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[0:56] Lauren Van Hemert: Hello everyone, I'm Lauren Van Hemert, and this is the Beltline to Broadway Podcast.

[1:05] Lauren Van Hemert: For many of us, it is difficult to comprehend the overwhelming enormity of the Holocaust and the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.

[1:21] Lauren Van Hemert: Think about it for a minute. How difficult is it for us to imagine right now the 3.1 million lives lost to COVID-19? Now double that, and that is the number of Jewish people, mothers, fathers, children, grandparents who were persecuted as a result of a systemic state-sponsored policy.

[1:51] Lauren Van Hemert: The historical trauma that impacted generations of displaced people and their families following the Holocaust is the subject of the film, Where Can I Go. Executive produced by Raleigh Cary Jewish Family Services in partnership with the Justice Theatre Project.

[2:14] Lauren Van Hemert: The film is the result of a year-long program, Kesher, which utilized creative arts therapy to improve the mental health and reduce the social isolation of five Holocaust survivors living in North Carolina and sheltered in place during the pandemic.

[2:37] Lauren Van Hemert: Last week I had the opportunity to chat with these five survivors, along with the film's co-director, Barbara Kanan, to talk about the importance of connecting, understanding, and remembering.

[2:53] Lauren Van Hemert: The first voice you are going to hear is that of Kanan, who began this interview session with a centering exercise.

[3:06] Barbara Kanan: So adjust a little bit as you may need. Whatever that means to you in this moment.

[3:30] Barbara Kanan: Unique life force and our next in breath I want to invite you to breathe in gratitude and breathe out gratitude. Here we are present with each other in this moment and ready to move into a meaningful discussion with Lauren about our process.

[3:30] Marianna Miller: My name is Marianna Miller. I was born in Kreshov, Czechoslovakia. I was in North Carolina about four years.

[3:30] Judy Stevens: Hi, I'm Judy Stevens. I was born in Hungary. I lived in Budapest until we left Hungary.

[3:30] Tobi Dicker: Tobi Dicker. I was born in Firth, Bavaria, Germany, and I've been living in North Carolina for 27 years.

[3:30] Eva Weineman: My name is Eva Weineman. I was born in Biawaplash, Poland, and I've been living in North Carolina for 14 years.

[5:01] Harry Rubinstein: Of the famous Rubinstein. I've been here a year and a half, and I was born in Cologne, Germany.

[5:29] Harry Rubinstein: It helped me to connect with other people while I was stuck in the house, as they say. Not being able to go out, I was able to speak with people. And also people who have experienced what I have experienced. I felt this whole experience was a gift to my parents and to their suffering because they were executed in a mass grave, and I never did anything for them. I felt that this experience gave me a chance to be close to them again.

[6:13] Harry Rubinstein: Well, I was thinking about things that I hadn't thought about for a long time. It gave me a chance to cry a little bit. So I guess for me it's not only to review my family story and get a group of very sympathetic and very understanding people to work with, but also sort of clarifying my mind how in the way it has affected me and what role did the Holocaust play in my life, not only in my mother's life but in a way in my life as well.

[6:56] Judy Stevens: Like Judy said, it helped me understand a little bit more about what my mother went through. And again, having all these five people made it very warm, at home. A hame is a house in Yiddish.

[7:25] Lauren Van Hemert: Have your families seen the film, and what was their response to seeing you on screen and speak so honestly and openly about your feelings and your experiences?

[7:41] Marianna Miller: We never talked about the Holocaust till now. It's been a big revelation for I think all of us in a sense of being able to return something to the past.

[7:58] Lauren Van Hemert: How about you, Tobi? Do you feel maybe a little like Marianna in that this somehow gives back to the past or maybe answers some unanswered questions at all since your mom didn't talk about it so much?

[8:23] Tobi Dicker: What I can gather from Eva, Marianna, and Harry are just facts, you know, they're facts that I've grown up with, that I've read about that it doesn't truly answer anything about my parents, and that's what I would like to know more about my parents. And again, as a child of a survivor, I can't really go back and think in terms of the war because I wasn't there like Eva can. Eva can remember running through the woods. I don't have those experiences. And I don't remember the DP camp in Germany because I was only three years old when we left. And again, my mother congregated with a lot of survivors, but like my mother, they did not talk about it. And the children, which I was one of, we on a Saturday when we all went to the park and got together, none of us talked about it.

We were in a different place. We were in the United States, and we were not hopefully affected by the war. It was not years and years and years of discussion, and that's why my daughter now would like to know whatever she can.

