-See that one?

-You might be torn.

-I want to sort these, like, chronologically or something.

-Well... -"To whom it may concern, Manny Drukier has been associated with the 17th F.O.B.

for the past six months..." -I have to have two of them.

-Well, that's the other box.

"...having been taken from Buchenwald.

He is awaiting a visa from the American consulate to be shipped to the United States."

That's why you're in uniform.

-Yeah.

-Must have been pretty proud.

You see these, L.D.?

-I've seen the one in the uniform.

-No, but these... Manny, this is a different box of pictures.

I have not seen some of these.

-After the war, we had heard a rumor that there was a children's home in Germany.

-So, it was like -- they had rooms for you and everything?

-Well, it was a school building, and they built some, uh, bunks.

-The assignment was to go into Germany and look for unaccompanied children.

-This is pretty funny, you guys all posing.

-It looks like a... disturber.

[ All laugh ] -The first thing was to give them food, to give them clothing, and listen to their stories.

Each had a terrible story to tell.

The real sufferers and survivors were not small children.

They were between 15 and 18.

-Manny arrived in the orphanage at age 17.

He is a Holocaust survivor.

♪♪ -Somebody there, I don't know who, had had a camera.

Took these pictures.

♪♪ ♪♪ -I'm speechless.

-I know.

♪♪ -Anyway, it's, uh... all that in an old cigar box.

♪♪ ♪♪ -That's Manny a couple months after he landed in New York.

His cousin got married.

And this is how the bridesmaids and the ushers were groomsmen or whatever, would dress at these weddings, that the women would dress up as brides.

It was a very short courtship.

I want you to know.

We met, and three months later we were engaged, and six months later we were married.

There's Manny, putting the veil over.

He was determined.

"This is the lady I'm going to marry, and that's it."

And this was under the chuppah, the wedding canopy.

So, he's always been very sure of himself.

And in a certain way, I felt that he was special because of what he had gone through.

♪♪ ♪♪ -I arrived in New York in December of 1946.

From then on, I got started, but it took a long while.

-I heard the cries.

I saw the beatings.

I saw the shootings.

I saw their being murdered.

-Over the years, he didn't talk much about what he went through.

-How can you talk about something that's been horrendous?

Out of Poland alone, 3 million people were exterminated.

Altogether, 6 million Jews were sent to camps and never came out.

-When he was young, he had a really big extended family, and after the war much of the family has been lost.

-You try to forget it, but you can never forget it.

♪♪ -Yeah.

Oh, I see you're on.

Okay, let me phone you.

[ Beeping ] Oh, you're phoning me.

Okay.

-Hello?

-Hi.

-Hello, there.

[ Voice distorted ] -What?

Oh, wait.

I got a picture.

Gordon, all we see is your beard.

-Yeah.

-Are they recording or something?

-No, no, no, that's cousin Helen.

-That's cousin Helen?

-January '47.

-Yeah.

This is their Passover preparation.

-Oh, wow.

-And that's the chicken-soup pot.

-Is it big enough?

-There was this article in the Smithsonian about the exhibition that was being held in New York about these children from Indersdorf.

And I remember my father had been there.

So, I sent my mother a link to the article in Smithsonian so that, you know, just might be interesting, I thought.

-So, Gordon sent us the article.

I clicked on the link, and I scrolled down, and there were photographs.

And I recognized my husband.

-How did it come about that you ended up there?

-At the orphanage?

-Yeah.

-We heard about this place that, you know, there's three meals a day and maybe you got a chance to leave the country.

-And then we learned that this woman, Anna Andlauer, she's a historian.

She lives in the town of Indersdorf in Germany.

And she's been, you know, over the last ten years trying to find kids that were at the camp and that survived.

-When the Americans liberated this part of Germany, they saw that there were a lot of children around, and they thought a special home is needed.

And then it became the Children Center.

I think it really started when I moved here in 1986, and I started to do voluntary work in the memorial site.

And at the beginning I thought, "I know everything."

And then somebody turned up and said, "Do you know that there were Jewish children in Indersdorf?"

Here, nobody knew about it.

