Bearing Witness to Their Tortured Past

You wouldn’t expect to find a camera crew in this man’s Marina del Rey home. Generally unassuming, he now squirms under the light. The interviewer, an intense-looking woman in her 40s, leans forward, eyes narrowed. As the man speaks, his face is framed tight by the videographer. The questions are probing, relentless. At one point his voice catches and he breaks down, releasing a torrent of tears.

“I can’t go on,” he pleads. “Shut it off.” The woman nods, but when she turns toward the cameraman, her whispered command is: “Keep it rolling.”

The man, a Holocaust survivor, is telling secrets of a tortured past. The woman interviewing him is Klara Firestone, a caterer, jewelry designer and volunteer who takes oral histories from men and women who survived Nazi concentration camps.

Firestone is part of a 15-year-old grass-roots movement in which a handful of small, independent archives around the country have been videotaping the chilling testimonies--a shift from what had been a deafening silence.

While World War II has been largely romanticized in movies, the personal experiences of survivors were sealed behind the eyes of the witnesses themselves.

“It was always a case of one half not wanting to talk and one half not wanting to listen,” says Mary Rothschild, a Los Angeles-based therapist who has interviewed about 30 death camp survivors for an archive run by the Los Angeles group Second Generation.

People who survived the camps, she says, have an intense need to bear witness, “but they never did. For many years and in many places, they were told, ‘Go away with your pain, don’t bother me, I don’t want to hear it.’ So, they just went on with their lives as best they could. This isn’t a past anybody wanted to dwell on,” Rothschild says.

That began to change in the early 1980s, when the specter of dying with the burden of unspoken memories had become a disturbing prospect. In 1981, survivors finally emerged to hold their first formal international gathering in Jerusalem, an event attended by San Francisco-based free-lance writer Lani Silver.

“I remember saying to some of these people, ‘You’ve told your story before? It’s on the record?’ ” Silver says. “They all said, ‘No.’ ” Silver says her surprise was compounded when nearly 100 magazines she queried to write about the gathering turned her down.

“Genocide,” she says, “is not something anyone wanted to think about.”

It was at the Jerusalem gathering that Silver took her first testimony. In the middle of it, the survivor began crying, and Silver reached over to turn off her tape recorder. “He said, ‘No, don’t, these tears are part of the story.’ ”

Two years later, at a subsequent gathering of survivors in Washington, D.C., Silver showed up with several old tape recorders and a suitcase full of recycled audiocassettes. She recruited 25 journalists as volunteers and conducted an impromptu training session, giving them simple guidelines for attaining histories: Never interrupt, try not to become overwrought. Simply listen. Her effort yielded 20 testimonies.

Since then, Silver’s Oral History Project in San Francisco has recorded more than 1,300 testimonies--800 of them on video and others on audiocassettes. Yale University has an archive that has videotaped 3,000 survivors. Here in Los Angeles, Second Generation has recorded 150 testimonies. A couple of years ago, a small program at UCLA recorded about 50 testimonies.

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Perhaps the most ambitious undertaking is the Survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust) Visual History Foundation, established by director Steven Spielberg following the unprecedented attention brought to Holocaust survivors by his film “Schindler’s List.”

The foundation’s mission is to film the testimonies of Holocaust survivors around the world. Suddenly, instead of makeshift studios and beat-up camcorders, there are state of the art resources, including digital technology, computerized data bases and post-production facilities.

Only eight months old, the foundation is already sending out camera crews twice a day, five days a week, establishing satellite projects in New York, Toronto and other major cities. Ultimately, the project will extend around the world.

“I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have imagined that something on this scope would have been done while the survivors are still alive,” says Adelle Chabelski, a professional translator in Ojai who has interviewed 40 survivors for Second Generation. “I feel absolutely wonderful.”

But, she says, the core of any oral history project remains its interviewers. Instead of trolling for occasional volunteers as the smaller groups have done, the Shoah Foundation has been conducting large-scale training sessions in Spielberg’s Amblin’ Entertainment offices on the Universal Studios lot.

Nearly 100 people in Los Angeles alone have come forth to serve as interviewers (an additional 100 have been recruited in New York City), among them psychotherapists, physicians and film industry executives.

The 2 1/2-day sessions are conducted by Silver and others, who have been shouldering this mission alone for years.

But no amount of technology can soften the process of what is an emotionally wrenching task, one that inevitably causes a recurrence of nightmares for the survivors and fits of depression for the interviewers.

“I have trouble sleeping,” says Chabelski, her voice weary and measured with the painful personal histories she has recorded over the past three years. “I have been uncomfortable listening to some of them and have cried over many of them.”

What the interviewers hear as their subjects talk--usually around three hours--are tales that are simultaneously chilling and affirming. Nubile women were sterilized at the camps. Another woman--just 10 at the time--witnessed her 5-year-old brother being beaten by Ukrainian soldiers and then dumped down a well. She ultimately found refuge with a non-Jewish family, but in an ironic twist, she was raised during the war to be anti-Semitic.

Overwhelmingly, the testimonies contain stories of separation, a source of guilt that has haunted survivors for life. But others somehow rose above the disorientation to achieve what was ultimately a fatal clarity.

Rothschild tells the story, recounted to her by a woman survivor, of a young boy whose father managed to keep him hidden in the camp for several months until the child’s hiding place was sniffed out by guard dogs. As the child was pulled away screaming in the midst of the camp, the helpless father turned to the woman, shrugged and said: “What can I do? I can’t let him go alone.” Grabbing the child’s hand, he walked with him into the gas chamber.

Not all the testimonies are from survivors. Among Rothschild’s subjects was Col. James Hayes, who led the liberation of Buchenwald in April, 1945. Hayes told Rothschild of a bizarre experiment conducted by German scientists, ostensibly to test the human limits of hypothermia. Jewish prisoners, Hayes said, were pushed into frozen lakes, removed and then vivisected while still alive. “It was really just an excuse for torture,” Rothschild says.

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Through the telling of these histories, the interviewers try to remain passive but supportive. They are not seen--and not often heard--on the videotaped testimonies. But maintaining the role of an unobtrusive observer is difficult at best--in fact, some interviewers say, it’s impossible.

“I do not believe that anyone should sit in front of a survivor while he is pouring his guts out and remain passionless,” says Firestone, who admits to being a more aggressive brand of interviewer. “I hurt for these people and I can’t keep that inside.”

Danese Bardot, a Los Angeles paralegal who has volunteered for Second Generation, agrees that maintaining a stoic attitude is difficult.

“It can’t be helped, you can’t be emotionless when you’re listening to their stories,” she says. For Bardot, interviewing survivors is not just about memories: The experiences have an unfortunate immediacy to her own life. An African American, she decided to join the project when her son brought home a flyer from his high school that had been distributed by white supremacists, telling students not to associate with the blacks in school.

“I feel a connection with the oppression that these people went through,” Bardot says. “I still have trouble comprehending that nations of people could be convinced that the solution to their problems is the destruction of a race.”

While many Holocaust interviewers say they feel privileged to be told of these experiences, they acknowledge that being present at the bearing of witness is difficult.

“Listening,” Rothschild says, “I experience pain and loss and rage at what has been done to these people. And I also feel despair about my own helplessness because I want to restore to them what was lost and I know it’s impossible.”

* If you want to be interviewed by the Survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust) Visual History Foundation, call (800) 661-2092.