[9:56] Lauren Van Hemert: Yes, and you're very special. You have a very unique position among American citizens in that you are Polish-born and essentially bear the scars of the Holocaust and came out at the other end. I admire you very much.

[10:22] Lauren Van Hemert: Did you feel maybe like the film was an invitation to have a conversation with your family, Eva?

[10:32] Eva Weineman: Yeah, in a way I did feel that way. Even though we have conversations, my daughter and the children, but this was special.

[10:43] Lauren Van Hemert: Judy, how about you? Has your family seen the film?

[10:45] Judy Stevens: Yes, some of the older members of my family, not the younger kids. It probably wasn't appropriate. I think they knew the story of my mom as it was very open and very public. And I think I may be wrong, but it's harder for my kids to really understand or want to. As a mother, it's easier to look at what the grandparents went through than the fact that it might have had some effect on me. I don't usually talk about my feelings, so it probably was brand new, but they didn't really comment on that much too much on that.

[11:35] Lauren Van Hemert: Yeah. It's hard to explain. But it does sound a little bit, Judy, that this process has helped validate some of your feelings, though.

[11:50] Judy Stevens: Yeah.

[11:50] Lauren Van Hemert: And this is for all of you, but I'm gonna start with you, Eva. Tobi was saying you have memories.

[11:57] Eva Weineman: At three and four years old, I have certain memories. And the others is what my parents told me. You know, I do remember running through the woods. I do remember hiding in my grandfather's house up on the roof with my mother while my grandparents were taken and they killed right on the spot by the Germans. And not knowing where my father was, so it was just my mother and I for quite a while until my father finally found us.

[12:34] Lauren Van Hemert: I obviously you've all connected to each other, but has this experience helped you get closer to your spouse or your children or your grandchildren?

[12:47] Eva Weineman: I'm not sure I really or whether we never talked about my own feelings that came out of as a result of the whole experience, which I think I greatly benefited from because the dominance was always my parents and their story and understanding that the second generation is affected, but I'm not sure how much my children. I've never really talked. I'll have to ask.

[13:21] Marianna Miller: I really never asked them because they we only talk about my mom and my dad and their story.

[13:28] Judy Stevens: Connected to that, I'm curious about shifting the question just slightly to turn it inwards, and say, do you feel this process has changed your connection to yourself? And if so, how?

[13:48] Marianna Miller: Just what I in a sense I'll just for me it helps me to understand myself better and my own feelings that I've sort of never focused on. Yeah, my aunt and uncle did get very close and I understood them and they must have really suffered. My aunt survived with her baby, my uncle was killed, and they came to visit us in the United States and my nephews they almost came but decided to stay in a Muslim home in Belgium and they're alive now, but they're not allowed to speak fairly, I don't think. I think it made me understand my parents better and the depth of sacrifice that they made in sending their young child to a foreign country, and it must have been a terribly painful experience for them.

[15:08] Judy Stevens: Marianna, something you said makes me a little curious. You said that this helped you understand the sacrifices that your family made. I'm wondering if through this process and this Kesher group has it helped, has there been any level of forgiveness?

[15:36] Marianna Miller: I think there's a forgiveness of what love can do that you can sacrifice the most dear thing in your life in order to help. I'm sorry, I'm putting it badly, but sacrifice parents to do this to let their child go far now truly an act of love.

[15:50] Harry Rubinstein: Mariana is what I'm hearing you say yes. Did you have anything you wanted to add to what Marianna had said?

[15:50] Harry Rubinstein: It just it's a matter of forgiving for what I don't forgive the Nazis or the Polish government for its stupidity and I don't understand how anyone could.

[15:50] Judy Stevens: Well said, Harry. I feel strange even using the word forgiveness because obviously what the Nazis did what these governments did was unforgivable as Harry said. I guess the forgiveness that I'm speaking of is maybe the forgiveness to your family, to your mother, if this process has helped you maybe forgiveness isn't the right word reconcile those feelings.

[16:43] Marianna Miller: I admire it more for what she did she took a chance in her own life to say it's so and I am reconciling with my mother for leaving so soon my mother died young, you know understanding that there was just nothing she could do.

[17:20] Tobi Dicker: I was just thinking that kind of now that I think about it wonder what kind of parents my parents would have been without their experiences in the Holocaust. Would they have had less burden that they carried and would that have made a difference in the way they parented? Would I have more siblings and would I have been able to not be so involved with their luggage that they have to carry because the trauma they went through? So you sort of wonder sometimes would it be different if I had grandparents and aunts and uncles who would have been there which I never had.