And I thought, "These people might still be alive."

And then I started to search.

And by now I have found more than 100 survivors who were in Kloster Indersdorf.

He lived in London, he in New York.

He in Carolina.

He is still alive in New York.

He lives in Israel right now.

He lived in London.

He is still alive in Warsaw.

And Erwin really was my first discovery.

Right from the beginning, Erwin said, "Please find Drukier.

He was such a strong person, such a wonderful friend.

Please find him."

I think I looked for many, many years.

I tried everywhere, and suddenly I got an email from Erwin telling me, "Imagine.

Drukier called me."

It was a wonderful surprise.

There was an article on the Smithsonian magazine with Manny and Irvin in the same picture.

-Erwin Farkas was like my dad's buddy, his best buddy, when he was there.

The last time they'd seen each other was 1949.

So, Manny caught up on the last 70 years.

-Then I asked Erwin, "Can I please have the phone number?"

And then I called Manny.

-Hey!

-Manny!

-Hi.

-Hello... -At long last.

-[ Laughs ] Well, you're a discovery for me, too.

-Well, I don't think so.

But, anyway, we can always think about it.

-These survivors are our last chance to hear something firsthand about the Holocaust.

I had wanted to have Manny come and talk to students in Indersdorf and somehow get a little bit, at least a little bit, of what he had to go through.

♪♪ -The reason he had cold feet, as I understood, you know, after I kind of pried it out of him, you know, was, "Why do I want to go back to the scene of the horror?

Why do I want to go back to that?"

Fair enough.

[ Laughs ] -I love that photo.

-That's great!

-That's the picture for... -I felt that it was about time Manny talked about it, because for the longest time he didn't.

-As opposed to coming... -Immediately after the war, most people just wanted to move on.

[ Indistinct chatter ] Among the survivors, there were no discussions.

There might be a brief observation, but people wipe it out.

They try to live a normal life.

-I felt it was important, you know, that he should tell the kids his story, that they had a right to know.

-When we were growing up.

I never really felt that I got all the details of exactly what happened.

-It was something that I never felt that I could actually probe him on.

So, I took whatever little pieces I got.

-I feel like all I knew was, Holocaust survivor.

Most of the family perished.

-To this day, no idea how much he thinks about it on a daily basis, weekly basis?

Is it common?

No idea.

-And I thought for him, it would be good to not get it out of his system, but to share it.

At first he didn't want to do it.

But then he thought about it.

And then he came to the conclusion on his own, which always happens, you know, like it's his idea.

-Manny decides to go to Indersdorf and brings along his family.

-We had to find a good point to start from, so I thought the best thing would be if we went to Poland.

-You know, he had it all mapped out in his head.

"All right, I think we should go to Poland first and then go to Germany."

-I was thinking of it as this great adventure, as much for the the traveling with the whole family as it was for what we were going to see.

-You know, Brett was in all along and talked to Gordon, and he can get the time off.

-I was like, "I'll be like... I'll do social media or something.

Like, just bring me along.

I'll do anything.

I just want to come."

-And suddenly Wendy can go.

And my husband Jan is coming, and he's a native Polish speaker.

Okay.

Game on.

♪♪ ♪♪ -But the funny thing... -Yeah?

-Yeah.

...we seem to keep passing this great car, playing leapfrog.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Smells good.

Let's get a baba.

The trajectory was to go to the places to do with my past.

So, I insisted on the first week to do Poland and the second week Germany, because to do it the other way, it wouldn't work in my mind.

-We wanted to come to Poland, as well, to show the children Manny's beginnings, and I think the kids will be more able to understand where their father came from once they see all these places that Manny was.

-I think probably... -Yeah.

This is... -This is it.

-This is it?

-Yeah.

-This is it.

-What is this?

-This is... This is Manny's childhood home.

-Number 13 is the actual apartment.

-You know, every Pole is fascinated with the Holocaust, but it's for most of them it's a very historical thing, whereas here I had a real connection because of Manny.

-This is the doorway there.

-That door?

-The doorway, yeah.

-Yeah.

As I remember, this cobblestones was smooth, beautiful, smooth.

