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Janae Pierre: Hey y'all. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. It's The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre sitting in for Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Friday mark's International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On January 27th in 1945, Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp was liberated. The Remembrance Day is a day to commemorate the 6 million Jewish lives that were lost at the hands of the Nazi German regime and the millions of other Europeans the Nazis saw as racially inferior. These included Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Santi populations, people with disabilities, and polish people. We spoke with one of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who now lives in New York.

Toby Eisenstein Levy: My name is Toby Eisenstein Levy. I was born in the same era Hitler came to power in Ukraine now, but the time when I was born was Poland. The name of the town was Hodolf, very close to Lviv. Now that you're seeing Ukraine on the maps you know where Lviv is. Very close to there. My parents were born there, my grandparents, great grandparents. It's a small town and small Jewish community, but very vibrant, very nice. Small but nice.

Janae: In those early days of the Nazi regime, many didn't understand the full impact of what was about to happen.

Toby: We did hear what goes on in Germany, but I can't tell you that we understood. We didn't add the dots because the information it's not quite instant as you have it today. Information was not very quick and you couldn't believe what you heard because you didn't hear it from the first mouth, you heard it third or fourth person. The dots were not clear what happening in Germany. The Jews in Poland did not connect it. When we were occupied by the Russians, we were okay but many Jews that occupied by the Germans did run away to us because they did tell stories what's happened.

The Germans came in, they took the men and the families were disrupted but no one understood that. That's clear. No one could understand how bad this will be, how hatred this was. We didn't understand it so we let it go. The German Jews did not take it seriously till 1938 until Kristallnacht that's when they realized its bad.

Janae: Kristallnacht is also known as the night of broken glass. In the fall of 1938, Nazis coordinated attacks on Jewish communities in Germany. It was seen as a violent turning point of the Third Reich. A year later, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland, which started World War II. Ms. Levy's town had been occupied by the Soviet Union until the Germans invaded in 1941. Her family tried to leave by train, but couldn't make it. When the Germans arrived, they rounded up all of the Jewish people in her town.

Toby: The hatred is so obvious, they didn't look at you into your face, into your eyes, they look at you that you're not a human. I was eight years old. What I remember is seeing the boots. Didn't see-- The soldiers were so tall and handsome and they screaming and yelling and giving us order what the next thing to do. I'm pulling in my father's hand. My father never, ever yelled at us. All of a sudden, he turns to me and he says to me, very clearly quiet, screaming at me. I saw the fear in his eyes, and I knew. Children are very intuitive, understand their parents. I didn't know what the fear was about, but I saw fear.

Janae: In the fall of 1942, Ms. Levy's family went into hiding. They were taken in by a Polish woman named Stephanie. She and her 16-year-old son helped hide the family in a barn.

Toby: That's where we sat for two years. He watched the barn 24 hours [unintelligible 00:04:44] and his mom saved our life. To me, the whole thing is a miracle. To me, she was the angel between the devil. Every house hated the Jews except Stephanie's.

Janae: Ms. Levy's family made it out of Poland alive and they came to the US in 1949. Now, as a Holocaust survivor, Ms. Levy teaches about the Holocaust, about hatred, and about the lessons we can learn.

Toby: This is what I teach at school when I talk hatred, what my father taught me, why don't I have hatred? Because for two years in hiding, my father tried to tell us, "This war will end. There will be Jewish survivors no doubt. There won't be many, but there will be because they have to tell the world what happened." Every day, my father, he would say to me, "I don't know the answer why everybody hates us, but if we make it, you go to school and you get older, you'll figure it out. Maybe you'll tell the world why they hate us." Well, I made it and I'm teaching and I'm learning. Why they hate me? I haven't got the slightest idea, but I'm still teaching the same thing.

Janae: Holocaust Remembrance Day is also a day to reflect on the history of the brutal genocide committed by Nazis before and during World War II.

Jack Kliger: The museum is the most important work I've ever done. It's a mission to remember our history and to teach the lessons of history to future generations. Remembrance and education are our two twin pillars. I'm Jack Kliger. I'm the president and CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a living memorial to the Holocaust. I'm also the son of two Holocaust survivors. My father escaped from the ghetto in Lutsk, Poland. What was then Poland is now part of Western Ukraine. He survived the war, first living in the forest, hidden there, then became a partisan, then eventually joined the Russian army where he wound up at the end of the war in Budapest and saw my mother on a breadline.

