Chapter Content
Okay, so, chapter seven. It's called "The L.A. Survivors' Club," and, you know, it starts with this quote: "And I didn't talk about the Holocaust, not even to my own child." Kind of sets the stage, right?
So, the chapter opens with this guy, Fred Diament, right? He was only fifteen when World War II broke out, and he got sent to Sachsenhausen, which was a concentration camp outside Berlin. Then he was sent to Auschwitz. He was a "low number," which meant he was one of the first, like, *ever* sent to these camps. His father was beaten to death, his brother was hanged, and he spent five winters in these camps. He even fought in the underground resistance in Auschwitz, and he survived this crazy death march in 1945. And get this, he met his future wife on a boat to Palestine, like, *wow*. He served in Israel's war for independence, fought again in the Sinai campaign, then he moved to Los Angeles, got his degree at night, and, get this, became the CEO of a women's clothing company. And he was only five-foot-four, but people called him Freddie because he acted like a giant, you know?
So, there's this woman, Rachel Lithgow, who met Freddie and this whole group of Holocaust survivors in L.A. when she was working for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. She says that Freddie was, like, "very angry." But also, "hilarious!" She said he had this incredible, dark sense of humor, you know? He called Auschwitz "the country club."
Freddie's best friend was Siegfried Halbreich. They were together in Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. Sig was actually one of the leaders of the Auschwitz resistance, and he was a pharmacist before the war, so he was like a doctor to the prisoners. He moved to L.A. in 1960 and opened a custom frame shop. He and Freddie were inseparable. Lithgow said they were like, "Ralph Kramden and Norton," always arguing. Sig was this really proper German guy. She said the most casual she ever saw him was when he didn't wear a tie *once*.
Freddie died in 2004. So, at his funeral, it's a full house. I mean, *everybody* was there, even people who hated Freddie, and he hated them! And Sig, his best friend, gives the eulogy. He gets up there, totally dramatic in his best suit, and he says, in his thick German accent, "What can we say about Fred Diament?"
And then he turns around to the coffin, with his back to the audience, and he starts waving his hands like crazy, just pointing and waving, you know? Nobody could hear what he was saying! Then he turns back around, grips the podium, and very dramatically says, "Und dat vas Fred." And the whole place just lost it! Everyone was laughing so hard.
Then there's Masha Loen. She was Lithuanian. She survived Stutthof, which was another concentration camp. She got typhus, twice. She called them "the typhuses." When the camp was liberated, she was actually buried in a pile of bodies, but somebody saw her waving her hand. She married the love of her life and moved to L.A. She was, like, *indomitable*.
Lithgow said that Masha was her secretary, and one year during Passover, they were doing a mailing, and everyone was wondering where Masha was. So, Lithgow goes to one of the unused offices and opens the door, and there's Masha, like, *this* with a cheeseburger! I mean, cheeseburgers are about as non-kosher as it gets, right? Lithgow was horrified, and Masha just says, "Shut the door." So, Lithgow comes in, shuts the door, and Masha goes, "Listen, you. I'm a good Jew. I survived the death march and the typhuses…I should be constipated for two weeks because our ancestors wandered in the desert?" Then she tells Lithgow to get out of the office and threatens to kill her if she tells *anyone*, even her husband. Lithgow just backed out slowly, haha!
Freddie, Sig, and Masha, they were the heart of this L.A. survivors' club. They took English classes together at Hollywood High School at night. Then more survivors started joining them. A teacher noticed and gave them classroom space. Lithgow said that they "slowly started to see [themselves in] each other, you know?"
They would stay after class and just talk. Then they started bringing stuff, like, "This is the last photograph taken of my mother," or "This is the prisoner uniform I wore when I was liberated. I can't throw it away, but I can't have it in my house for one more second. We don't know what to do."
So, Freddie calls some guy he knew at the Jewish Federation and asks if they could borrow a closet to keep their stuff in. They wanted to save it, but they didn't want it in their houses. But this guy at the Federation told them they should make a little display of their things.
They took their stuff and put a tiny little ad in the L.A. Times, saying that Holocaust survivors were showing their things at the Federation on a Sunday, and thousands of people showed up! The survivors realized, "Gosh, we have something here."
The Jewish Federation gave them some space on the ground floor of their building. They called it the Martyrs Memorial Museum. It opened in 1961. It was the first Holocaust museum in the United States. Lithgow would later become its executive director.