-Going through these various places in Poland where my father had been... -You see that space there between the buildings?

-It was very interesting to see and be able to tie back together the present with the past.

-This is it.

-Near as Dad can remember, his Uncle Fischel and Aunt Bluma were on the second floor to the left of that old door there.

-Okay.

-So right above the sex shop.

-Yeah.

-Sex shop.

-Yeah, that probably wasn't here.

-[ Laughing ] Sex shop.

-Hi!

We're all here!

-[ Laughs ] -It's not up on the first floor.

-Are we there yet?

-Haven't even done one block yet.

-Well, this is it.

They've torn down the building.

This is where the school was.

-Okay.

-We think a lot about where he used to walk and his school and the old neighborhood and all the people, and it was really cute to hear.

-There's no mistaking.

This is... This is this school, and this is this school.

-Tracing Manny's story through Poland and trying to imaging how it would look for him, it was like being able to go back in time.

♪♪ -I got to get some sleep because we're going to keep walking.

♪♪ -He didn't get really implicated in what was going on in our lives as kids.

I remember being young and resentful because if we were upset about something or having a fight about something, he just kind of threw up his hands and thought it was ridiculous.

-We didn't know his whole story when we were growing up, so we never said to ourselves, "Oh, this is nothing compared to what Dad went through."

-Compared to the problems he faced as a kid, he thought our problems that we thought were huge were just trivial.

-Oh, this is us.

-It's not that I didn't know that he loved me, but that kind of revealed a bit more to me about how he's dealt with what he had to live through.

♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] -This small train station was the arrival point for about 38,000 Jews from Central Europe.

-Hello, everyone.

My name is Mr.

Gawlik.

I'm going to tell you in a few sentences about everything that happened here in the ghetto, when basically the German military started occupying.

♪♪ -Towards the end of 1939, it looked like they were going to create a ghetto for the Jewish people.

My family was still together.

We thought we should get out, first, my mother and I and then my father and my sister.

We were the lucky ones.

-The rest of Manny's family decided to stay.

-So, here's a model of the ghetto.

Before they opened the ghetto, all these buildings were destroyed to make a buffer zone between the ghetto and the rest of the city.

160,000 were put into this area.

Most did not come out alive.

-Every now and then, they would send out people who never came back.

-On the table here, you saw lists.

They were Jewish people who got deported, deported to the death camps.

-His aunts and other family members had been in the ghetto.

Seeing the transport lists and finding their names and realizing they had been there till the very end.

-Oh, I got one.

-Oh, a Drukier?

-Yeah.

Erna.

-E-r-n-a.

-Can't see it.

-It says Druiker.

-That's my aunt.

She was sent with my grandfather.

-In 1944, the Nazis began liquidating the ghetto.

All were sent to death camps.

♪♪ -That's a big place, you know.

-Yeah.

-Looks like we're going directly there.

[ Insects chirping ] -So, where is it?

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -[ Speaking Yiddish ] -At some point in grade school, we had to do a country project.

So, first I picked Poland because my father was from Poland.

And then a day or so later, after picking that, I had this sort of feeling like, "This is a terrible idea."

I don't know why.

It could be just out of fear that at any moment, anybody that I'm fond of could just disappear.

♪♪ You think about all your ancestors and all your relatives that didn't survive.

It's not an easy thing... to live up to.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The persecution started in 1941.

The Germans made sure that all the Jews were to be killed.

So, we had to find a place to hide.

We took for the next major town in the interior, which was Kielce, and we rented a flat there.

-Yeah, just in the green building.

They may have added a wall.

-Changed it entirely.

-Can you read that?

-Yeah.

-This is fruit and vegetables and also other groceries.

-Let's ask what happens when you go behind the back door?

-Let's see.

[ Conversing in Polish ] -You see that, where it's all covered up?

This was the apartment.

Yeah.

[ Dog barking ] -We stayed there for something like nine months.

And when food got scarce, we moved to Staszow.

-Turn left.

-Turn left?

-Yeah.

This is actually the street.

-Okay.

-This is where we spent a year or two.

-In there?

-Yeah.

