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MAN: I'm terrified of Auschwitz.
MAN EXHALES
Okay.
No.
I'm not ready to walk in yet. Sorry.
MAN EXHALES
Why do I not have the guts to do it?
DIRECTOR: You live in a very unique world,
because the world knows about your mother and father.
WOMAN: Mr. Sokolov...
Call me Lali.
You're looking for someone to write your life story?
My parents were almost like, that got put away in a box.
His story was kept hidden for decades,
until he revealed it to author Heather Morris.
It is a Holocaust story.
It's not the story of the Holocaust.
GARY: There are still unanswered questions.
Why was my dad so hardened?
Why was my mom so depressed?
The people that have read the book
actually knew more than I did growing up.
The thought of having to walk through those gates
terrifies me.
And I have tried four times and I couldn't even cross,
which made me feel like a coward.
This is my parents' history.
My dad would be so proud of that.
It's amazing.
I felt the presence of your mom.
She let me tell this story.
He's just this one man and he's so small
in this enormous camp,
and he's learning about the horror that's unfolding.
GARY: And that's what beats me up,
is that there's this gap
of their experience that I haven't experienced yet.
I have to do this now.
GARY: Smile for the camera.
You beautiful bird.
When she's not trying to tell me off.
There you go.
BIRD CHEEPS
GARY: Yeah, oh!
Okay, so, my name's Gary Sokolov.
I am the only child of Lali and Gita Sokolov.
My parents were happy people.
They had managed to almost wipe out that whole experience,
and for them, it was always about moving forward.
I mean, how beautiful is my mom?
And look at my dad. And there was that smile.
How proud they were to have had a child.
You know, 16 years of trying,
and they finally had a son.
And you can just see the glow.
I'm 63.
It's time.
It's time for me to know my parents.
And they deserve for me
to understand what they went through.
I want now to walk in their footsteps.
You know, try and understand
what was going through their heads,
because the impact it had on them was lifelong.
INTERVIEWER: When did you arrive in Australia?
1949, September.
You want to see the picture?
In that photo is when we arrived,
the first day, to Australia.
It is Sydney.
INTERVIEWER 2: Have you had any children?
I have one son. Thanks, God.
Who is a very big and good boy.
He is big all the time, but good occasionally.
INTERVIEWER 2: What's his name?
Gary, and we love him very much.
GARY: Do you want some help?
GIRL: Can you grab the mayonnaise?
GARY: Yeah.
And salt.
-Yeah. -What's that?
GARY: Being a dad was really, really important to me.
I suppose, if there was any enormous guilt,
it would have been if my parents had survived
and there was no continuity.
-Hello. Good Shabbos. -GARY: Good Shabbos.
-Hello, Mommy. -Mali, you look beautiful!
How are you? Good Shabbos.
GARY: I cherish every single happy or sad moment with them,
because I'm a dad.
And that's, like, amazing.
-Good Shabbos, everyone! -Good Shabbos, everyone!
-L'chaim. -MOM: L'chaim.
Dig in and eat.
Right, who stole the gravy?
GIRL: Me.
-HEATHER: Are you ready? -Yes.
HEATHER: When I had spent that first day with him,
he said to me,
"Did you know I was the Tattoowierer in Auschwitz?"
I was spending time with this man who had lived through
one of the most horrific episodes of recent history.
Not only lived, he'd survived. He'd been a fighter.
He always would do that to his arm,
and made the numbers...
GARY: I would sometimes come home from work
and he would be standing, staring at that window.
He wouldn't even hear me come in.
And it would be like, "Hi, Dad."
And he wouldn't react for a minute or two.
LALI INHALES
I'm right here.
You know it.
HEATHER: Your dad said to me so many times
about he was constantly surrounded by ghosts.
Mm. Yeah.
They had been part of his life since the day he left there.
I could see every now and then when he left me,
and I knew, "Now he's back in 1942."
I was 11 or 12 years old, and there was a documentary.
Um... World at War.
And my parents said to me that I have to watch this.
And I had to sit there by myself,
watching this.
NARRATOR: What we went through will be difficult to understand,
even for our contemporaries,
and much more difficult for the generations
that have already no personal experience from those days.
