Hebrew Voices #69 – Nothing is Forgotten (Rebroadcast)

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, Nothing is Forgotten, Nehemia Gordon talks with author and historian Peter Golden who has interviewed world leaders from Ronald Reagan to Yitzchak Rabin. Golden explains the origin of the word "Holocaust" in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the critical role Soviet Jewry played in the founding of the State of Israel, and how blue jeans and rock music brought down the Soviet Union. Luci wrote: “‘Nothing is Forgotten’ was so good! We listened to it with the kids again last night! It provoked lots of excellent discussion. Thank you Nehemia!”

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #69 – Nothing is Forgotten

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkot.

Announcer: You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at nehemiaswall.com.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon and welcome to Hebrew Voices, today with author and historian Peter Golden, who’s going to speak to us about the Holocaust and the Cold War. Shalom, Peter.

Peter: Shalom.

Nehemia: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Peter: I’m a historian and a novelist. I write books. I’ve been writing books full-time for over 30 years. I’ve written a number of novels, I’ve written biography, I’ve written a history of the Cold War and Soviet Jewry. And I’ve interviewed a lot of presidents, President Ford, President Reagan, President Nixon, President Bush, 41. I’ve interviewed Gorbachev, Henry Kissinger. So I’ve written history and I write historical novels.

Nehemia: Wow. And you’re coming out with a new book.

Peter: The new book is coming out April 10th. It’s Nothing is Forgotten. It is about a young guy who grows up in New Jersey. His grandmother shows up in the late 1940s and lives with them. He learns Russian from her. She actually raises him because of various difficulties with his parents. And he goes on to become a disc jockey in an underground radio station, broadcasting rock and roll in his area. And as it turns out, this has been recorded by an organization - ultimately, it’s the CIA that did this kind of thing - and broadcast into the Soviet Union.

Nehemia: And what really got me interested in what you’re doing is that your novels are based on actual history.

Peter: Right. I think there are probably 12 pages of source notes.

Nehemia: [laughing] Okay. So give us some of the history behind this type of thing.

Peter: Well, the CIA got in their head, for good reason, that rock and roll in the Soviet Union would be helpful to undermining the Kremlin.

Nehemia: This happened in real life?

Peter: Yes. And so we financed that a whole bunch of different ways. We also broadcast other things - commentary, news, all kinds of things into the Soviet Union and they spent a lot of time jamming it. We built towers so they couldn’t do it. I mean, there was a whole information war going on. In the meantime, Soviet baby boomers were enthralled with Western pop culture - with the Beatles; they had a whole counterfeit operation going, they called it “rock on bones”. They used to re-record American music unto old X-rays, and so you’d get a thing that looked like a record, but it was somebody’s rib cage.

Nehemia: What? Wait, what are you talking about? [laughing]

Peter: Yeah, this went on in the Soviet Union.

Nehemia: There was a technology where you could record audio onto an X-ray?

Peter: Yeah, they set up these contraptions that could re-record music onto other medium, and the medium they used for a while were old X-rays, because they didn’t have vinyl. And this was known in the Soviet Union as “rock on bones”. And the KGB… I mean the government chased them. There was also a lot of smuggling of blue jeans into the Soviet Union. You could wind up in prison.

Nehemia: Blue jeans, you could go to prison for blue jeans?

Peter: Levis, yeah. The other thing, and people, of course, know about this, I suspect, who listen to your show, is that the novel Exodus could get you in a lot of trouble.

Nehemia: I’ve seen the movie. It’s one of my favorite movies. In fact, one of my favorite scenes in the entire movie is when he’s driving… I guess he’s just above the Jezreel Valley, looking down over the Valley - this is the Jewish character - he turns to his non-Jewish girlfriend and he says, “I’m a Jew and this is my country.” And it’s one of my favorite scenes of all movies of all time.

Peter: Well, that book was about that, and what the book was about, it was about the founding of the Jewish state. And it’s all rooted, of course, in the anti-Semitism of Europe and in the Holocaust. The Kremlin didn’t like it because it encouraged Jewish nationalism in particular, and nationalism in general, which they didn’t like. And so there were people hand-copying the book Exodus into Russian and passing it around.

Nehemia: Hand-copying it?

Peter: Yeah, and if you got caught with it, you’d go to prison.

Nehemia: Wow, wow.

Peter: Yeah, I mean they were very frightened of that book. And the Soviet Jewry movement is rooted in that book. The Soviet Jewry movement - and let me go back a little further – the Soviet Jewry movement is really rooted in the Second World War. After the Second World War, so many hundreds of thousands of Jews served in the Red Army, they thought things would change for them, much in the way that African Americans in the United States thought things would change for them after their service in World War II, but nothing did.

So my book Nothing is Forgotten focuses also a lot on the impact of the war on the Soviet Union and the losses that they incurred.

Nehemia: And so for those who don’t know, the Soviet Union was what President Reagan referred to as the Evil Empire. It was founded in 1917, and it officially fell… I believe the date was December 25, 1991, when the coup failed to replace Gorbachev. Really, it fell in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. But it was a system of communism which caused the death of tens of millions of people. Technically, it wasn’t communist, it was socialist and they called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - the USSR. That’s the song, Back in the USSR, that’s what they’re talking about. And for decades, the Jews wanted freedom from the Soviet Union.

And I remember when I was a young man, you’d go to a synagogue and there were these massive billboards and posters of a Jewish star wrapped in chains. And that represented the Jews who were refuseniks who were prisoners in the Soviet Union.

Peter: That was a very concise, very good history.

Nehemia: When the Soviet Union fell, 1.1 million Jews left the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and came to Israel, and it completely changed the country of Israel, because all of a sudden we had people with PhDs in nuclear physics who were a dime a dozen, you know? And before, it was… all these skills, it really created this economic boom in Israel that launched Israel into what soon may be a trillion-dollar economy.

Peter: And it’s interesting, because it’s American history as well. The same exact thing happened with African Americans here. The Jews were always accused of being cowards, of not fighting, of not being fully Russian, and they volunteered like crazy to fight in the war. I think half a million fought in the Red Army. I believe 200,000 died. A large number received, I think it was called the Order of Lenin, I believe, which is like their medal of honor, and their feeling was that this would change people’s minds about Jews.

So let me tell you the story that in many ways set everybody off. One of the earliest Soviet partisans the Nazis executed was a young girl, Masha Bruskina. There’s a very famous photograph of her being walked to her death by the Nazis, her – she was a teenager, a teenage boy, and an older man, and they were going to be hung. The Nazis are going to hang them at a yeast generator plant and leave their bodies there for everyone to see. And they took a picture of it, and that picture appeared all over the Soviet Union after the war.

Nehemia: And Masha Bruskina was Jewish.

Peter: Yes. And in the photograph, it identifies that man, it identifies the boy, and it says, “Girl unknown”. Now, everybody knew who she was, and everybody knew she was Jewish. And people were really angry about this. Also at the end of the war you can imagine, particularly for Jews, even if they were not religious Jews… you know, you go and you find an assimilated Jew in America, he probably still says Kaddish when it’s time to say Kaddish. And so there are lot of people who had to say Kaddish after that war, because they had big families too.

Nehemia: For those who don’t know, Kaddish is the prayer you say after someone dies, and I talk about that in my book, Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence about saying Kaddish for my father. So yeah.

Peter: So anyway, they had all these memorials they were putting up. So many people died, and they would meet at these memorials - these Jewish veterans - and they would say, “Nothing is going to change. Nothing’s going to change,” and they started to feel like the way many African Americans did, thinking they came home heroes, a lot of them died fighting, they came, they should have been fully accepted. They came back to the Jim Crow south, it was so bad in the south that MPs escorting Nazi POWs through the south, when it was time the eat, the Nazi POWs could walk into the restaurant and the black MPs had to walk around the back and get served out back at a window.

So the Jews had a similar experience. Then, what happens is this.

Nehemia: Wait, I just want to make this clear. So the experience that the African Americans had in the south in the United States after the war was very similar, you’re saying, to the experience the Jews in the Soviet Union had after the war.