She had been a survivor of the Budapest ghetto. They married, moved to Italy where I was born, and then decided that they were going to come to America three years later. We emigrated to the United States. I came here in 1950 and the first thing my family and I saw when we came to the United States was the Statue of Liberty. Now, interestingly enough, I work at a place where I look at it every day.

Janae: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York sits on the southern tip of Manhattan near Battery Park. It overlooks Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the gateway through which millions passed seeking refuge. It's the third largest Holocaust museum in the world in the city with the most Jews and the largest survivor-related community outside of Israel. Our commemoration of 78 years since the end of World War II can't be separated from the fact that some high-profile celebrities and politicians have made anti-Semitic remarks.

There's been a rising trend of harassment, vandalism, and violence directed against Jews. According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents reached an all-time high in the US in 2021.

Jack: I think traditionally, anti-Semitism rises when there's anxiety, when there's a lot of division, and when there's a need to look for scapegoats. Unfortunately, I think those conditions exist in a more pronounced way now than in the past. There are various causes of it. I think a lot of our political discourse has encouraged division. Unfortunately, we have not taught Holocaust history as well as we should in this country. We do less of it than in many other parts of the world. I think therefore a lot of people grow up without knowing a lot of the history.

Frankly, a lot of people grow up not knowing Jewish people. It's the othering of people that seems to be a lot more common, of dividing people into groups. There's fear. There's fear and anxiety and ignorance, and that can easily be appealed to in the form of hate and distrust.

Janae: Antisemitism was at the foundation of the Holocaust fueled by centuries-old myths. The museum has made it a priority to educate children as young as 13 about Jewish history, culture and about the atrocities committed.

Jack: Obviously telling somebody that 6 million people were killed because of hate is a very hard thing. It's almost impossible to grasp. What we do is we tell individual stories about people because these were people, these were individuals. We tell stories about the actual experiences of people who we specifically name and know their stories about. We also tell stories through the objects that we have in our exhibit. The objects tell the story and the storytelling about individuals bring it to a level that younger people can understand. We also ask them to tell us what they think they would have done in circumstances like this.

What they would have decided, how they would have reacted, what would they have thought, how would they have responded because they put themselves in that picture. They think of themselves in that circumstance. We do have to be sensitive to being too graphic in what we show, but we're really talking about how they make their judgements and values and understand that there were both perpetrators, there were victims, but there were also bystanders and there were upstanders. You can choose as an individual how you'll react to what's going on around you and that there is an ethical choice that can be made.

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Janae: Although there's still hate out there, there is still hope.

Jack: I have hope on a couple of levels. Number one, when I deal with survivors who have gone through things that nobody can describe, and to see them still have belief in humanity and that they don't hate, that in itself is one inspirational thing. The second is to see younger people want very much to know not only what happened, but how they can make sure things like this don't happen and the response when there are hate incidents.

Two years ago, we had a group of proud boys wrapped a confederate flag around the front door of our institution and that was very disturbing and then stand in front and do a Nazi salute in front of a railcar. Those were very disturbing things. What was more hopeful was the response from the community. The school across the street, we had a hundred fifth graders come by and show support. We had teachers, we had residents, we had people from all over town saying, "Not here". There are people who will stand up and say, this is not acceptable, and this is not going to work. That gives us hope.

Janae: Thank you to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Jack Klinger and Toby Levy for sharing these important stories.

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We're continuing our coverage of Holocaust Remembrance Day with the story of Arthur Kahn, told to us by his great niece, Mattie. Arthur became the first Jewish victim of the Holocaust in 1933. Mattie wrote a feature about him for the Atlantic in May of last year. We must warn you that there are a few graphic details in Mattie's story about her great-uncle. Here is her story interspersed with passages from that article.

Mattie Kahn: My name is Mattie Kahn, I'm a writer and the author of the forthcoming book, Young and Restless. Arthur was my great uncle, the oldest oldest child in my grandfather's family. That's my dad's dad. He was born in a small town called Gemünden am Main in Germany. He was 21 when he was killed and became the first Jewish person ever killed by the Nazis. Arthur was a college student at the University of Wurzburg.

I was told the first child of his town, Jewish or not Jewish, to go to college and was something of a golden boy. He was 21 and he had left school for Easter break in March, 1933, just about 10 weeks after the Nazis came to power. He didn't know it, but his name had ended up on a list of radical students. There's no real evidence that he was actually much of a radical. He was a good student, wanted to enter into the field of cancer research, which was just beginning, but his name ended up on this list.