EXHALES
I saw the bulldozers
doing piles of dead bodies,
and people just lying there,
just skin and bone.
That has stuck with me, and that was my first exposure.
And even after that...
have something to eat, go to bed.
DIRECTOR: Would you say you've been traumatized
by their trauma?
That's a really interesting question.
My parents were almost like,
that got put away in a box.
"That was where we were.
This is where we are now. We're in Australia."
INTERVIEWER 2: Why did you come to Australia?
Why we came to Australia?
As far away from "ism" as possible.
Nazism, communism, I didn't want to hear about it,
so as far away.
SHIP HORN BLOWS
NARRATOR: Australia opened its doors to Europe
after World War II.
A million-odd migrants brought a new flavor and a new look,
learning English, finding jobs, raising families,
and, by and large, having few regrets.
Yes, young Australia is a bright light,
a fair dinkum land,
in our changing world.
GARY: I've never met a Holocaust survivor
that's actually willing to talk about his experiences.
So, we're now on our way to visit
a gentleman called Abram Goldberg.
He was one of the founders
of the Holocaust Museum here in Melbourne.
It's actually his birthday in ten days' time.
He's going to be 100.
When they opened the doors,
do you remember what your first thought was?
I only thought about, "What will I do? How will I save my mom?"
Right. Okay.
And when my mother had to go down to the high cattle train,
we didn't know what those flames are.
-GARY: Right. -ABRAM: Nobody knew anything.
You only realize it's hell.
And outside, the way people were treated,
she realized she is not going to survive.
No. Okay.
So she turned to me and said,
"Abram, you should do everything humanly possible to survive."
I knew that I was going to dedicate my life.
It's what I'm doing.
You've done an amazing job.
Not let the world forget what happened.
GARY: I'm so honored that I got to talk to you,
because my whole life, no one spoke to me.
No one wanted to.
ABRAM: I made sure that my children knows.
NARRATOR: The young Jew in Australia
has often been brought up in the shadow
of his parents' direct experience of persecution.
SINGING IN HEBREW
My name is George Halasz, and for the last 25 years,
I've been researching intergenerational trauma
based on the lived experiences of my mother, Alice,
who's a Holocaust survivor.
You're a second generation like I'm a second generation.
So, were you curious about their stories?
I think I was already at the point where I stopped asking,
because my parents never answered.
So, that, to me, speaks about the desire to be secretive.
Yes.
Do you think there was any quality of numbness in either,
or both, of your parents?
Definitely not Mom. Very possible with Dad.
Just because I never saw any emotion from him.
Right.
So something must have happened to him in the camps
that numbed him,
where he became a person that only ever looked forward.
-GEORGE: Yes. -Never looked back.
Look, I witnessed things.
Killings. Right?
Torture. Beatings. Right?
Unbelievable, where boys killed boys,
inmates killed inmates.
What I'm hearing, your father,
despite the experiences of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
went on regardless.
If you survived when everyone around you is dying,
you just think, "All right, I've survived today."
That survival instinct.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Right.
Holocaust trauma is the lived experiences
that were so overwhelming
as to actually have changed their minds and their bodies.
And it is this persistent survival mode
that is labelled "traumatic experience".
GARY: Why was my dad so hardened?
Why was my mom so depressed?
How they must have felt every single day when they woke up.
The concept of,
"Am I still going to be alive in ten minutes' time,
or will someone just walk past me and shoot me?"
I want to understand and feel that.
I think I'd like to go back there.
Yes, to Birkenau, to the camp.
I... I thought you'd never go back to Europe.
GARY: One of my biggest regrets with my father
is I should have just hopped on a plane and taken him.
I'm terrified of Auschwitz.
You know, you hear the stories,
you read the book, you see the miniseries,
but to actually stand where they stood...
Yeah, I don't know. I've been avoiding doing it.
I'm 63 now, yeah?
Um...
I wake up at night and sweat.
Why do I not have the guts to do it?
This is my parents' history.
I have to do this now.
Keys, phone, wallet, passport.
I'm ready to go.
Look at that. It's real. It's actually happening.
Ooh!
FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Passengers and cabin crew should now be seated
with their seatbelts securely fastened...