Peter: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: Now, but to some degree, African Americans had options. They’d get on a bus and come north, which many of them did, to escape Jim Crow. But you couldn’t leave the Soviet Union. And then, something really interesting happens. In 1948, this little lady shows up from the new State of Israel. September ’48, this lady shows up in Moscow and she happens to be the new Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: Okay? It’s Golda Meir.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: She’s the ambassador. Now, she was from Ukraine originally. She shows up, and Red Square, which is in the center of Moscow becomes mobbed. And they are screaming at her in Yiddish, “My Golda, my Golda, my Golda.” They’re screaming. And Stalin sees this and he becomes absolutely livid and says, “I saved them. What are they screaming for her for?”

Don’t forget, Stalin had his fantasy world, too. And his fantasy world was that the Soviet Union was going to be like the United States. They’d have a common language, a common religion - which would be communism - and all these ethnic differences – I think they spoke over 100 languages in the Soviet Union – would be gone. And here you have this woman showing up and all of a sudden, after the war, all these people are doing is speaking Yiddish. She came on the first day of Rosh Hashana in 1948. It was right by the Choral Synagogue in Moscow. And they estimate 50,000 Jews were there, and I think she went to both Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services.

Nehemia: And this is in the Soviet Union, where religion is outlawed, essentially…

Peter: Right.

Nehemia: …and you’re not supposed to be going to any kind of service.

Peter: Right.

Nehemia: Wow. So you’re saying the arrival of the first Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union had a profound impact on the Jews in the Soviet Union.

Peter: Well, now they had a place… They couldn’t leave but now they at least had a place to go. They’d never had a place to go, and they couldn’t leave. Now, they had a place to go.

Nehemia: Oh - meaning Israel?

Peter: Yeah. And again, she stimulated nationalism. Now, in defense of the Soviets, Golda Meir, who hated the Russians, and certainly the Ukrainians… In fact, there’s a very funny line. They took her to see Fiddler on the Roof when she came to New York. And they asked her afterwards what she thought and she said, “I don’t remember so much singing and dancing.” [Nehemia laughing] And so she had a very realistic view.

But she says this in her memoire – and I was stunned when I read it – that had it not been for the Soviets, arming them, because they armed them. The United States would not arm the Israelis. They armed them through Czechoslovakia. Had they not armed them, she doubted that they would have survived the ’48 war. And what she says to explain it is, only the Soviets could have come close to understanding what it was the Jews had suffered in the war. They were the only ones that suffered on the same scale as the Jews. And it created this rare moment of empathy, and so there was a lot of support inside of Russia to help the Israelis.

Of course, you know, Stalin never did anything for fun, and it was clear that if Israel became a country, they would help kick the English out of the Middle East, which of course, Stalin was all in favor of. But I don’t think he bargained for the explosion of nationalism. And, you know, it’s not long after, in one of the sickest and funniest things ever said, it’s not long after that he starts persecuting all these Jews, Stalin, the Doctor’s Plot and the rest.

And when Khrushchev, who followed Stalin, was asked about it he said, “Well, he was sick then and he wasn’t as able to control his anti-Semitism.” And I thought, “This is the guy who wiped out of millions of people. He was feeling good that day, when he woke up, and he killed, I don’t know, 10 million people in the Ukraine, or 15, whatever he killed there.”

Nehemia: Well, I think he starved six million to death. We’re talking about Stalin.

Peter: The famine, yeah.

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: Whatever it was.

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: He murdered a lot of people. He probably out-distanced Hitler.

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: So in his overall performance. And of course, he was second only to Mao.

Nehemia: He had longer to do it, right?

Peter: He had longer to do it. And Mao, of course, probably beat them both.

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: But the point is that Khruschev’s explanation for his anti-Semitism, that he couldn’t control, I believe it was tied to this. He was really angry about this. He felt he wasn’t getting his due, and he was right to some degree. They did owe him, although the Soviet Union didn’t save the Jews. They ran away and the Soviet Union was there. They ran away from the Nazis and they ran into the Soviet Union, because that’s next to Poland. But to some degree, he was correct - he did help them, and he did accept her as an ambassador, but he lost his mind when he saw this. And in her memoire, Meir talks about the Russians coming up to her that were very frightened and wanted to leave.

Nehemia: Wow, in ’48?

Peter: Yes.

Nehemia: So Israel’s surrounded by all these Arab armies that are invading, and Jews are walking up to Golda Meir in Red Square saying, “We’re afraid of being here. We want to go to your country, that’s under invasion.” That’s incredible.

Peter: Well, here’s the fascinating thing. Ben Gurion always knew, he believed, that one of the keys to Israeli survival was to get the Russian Jews and bring them to Israel. Americans, even as late as when it was happening - there were many Americans who were like, “Just get them out. We are not going through another Holocaust, get them out. We don’t care, Israel or America, just get them out.”

The only other people that were as sophisticated about the Soviet Jews as the Israelis were the Arabs. And you will find editorials in Arab newspapers in the ‘50s, decrying Stalin’s anti-Semitism, saying, “He should stop it, because all it does is encourage Jews to come to Israel.”

Another editorial, this is again in the 1950s, from Lebanon, says that the Jews in the Soviet Union are more dangerous to the Arab states than every weapon the Israeli army possesses.

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: So the Arabs were well aware. One thing that’s never advertised is one of the sticking points of negotiating Camp David was that Sadat requested that Israel agree to allow no more Soviet Jews to enter.

Nehemia: Really?

Peter: Yes.

Nehemia: And that wasn’t agreed to, obviously?

Peter: No, but it was not advertised. Now, there are two explanations for it. Sadat went around trying to keep the Palestinian Liberation Organization off his back. So maybe Arafat said, “You’ve got to ask them to keep these people out.” So he could have done that as sort of pro forma. If it’s not pro forma, then it raises really interesting long-term questions about his commitment to peace, doesn’t it? Because the only way they were going to survive was by an infusion of people, and as you have pointed out, these people came with skills.

Nehemia: Right. Well, and of course, the Arab countries were kind enough to expel hundreds of thousands of Jews from North Africa and Iraq. And so there were two infusions of people into the early State of Israel, one were survivors of the Holocaust and the others were essentially Arab Jews, or Jewish Arabs, who were kicked out of the Arab countries. And so they came home to Israel.

Peter: That’s a great point. In fact, there’s a very funny interchange between the Russian Foreign Minister and the Egyptian Foreign Minister, who was complaining about the 100,000 Jews that are coming from the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Foreign Minister turns and says, “Don’t talk to me about 100. You kicked a million out. Where did you think they were going to go?”

Nehemia: Yeah, right. [laughing]

Peter: [laughing] I think something like 10 or 15 percent at one time of Israelis could trace their origins back to Morocco.

Nehemia: I mean, today the population of Israel, approximately 50 percent of the Jews in Israel are Sephardic extraction, which means they came from north Africa and Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Syria and Lebanon, and Yemen. But primarily, Iraq and North Africa - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt are about 50 percent of where the Jews come from in Israel.

Peter: It’s a great irony, isn’t it?

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, look, the way I see it is, you know, my ancestors and your ancestors for 2,000 years prayed, “Next year in Jerusalem.” And so this was something that was in the Jewish collective conciousness for many, many centuries. And I actually take exception when people try to portray Zionism as a modern phenomenon. Certainly, there was the ability to actually come to Israel. That’s something that’s available now that didn’t exist 200 years ago. So you could call that the modern expression of Zionism. But the desire to come to Israel - that’s been there all along.

Peter: But for your younger listeners I’ll say this. Listen carefully, because what I’m about to tell you...

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: ...has shaped much of your world without you knowing it. In June of 1941, Adolf Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union. It’s considered one of the dumbest things ever done, and it was, but he did it anyway. Unlike World War I, he wanted to see a war of anihilation. And so they went into the Soviet Union to destroy things. They were also interested in getting the Jews that were there.

Sixty million people are the estimates of the number of people that died in the Second World War. It’s the greatest catastrophy in human history. Twenty-six million of them, about, were citizens of the Soviet Union. So that gives you an idea...

