an executive order stopped the large majority of the separations.

But in that process, we interviewed almost 400 parents, who had been separated from their children.

And what we discovered right away is that in the vast majority of the cases, the parents were led to believe that they were coming to court for their hearing and that when they came back to the border patrol station, their children would be there.

And as the days went by, we found out that that was not the case, that the children had been sent away to shelters, in some cases, across the country.

Some of these parents were separated from their children for months.

Some of them still are separated from them.

And we also learned that the government was not keeping track of which children had been traveling with which parent, which was extremely problematic in all cases but particularly for the very young children.

- So did you have any sense when you got that first call that this was government policy?

And I wonder what you...

Hearing you tell this is so shocking that because you didn't know what the government policy was.

I wonder what you thought.

- You know, at the time the only policy we had heard about was the zero tolerance policy, which called for a criminal prosecution of everyone who crossed the border.

But when I got that phone call, I remember thinking, there's no way, it can be that way.

Not in 2018 in the United States of America, it's not possible that the government will be taking children systematically from their parents and not telling them where they are going, who's taking care of them, when they might teach them again.

I just could not fathom that.

But sure enough, the next morning and the following weeks, that was exactly what was going on.

I find it breathtaking and it just...

I find it so upsetting even hearing your telling it now, I've certainly read all about it and follow the story very closely.

In no small part because I grew up with kids whose parents were on the Kindertransport and were sent from Germany to safety never to see their parents again.

And I couldn't believe that our government was doing such a thing... We weren't killing the parents but we were separating them.

So, Marci, I know you made the leap from this story to what you knew of the Holocaust and family separation.

But really is it... Can we make that comparison?

Is it fair or was the Holocaust a singular event?

- Let me say a couple of things in response to that, I mean - Sure.

- But first, I would say that even though I don't have any experience of the Southern border, it was not difficult for me to imagine myself in that situation.

When I was training to be a historian in the 1990s, running around Eastern Europe, there were many more survivors of Nazi-ism and Stalinism as well, who were still alive in the 1990s.

I met a lot of them.

And those encounters were very important to my coming of age as a historian and understanding what the horrors of the 20th century were about.

Everyone who survived, who got through Nazi-ism or Stalinism or both, at some point had to flee a desperate dire circumstances and survive to meet me in the 1990s only because they got lucky and somebody was kind to them somewhere at some point.

And because what we do as historians is we try to read ourselves into other people's stories.

It was not difficult for me to imagine those parents on the border.

In the interim between 1990s and now, I have become a parent.

I had two young kids.

And it was not hard for me to imagine that if I were fleeing with my children and somebody tried to take my children away, I would be capable of killing someone.

That is not a human situation.

And so the first impulse was not intellectual, it was visceral.

Now as a historian, one of the things that we're always working in is what is particular and what is universal.

Or I should say, as a historian of intellectual history, I work a lot with history of philosophy, the relationship between what is universal and what is particular is central in philosophy.

Historians often work with a kind of middle layer, with a category that is in between the universal and the particular.

Be it nation, class, religion, race, ethnicity.

But that which is irreducibly unique, and that which is common and transcends borders is an epistemological question we constantly ask ourselves.

And so it was natural for me to ask that question.

No situation is ever exactly the same as any other situation.

No historical moment is ever exactly the same.

Just like no human being is exactly the same as any other human being.

But that doesn't mean we don't learn things about people from knowing people or we don't learn things about different moments in different situations from understanding other moments and other situations.

So for me, this was not kind of Kierkegaardian, yes, no, either, or, question.

For me, this was a question about how.

How do we use the past to help us better understand the present.

- And that's what you've done with creating this document- by commissioning of this documentary, is bringing the past to the present.

Tim, when are our historical comparisons relevant and why do we need them?

And do we need them?

- I guess I would say that when we say history, we shouldn't immediately say comparison.

Because when we say comparison, it's like we're saying now versus then, or us versus those people.

It's like we're treating history as a series of discrete moments.

And the implication there is always that something must have fundamentally changed.

There must have been progress.

We must be better, we must be different.

I would say that before we even think about whether it's a comparison, we look at the common threads.

And we look at the continuities.

We look at history as more like a flow.

In this film that we just watched, we have these five people who were still alive in the 21st century or the late 20th century, talking about things that happened to them in 1930s and 1940s.

That's a flow from Europe into American life.

Those are experiences about being a refugee, about being deported, about being separated from your family, which are human experiences.

Those human experiences were brought to the United States.

They're there for us to learn from if we want to.

And the second thing which I think is important is that one of the things that historians of the Holocaust learned in the 1980s is that you have to listen to the voices of the people.