[18:02] Judy Stevens: So when we look at this past year in the pandemic there's so many people who are coping with loss. What can we learn from you all and from our survivors about coping with loss?

[18:25] Tobi Dicker: The one thing I can sort of associate with is wanting to share some of the things I'm going through with my parents. Some of the experiences I want to pick up the phone and say hey mama you know or have them talk to the grandkids so there's a loss of not having that anymore you know and most of that generation in my family has sort of gone now and now it's only like my generation. So I miss that. I miss the sharing and the asking more questions about things that I don't know as much about as I would like to.

[19:08] Marianna Miller: It kind of sounds like you had that experience too with your mother kind of having a lot of unanswered questions or wanting to know more.

[19:17] Tobi Dicker: Yeah, I just wish that she could have been more open so we could have shared more. She was just so obsessed with dying and hunger, and that ruled her life. Everything was in terms of money wasn't for materialistic things. Money was so that you would never starve. And sometimes she was extremely overprotective, but I was still the parent. She was the child, and I was the parent.

[19:55] Tobi Dicker: What I did at nine years old for the refugees was not what kids do today. I did all their paperwork, I took them to all the places that they had to go to, and I was only nine years old. And that put me in the mother figure. And even years later, if my mother heard of an accident, if there was a plane crash, she called everybody just to make sure that I was not on that plane. She was always obsessed that something was going to happen to me. And again, it was a rough life. My husband died at 44. Thank God my mother did not live to see my son die. He was 44 also, because I don't think that she would have been able to tolerate that. And I think that gave me a perspective of the reason that I'm here, so that nobody forgets my father, my mother, my husband, and my child.

[21:03] Judy Stevens: I'm just wondering about one thing, Toby. I think because you and I are like the second generation, and what you said about being like a parent and I had the same experience of being like a parent to my parents. Because they didn't learn to speak English as quickly as I did.

[21:25] Tobi Dicker: Yeah.

[21:25] Judy Stevens: And then I became you know all their friends all the ones the refugees that were left they came to me to fill out their paperwork to take them if they had to go to an office or wherever they had to go and at nine years old I was riding the subways the buses and I took everybody wherever they had to go and for me it was listening to their pain so I didn't have anybody to listen to because nobody told me anything.

[21:25] Judy Stevens: Your stories just are so meaningful your life experience is so meaningful what do you hope that people will learn from watching this film?

[21:25] Tobi Dicker: Never let your guard down.

[21:25] Judy Stevens: Right, what do you hope people will get from watching this film that they should learn because of what's happening these days?

[21:25] Tobi Dicker: I feel it's happening again and we need to realize that we can't do that anymore we have families we have children that we need to protect take good care of your children for they're the real treasures we carry all our lives.

[22:51] Harry Rubinstein: Harry, how about you? What do you hope people get from watching this film?

[22:58] Harry Rubinstein: Social wills.

[22:59] Judy Stevens: How about you, Judy?

[23:02] Judy Stevens: Well, to me, I always think of what has happened, and now I look at if it happens to one group of people, it's happening to me too. If it's happening to the blacks, if it's happening to the Chinese or the Hispanics, it's in my heart because I feel it so much so strongly.

[23:28] Harry Rubinstein: Tremendous empathy, Judy.

[23:31] Judy Stevens: I think it gives you empathy.

[23:33] Harry Rubinstein: That's the word.

[23:34] Judy Stevens: Thank you. And something related to that that we've spoken about in our group is how small acts of hate and crime build and build if they are left unchecked and grow into the Holocaust or have the capacity to grow into something like the Holocaust.

[24:01] Harry Rubinstein: That's exactly it.

[24:03] Judy Stevens: In 2016, President Barack Obama said during Holocaust Remembrance Day, the stories of these survivors and their protectors remind us to confront persecution wherever it arises, and that silence can be an accomplice to evil. They remind us of our duty to counter the rising tide of antisemitism, bigotry, and hatred that threatens the values we hold so dear. Pluralism, diversity, and the freedoms of religion and expression.

[24:46] Lauren Van Hemert: I would encourage you all to honor the survivors you've heard from on this podcast by watching their film Where Can I Go. The film is available to watch on demand. You can find out more information about all the survivors as well as viewing and ticket information on the Justice Theater Project website. I'll put a link in the episode notes.

[25:14] Lauren Van Hemert: If you like what you've heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast. Follow us on social media at Beltline to Broadway, or visit us online at www.beltline to broadway.org. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.