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: ...of the numbers. They lost 26 million people. America, by comparison, lost about 425,000. The Soviets lost more in six weeks than the United States lost in three-and-a-half years. The devastation to the country was beyond imagining. And out of that comes this dedication to their borders and their aggressiveness, and we’re seeing some of that, of course, today with Putin. This goes a long way to explain the sensitivity Putin has had to the expanding of NATO and some other things that are going on. So I thought I would just sort of throw that in.

The Jews, meanwhile, were being... Hitler used the word “Bolshevic” and “Jew” as the same thing. A Bolshevic was a communist. He figured he could kill them, too. So they started to slaughter the Jews and some of the greatest massacres of human beings ever occurred… one was in Babi Yar in Ukraine, and the other was in Rostov in Russia. The one in Rostov is in my novel. They killed, I think, 27,000 people in a day, or 24 hours, across 2 days.

Nehemia: And we’re talking civilians. And so really, in a sense, historians talk about how there were two Holocausts. There’s the Holocaust that most people know about, which is the Holocaust of Auschwitz, where they had these death factories which were gas chambers and pretty systematic. But before that, when they invaded the Soviet Union, the Nazis sent in what were called Einsatzgruppen, the special units, and they would dig trenches and line people up in front of the trenches, and just mow them down with machine guns. And I believe the estimate is that they killed about one-and-a-half million Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Peter: Yeah, that’s the number. The reason they built the camps...

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: ...was to spare the German soldiers the horror of what they were doing, because many of them… Some of them actually suffered terribly and became non-functional from murdering women and children, and there were many that refused and they were euthanized by the Germans. They refused to do it.

Nehemia: You mean the German soldiers who refused to kill babies and women and innocent civilians were put to death by the Nazis, you’re telling me?

Peter: Yes. They killed about 40,000 of their own soldiers, yeah. It’s a lot, and to say nothing of the horror that many of them experienced and then stopped doing it later. I mean, they really step it up. As the war becomes more horrible, they become more indifferent to what they were doing. But initially, they were horrified by it, and the professional military was particularly horrified by it at first. They didn’t want anything to do with it. In fact, the generals tried to argue Hitler out of it before they even invaded. And Hitler said to them, “They’ll feel bad about it at first, but once you get them started, there’ll be no stopping it,” and he was right. That’s basically what happened.

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: But at first, they were horrified, as was Himmler. Himmler saw one of these executions and became sick. And it’s one of the reasons they started the camps.

Nehemia: And Himmler was the head of the SS, correct?

Peter: Head of the SS.

Nehemia: And you’re telling me, Heinrich Himmler saw one of these executions in the forest with the pits, and he was sickened by it?

Peter: Yes.

Nehemia: Wow. And how did the camps solve that problem?

Peter: Because it was industrial. I mean, when people think about the horror of the Holocaust, most people don’t think about the Einsatzgruppen. That, to them, looks like the kind of thing that happens in war. But when people think about the Holocaust, they think about the gas chambers. And the horror of it is… Don’t forget, I mean, the Nazis mostly killed people by starving them to death. It’s the cheapest way to kill people, and that’s how they did it.

Nehemia: Well, they worked them and starved them to death. It was a combination.

Peter: Either that or they surrounded the cities...

Nehemia: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Peter: ...and they just didn’t let food in, and people starved to death.

Nehemia: Right. Or in the camps, my understanding is they actually did a calculation of how many calories somebody needs to work, and they calculated that people would starve to death working within, you know, I don’t remember the exact period of time...

Peter: Yeah.

Nehemia: ...but something like six months they would starve to death.

Peter: Absolutely.

Nehemia: And they’d be replaced by new people.

Peter: Absolutely, these were done.

Nehemia: Wow. And you saved the Zyklon B gas. And from what I’ve read, Auschwitz became Auschwitz, that is, you know, just this industrial-scale killing of 20,000 people a day, full of trains, when they decided to liquidate the Jews - and liquidate means murder - the Jews of Hungary. Hungary had been a German ally, and when Hungary realized, “Okay, we’re losing the war,” and then Germany invaded Hungary and there were all of a sudden had these massive numbers of Jews in Hungary, which was a major Jewish center, and then they were getting 20,000 people a day in Auschwitz being gassed in that period.

Peter: Well, one of the things that when you go back and you study the Holocaust is you see that this is a gradual... For a long time, even early on when they were talking about the Nuremberg Laws, which were the laws that prohibited Jews from working and doing all kinds of things, they were talking about exempting Jewish war heroes from the First World War.

Nehemia: Really?

Peter: Yeah. This was a gradual process. In fact, Hitler, it would appear from all evidence, that Hitler’s original idea in practical terms - in Mein Kampf he talked about getting rid of all the Jews - but in practical terms, simply to get the Jews out of Germany. But this is an idea that grows.

So to go back to where we were, they took something that people were very proud of, which was the means of mass production, which was a relatively new invention in the 1930s and ‘40s, and they applied it to murder. And when you go to a camp and you see how these are set up, it’s hard to imagine that a human being thought about it. It’s incredibly efficient, and knowing that the person was sitting at a drafting table doing this to murder people, that’s the part that’s so horrifying. And so I think that people are often horrified by the technology of the Holocaust as much as by the actual murder. Of course, the scale. But since we have younger audiences, let’s go back because my book deals…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: …with how people became aware of the Holocaust. Today, particularly for your younger audience, everyone knows about the Holocaust. There’s a museum, it’s read about in school. From about 1945 until about 1961 there was very little discussion of it. Oh, there was a book by Anne Frank, and a movie, but Anne Frank isn’t really in the Holocaust, so to speak. We don’t see Anne Frank get captured. We don’t see Anne Frank at a camp. We see her hiding. The horror of it is that, of course, the people reading her diary know what happens, but we don’t really get to see much of that. People weren’t too interested.

And then, a book in 1960 is published called The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It’s an enormous best-seller, and the camps are hardly mentioned. It’s 1,200 pages long.

Nehemia: What?

Peter: Yeah. And there are 30 pages that mention the camps. Now, Ben Gurion is sitting in Jerusalem. Now, Ben Gurion, I don’t know this for a fact, this is my educated guess. Ben Gurion was an enormous reader, and he read in many, many languages. When they knew for some time where Eichmann was, it occurred to Ben Gurion that people needed to hear these stories. The trial of Eichmann was not about Eichmann, and that doesn’t happen until 1961.

Nehemia: Tell our younger listeners who Adolf Eichmann was.

Peter: Adolf Eichmann was the Chief Operating Officer of the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann was the guy who made the trains run, who made sure everybody got to the camps, who made sure the camps had what they needed. He oversaw the slaughter of millions of Jews.

Nehemia: Can I give an analogy here, just so people understand? So imagine we’ve got a municipality and they decide, “We’re going to provide drinking water to the people.” Okay, great. Who’s the chief engineer who goes out and decides where the pipes go, and when the water is turned on, and when it’s turned off? And that was Eichmann.

Peter: Exactly right.

Nehemia: He was the bureaucrat who made it happen.

Peter: Exactly right. And in fact, that would become his argument at trial. But they get it in their head, the Israelis, they’re going to try him. Now, he’s hiding in Argentina. As soon as they grab him, the world erupts. How dare the Israelis try him? One journal accused them of getting their pound of flesh, which is a very unflattering…

Nehemia: Ooh.

Peter: …description of Jews from Shakespeare.

Nehemia: An anti-Semitic slur from Shakespeare.

Peter: Right.

Nehemia: So they kidnap Eichmann, they bring him to Jerusalem. And you’re saying there are people around the world saying they don’t have the right to do this?

Peter: Right. Now, what’s very interesting is this. They’re all complaining about the trial. The trial was the least important part for the Israelis. They could have simply shot him, and they do shoot one war criminal, and I’ll tell you about that, because that story is in my book. But the Mossad could have simply killed him and left him in Argentina, it would have been a lot easier than what they did, which was sit in his home in Buenos Aires, on Garibaldi Street, I don’t know, for five days or something like that, or longer. And then they sort of snuck him out on a diplomatic plane, and all the while, the Buenos Aires Police knew exactly what they were doing, because they had been watching Eichmann for some time. So they saw the whole thing happen.