So before you and I, or before I'm a defender of the policy says like, "Hey, these things are different."

You have to actually listen.

But in the 1980s historians of the Holocaust were minimizing it.

And they were understanding it entirely from the point of view of German documents.

I can imagine historian in the future looking back at the Trump child separation policy and just reading government documents and missing something which is essential about it, which is the inhumanity, which is the way that if you do something like this it always involves a lie, a lie to those parents, right?

A lie to those children, a lie that's then repeated and then echoes outward and echoes goes down the generations.

You miss the way that when policemen or other officials behave like this, they change, they become capable of doing other things.

And then, and to echo something which is implicit, I think in what both Marci and Efren had said, there are things that are possible that you don't realize are possible.

And the history of the Holocaust isn't there to tell us exactly how things are going to be in the future.

The history of the Holocaust is there to tell us that that range of what's possible, that you didn't think was possible, goes very, very deep.

And it can go very, very deep, very, very quickly.

- That's one of the things that I find so striking is how quickly things can change because the Holocaust wasn't the Holocaust when it started out.

And you mentioned Timothy, the lies that people are told.

I'm reminded of some of the testimonies I've listened to, where people were told lies in order to put them in a position where they would lower their guard.

And then awful things were done.

Where they were told, "Oh, don't worry, you'll be seeing them again, just behave."

And, and they behaved and they never saw their loved ones again.

Hearing these stories is so different from reading the stories.

I wonder, Efren, what you think, having watched this film now, what is the power of hearing the voices and seeing the stories told about the past?

How real is it for you when you see these stories and hear them?

- I still get chills thinking about what these parents told me.

You know, we had a few minutes with them in court but speaking with them, hearing them, I had at least two mothers tell me that the guards, the border patrol agents told them they were taking their daughters for a bath and they never brought them back.

And, thinking of the... Is this a singularity or is it a universality in this point?

I think if we start parsing out factual differences, distinctions, we are missing the point.

To me the universality here is the "othering" of human beings.

We express a commitment to human rights.

I believe that as human beings, we are all deserving of some basic rights.

But when "other" other people, when you see them as differently, as different than you be that, and therefore less than you, be that because of skin color, race, religion, language, nationality, whatever that is, it allows people to go to extreme lengths in the suffering you can cause other people.

And a turning point in the summer of 2018 and it goes to your question, Eric, about hearing them, was when that audio of children crying in one of the border patrol cages was leaked.

Because the power of that audio was that it wasn't video.

And in hearing those children cry and say, "Mommy, mommy."

And just cry uncontrollably, is that when you hear those children you don't see the color of their skin.

And those cries of those children are universal.

- Yes, I find...

I work on also a podcast for the Fortunoff Video Archive called Those Who Were There.

And these are drawn from the videotaped testimonies that were given by survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust.

Hearing the voices and not actually seeing the people has such enormous power.

And because of the way also we listened to podcasts using earbuds, we hear the voices in our heads, so it's very intimate.

So that in some ways the audio is more important than the visual.

We focus more when we're not watching.

So as powerful as I think the documentary is and actually I can hardly watch "The Last Time I Saw Them."

I had to watch it over and over again when I was working on it.

And when I work, I can detach myself or dissociate but actually watching the finished film, I wept.

And I actually hope not to have to watch it one more time.

But it's the listening, when I hear the voices and I still hear the voices in my head, that has such power.

And I remember that audio of the children crying for their parents.

And I thought, how could we do that?

How could we treat people in that way?

And this is a question for the three of you.

People often say that we need to remember the Holocaust, so we don't remember the... we don't repeat the past.

But something I think, does remembering make any difference?

We humans seem to be horrible creatures when the guard rails come off.

So does remembering make any difference?

Marci, I wonder if you can start with responding to that question.

- I do think it does and I think there are things that we can learn.

One of the things that, and first thank you so much for making the film.

I had the idea to make the film but I did none of the actual work making the film, that was you and your team and Stephen.

We're listening to people in the film who are adults, and they're older adults at the time their testimonies are being filmed.

And they're speaking about things that happened decades and decades earlier when they were children.

And it has never been made okay for them.

They are not okay.

What happened to them is not okay.

Heda Margolius Kovály, who appears in that film, I knew a bit personally before she died.

Some of you may have read her extraordinary memoir "Under a Cruel Star."

She was one of the great women of the 20th century.

And she was one of the strongest women of the 20th century.

She was one of the strongest women I have ever met anywhere in any country.

And you see in that film that losing her mother, that separation from her mother, the moment when they take her away, and she was 19 at the time she was already an adult, she has never gotten over it.