He was arrested while he was in Nuremburg on that school break and brought to Dachau, which we now know as a concentration camp, but at the time, it had just opened as a prison for political dissidents which he had been identified as. He made it about 24 hours there and he was shot within a day of arriving. The Nazis who were running Dachau said that he was shot while he was trying to escape. I had always heard the story and had it confirmed in my own research that when my great-grandfather opened his coffin, he could see that Arthur had been shot through the forehead and through the back. It was clear that he hadn't just been shot while trying to escape.

Janae: Mattie remembers always hearing about her great-Uncle, Arthur.

Mattie: I think that my earliest memories are probably of hearing about him over Passover. That was the anniversary of his death in the Jewish calendar. The second Seder in particular was the night that my grandfather associated with his older brother. I think when you're a kid, family trauma feels a little different. It's just part of the fabric of your life and it's part of the fabric of these holidays. I remember my grandfather talking so much about how much he admired his brother's intellect.

It was something, smarts in general, very much prized in my family. Hearing my grandfather, who we all thought of as "the smart one", talk about this brother, who never got to grow up, who never got to reach his full potential as his intellectual role model, I think that was one of the things that made a real impression on me young.

Between 2018 and 2021, I traveled to Germany to the sites of Arthur's life and death four times. I felt drawn to these places as if walking in his footsteps might tell me something about the person whose gruesome death had come to define his life. I needed to make present the person I had known as an absence. I wanted to see him. A lot of people who've lost family in the Holocaust or for all kinds of other horrible reasons, yearn for this idea of the life before.

I felt like everything I knew about Arthur, aside from these details about how smart he was and what he might have done if he had lived, was tied up in what had happened to him. I turned over every stone I possibly could. What I did find, and what brought me a lot of solace is the photo at the end of the story, which is after years and years of going back and forth to Germany and learning really for the most part about Arthur's death.

I participated in what I thought would be the capstone of this project, which was a stone lane in Gemünden am Main, the town where Arthur was born, that the artist Gunter Demnig initiated as part of his stolpersteine project to lay stones at the last known addresses of victims of the Holocaust. I thought "That's the best that I'm going to do and that's the best way I know to honor Arthur's life."

After I came home from that and had accepted that there would be very little that I would learn about what his life had been like before, I got this incredible email from the public historian of the town, one town over from where my grandfather and Arthur grew up, that said that after he'd read about the stolpersteine laying on the news, he checked the town archives and found that Arthur had been a high school student in this small town in Germany. I hadn't even known that Arthur had left Manderba High School. He included in the email a letter that had been written to him in the '90s by one of Arthur's classmates, reckoning with what had happened to this extremely smart gifted kid from this town.

The letter was fascinating to me for so many reasons. The photo is a photo of Arthur at his graduation. He's the only Jewish person in his class and we know now probably the only person bound for college and the valedictorian. It's just this image of this young man just full of excitement about what's to come. His face looks like the face of every person you've ever seen in a high school graduation photo. It just moved me to think, when this photo was taken for all that may have been going on in Germany at the time, his life was laid out before him and it brought me a peace I really hadn't expected.

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Janae: A picture she was given of her great-uncle had so much to say.

Mattie: I look at that photo and I see Arthur's light and I also see that shadow of what is lurking and what's to come.

Janae: Stay with us. When we return. Mattie reflects on the lessons of the story of her great-uncle whose death marked the beginning of the Holocaust. Plus more about the effect of the Holocaust on Jewish people and the world. It's The Takeaway.

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You're back with The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre filling in for Melissa Harris-Perry. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we're hearing from writer Mattie Kahn about her journey to find the answers about her great uncle, Arthur, who was the first Jewish person killed by Nazis at the start of the Holocaust. Last May, Mattie wrote about his story for The Atlantic, where she describes herself as part of the "never forget generation", but finds that that label is not enough. She spoke to The Takeaway this week.

Mattie: A slogan can't bring about redemption. In searching for Arthur's life amid the wreckage of his death, never forgets, started to feel inadequate. The work of historical excavation is not just to remember what happened, it's to sit with the gaps that no amount of research or reading can ever fill in. There are questions I will never answer about Arthur. There are millions of Arthurs.

I used to think that that 6 million number that so many people know was imprecise. Not only because we know that the Nazis had millions more victims, but also because it felt like such a blanket over these individual stories of horror. Now I feel like I can't even take the 6 million number for granted. I know from reading the research that there are so many people who don't know or recognize the name Auschwitz, who don't know really how the Holocaust started.