This is the street.

But there was never an apartment building in the whole city.

Yeah, that's it, right here.

The basement was where the red fence is.

A mother and father and a daughter were living there.

They were hiding with us.

Right there was the basement where we hid.

It was a burned-out house and the basement was there.

♪♪ At this point, Staszow also became a ghetto.

We knew that our days are numbered.

It was a hide and seek type of thing because if you let yourself be found, you were gone.

♪♪ So we kept hiding in the basement of a building that was torn down until we got captured.

-After being captured, they were sent to a camp in Kielce and then separated.

His sister was sent to Ravensbruck.

Manny and his father were sent to Czestochowa.

And his mother Auschwitz.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] -This is Lucas.

I told him we're all really inquisitive minds and we want to know as much as possible about everything.

-During the war, there were thousands of other different camps, but among all of them, Auschwitz was known as the biggest, the largest one.

The Germans killed over 1 million people.

90% of all the victims were Jewish.

So if you're ready, we can go to the main gate first, the one with the famous sign, "Arbeit macht frei."

♪♪ Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, it's the map of the Europe.

But have a look at the location of Auschwitz.

There were people brought the Auschwitz from almost all over Europe.

They were sent here to die.

-The Holocaust is probably the most well-documented and most prominent genocide.

Growing up as a child of a survivor and it being the fabric of who I am, one of the things I always wondered about is how can this evil be perpetrated?

-If they were selected to die from this place, they were sent this way and then to the end of the tracks.

So, in the photograph you can see people that are already on their way to the gas chamber.

And a couple hours after this picture was taken and those people were dead.

-We should never forget, and I really think it's important to make it relevant to people that they can really connect with it on an individual level, because that's, to me, a good way to prevent such a thing from happening again.

♪♪ -Guys, this can be very emotional because I'm sure you have similar photographs like these at home.

-I was thinking about the people who were there.

The Nazis took these people who were blameless, just ordinary people living their lives, and exterminated them.

For me, I just felt the heaviness of the emotion.

Like as if the emotions were still there as a physical entity.

♪♪ -First time.

-This is kind of like driving in a box.

-Turn right.

-Ah!

Engleski.

-Turn right and then turn right.

-Wait a minute.

Turn right and then turn right?

I can't.

So where's reverse?

[ Laughter ] Oh, no.

-Just go backwards.

You'll be alright.

And then you take first left, L.D.

-Oh, frick.

-Maybe you should drive the other vehicle.

-Having difficulty?

-L.D, left, left, left.

-I'm there, I'm getting there.

Frickety frick!

[ Laughter ] Okay.

I'm good, I'm good.

-[ Laughs ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -The second week when we were in Germany was basically organized by Anna, bringing my father over to give a presentation in Indersdorf.

-With the talk with the students, I have to say there's a bit of, like, nervousness.

I was definitely unsure going into it how Manny would be.

-The apprehension I felt more was how it was going to impact on him, because it was pretty heavy stuff with what happened during the war.

-I was totally apprehensive because I didn't know how much a human being can turn off their emotions for good.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] -George, how are you?

-Yeah, Manny.

-Anna.

-Manny, pleased to meet you.

-At last.

-Yes.

At last.

How many years are you apart, Gordon and... -Almost two years and then four years and then... -Manny, for example, didn't want to tell his children.

He wanted to protect them.

And, uh, of course, the past is always inside him.

-We would watch movies or miniseries or whatever about the Holocaust, and Manny would go, "Ah, it wasn't -- That's a Hollywood version."

-Yeah.

-It wasn't like that.

-He did that a lot.

He said, "No, it wasn't really like that.

Ah!"

And he'd walk away.

"They don't know what they're talking about."

-Some of these things are not...explainable.

Well, you've had discussions with any number of survivors, right?

Going back there who visit these places.

Most people won't go back.

Anyway, this nightmare is there.

-The survivors had a whole trail of traumatic experiences behind them.

Not just one traumatic experience.

But the worst always was the separation of their family.

And this is certainly true for Manny.

-Some people live forever in the past.

You know?

Now with me, for instance, I, uh... I never forget what happened, but I'm prepared to live on.