Now she's no longer alive, but there's no way to make that okay.

And knowing that and thinking about those children you know that they're never going to be okay again.

That what's being done to them is something so unforgivable that hopefully at some point they're reunited with the parents, but they will never be all right again.

You've done something to them that can never be compensated for.

- Yeah, actually I have a question about that, that I'm gonna ask you shortly.

Timothy, what do you think?

Does remembering make any difference?

Or we just are irredeemable?

- Absolutely remembering makes a difference.

That's one of the basic lessons of totalitarianism in in the part of the world, I know something about; that the people who want to lure you in the worst ways are going to start by trying to make you forget.

And we as Americans are forgetful people.

We're forgetful about the basic elements of our history, whether it's the Southern border, whether it's native Americans, whether it's African-American history.

You have to remember in order to be honest with yourself, honest with yourself about your country but also honest with yourself about what you and your fellow citizens are capable of doing because you've done it in the past.

But also if you remember...

I mean, it's important when we say, remember, not just to remember the things that you think you know but to actually learn about the Holocaust, right?

I mean, we do a lot of talking about remembering but sometimes we just mean let's repeat the things that we've already heard other people say.

Like, for example, how many people know that the first major act of violence in the Holocaust was a deportation of undocumented immigrants?

Basically nobody.

But in 1938, the first major violent action by the SS was a deportation of Jews who didn't have German passports.

That was shocking at the time.

And nobody remembers that.

If you know the history of the Holocaust, then you see more connections.

And then the final thing is, if you have a sense of the past, then you're not surprised, right?

I mean, in a way like your conversation with Efren and Marci is about how they reacted, right?

And you can react to an event only if it calls forth some set of associations for you.

And so even those associations, aren't a perfect echo.

They give you a place to start.

They give you a place to dig in and say, "Okay, I have an idea where this might be going, so I'm going to do something now and not just wait."

- Efren, you were witness to so much of this horror on the U.S. Southern border, and heard so many stories.

And Marci raised this issue about making things right that you never can.

I actually have a two-fold question for you.

First, there are still hundreds of children who have yet to be reunited with their parents.

First, what obligation do we have to them?

And then secondly, is there any way to make things right with more than 5,000 families that were forcibly separated?

we can never make a completely right but is there anything we can do to begin to try to make it up to these families?

- You know there are hundreds of children who are still separated from their parents as a result of this policy.

And it's possible that some of them may never be reunited.

And even those who are, the damage may be lifelong.

To your point also about the importance of remembering, I think, countries and societies that have gone through traumatic human rights violations, like I consider the family separation policy, have opted for truth and reconciliation commissions.

So that there's a discussion about what happened, how did it happen, so that it is a healing process and memorializes for future generations that this happened in 2018.

And that, let's be honest about what our government did in our name, how this was possible, who was responsible for it.

So that the very first step as Timothy was saying, is to be honest with ourselves about the facts and in this day and age, it's very difficult.

I have heard interviews of border patrol agents, who claim that they're not sure if there were any family separations, that they would need to look at the data to confirm that, which is outrageous to me.

But that is the risk that we run if we are not careful in first and foremost, documenting that this in fact happened.

And collecting testimonies from the families and something like a truth and reconciliation commission could be an avenue to do that.

And then on the practical side of things, I think for those families who are in the United States, ensuring that they receive asylum or immigration relief, so that they are not in fear of deportation ever again.

And those who were deported without their children that are allowed to come back to the United States and present their cases.

At the end of the day, our government tortured them.

That is the least we can do for them.

- Marci, I wonder if you have thoughts about that as well?

- I think Efren's in a much better position to answer that question.

I certainly think everything should be done to immediately reunite those children with their parents.

I think everything should be done to compensate them and try to mitigate the trauma that they've been through.

I certainly think they should be allowed to remain in the United States.

Let me maybe add on that topic that one of the things that...

I mean, one of the things that remembering can help us with is the fact that it's so difficult to grasp what's going on in the implications in real time.

I mean, this is Efren's field.

And he's saying when he first heard that this was happening, he couldn't believe it.

Even though we're a good ways into the Trump administration, we understand what the attitude is towards the border.

We understand the kind of grotesque, lack of concern for other people's lives and for human rights.

But still there's a moment of not being able to believe.

And one of the things we learned from the past is that by the time we've understood what's going on we've often normalized what's completely unimaginable.

And one of the lessons of the Holocaust is not just the technicalities of how you kill people or let's look at the fences in this camp and compare it to the fences in that camp.

The bigger lessons are things that the borders slip really, really quickly, in the sense of the boundaries of the possible, they slip really quickly.