What Ben Gurion wanted was, he wanted the survivors to testify. This is the first internationally televised trial in history. They videotaped the testimony of the survivors and every evening at the end of the trial, they flew those video tapes all over the world…

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: …to be played on television.

Nehemia: So it was in 1961 this Eichmann trial, in Jerusalem. I believe they built Binyanei HaUma, the International Convention Center, which is still there in Jerusalem, for the purpose of this trial.

Peter: I think they were working on it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: They didn’t know if they would finish it in time. They said, “Let’s put him there,” but it wasn’t done.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: They were working on it. That was a big part of… what they hadn’t counted on was the interest, the journalists from all over the world descended on the trial.

Now, this is where it gets pretty interesting. People start to testify. Now, there is an American journalist there by the name of Paul Jacobs.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: He keeps listening to the Israeli prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who keeps referring to the Holocaust as Shoah. It’s a Hebrew word, I think it’s a Biblical term. It probably appears a dozen times in the Bible.

Nehemia: Yeah, so shoah in the Tanakh is a…

Peter: Ruin. It means like “ruin”.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: It’s great ruin, it’s bad. Now, in the 1930s there were already religious Jews in Israel referring to what was going on in Europe as a shoah. So Paul Jacobs needs a word, so he comes up with the word “Holocaust” and he capitalizes the H. This is where the word “Holocaust” with a capital H comes from.

Nehemia: Really?

Peter: He turned Holocaust into a proper noun. So when you hear people saying, “Jewish Holocaust”, there is no non-Jewish Holocaust. There’s only Holocaust, not that Hitler didn’t murder lots of other people for lots of other reasons, and murdered lots of people in gas chambers and executed them and did all kinds of things to them. This is not victim competition. This is history. Holocaust refers to the six million Jews that were murdered as a result of the German plan which was known as “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. That’s what the Holocaust is. That’s the answer to that question, and that’s what the Germans referred to this as. When you hear “Final Solution”, that’s only part of the term in German.

Nehemia: Hey, I’m a Bible scholar, that’s my main thing. Let me bring you some verses with the word shoah that I’ve now looked up.

Peter: Okay.

Nehemia: Isaiah chapter 10 verse 3, it says, “Uma ta’asu le’yom pekudah u’leshoah mimerchak tavoh?” “What will you do on the day of judgment when the calamity comes from afar.” And that’s how shoah is translated, “calamity”. And apparently, the literal meaning is something like a storm, a “devastating storm”. You think of like a hurricane.

Peter: What’s the shoresh for the word? I’ve never known the shoresh of the word.

Nehemia: So according to the lexicons it’s Shin-Aleph-Hey, which refers to a storm. And the main verse where we get that is, for example, Zephaniah 1:5, “Yom shoah u’meshoah, a day of shoah” and another word that really means shoah, too. “A day of darkness..”

Peter: Right, gloom.

Nehemia: “A day of doom,” right. And a day of cloud and dark mist, so it’s some kind of… well they didn’t have hurricanes in Israel, right? But think of some devastating storm that just destroys everything in its path. That’s the literal meaning of shoah in biblical Hebrew.

And by the way, the day that we celebrate every year, every Yom HaShoah, which is Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, is actually… You know, they debated when to establish Yom HaShoah. Some people said it should be on the 9th of Av, the days of the destruction of both Temples. And finally they decided it would be the day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began.

Peter: That would be a good day.

Nehemia: Yeah. And so it’s on the Hebrew date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So let’s go back to 1961, Adolf Eichmann. Before that, no one’s talking about the Holocaust. And you know, it’s really interesting. I did an interview with Deputy Minister Michael Oren, who’s a member of the Government of Israel, and he’s actually the foremost living historian to have written on modern Israel.

Peter: Right.

Nehemia: And one of the things he’s pointed out, he said this in the interview, he said that people were embarrassed. Jews were embarrassed to talk about the Holocaust, really before the Six-Day War. It would be like talking about some horrible thing that happened to you. It wouldn’t be something… You know, we live today in 2018, we have this culture of the victim Olympics, right? The more of a victim you are, the more nobility you have, in some sense, a bizarre concept, historically. Whereas it was humiliating for people to talk about the Holocaust.

Peter: It was unpleasant, and this is where this gets, in my mind, really interesting.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: Because the question arises - why didn’t Jews talk about this? Well, people didn’t... I’ve often wondered, you didn’t hear much talk about breast cancer, either. It didn’t mean women didn’t get breast cancer. You know, you didn’t hear talk about cancer at all, people didn’t say the word. So there are a lot of things. You certainly didn’t hear any talk about any type of sexuality. I mean, so people were a lot more restrained.

Nehemia: It just wasn’t something people talked about.

Peter: Yeah, I think people didn’t talk about unpleasant things.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: You know, as a baby boomer, you were told, “Don’t talk about politics, sex, religion or money. You don’t talk about those things in public.” But this is where it gets, to me, more interesting. David Susskind was a producer of television shows, and for your younger viewers, these things you’re watching on Netflix, the great series that have been produced for HBO and Netflix, this sort of goes back to the early days of television, when they produced really almost first-rate theatre for television. And it was wonderful stuff, and some of the best writers of all time worked in that medium.

David Susskind was a producer. He had a show about a Holocaust survivor he wanted to do. And in those days, the advertisers had a lot to say about what was put on TV, and they’d often look at the scripts. And if you’ve ever watched Mad Men you see some of that going on. That’s how TV was produced. It was often produced in conjunction with people who were buying time on the networks.

His Holocaust survivor, understandably, was Jewish. He was told by the network that he had to make him something else.

Nehemia: What?

Peter: He had to make him a minister, something else. He couldn’t be a Jew.

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: Now, the question is, why?

Nehemia: What year are we talking about?

Peter: Late ‘50s.

Nehemia: Late ‘50s, okay. So this was before the Eichmann trial?

Peter: Yeah, probably before. The point is that Jews had their own feelings about the Holocaust across a whole spectrum of reasons, whether they identified with the Jews or they actually lost family. And it was making non-Jews increasingly uncomfortable, and that’s why I suspect they didn’t want Jews there. Now, the people it made, of course, most uncomfortable, were Germans. And let me tell you a story that comes right out of my book, and that was very personal to me.

When I research a book - and this book takes place in Russia, this book in France, in Paris, in Nice, and Amsterdam, there’s a whole part of the book that takes place in Amsterdam, and part of the book, of course, takes place in Munich. Berlin is the city they always talk about when they talk about the Cold War, but there was an awful lot of action in Munich. And Munich, of course, was where Dachau is, it’s located right outside of Munich, and it’s also where the Nazi party was born. And somehow, the United States bombed Munich 70 times during the war and didn’t manage to hit one of those places, so they’re all still there.

So in the process, I interviewed one of these people that worked at an American radio station, it actually was a CIA-funded radio station - it was called Radio Liberty - that broadcast into the Soviet Union. And he told me the following story. He was there in the early ‘60s, and at the time, they were erecting the memorial at Dachau. And, I think it was a councilman from Dachau, the town of Dachau, was incensed by the idea of a memorial. And in explaining this to this guy, he said, “If you build a memorial at Dachau, when anyone ever hears the word ‘Dachau’ he’ll never think of anything but a camp.” And he said that, and I started in this, I guess, bizarre way, to laugh.

I said, “You mean to tell me that this guy though if they put a brewery there, people would start thinking of it as a beer?” and he said, “Yeah. That was the impression that he gave.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: In some way, that freed me enormously, because what it told me was the people living there at the time didn’t understand the scope of what had happened, and what this was going to mean 20 years after the war. I mean, today in public life, if you call someone a “Nazi”, he’d better be a Nazi. I mean, it is such a term of disparagement…

Nehemia: Nazi means anybody you don’t agree with, politically, today.

Peter: Right, but if you use it too much, you’re going to get yourself in trouble. It’s a term of such disparagement.

Nehemia: Really, I think it’s tragic. It’s been so over-used, so now there’s large swathes of the population who hear “Nazi” and they ignore it, because everybody’s a Nazi, anybody you don’t agree with. And then we’ve got real Nazis out there that are slipping under the radar because the term has been… it’s proverbially the boy who cried wolf.

Peter: I think you’re exactly right. Okay, so now they build the memorial in Dachau.