INTERVIEWER: Where were you born in Czechoslovakia?
In a small town named Krompachy.
It is Slovakia.
GARY: See, this view, it's just phenomenal.
Overlooking the hills and the valley.
Imagine waking up to that every morning.
What a peaceful way to grow up.
What would it have looked like back then?
So, I know absolutely nothing about Krompachy.
All I know is that my dad lived in Krompachy with his parents.
I mean, what a shock.
There was a war about to happen.
INTERVIEWER: 1942, the Germans came into Slovakia.
LALI: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any indication before that,
that they were coming your way?
Not...
What... If I want to tell you...
I never believed it, right?
I never believed it,
because we lived in a different environment, right?
HEATHER: I don't think Gary has any idea
what he's about to see, feel, and learn
over the next few days here.
He's now learning it for the first time
as a man in his early sixties.
I suspect this is going to be a very, very emotional time.
I'll be there for him.
Heather.
-HEATHER: Oh! -GARY EXHALES
HEATHER: We have no more special place in Krompachy
than where we are standing right now.
This is my gift to your dad and your mom, to you and your girls.
-GARY: And my girls. -HEATHER: Yeah. This is it.
Lenka, please come and join us.
GARY: Hi, Lenka.
-LENKA: Pleasure meeting you. -GARY: And you, too.
HEATHER: Lenka, can you translate?
LENKA: It would be my honor.
So, "This is to the memory of Mr. Ludwig Eisenberg Sokolov
who has lived here.
And this memorial has been dedicated
to all the people deprived of their freedom,
dignity, home,
and their own name.
For the memory of all victims of Holocaust."
My dad would be so proud of that.
It's amazing.
LENKA: And we are very proud to have it here.
GARY: This image,
you know, is embedded in my brain.
My whole life, my parents held hands.
They were just so in love.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go to school in Krompachy?
Yeah. Yeah, I went.
I went for eight years in the normal school,
like every child should have.
-Hi. -Hi. Gary?
-Gary. I'm Gary, yes. -Anna.
Nice to meet you, Anna.
-ANNA: Dobry den. -Dobry den.
Wow, wow.
Am I allowed to sit in a chair?
HEATHER: I don't think it's an original one.
GARY: That doesn't matter. It's the room.
Sit down. In the back row.
Yeah, because Dad would never have been in the front row.
HEATHER: Yes.
It was just something he said to me about, at school,
how he used to sit and look out the window and daydream.
Look at this, Dad.
I'm probably sitting in your chair,
looking outside the window at your hometown. How cool!
SPEAKS SLOVAK
"When the book came out
about The Tattooist of Auschwitz...
SPEAKS SLOVAK
...I realized that Lali was born in 1916."
SPEAKS SLOVAK
"My father was born in 1916, too.
We are hoping for you to pick your dad, Lali."
It will be one of those two.
More than likely this one. Definitely him.
Right there, looking really smart.
GARY LAUGHS
SPEAKS SLOVAK
Really?
LENKA: "And keep it as a memory."
Thank you so much.
I've never seen a photo of my dad before the war.
Nothing.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
GARY: Today was the most amazing day.
LENKA: I have found something
that I believe you would love to see.
I can confirm that we have found a house
where your dad lived in the year 1930.
-This is my friend, Miro. -GARY: Hi, Miro.
-Very nice to meet you. -MIRO: Nice to meet you, too.
This is a very good find.
-Thank you. -Well done, you.
LENKA: The houses here are beyond repair
and they have to be demolished.
MIRO: This part of the building was for the animals.
-GARY: The stables. -MIRO: Yeah.
And you can imagine where there are some rabbits,
maybe some chickens.
There would have been a horse as well.
LALI: We had horses,
with two people carrying stuff
over from the station
to the places where they had to go.
INTERVIEWER: Did you help out in your family business?
LALI [LAUGHING]: No, not much.
So, finally, we are approaching your grandfather's house,
where your father lived.
So, we've got the steps leading into the house,
for sure, the family members would have walked.
Lucky they were short.
MIRO LAUGHS
Yeah, as you can see, it's in a very bad situation,
so this is probably the last chance
to visit the property as it is.
Wow.