Over the next few decades, they moved from one tiny space to the next, always struggling with money, but they kept going. Eventually, their idea spread across the country. Now there are Holocaust memorials or museums in almost every major city.
The Martyrs Memorial Museum is now called Holocaust Museum LA. It's in a new building in Pan Pacific Park in Hollywood. If you're ever in L.A., you should check it out. Lithgow said that the museum's events "don't end with the national anthem and they don't end with ‘Hatikvah’ [the Israeli national anthem]." They sing "Partisan Song," which is the unofficial anthem of Holocaust survivors. It was written in 1943 by Hirsh Glick, who was a prisoner in the Vilna Ghetto. Then she starts to sing it, in Yiddish. I won't butcher the lyrics here.
She says, "It's what they would sing in the woods or at night in the barracks to keep their spirits up."
After you leave the museum, you might wonder why it took so long for there to be a Holocaust memorial in the U.S. I mean, why did it take until 1961 for there to be even one? And why did it take so long for the idea to spread across the country?
The first one opened in 1961, but the second didn't open until 1984. Most of them opened in the 90s, which is like, half a century after the Holocaust.
So, the author wants to talk about overstories, the way that cultures and countries think and feel. What does it take to change one of those overstories? Can it be rewritten in a way that changes how people think and feel?
The author says yes and even knows who was responsible for one of the great overstory revisions of the last century.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves!
Then, the chapter talks about the "rhythm" of our memories of the Holocaust. The author references how Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" came out ten years after the end of World War I. And that rhythm is typical. The U.S. pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, and the most influential movies about the war came out in the late 70s. There was a memorial on the Mall by 1982.
But the Holocaust was different. There was a Broadway production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" in the 50s, and then a movie. In the 60s, Sidney Lumet made "The Pawnbroker" about a survivor, but it wasn't a huge hit, and some Jewish groups even boycotted it. There were a few other books and movies, but nothing big. It wasn't that people were denying the Holocaust. It was that they didn't know about it. Or they knew but didn't want to talk about it.
In 1961, this Harvard historian, H. Stuart Hughes, published a book about Europe, but he never even used the word "holocaust." He only mentioned the concentration camps a few times. He spent more time talking about Arnold Schoenberg and music.
The next year, Samuel Morison and Henry Commager released an updated edition of their textbook. If you were a college student in the 50s or 60s, you probably read it in your history class. They talked a lot about World War II. But the Holocaust? It gets a few sentences, and there wasn't any emphasis on antisemitism. They said the camps were established in 1937 for Jews, gypsies, and anti-Nazi Germans. They gave some more description and then said that the "pathetic story of one of the least of these, the diary of the little German girl Anna Frank, has probably done more to convince the world of the hatred inherent in the Nazi doctrine than the solemn postwar trials." And then they moved on to Roosevelt's winter house. They get the name wrong, "Anna Frank" instead of Anne Frank. And even though it's technically accurate that she was born in Germany, she was living in Amsterdam because her family had fled the Nazis, and she was Jewish!
In 1970, Gerd Korman, who was a historian and a Holocaust survivor, read through some of the top contemporary history books and said that references to "Auschwitz" or "Concentration Camps" were rare.
Even within the Jewish community, there was reluctance to talk about it.
Renée Firestone, who was another member of the L.A. survivors' club, talked about how long it took her to talk about what happened. She lived a glamorous life as a fashion designer until she got a call from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, asking her to tell her story. At first she was like, "Why should I now start talking about those terrible days?" But then Rabbi Cooper told her that a Jewish cemetery was desecrated and a temple was spray-painted with swastikas. She said that when she heard the word "swastika," she went crazy. She decided that she was ready to talk.
When she came here, she said that she started her business and realized that she had to focus on a family, because they were a unique group of people with no children or elders. They had to recreate a new nation.
And she didn't talk about the Holocaust, not even to her own child.
Lidia Budgor, who survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, Stutthof, the death march, typhus, and saw almost everyone in her family killed, had a son named Beno. The interviewer asked if she told him about the Holocaust. She said that they talked about it in high school. She said that he knew that she was always involved. When the interviewer asked how he handled it, she said, "No reaction. No, it didn't affect him." No reaction? I mean, what version of events did she tell him?
Masha Loen said, "When I first started [speaking out], there were people who didn't even know there was a Holocaust." Even some Jewish people didn't know.
Today, we call the genocide "the Holocaust," with a capital H. But in the years after the war, if it came up at all, it was called "the Nazi atrocities" or "the horrors" or "The Final Solution." If you said the word "Holocaust" in those years, nobody would have known what you were talking about.