Nehemia: What decade are we talking about, the memorial in Dachau?

Peter: 1960s. This goes on for a very long time…

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: …because they keep putting more stuff up. There’s a Russian POW memorial. The Germans took Russian POWs, put them in Dachau and put them on the target range and used them for target practice.

Nehemia: Wait, so you’re telling me there was a Russian POW memorial, but there wasn’t one for the Jews killed at Dachau?

Peter: They were working on them all simultaneously.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: There were a number of people that were working on it. They murdered a lot of people at Dachau, not just Jews. And so the whole idea of turning the camp into a memorial was an anathema to these people who lived there. And it’s a very bizarre place, because when you go there - I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but if you go…

Nehemia: I’ve been to Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka. I haven’t been to any of the camps…

Peter: Dachau is like in a suburban neighborhood. And in the novel, I have the main character thinking just what I thought. I mean, your boss is coming for dinner and you give him directions and you tell him, “Turn right at the crematoria. Go right past the gate, go to the gas chamber…”

Nehemia: Wait, is that it? It was part…?

Peter: Well, yes. It was right part of the town. The people that denied, it was sitting right outside of the town. These people denying that they knew anything about it was absurd. It was absurd, and they had railroad cars running these prisoners in all the time, the inmates. But it gets worse.

Now, for your younger viewers, at the end of the war, Germany was divided into the Western allies, the United States, Britain and France. They were in charge of West Germany. They were given West Germany, and the Soviet Union held on to East Germany. And when it came to prosecuting Nazi war criminals, the East Germans were a lot of more aggressive about it than the West Germans, because, you know, they were being run in a large degree by the Soviets, and the Soviets wanted to try these people, understandably. West Germans had them working in their government. [laughing] Something like 80 percent of the judiciary had been in the Nazi Party in 1965.

Nehemia: What are you talking about? The United States had them working in the government.

Peter: Right, right.

Nehemia: We had… Wernher Von Braun is a hero of Huntsville, Alabama, where he built the rocket that went to the moon. He’s almost the founder of the town, in a sense, or of the technology in the town. So it wasn’t just the West…

Peter: Absolutely.

Nehemia: It’s interesting what you’re saying. So the US is trying to convince these people to be allies. The Soviet Union doesn’t have to convince anybody. They have an army sitting there with a totalitarian communist regime. “If you don’t like it, we’ll just kill you.”

Peter: Well, that’s the basic outline. So let me tell you the fine points, because the fine points are what my novel’s about.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: In 1965 the West German government gets it into its head that they are going to exempt all West German citizens from charges of war crimes committed in-between 1933 and 1945.

Nehemia: Now, say that again, because I can’t believe what I just heard.

Peter: In 1965, there was a movement in the Bundestag, which was the West German Congress…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Peter: …to pass a law that would exempt all West German citizens from charges of war crimes committed between 1933 and 1945. And for your younger audiences, those are the years that Hitler was in power.

Nehemia: And did that law pass?

Peter: Well, they thought it was going to, and let me tell you what the Israelis did.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: And I use this event in my novel. They tracked down the fellow by the name of… I never can pronounce it right. His name was Cukurs, Herbert Cukurs, okay? And he was responsible for the death of an enormous number of people. He was Latvian, and he oversaw the murder of an enormous number of people. He was involved in the mass murder of Latvian Jews. And he was known as the “Hangman of Riga”. He was a successful businessman. First, he went to Germany as the war ended, and then he went to Brazil after the war, and he became a business guy. And the Israelis found him, and they lured him to a meeting and they killed him. This is the Mossad. It’s the only war criminal we know of the Mossad assassinating.

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: It was in Uruguay. They killed him, they put him in a trunk with a note. And the note basically said something the effect that, “There are those of us who still believe in justice and who won’t forget, and we’ll continue to pursue justice.”

Now, for many years, or for a while, everyone thought this was some weird prank or something. But what the Israelis were basically saying was the following. “If you do this, we’re going to track these guys down and kill them.” So do you want the Mossad running around your country, or do you want to try these people? And that was basically their threat, and that’s why they did it. And that law ultimately failed, but I think it only lost two-to-one. It wasn’t like it was overwhelmingly in favor.

I should say in fairness to the United States, there was a real split in the United States about how rehabilitated the West Germans should be. The conservatives, of course, favored it, but there were a lot of people who didn’t. And my novel, in Nothing is Forgotten, we get a look at both views from American CIA operatives. One of them off-book is running an operation to track someone down, because he wants to do something that’s right.

And you mentioned Werner Von Braun. By all rights, Von Braun should have been hung. He was an SS Colonel. He used slave labor to build those rockets he built for the Germans…

Nehemia: Yeah, and it’s the Peenemünde concentration camp. We know the name of the place.

Peter: Right.

Nehemia: Like, we have all this information. It’s not like speculating, we know exactly what his crimes were.

Peter: And we know what the rockets were built for. They were built to kill civilians.

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: So by all rights, he should have been hung. But there was a race to find him. Stalin was furious when he found out the Americans got there first. It wasn’t just him, he had like 300 co-workers that we grabbed, too.

Nehemia: Yeah. All right, let’s go back to 1961. Israel’s sending information around the world, sending videos, we call “videos” around the world, of the Eichmann trial. How does that cause people to start talking about the Holocaust?

Peter: Well, it’s on TV.

Nehemia: Okay.

Peter: It’s on TV. And if you talk to people of a certain age…

Nehemia: Wow, that’s amazing.

Peter: …me included, my brother-in-law, he remembered it in quite detail, sitting with his parents every night. It became almost a religious ritual.

Nehemia: So the younger people won’t know what I’m talking about, but for those people my age and older, a similar - not to compare the two, right? We say, “lehavdil elef alfei havdalot,” not to compare the two – but a similar thing happened, I think, in American society with crime dramas following the OJ Simpson trial. All of a sudden, after the OJ Simpson trial, you have this explosion of people talking about forensics. In the ‘80s you said the word forensics, I don’t know if they’d know what it was. Today, everybody knows, you know, CSI and Law and Order, and this came about, I think, as a result, to a large extent, of people watching day in and day out, the OJ Simpson trial and becoming fascinated by it. And you’re saying to an extent, a similar thing happened with the Holocaust?

Peter: Yeah. I think also – and you’re making really, a very interesting historical point. And again, for your younger listeners - you have to remember, there were very little ways to spread information. You get more information on your phone before you go to work than most people, when I was growing up, got all day…

Nehemia: Yeah. [laughing]

Peter: … reading two newspapers and watching the news. I mean, people today - you turn on the news, and if something terrible is happening, you watch it. First of all, if something terrible happened at 8:00 o’clock in the morning, you didn’t even get to read about it in the newspaper, because the morning newspaper was printed the night before. The first inkling you had on it was at 4:00 o’clock when the afternoon newspaper came. And then you would get a little more about it at 6:00 o’clock, when the national news came on, which at first was only about 20 minutes long, or 15 minutes long.

The success of the Civil Rights movement in part, is due to the fact, for two reasons. One, they invented a TV camera that was a lot lighter and people could carry it around, and two, the news expanded from 15 minutes to a half-hour. So it’s very hard for young people, I mean, to understand how hard it was to get information. But this was a revelation to people, to watch an international trial.

Now, at the trial – and maybe some of your listeners have heard this – this is where Hannah Arendt comes up with the idea of the banality of the evil, and she writes about this and causes a stir. In fact, I would recommend to your younger viewers who go on Amazon and watch movies, that there’s a wonderful movie about it, that was made about this issue. Basically, her position was, he was just this little runt of a guy, Eichmann, who wasn’t particularly evil, and he just got this assignment and just sort pushed the buttons, and made the trains run. He could have been delivering wheat. Instead, he was delivering human beings to gas chambers. That was her basic view of Eichmann.

It’s a wonderful concept but it is totally misapplied to Eichmann, who was among the most radical anti-Semites among the Nazis. And even after the war was lost…

Nehemia: Really?

Peter: …and they wanted to try and make a deal with America, which meant they wanted to stop the killing, because they knew people were going to be really angry about it, he wouldn’t stop. So it was totally misapplied to Eichmann, but it’s a very interesting observation about human beings.