♪♪ There I was 14 years old or something, making munitions and whatever else they needed.

You didn't know if you were there for a month or a week or a year or whatever, but there was no such thing as a safe place.

♪♪ While all this was happening, you were hoping that the war would end at some point.

Well, the war didn't end, so you had to find a way to stay alive.

-Hoping to trigger his recollection, Anna arranges a visit to some sites to retrace Manny's memory.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -On behalf of the Leipzig Nazi Forced Labour Memorial, I'd like to welcome you all.

And on this location, the HASAG has had its main factory.

It had around 16,000 employees, and around 10,000 of them were forced laborers.

-This map is a historical map of Leipzig.

-How many camps were there approximately?

-So nowadays we know there are at least 700 in Leipzig camps.

-You mean just in Leipzig there were 700 camps?

-Yes.

-I didn't realize there were so many camps in Leipzig.

We just thought that we were the only ones, you know.

-You know, when we saw the map in Leipzig with all the pins in it of all the concentration camps just in Leipzig, um, it was, you know, in a scale beyond what I had comprehended.

-I just never realized the extent to which the Nazi war machine was fueled by slave labor.

-With so many hungry people working, there was no rebellion or anything like that.

People were so hungry.

There was starvation.

So you were better off working and getting that bread and soup, as long as you just barely got enough to live.

-Extermination through work was a means to kill prisoners as a result of forced labor.

-They perished because of lack of any medical care.

And this, in the effect, was extermination.

♪♪ -How many people have lived through the war?

I don't know if I would have existed if I would have lived through something like that.

I don't think I would have survived.

♪♪ ♪♪ -We were in a munitions factory for something like two and a half years.

And the chances of preservation were diminished every month.

Myself, my father, we were still together.

And then we were sent out to another camp in Buchenwald, Germany, which is much further west.

♪♪ ♪♪ -You might have a look and remember the inscription of the gate.

-What does it say here?

-It's only -- You cannot read it from here.

It's only to be seen from the inside.

-Uh-huh.

-In German, it is "Jedem das Seine" -- To each his own.

Which is actually another act of humiliation of the people.

So where the, um, where the barracks used to be, that used to be a zoo.

-What?

-What?

-A zoo?

-A zoo.

-While -- While the camp was operating?

-For the SS.

-For their amusement?

-For their amusement.

-How lovely.

-For their leisure time, that was, um, a cage for bears.

But they also had some stags, some deer, some monkeys, goldfish.

On one hand, animals well fed because they had to look nice.

On the other hand, the prisoners, starving people.

And not only that they were starving, but to them it was very humiliating to see that animals were treated much better than they were.

♪♪ -Each of these places, we deliberately want there to bring back some memories, not necessarily pleasant.

♪♪ Being reminded about it in this fashion is probably instructive for people who have not experienced it.

But to have it told again and again and again is not the type of experience I would go out of my way to look for.

-He wasn't just in concentration camps.

He was in some of the worst concentration camps.

And these places were designed not just to kill you physically, but to destroy your soul.

♪♪ -Here is the number you got here.

114985.

And this is the number you had in Kielce.

-With overcrowding in Buchenwald at its worst, Manny and his father and others were shipped to a satellite camp in Flossberg.

-The numbers were read out and my father was on the list to be sent.

And I wanted to be with my father.

So I switched numbers with another fellow.

I gave him my number and took his number, and we were sent out.

That was pretty rough.

Few survived it.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversation ] -Do you remember, uh, uh, about details of the barracks where you have been or something?

-I don't remember a forest there, but the level field here as -- as the way it was.

Except there was no grass.

It was all mud.

-How did this compare to Buchenwald?

So you came.

Is this a better or worse place?

-Worse.

-Yeah.

-People, of course, were starving and they were taking dead bodies away.

You know, there's people dying every day.

The bodies were stacked up three, four high.

And it was just -- just bad all around.

Uh, all they tried to do is ship as much of the weapons out of there as possible.

-The prisoners there, like Manny and his father, was producing Panzerfausts, a type of bazookas for the German army.