A chart shows how often the words "holocaust" and "Holocaust" appeared in print over the past two hundred years. The lowercase version goes from a trickle to a stream. The uppercase version is almost never used until the late 60s. But then, around 1978, something dramatic happens. The "Holocaust" line goes almost vertical. So, what happened in 1978?
In 1976, these executives from NBC were walking by a bookstore when they saw a book about the Jewish experience during the Second World War. One of them was Paul Klein, who ran programming for NBC. The other was his boss, Irwin Segelstein, who headed the company's planning group. They were the people who decided what went on the air.
Segelstein looked at the book, turned to Klein, and said, "Why don't we do it?" And Klein replied, "We should."
These weren't men with ideological agendas. They understood the American zeitgeist. Their job was to know what the public wanted, and they were very good at it. Segelstein also had lost an uncle, an aunt, and three first cousins at Auschwitz. He knew what happened in Europe. And what Irwin Segelstein meant when he gestured at the book and turned to Paul Klein was, Did we think the American public is finally ready to hear about it too? And Klein's response meant, I think they are.
They made a miniseries called "Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss." It told the story of a Jewish family and Erik Dorf, who was a rising Nazi official. Meryl Streep was in it. It cost $6 million to make, which was a lot back then. They filmed a lot of it at Mauthausen concentration camp.
Meryl Streep said that filming there was "too much for me." It was grueling.
The director, Marvin Chomsky, hired extras to play the camp inmates. He warned them that they would have to take off their clothes and be machine-gunned to death.
Chomsky recalled that a young cameraman came up to him and said, "Mr. Marvin, you are making this up for the movie, this didn't really happen." Chomsky asked a military man if it was true. The guy said yes. All the young people ran off crying.
Again and again, Chomsky had to deal with disbelief among the crew. They traveled all the way to Austria to film at an actual concentration camp, but the crew still couldn't believe it was real. They would look at photographs and shake their heads, saying it was all "doctored."
The final cut of the miniseries was nine and a half hours long. It aired on NBC over four nights. The show didn't sugarcoat anything.
Elie Wiesel called NBC's "Holocaust" "untrue, offensive, cheap" and "an insult." In a way, he was right—it was television's version of history. But Wiesel missed the point: This was the first time most Americans had ever heard about the Holocaust.
The scene goes on for a long time. The camera turns to a pile of lifeless bodies dripping with blood. I won't read it out here. It's rough.
The chart showing usage of the word "Holocaust" showed that sometime in 1978, that word goes from almost never being used to being used all the time. The "Holocaust" miniseries aired April 16, 1978.
It's hard to accept the idea that a television show could change the world, right? I mean, audiences are so fragmented now. Back then, television was different. The 1983 series finale of M\*A\*S\*H drew 106 million viewers. That was over 45% of the American public.
Larry Gross, who studies television, said that the most popular shows would do better than the Super Bowl does today. "It was like preindustrial religion, entire communities gathered together to absorb the same messages."
Gross and some colleagues did research to see what television of that era was capable of. They analyzed people's responses to racial issues in the 70s. Liberals, moderates, and conservatives were far apart on those issues if they didn't watch a lot of television. But the more television people of all ideologies watched, the more they started to agree. When a large group of people watch the same stories, it brings them together.
"It's the media creating the cultural consciousness about how the world works…and what the rules are." The stories told on television shaped what people thought about, the conversations they had, the things they valued. Knowing how much television someone watched was a better predictor of how they saw current issues than knowing who they voted for. Gross quotes a Scottish writer, Andrew Fletcher, who said, "If I can write the songs of a nation, I don't care who writes their laws."
So, back to the L.A. survivors' club. They were a group of people who survived something terrible. They could have reacted in a million different ways. Some would want to tell the world; others would want to move on. In the postwar years, there was a kind of agreement not to speak of it.
Historian Novick was talking about the effects of an overstory. The American Jewish Committee convened a conference just as World War II was ending. They invited scholars to learn how to combat hatred of Jews. The consensus was that antisemitism was driven by a perception of Jewish weakness. Jewish organizations should "avoid representing the Jew as weak, victimized and suffering…We must normalize the image of the Jew…The image of Jewish weakness must be eliminated."
In the late 40s, there was a proposal to build a Holocaust memorial in New York City. But the representatives of Jewish organizations rejected the idea because they thought it would make Americans think of Jews as victims.