Nehemia: Now, I want to bring up something here. So it’s interesting what you’re doing. You know, you talk about how in the past, we didn’t have ways of conveying information, and now we have so much information on our phone. Yet novels and fiction are still such a powerful way of conveying information. So I’m giving this talk at McNeese University in Louisiana about the diaries of Auschwitz, about the Scrolls of Auschwitz. These things were written by people at Auschwitz, and I’ve read articles and journals and books.

And then, last night I sit down and I watch this movie I’d never even heard of, called Son of Saul, about the Sonderkommando. And that conveyed in such a powerful way, I can’t even explain it, it’s so powerful watching a two-hour movie convey things I’d read about. And then when I saw them in the movie, I’m like, “Wow, they actually just recreated a photograph that survived, that was smuggled out by the Sonderkommando,” you know. So they’re telling it in a fiction way, and I want to bring this quote from Elie Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel, of course, is the great writer who survived the Holocaust. If you haven’t read this, people, the book, Night by Elie Wiesel, you need to go read that book.

Peter: You know how long it took him to get that published in the United States? Just to go back to what we were talking about earlier. It took him years. It was already published in France. They wouldn’t publish it here.

Nehemia: Wow. Well, I mean, it is one of the great novels of Western civilization, is Night. So here’s the story about he meets his Rebbe, this Chassidic Rabbi of a child. Maybe you know this story, it’s told in the… actually, I guess he tells it, but it’s quoted in a book called The Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust by Gary Weissman. And he’s quoting this story Elie Wiesel tells.

“What are you writing?” the Rebbe asks. I’ll do it with the Yiddish accent, I have to. “Stories,” I said. He wanted to know, “What kind of stories, true stories about people you knew?” “Yes, about people I might have known.” “About things that happened?” “Yes, about things that happened or could have happened.” “But they did not?” “No, not all of them. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end.”

“The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up…” this is Elie Wiesel talking. “The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger, ‘Means you’re writing lies.’ I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet I had to justify myself. ‘Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true. Others are, although they never occurred.’” It’s actually one of my favorite quotes, that last part.

And then, in a different version of the story Wiesel writes, “In literature, certain things are true, though they didn’t happen, while others are not, even if they did.” And there’s something really profound about that. You know, Dr. Jordan Peterson has these incredible lectures he gives, and he calls it a mythic truth. Now, he applies it in places I don’t know that I would agree with him on, but there are things that could be true. We could split hairs about that it happened at 5:00 PM or 7:00 PM, it doesn’t matter. There’s this truth in the story, in the events. And what I’m saying is, a book like Night, based on a true story, did those exact things happen at those exact moments? Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But there are profound truths that could be conveyed through a novel. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Peter: Yeah, I think so. You know, there are many people who don’t hold that the Bible is literal truth, right? And those stories hold profound…

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: I mean, profound truths whether one accepts them as divine, or divinely inspired, or whatever. So I think that’s part of it. But more to the point…

Nehemia: Wait, let me… I’ve just got to jump in on the Bible, because, you know, I do accept the Bible as truth. But, for example, within the Jewish tradition, there are… and I guess we just used truth in two different ways, right? I accept them as historical fact, but also true.

But within the Jewish tradition there are rabbis who said famously about the Book of Job, “Mashal haya, lo haya, ve lo nivra.” “It was a parable. It never happened, and never was created,” meaning no such thing ever happened on planet earth, that the entire thing from the beginning to end of the Book of Job was a parable. Now, whether you agree with it or not, that’s not the point. Even within the Jewish tradition, I think it was Maimonides who said that. Within ancient Jewish traditions there were people who said, “Yeah, this didn’t literally happen, but it’s a parable that conveys a deep and profound truth about the Book of Job.” And whether you believe it happened or not, the truth there is still as important.

Peter: Well, I think that people who consider themselves religious who feel often that way about the Bible… I mean, I don’t care. I mean, the stories are so powerful and say so much, it’s not even worth arguing about. It’s always struck me that way. I mean, but I think in the terms of historical fiction…

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: …which is what you were talking about right now. It’s very hard to understand things from a distance. But if you read a character that you feel deeply about, and there are two of them in my book, I hope people do. One is Yuli, who’s a Russian war orphan and an intelligence officer, and the other is Misha, who’s the disc jockey. You begin to put yourself in their place, and you begin to identify with them. And then you go through these experiences with them. So it’s as if, in great fiction, you have undergone an experience that you would not have gotten had you just read straight history.

That’s why I read so much history to do these things, because I want people to get both. But I know just to recite the facts and figures is inadequate. It’s just inadequate. I was talking before about it when I said 80 percent of the men born in the Soviet Union in 1923 were dead by the end of the war. That means, they were 17 and 18-years old when the Germans invaded Russia. Eighty percent. I don’t how else to say that. How else do you say that? You can’t. How else do you describe it? You can’t. You have to make it, and make it whole, so people can see it and feel it, because it’s beyond imagining.

Stalin is the one who said, “One death’s a tragedy. A million is a statistic.” It’s very, very hard. The scope of the Holocaust is why we’re still talking about it. There are lots of people who wanted to kill Jews before, and there were lots of people who were very good at it. They didn’t have the technology available to them, but they were certainly committed to doing it. Khmelnytsky is one who comes to mind. I mean, they slaughtered Jews whenever they could.

Nehemia: And for those who don’t know the historical reference in, I believe it was 1648, Bogdan Khmelnytsky wiped out one-third of the Jews of Europe in what actually the Ukrainians to this day consider one of the founding events of…

Peter: Right, he’s the hero.

Nehemia: …of their national identity. He’s actually in their national anthem, you know, the Hitler of the 17th century.

Peter: Well, let me tell you a very funny story I heard. I couldn’t get it into the book, but it’s a very funny story. This young Ukrainian woman was being interviewed, and the interviewer asked her, did she believe that Jews took the blood of Ukrainian children to make their matzahs for Passover? For your audience, that was a very common charge made against Jews in Ukraine - that they murdered young Christian children and used the blood to make matzah. This young woman replied the following. “Of course, they don’t do that anymore. They don’t have to do that anymore. They have blood banks now.”

Nehemia: [laughing] Oh, my God. Wait, and this is recently?

Peter: In the 21st century, yeah.

Nehemia: This is in the 21st century.

Peter: So what I wanted to show, and this is why I think a younger audience would be interested, Misha doesn’t know anything about the Holocaust. When this whole thing starts, he’s 21 years old.

Nehemia: This is the character in your book, Misha?

Peter: Yeah, well his name is Michael. His grandmother calls him Misha. He’s fluent in Russian, so she calls him Misha or Mishka which is his Russian name. And he knows nothing about this. All he cares about is rock and roll. And the only time he ever asked her anything at all, she just told him, “Don’t ask,” so he didn’t ask. He knows nothing about her.

And he winds up in the Soviet Union and in France and in Germany, and he discovers this whole world he never knew about, this whole secret life that his grandmother had. And that is the sense of discovery. So I’m trying to give the reader two things. One, to discover the Holocaust, how it would have looked were you to discover it. And two, to discover what went on in the Soviet Union, because that’s how you really can appreciate the level of devastation.

It’s hard to imagine. I mean, if people in this country understandably were so upset by what the towers looked like after 9/11, imagine a whole country looking like that. And the Soviet Union was about 15 percent of the world’s surface.

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: Imagine a whole country looking like those two towers, because that’s what the Soviet Union mostly looked like. General Eisenhower was in charge of the American forces before he became President, and he went to Moscow and met the general who was in charge of the Russian forces, his name was Zhukov, Marshall Zhukov. And he was a very tough guy, [laughing] and when Eisenhower got there, Zhukov was beside himself.

First of all, Eisenhower says, “All I saw was rubble.” And then Zhukov comes, and they were very friendly. And Zhukov says to him, “We’re never even going to know how many people died.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: These were not a couple of sentimental guys.

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: You know? These were some very tough men…

Nehemia: Right, wow.

Peter: …who had been through an awful lot. And they were overwhelmed with it, Eisenhower was overwhelmed with the camps.