[ Tapping ] -[ Speaking German ] -Yeah.

Yeah.

This is the kind of tube.

That's it.

Yeah.

We made these.

And this is the trigger.

Yeah.

The powder was filled in there.

-This was a preferred type of weapon in the German army, and they urgently needed huge amounts of it.

And when the Russian troops came closer from the east, Flossberg was shut down, and it was decided to move them by train to Mauthausen in Austria.

-All prisoners, including Manny and his father, were put on a death train headed for an extermination camp.

♪♪ -It was something along the lines of, "You know, you were the same age too.

Why aren't you thinking about this?"

And it's just... It's like -- Sure, it's the same age, but I probably wouldn't have done anywhere near the same things that he did.

It's similar but very dissimilar at the same time.

-And, um, you say you wouldn't have done any of the things.

Um, like what things?

What were some... -Well, I -- [ Chuckles ] I probably wouldn't have survived is what I'm saying.

-[ Speaking German ] -In most cases-- In many cases, people didn't know that basically crossing this space -- after crossing this space, they didn't have much time left to live.

-Normally, we were divided into work groups and marched off.

That particular morning, they said, "No, no, you're going to be going on a train."

My father went in another wagon and I went with the younger people.

♪♪ The locomotive would stop every once in a while and they would knock and yell, "Viele Tote?

", which is "How many dead?"

to remove the dead bodies.

I didn't know which wagon my father was in.

One of the stops I went by and yelled out his name, and one of the people said that...he died.

♪♪ We were given a slice of bread a day for the next two, three, four days.

And as far as we were concerned, we weren't going to sit there and starve to death.

So we're just trying to figure out how to get out.

At that point, there was no option.

That's when we decided to jump when the train was moving.

I had the fellas push me out of the window because I didn't have the strength to lift myself and get out.

So I fell down the embankment and my friend was pushed a few minutes later and he walked back and picked me up.

We survived.

-Being sent to the death camp, it's very difficult to imagine just what had been going through their heads.

Panic.

Um, perhaps cynical thoughts.

Anger.

It's very somber atmosphere, I suppose.

♪♪ -Just a few days after Manny jumped from the train, Germany surrendered and the war was over.

-For someone who went through what he went through, he's never felt sorry for himself.

And I'm positive that he survived because of his personality.

♪♪ -I like to think that I've been lucky.

It may seem difficult, but I managed to be optimistic all along.

After we jumped, we walked over to the first house we could see.

Sure enough, there were haystacks.

We found one and we crawled in and went to sleep.

Then in the morning we went to the next town, and while we were there, we heard about the children's home in Indersdorf.

It was a wonderful place because we got three meals a day.

You got a roof over your head.

So we went there and registered.

[ Bell tolling ] [ Indistinct conversations ] -Shall we just walk around first of all and let's see what you remember here.

-Yes, there was a staircase, but I don't remember it being so impressive.

-[ Laughs ] I always try to imagine what kind of boy he was.

He was all alone in the world.

His father was dead.

And somehow he managed to live and he made it till today.

-All the negative aspects -- There's always something very positive.

This hope made them survive.

-I think that some people are born with optimism.

Some are born with pessimism.

You just have to do the best you can on the circumstances.

-Manny made it against all odds.

It never occurred to him that he wouldn't make it.

And of course, there was probably a lot of people that had similar characteristics that didn't make it.

And that's simply through the providence that he enjoyed.

-How can a person go through all this and not being bitter?

And this is a wonderful message.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversation ] [ Indistinct conversations ] What did you think of the empty field?

[ Conversations stop ] -Hello.

So, we'd like to say thank you that we have the opportunity today that you tell us your story.

And nice to meet you.

-[ Laughs ] [ Applause ] ♪♪ -We did it ourselves.

-Thank you.

-It's honey.

-Was it honey?

Yes.

-Yes.

-Thank you very much.

-Nice to meet you.

Yeah.

-Guten Morgen.

You must realize I was almost 11 when the war started.

So all I can suggest to you is to read up on the period and the terrible things that were happening.

-It just really struck me how interested they were, how engaged they were, how vested they were to hear his account.

