On the Holocaust - Yad Vashem Yad Vashem

Before and during WWII, German corporations went from the abandonment of Jewish colleagues, through profiting off the dispossession and murder of Jews, to working Jews to death. The leading executives of these companies embodied the “thoughtlessness,” the indifference to the people on the receiving end of their deeds. The actions taken by most of them, weren't just a means to keep their businesses running , but an opportunity to profit and shine - a "banality of evil" with deadly and lucrative results. In this episode, we hear about some of these executives, and some of these companies - several of which still manufacture and distribute products we may find ourselves using today.
Featured guest: Peter Hayes, Emeritus professor at Northwestern University, and the former chair of the academic committee at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In the late 1970’s, the American TV mini series “Holocaust” was broadcast in West Germany, and immediately took over the public discourse. For many younger Germans, this was the first time they’d seen the Jewish victims of the Nazis depicted on screen. It began an unprecedented period of reckoning in Germany, where the word ‘Holocaust’ was not widely used before, and where the horrific crimes of the past were in many ways swept under the collective rug.
Featured guests: Actor James Woods; filmmaker Avi Nesher; professor emeritus Moshe Zimmerman, history department of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

A sister writes to her brother, telling him their mother is gone. A husband, still looking for his wife and son, writes to old friends asking for some warm clothes. Four letters, by four survivors, written shortly after being liberated, tell the story of the holocaust and its immediate aftermath in a way that few other texts can. .Featured guest: Doctor Robert Rozett, senior historian at the institute for international holocaust research, Yad-Vashem.

In August 1941, a young writer, Leyb Goldin, sat down to write about his day, struggling to survive in the Warsaw ghetto. This short piece of reportage, described as “a first person account of a man slowly dying of hunger”, is extremely powerful in portraying the terror of starvation, and perhaps deserves a place up there with some of the famous works of holocaust literature. .Featured guest: David Roskies, Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

On July 7 1944, a mere couple of hours before the liquidation of the Będzin Ghetto and the murder of all the Jews imprisoned in it, Sarah and Yehiel Gerlitz wrote a farewell letter to their six-year-old daughter Dita. Dita had been handed over to a Polish family a year earlier, and in their letter her parents wrote to her what they believed to be their last words. How was Dita taken into hiding? What did Sarah and Yehiel write to their daughter before they were deported to the unknown? What happened to the family members? And what happened to the letter?

Calel (Calek) Perechodnik was a Jewish policeman in the Otwock ghetto. Within his role, he took part in an Aktion (forced deportation) in which 8,000 of the city's Jews were deported, among them his wife Anna and daughter Athalie. Calek, certain they would be safe, took them out of the hiding place in which they had been located, and led them to the deportation square, where they were put on trains and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Calek remained alone, consumed by guilt and, after several months spent in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw, penned a combination of a confession, a ringing indictment, and a diary - which he dedicated to his wife and daughter. The text Calek wrote is one of the most graphic, honest, and jarring texts produced during the Holocaust period. Featured guest: Dr. Amos Goldberg, Professor at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, and head of the Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry. Author of Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust, 2017.