An interesting aside, my last novel dealt a little bit with this. But when Eisenhower walked into the camp, it was Ohrdruf, I don’t if I’m pronouncing it correctly. But he saw it. The first thing he did was turn around and say, “Get the film guys.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: They were like, “What?” He said, “Get me the film guys.” He goes, “In six months, nobody’s going to believe this happened.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: You hear about Holocaust deniers. I have spent my life researching, reading, interviewing, and I will tell you, I’ve seen the places where this stuff happened. And still, there’s something in me – and I think in most people - that resists what human beings are capable of. And again, this goes a lot to your younger people knowing about the Holocaust. It’s important to know what human beings are capable of on both sides of the question.

At the end of the war, the Germans find that it was a bunch of crazy people that did this, that killed all these Jews, and they were Einsatzgruppen, and well, there were 5,000 of those guys, but they didn’t kill all these people. They had a lot of help from the army. And it was people in Germany, the next generation, that started asking these questions, like, “What did you do in the war, daddy?” questions. And there was a museum exhibit in which they showed all the documentary evidence that the army had participated full out in the murder of these innocent people. And it created quite a stir in Germany, and it was a museum exhibit that traveled around the country. And they were really very forthright about it, and now, I believe in the curriculum in German schools, they study the Holocaust for six weeks, eight weeks, in junior high school.

When I was at Dachau there were school groups being taken all the way through. We were probably there in the spring, it was towards the end of the school year, and they were being on class trips. And they took them to the shooting trench, they took them to the trains, they took them to the crematoria, these kids. And they’re not that old. These kids were like 13, 14 years old, being shown this stuff. So they have, in many ways, faced up to their past.

Nehemia: I’ve met young Germans, and I was very impressed with what they know about the Holocaust and their history and part in the Holocaust, and I wish Americans knew as much about American history… [laughing]

Peter: I was just going to say that. I was just going to say what you just said to me, yeah.

Nehemia: Steal the line, take it.

Peter: No, I just wish that Americans knew nearly as much about our history and about the history of the Holocaust as the German kids do. I mean, six weeks… if you remember being that young in junior high school, six to eight weeks, that’s a lot of time in junior high school. That’s a lot of time to study. And then they go and they don’t just study, then they go and they look. I mean, Dachau was overwhelming. I’m a grown guy, and I knew what I was going to see when I got there. I don’t know how I would have felt if I was 14 years old.

Nehemia: Right.

Peter: And someone told me that my grandfather - it would have been my grandfather’s generation - put people in these ovens, put people in these gas chambers, and murdered people here and just shot them, women and children, because that’s what they were told, and then piled the bodies up, because that’s what you see when you’re there. They have all the photography, much of it taken by the American army. They have those photographs all reproduced, they’re all there.

Nehemia: Yeah. The term I’ve heard for years is, they would pile the bodies up like cord wood, and I never really knew what that meant.

Peter: Yeah, until you see it.

Nehemia: Well, actually a couple of weeks ago, I was helping a friend out. He had all these trees in Texas that were destroyed by… all these mesquite trees…

Peter: Right.

Nehemia: …were destroyed by a freeze, by ice. And I came out and I spent two days cutting up trees, and we were literally piling up the wood. And I’m like, “Wow, okay. So this is what it means.” It was eerie. So here I am, a Jew in the 21st century in Texas, and I can’t help but think about the Holocaust when I’m piling up and chopping wood.

Peter: So here’s a scene directly from Nothing is Forgotten. So imagine yourself into this: You’ve been fighting probably since June of 1944. It is now May of 1945. You have fought all through France. You have fought down into Germany, you’re in the southern part of Germany, in Bavaria. You come upon this place where you see these iron gates. You walk through these iron gates and all along the place are that cord wood you’re talking about. And people in striped pajama uniforms, lying down dead, or stuffed into barracks. And it’s freezing cold in May, it was freezing cold that day when the Americans walked into Dachau.

And then, there are these well-fed German soldiers in uniform, walking toward you, saying, “I surrender.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: Let me tell you what they did.

Nehemia: What did they do?

Peter: They lined up a number of them against the wall and shot them.

Nehemia: And that happened, that actually happened?

Peter: Absolutely, it happened. The American soldiers… and you will see, if you ever see that Band of Brothers series…

Nehemia: I’ve seen that.

Peter: …you will see.

Nehemia: It’s very moving.

Peter: Yeah. That scene in Band of Brothers was taken, was obviously story-boarded, from photographs. That scene of that soldier sitting and holding his head by the pits, and all the rest, those were photographs.

Nehemia: Right. Guys, go onto Netflix and watch, it’s called Band of Brothers. And I believe the episode was called, Why We Fight.

Peter: Right. And this is the Americans discovering these camps. And you can imagine the rage that these American soldiers felt when they walked in. This was not unusual. I’d interviewed American soldiers who told me stories about shooting Germans. And the outrage… We’re talking about how it’s unbelievable, and we know it’s not. We’ve seen all the movies, you’ve read the books, we’ve seen the pictures. Imagine, you don’t know anything about this, and you walk into a camp and you have a gun. You have a rifle, you have a submachine gun. And the guys who did it are standing right there, and smiling at you. “We surrender.”

The response of American soldiers in Germany, I think it was restrained, certainly restrained compared to what the Russians did.

Nehemia: And now, let’s put this in context. So I’m pulling up statistics here from the American Holocaust Museum website, and they say that the number who died at Dachau, what we’re talking about, the estimate is at least 28,000. Over a million were killed at Auschwitz.

Peter: Right, but the Red Army liberated… The ones in the east were found by the Red Army, which by the way, one of the reasons you’re seeing so many new books on the Holocaust, and books like mine can be written, is because the Soviet archives are now available. For years, they never let us see what was in it. So they knew a lot more about Treblinka and a lot more about Auschwitz than we did. They had the papers. They took the papers back to the Soviet Union.

Nehemia: And one of the other things is that the Nazis withdrew from Auschwitz and blew it up and took out many of the people of the camp, took them to other places in Germany. So when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the actual mechanisms of murder had been destroyed. One of the things that really shocked me when I went to Auschwitz in 1990 - I went on a trip there, and I was in Poland for a week - and I was at Auschwitz, and I’m like, “Okay, well, what am I seeing here?” It’s a blown-up building here, another blown-up building there. And here’s an empty barracks. And Treblinka, what do you see? You see a memorial.

And then you get to Majdanek, and in Majdanek you see bones in the ovens that are still there the way they were there in 1945 when it was liberated by the Red Army, by the Soviets. So I think one of the reasons that we have this association with Dachau, which, I mean, was a side show, let’s be honest, compared to the death factories of Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor and Auschwitz, Dachau was a relatively minor camp. But it was captured completely intact by the Americans.

Peter: It’s also the first camp they had built, and it was where they…

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Peter: …experimented with gas chambers. I don’t know if anyone ever died in a gas chamber at Dachau. It’s where they started to experiment.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s interesting.

Peter: ...don’t forget, Bavaria is sacred ground for Hitler. This is… in Hitler’s mind, Bavaria was the greater Germany.

Nehemia: Wow.

Peter: That’s where Munich is, and that’s where Dachau is. What was also so noticeable about Dachau was it’s built right next to this cute little town. So imagine some nice little town in America, some Norman Rockwell town with a concentration camp next to it. And then, when that concentration camp’s uncovered, everyone in town says, “Oh, I didn’t know it was there.” Also, when they left Auschwitz, one of the places they were moving back to was Dachau. So the Americans discovered railway cars filled with bodies. And it had a small capacity, the crematorium at Dachau. And so those stacks of bodies, those were outside the crematoria. Those were bodies that were supposed to be burned.

Nehemia: And they didn’t get to them.

Peter: Also the SS ran away from Dachau, a lot of them. They ran, because they knew what was going to happen when the Americans showed up. So they didn’t have the manpower to do what they did in Auschwitz. Himmler, who was the head of the SS, sort of took over Germany after Hitler was in the bunker and dead. Himmler had this fantasy that he was going to negotiate a settlement to the war.