The thing that was completely inconceivable and unimaginable can become the new normal a few months later.

And by the time people are aware that that's happened we've already somehow adjusted to it.

- Yeah, I have a final question for the three of you.

There are crises around the world with refugees seeking safe harbor.

And I can tell you when I see these stories, I think of my family fleeing Europe in the early 20th century and finding safe harbor here and sneaking in through Canada or through Argentina because they weren't welcome here.

And not a lot of countries have put out the welcome mat for refugees in this day and age and quite the opposite.

And I have to admit that I feel pretty hopeless about us humans, that we seem to repeat this sort of thing again and again, and and make the refugees the other.

And I wonder if you can briefly each tell me, what do you think.

Timothy?

- Well, I think the kinds of things we've been talking about in this conversation, actually, help with this.

I mean, this film that's been produced reminds us that refugees are our sons and daughters.

And refugees are people who've experienced something perhaps that we haven't experienced ourselves.

Another important underlying theme in this conversation has been that of human rights.

That's an idea which the United States unfortunately has ignored under the Trump administration, but it wasn't there at the time of the Second World War.

Now we have it.

Now we have the argument that people have a claim which goes beyond what any State is going to do to them or do for them.

And that's a kind of progress.

And I mean, as for hope, I think hope comes with labor.

I mean, as historians, Marci and I are concerned about the same thing a friend is concerned about.

We're concerned about documenting this.

Because one of the ways things go wrong is that big things happen in the history of your country and they're not remembered as big things in the history of your country.

So you have to grasp onto the moment.

You have to see something like this as an axial point in your country's history, speak gently and appropriately to the people who have survived it, make it a topic.

And, I think then it's not certain things will get better, but these are the kinds of things we can do that we know are the right thing in the moment and may make things better in the future.

- Thank you, Timothy.

Marci, what do you think?

- Well, I would say first that hope is an act of faith.

And because I have children and I brought them into this world, I have to have hope that we can make this world somehow better.

The question of refugees and statelessness for me as a historian, has been central to the experience of certainly of modernity.

There's a very famous passage in Arendt's, "Origins of Totalitarianism," where she talks about the refugees at the end of the First World War, when you first needed a passport to cross borders in Europe.

And she said, what we learned from that is that suddenly if you don't have a passport, if you're stateless, there is no such thing as human rights.

What we learned from that, with how thin our understanding of human rights was because it turns out that in the absence of a state to guarantee them, they mean nothing.

For me, that's a kind of mandate that the first thing we need to do today is insist on a kind of universality of human rights.

I've been making my students read Kant as well, go back to Kant to go back to the categorical imperative.

You always treat every human being as an end, you know never as a means.

For Kant, anything that can be replaced by something else if it's equivalent has a price, anything that is beyond all price and bears of have no equivalent has the dignity.

Human beings are distinguished because we do not have a price, we have dignity.

And from that comes the categorical imperative.

You always treat a human being as an ends, never as a means.

If we just kind of went back there and grounded ourselves a little bit, maybe there would be some hope.

- Yeah.

Efren, you've been dealing with this in real time, not as a historian but as somebody who trying to save lives and save families.

And you've listened to horror stories of refugees today.

And do you have hope?

- I immigrated to the United States when I was 13 years old.

And I feel that that allowed me in part to relate to these families in a special and a particular way.

I'm a father, I have two young children and that also helped me.

But I think if we're committed to the principles of human rights and to treating other human beings regardless of their nationality, their language, we need to continue battling efforts to divide us.

Instead of looking for ways to see strangers as different from us, I think it's essential to forget about those differences and look at the humanity of other people, regardless of whether they speak our same language or what country they were born in or how they came to the United States.

If we are going to be true to the principles that we say we are true to, I think it's critical.

And I am committed to doing that that is why I do the work that I do, but it's an uphill battle.

And it seems like every generation there comes a challenge to those principles and to those ideals.

Using proxies such as national security and securing the border, or they are coming to take our jobs or any excuse from people trying to prevent those who look different from us from coming into this country, but only by fighting against those efforts to separate us and divide us, can we hope to be true to the principles of human rights?

- Thank you so much, Efren and thank you for being with us today.

And thank you, Marci for commissioning the film and the opportunity to explore this history.

And thank you, Timothy as well, for joining us today.

If you'd like to learn more about the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust testimonies, which is based at Yale university, go to fortunoff.library.yale.edu.

We also produce, as I've mentioned, a podcast, featuring testimony from the archive.

You can find the podcast at thosewhowerethere.org.

That's thosewhowerethere.org.

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

This has been a production of CPTV's Cutline in the Community.

I'm Eric Marcus and thank you so much for joining us.

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