-What I would like to do is have you ask me any questions that you want answered.

♪♪ From my point of view, you deal with each person as they are.

There is no common denominator.

-My father's never been a victim.

My father took the hand he was dealt.

He worked hard and he didn't stay burdened by the past.

-He's not a bitter person.

He's a happy person.

And it definitely, I feel like, came across when he was talking to people.

-If you're referring to if it's painful now, yes.

If it was painful then, it -- it was an ongoing thing that people were dying constantly.

-You could argue that he could easily have a strong sense of entitlement.

He lost his family, almost his whole history, and never having this feeling like the world owed him something.

-Thank you for being here.

My question is... -Manny's story is sort of a testament to this attitude of optimism that hopefully can inspire this generation.

-You're all young and the entire future is ahead of you.

I'd just like to leave you something.

No matter what the circumstances, you got to look at the bright side.

Never get discouraged.

Nothing is forever.

So you just move on.

I have been fortunate enough to think positively at all times.

So there.

[ Applause ] [ Indistinct conversation, laughter ] [ Indistinct conversations ] -Anna, we would like to give you a little gift.

-Oh, thank you.

-For starting this whole thing.

If it wasn't for you, none of us would be here.

It was a thank-you, and we wanted to show our appreciation for everything that she had done.

-It's really, really wonderful.

Thank you so much.

-It was something not every family experiences.

And I'm really glad that it turned out the way it did.

And, uh, as they say in Yiddish, it was bashert.

It was meant to be.

[ Accordion playing, group singing ] -This was an opportunity to see the side of Germany that had actually come to grips with its history, and not denied it.

-It's a country that is, you know, dealing with its past.

I don't think of it as the Germany of, you know, the early '40s or the '30s.

I think of it as the Germany of today.

-They're not trying to make everyone forget that this happened, that none of this is relevant.

They're out there.

They're trying to raise awareness.

They are doing the right thing.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversation ] -Filming support.

-Goodbye.

Goodbye.

-We remember everybody's names from the trip.

We remember all the meals we had, remember all the meals we shared with the people who greeted us or, you know, everybody became part of our family for that duration.

-Thanks again for all your organizing.

-Yeah.

-Our father is, you know -- He's hitting 90 pretty soon.

And, uh, if we hadn't done it then, we probably never would have done it.

-Thank you.

Thank you.

-It seems ridiculous, but in October, I'll be 90, you know?

I mean, it's -- Even in this day and age, it's pretty -- pretty impressive.

But as far as people like myself, hardly anybody is alive who can tell the story.

It's astounding.

-It's extremely important to know about the Holocaust and how it all started and how it ended and what it meant to individual human beings.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Things, as they fade into the past, become less real.

As time moves further on, we need those firsthand witness accounts.

So I think it's important to tell these stories.

It's still happening, and there's various places where there has been genocide, human rights abuses.

And I feel the responsibility to speak up to -- to try and do something about it.

[ Woman speaking indistinctly ] -Yeah.

It's really important not to forget, not because it's history and a horrible thing happened, but because people have to learn from it.

In China, the practice of Falun Gong was severely persecuted, and I look at, you know, what my dad suffered in the Holocaust, and I feel like the only way to prevent it from happening again is people have to point it out, see it, and say, "This is wrong."

-We all maintain a certain deep sense of history.

There's the stories that we tell about our past.

And for me, this was my story in a sense.

You know, they say that every Jewish child that's brought into the world is another refutation of the Holocaust.

And so I will therefore do my part.

-Thank you.

Thanks, Karen.

Thanks for inviting me.

I'll tell you a bit about my dad.

I didn't know any details.

We're the last generation that has a parent who -- who are survivors.

Yes, it was a generation ago, but we felt it in our growing up.

He couldn't help but be the person he is today because what he went through.

And so we can't help but be influenced by it because he w-- he's our dad.

-We're all meant to survive.

And I think I've contributed something by my staying alive.

-Manny's mother and sister survived the Holocaust, and in 1948, they reunited together in Toronto, Canada.

-♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪ Happy birthday, dear Manny ♪ ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