Now, for your younger viewers, World War I never really finished. That’s why we had World War II. Basically, what happened was, we allowed the Germans to retreat back into Germany. Many generals in World War I said, “You know, this is a bad idea. We need to take out their army, because if we don’t take out their army, we’re going to be at war again with these guys in 20 years.” That’s exactly what happened.

So there was no way the Americans were going to settle with the Germans. But Himmler had this idea that they would. So he tried to get the camps to stop operating because he thought, “Well, they’re going to be really mad when they see all these people we murdered.” Especially, since Churchill and Roosevelt had already threatened it. They already had threatened publicly that everyone involved in this was going to be tried and hung.

So a lot of these people went back to Dachau. So Dachau was kind of crowded when the Americans showed up, with people who had come on these what they called “death marches”, because a lot of people simply died.

Nehemia: Right, and that’s what’s described in Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, one of these death marches.

Peter: Right, when he’s on it, right.

Nehemia: So Peter, where can people find more about your books?

Peter: Well, my website, petergolden.com. I’m on Facebook. You can find me on Facebook, but the book will be out on April 10th. You can get it all the usual places - Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your independent bookstore. Nothing is Forgotten. And it will deal with a lot of the things that we have been talking about today.

Nehemia: Wonderful, thank you so much. Would you end this episode with a prayer?

Peter: Okay. How about this one? “Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, ve’al kol Yisroel.”

Nehemia: Amen. It means, “He who makes peace on high, may He make peace for us and all of Israel, amen.” Thank you, Peter.

Peter: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed talking to you.

Nehemia: Shalom.

Peter: Shalom.

Announcer: You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at nehemiaswall.com.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!



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Related Posts:
Jews for Guns
Torah Scrolls from the Holocaust
The Most Difficult Episode for Me in 2018
The Lost Scrolls of Auschwitz
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Studies
Nehemia Gordon's Teachings on the Name of God

Nothing is Forgotten by Peter Golden

SHOW NOTES:
Peter Golden’s website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMCCYnDvpJQ

Examples of the word Shoah (Holocaust) in the Bible:
Isaiah 10:3
Zephaniah 1:5

Further Study:
Adolf Hitler
Exodus (Book)
USSR
The Red Army
Soviet Jewry Movement
Masha Bruskina
Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence (Book)
Jim Crow Laws
Golda Meir
Fiddler on the Roof (Movie)
Joseph Stalin
Chairman Mao
Camp David
Andwar Sadat
Zyklon B Gas
Anne Frank
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Book)
Ben Gurion
Adolf Eichman
Pound of Flesh
Gideon Hausner
The Final Solution
Mad Men (TV Show)
Nazism
Wernher von Braun
Herberts Cukurs (aka Hangman of Riga; Butcher of Riga)
Hannah Arendt (Banality of Evil)
Son of Saul (Movie)
Elie Wiesel
Night (Book)
The relationship between testimony and fiction
Fantasy and Witnessing, Post War Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Book)
Blood Libel
Band of Brother (Miniseries)
Heinrich Himmler

  • Angela Logan says:

    Can’t believe Putin is creating a rubble of Ukraine. History repeating itself as centurions of the holocaust who survived it are not being killed by bombs.

  • Elaine Benavidez says:

    Brilliant. Informative. This content is one of the reasons why I am a donor of Makor Foundation (along with the study of scripture in context).

  • Jeanette Hartis says:

    Very informative. Learned a lot. I really enjoy listening to Nehemiah.

  • Nancy Fisher says:

    I was enraptured by this conversation! You two make for wonderful story sellers. Thank you!

  • Andelevanz436@gmail.com says:

    Thanks nehemia your research draws me closer to Israel and the God of the Israeli

  • Miri says:

    Great interview! So much new -to me- info. You know, there’s a lot of prejudice in Israel against the Russians. They’re not real Jews, they might be Jews, convert, no need to convert, can they marry, they eating pork, etc. etc, etc.
    I ordered Mr. Golden’s book, “Nothing is Forgotten”. Even though I’m only on page 20, it’s great, so much humor. He’s an excellent writer! My fav genre, historical novel.

  • Henriette Ludwig says:

    Toda raba, Nehemia, for this extremely informative (and very moving) report. It is so important for the truth to be known, and that there are people who speak up, but also people willing to hear and pass on such truth. Researchers and writers like you and Peter are valuable treasures, may you both be abundantly blessed, as I was by this information. May the truth continue to shine through people like you.

  • Miri~ says:

    Great info & most interesting interview! Really upsetting, though, to hear all this. Glad it’s being brought out. People need to know!
    There’s a lot of prejudice in Israel against the Russian immigrants.

  • Sheila Price says:

    It is so heartbreaking to know that while I was still in school so much of what happened in Russia and Ukraine in the 1960’s was happening but not talked about so much… and over the years the American history books have been wiped clean just about of any real teaching of real history that matters… I’ve said for a long time that the American public is being ‘dummied down’… creating a world for young people where ‘everybody’s happy’ and everybody gets what they want just because they exist… which has brought us to a place of doing as you said, Nehemia… calling anyone who dares disagree with their opinion a ‘Nazi”… desensitizing the word and it’s real meaning… desensitizing the actual horrors of what really went on in the Holocaust … and so many are being manipulated by the media and their propaganda and don’t see it. It’s all very sad.My heart breaks for the Jews and the anti-semantic attitudes that still exist… and I pray for Jews around the world, no matter where they live, be it Israel or anywhere else… every time I look at the night sky… when I see the stars I think of how God promised Abraham he would have more children than there are stars, or sand on the edge of the seas… when there are clouds I still know the stars are up above them… and I always say a prayer for Israel and God’s people… the night sky is my prayer trigger for the People Of God.
    Thank you once again for a great teaching of truth as to what really happened.

  • Delores Ochoa says:

    TODA!!!!!!

  • 2iceblest says:

    And to think, as a Jew I thought I knew what happened. This is going to happen again, and is happening, makes my heart sick. But, I have been viciously attacked online many times by non-Jews so I know how hated my people still are.

  • Jennifer says:

    I have, for most of my life , been …what is the right word… fascinated, appalled, drawn to, compelled to learn about…. the Holocaust. I think for me it really started when I read the book “The Hiding Place” and connected it to a friend I had when I was younger who was Jewish. I grew up in a non religious, “christian” home ,and her home was , as far as I knew outside of her bat-mitzvah, fairly non religious also. I say this only to explain that religion never really came into it for me. This has always been a “people” issue. Along with my studying so much about the Holocaust, I also have studied extensively about slavery… again, a people issue, meaning people can and do the most horrific things to other people.
    I pray for those who are lost, alone, hurting and abused and ask God to be that person who will stand outside of the crown and love them…and if the time comes and I am given the choice to go along or fight back, may He give me the strength to stand and fight. amen
    I

  • eric john nagel says:

    Thanks so very much for all your Hebrew Voices. May Yehovah Bless you and Keep you. Shalom

  • James Wilson says:

    Literally sick in my stomach. Not just for the Jews but the incredible carnage and brutality depicted across the board. My dad helped liberate at least one of the camps in WWII. He only briefly mentioned it once. The picture of the quaint village with industrial mass murder factories next door reminds me of the abortion mills here in the US where in chi\c townhouse “clinics” babies are dismembered while the politico\ans declare it is their “right”. 56 million since ’73. So sick, so incredibly sad. The storm is still raging.

  • heiki says:

    Wow, so interesting! Waiting for the “Nothing is forgotten” book to arrive, looking forward to read it.

  • Janice says:

    What about personally owned guns in Germany and Soviet Union, were all citizens allowed to have them? where Jews allowed gun ownership?

  • Janice says:

    Connect Evil Empire of 1917 to 1917 Balfore Declaration

  • Matok1971 says:

    Shalom Nehemiah! I want to say thank you for doing this podcast. I have to say that I found the subject insightful. I am one of the blessed few to have said I myself have been to Dachau. I grew up in an US Army family. We moved to Germany twice while I was a kid, the first time in 1979-1981 and again in 1988-1990. I have been to Dachau a few times. seeing the pictures and everything there is a very humbling experience. I also agree with the state that I wish more American children would know more about History like this than they do at this time.

    Again I thank you for your hard work. May YHVH Bless you and keep you.