I don't know that we're really remembering anything the way that we should. I think we suffer in America in particular, from a serious case of presentism and a lots of history is sacrificed at the altar of the present. I think we see that truly every single day. I think what I feel we can remember well when we apply ourselves is just how fragile things are, and just how easy it is to slide into a reality that would have once felt unrecognizable.

I think that my responsibility as being a grandchild of Holocaust survivors and having grown up immersed in this culture is not to make cheap comparisons between atrocities, but to recognize that little steps that represent any kind of ideology of fascism or totalitarianism add up quicker than you think. I think that what I hope we can remember well is that that slide, it is easy and it is simple and it accrues quickly.

I think what we are at risk of forgetting is an entire society is implicated by something like this happening. Whether you feel that you're part of it or making it worse or exacerbating it or not. I hope that we all recognize that we will be judged. That's really what I think we don't remember and we don't like to remember because it's really hard to feel judged by the future. That judgment will come for us. I think we have to ask ourselves, "What are we doing now to create the kind of world that we want to live in?"

Janae: Mattie feels so much pride for who she is.

Mattie: It's not just a matter of remembering or forgetting, but of how we tell our stories. The conclusion was the hardest to write. I didn't know how it ended, not the speech, not the quest I'd set out on. I settled on the truth. I am so proud to be a German Jew.

Janae: Mattie Kahn is a writer and author of the forthcoming book, Young and Restless. We've been talking about Holocaust Remembrance Day and we wanted to hear from you about how you and your loved ones remember those that survived and those that were lost. Your brief memories told us everything.

Speaker 1: Remembrance Day to me for the Holocaust is a very important way of honoring my family and honoring my husband's family and letting them know how much I care and love them and want them to know that I hope that that never ever happens again. Not just to the Jewish people, but to any people in the whole entire world.

Speaker 2: We had a cousin who died. He was a prisoner of war and he was held and died at Mauthausen Concentration Camp. We just really say some prayers and remember him.

Janae: For some, your remembrances go beyond this one day.

Speaker 3: We remember our family that was lost in the Holocaust every day, their lives, and the legacy that they left for us.

Speaker 4: To me, every day is Holocaust Remembrance Day because my mother was a Holocaust survivor, my aunt survived the death march and my other relatives that perished that I never got a chance to meet. Living every day honoring the sanctity of life and the miracle that they survived is how I observe every day. To me, today is just like any other day.

Speaker 5: My father was a battalion surgeon, the 329th Medical Detachment, and his friend, Dr. Paul [unintelligible 00:25:46], and he liberated the Nordhausen Concentration Camp. I have firsthand account and written records of their testimony, which was given in the trial after the war. We remember regularly, not just one day a year.

Janae: You shared how this day is also a reminder of the generational damage caused by the Holocaust.

Speaker 6: On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I always think of the time I tried to find my family in Europe and I went to the synagogue that we thought they were involved with, and they told me all of the records have been destroyed so that no one could be traced back from the Holocaust, which leaves my family here in America quite adrift with no records of any of our past.

Janae: There are also important lessons you're reminded of today.

Speaker 7: We do inform ourselves that it's possible for not just one person to be wrong or a group of people to be wrong or a large group, but it's possible for an entire country to be wrong and we do inform ourselves with that reflecting on the Holocaust. We should always do more. We should never forget, but we do remember how it's possible to be led astray as a nation.

Speaker 8: I think it's important for people, even without Jewish backgrounds or traditions, to take a moment and reflect on Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's really important for everyone to pay attention to this and not allow history to repeat itself. I didn't lose anybody family-wise in the Holocaust, but so many people did. Especially in this political environment and sometimes the rhetoric that gets tossed around to not be complacent about that kind of hateful speech. It's important for us to recognize the atrocities that were done to our fellow human beings.

Speaker 9: I like to remember my family through celebrating trans rights because the first people that the Nazis came for were trans, the disabled, the homeless and the immigrants.

Janae: You also told us how you use Holocaust Remembrance Day to educate others in an attempt to make the world a better place.

Scott Littky: My name is Scott Littky. I'm calling from Omaha, Nebraska. As a Holocaust educator, I spend every day trying to change the world to better understand from the atrocities of the Holocaust, to teach empathy, understanding, and to teach people to be upstanders if we can change one person as it said in [unintelligible 00:28:30], saving the life of one person is like saving the world. If we can change one person to be an upstander, we've saved the world.

Janae Pierre: Thank you all so much for those reflections. Call us anytime at (877) 869-8253. This is The Takeaway.

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