Sig Halbreich moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland to get away from all the questions about his past. You can't really blame him. When the survivors' club first got together, their discussions about the Holocaust were private.
Lithgow said that they were "embarrassed by it to some degree. They were embarrassed by their accents. They were embarrassed by their tattoos. They were embarrassed that their children didn't have grandparents or family members at the school plays that every other kid had. I don't know why it turned inward for them, but it did. They felt shame about it for some reason."
The survivors' overstory was that what happened in the camps was too overwhelming, and the only emotional path was forward. Those who hadn't gone through the experience had their own overstory. Historians didn't have the language or the imagination to capture the experience of the camps.
After the war, Halbreich served as an interpreter for Eisenhower. Eisenhower noticed Halbreich's concentration camp tattoo and asked, "Did it hurt you very much when they tattooed this number on your arm?"
Halbreich thought that the Americans didn't understand.
The silence was deepest in Germany. The Germans had their own shame to deal with. They settled on Ehrenfriedof—Honorary Cemetery—and said that they saw no reason to point out "the crimes of National Socialism to the foreigners who drive in large numbers on the federal highway."
The community planted thousands of trees and hedges, which soon overran parts of the camp. The Bisingen football club built a playing field over a charcoal kiln that the inmates had been forced to mine shale to fill. They hinted at what happened, but they couldn't say it out loud.
In the mid-70s, thirty years had passed since the end of the war. Historians were ignoring the subject. The survivors didn't want to talk about it. Hollywood was silent. In Germany, soccer teams were practicing on the site of abandoned concentration camps. All the United States had was a makeshift museum in Los Angeles. The Holocaust didn't even have a name. It seemed like it was going to end up as a footnote.
But then again, Miami went through shocks and was never the same. So, perhaps a better question was not if the way the world thought about the Holocaust could be changed, but how.
And so, the survivors' club opened the doors to their tiny museum.
Lithgow said that they were "shocked that anyone gave a damn. I think they were really stunned that people cared. And that anybody was interested in listening to them."
People were interested, and the Holocaust survivors learned that it really was possible to speak of the unspeakable. The numbers tattooed on their forearms were not embarrassing. Reliving a memory was not a sign of weakness.
That idea began to slowly spread. Outside Chicago, Zev Weiss started trying to persuade colleges to teach courses about the Holocaust. He traveled around the country to lobby colleges.
In the mid-70s, Jewish groups worked with Congress to pass the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which pushed the Soviet Union to loosen its emigration rules. Then in 1977, neo-Nazis applied for a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago. The town fought back. Something in the American Jewish community had turned, and that was what led the TV execs, Paul Klein and Irwin Segelstein, to pause in front of the bookstore window and make their fateful decision.
They created one of the most devastating history lessons in modern history. It aired for four nights in April 1978, and half the country tuned in.
In Germany, the effect was even bigger. The program ran late at night, on a little-watched network, but 15 million West Germans tuned in. It was called "the German TV event of the 1970s." Thousands of viewers called in to their local television stations. Neo-Nazi groups planted bombs at TV stations. Guilt-stricken veterans threatened suicide. A former SS officer reported that his family deserted him. The statute of limitations for prosecuting war criminals was about to expire. After "Holocaust," the West German parliament changed its mind and abolished the statute of limitations.
A German journalist wrote that "Holocaust" had shaken up Germany. "No other film has ever made the Jews' road of suffering leading to the gas chambers so vivid…Only since and as a result of ‘Holocaust’ does a majority of the nation know what lay behind the horrible and vacuous formula ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’"
Today in Bisingen, there is a proper museum, one of thousands that have been built across Germany.
Years after "Holocaust" aired, Herbert Schlosser, who was the head of NBC, said that in the earliest discussions of the series, the script was titled "Holocaust." But then that word was dropped. "It had no special meaning in the mid-70s."
"One day there arrived at my door a stack of scripts this high…And I made one contribution to it…I read the scripts. But I noticed the show was not called Holocaust. It was called The Family Weiss, which is the name of the family that goes through the Holocaust in the series. So, I called [the producer] and I said, ‘You don’t want to call it The Family Weiss.’"
Schlosser said, "Call it the Holocaust."
And that's why everyone calls it the Holocaust. After 1978, everyone used the word "Holocaust" in their name. Even the original museum on Wilshire Boulevard changed its name. The mass atrocity that no one knew how to talk about now had a name.
Because a television executive thought it sounded better than "The Family Weiss."
That's what storytellers can do. They can change the overstory.