I was really hoping, when I walked in,
just to get, I don't know,
a feeling, something spiritual.
I'm just looking for some stones to put on my dad's grave
from his home.
Look at this.
I've got enough for both graves. Huh.
Wow!
This is just superb.
Every time you go and visit someone's grave,
you're supposed to leave a stone,
just to let them know you've come to visit.
You know how you were talking about living history?
This is the history of where they were living.
CHUCKLES
That is just unbelievable.
Hello, Lali from Krompachy.
I have to go.
Wait! Wait!
I don't know your name.
It's Gita.
INTERVIEWER 2: Where were you born?
Vranov nad Topl'ou, Slovakia.
About 200 families were in that little town.
It was a very close-knit town.
INTERVIEWER 2: Was it 200 Jewish families, or...?
GITA: Jewish families, yes.
INTERVIEWER 2: How many people were in your immediate family?
Six children, my late father and mother.
We wanted to show you the birth records of your mom...
Oh, wow!
...which we have found at this registry office.
GARY: I'm tingling.
Wow, wow, wow!
-Baby steps, please. -Baby steps, yes.
Yeah, because otherwise, I get so overwhelmed.
I've never seen that photo.
That...
How stylish is my mom?
And look. You know, look at the smile.
And there's no trauma in that photo.
There's a genuinely happy person.
Happy to be alive.
It's a pretty cool photo, huh? Bless my mom.
LENKA: Gary, this is a place where you register the birth
of every child being born in Vranov.
The first and probably the most special.
-GARY: Mom. -LENKA: It's your mom.
GARY: Mm.
So, this is the record of her being born in Vranov
on the 11th of March, 1925.
Here you can see a record of your mother's sisters.
We've got Rachel, Golda and Franny.
HEATHER: Didn't come home.
Didn't come home.
Yeah. Okay.
Those bastards.
DIRECTOR: Why did your mom not tell you about her sisters?
How do I answer that?
How closed must my mom have been,
and shut down,
to not even mention that she had three sisters?
I love my dad dearly,
but all my heart came from Mom.
And this just has that little bit more meaning.
She just buried it.
She buried it.
And maybe that's why she was so depressed,
because she buried it all so deep,
but it was still in the back of her head.
And, you know, that would explain the nightmares.
GARY: Where we're standing,
in what was the heart of the Jewish community,
is symbolic of what happened all over Europe.
And I'll phrase it like this.
So, here there was a synagogue...
until there wasn't.
Over here was the spiritual bath
called the Mikvah, until there wasn't.
The Jewish people were there, until they weren't anymore.
What's left is a plaque.
That's it. That's all that's left.
This was the wall of the synagogue, here,
that my mom attended.
It's a bit of stone from my mom's synagogue
that is no more.
We're reading excerpts
from something called my mom's Shoah tape.
And this is a phenomenal project
to videotape every single living
Holocaust survivor's story.
If you don't mind, I just want to read to you what...
my mom remembered.
"So I went to school."
GITA: Then they kicked me out of school.
"Like every young person...
I had hopes that I had to study."
GITA: At 17,
you still haven't got a clear mind what you want to do.
We knew that the times aren't very healthy.
Knew something was going wrong.
They didn't fully understand what.
And then they asked her the question.
INTERVIEWER 2: Was your father able to continue working?
GITA: No. They took away the bakery.
That's when the troubles started.
"And after they had closed everything down
a few weeks later, they took us."
HE SOBS
And for her, that simple life,
overnight, gone.
Childhood, gone.
Family,
ripped apart.
Gone.
Everything was...
just...
gone.
LALI: The Slovaks were always antisemites.
You talked to everybody. They knew that you are a Jew.
But maybe, inside, they hated you.
People ask whether
what is being done with the Jews is Christian.
Is it human? Is it not robbery?
I ask, is it Christian when the nation wants to free itself
from its eternal enemy, the Jew?
Slovak, cast off your parasite.
MADELINE: I have a letter here.
This letter is from a six-year-old boy
who wrote to Jozef Tiso.
You know, I've got a seven-year-old,
so this is like trying to imagine her
writing a letter to do this is...
Right. It's just mind-boggling.
He's the youngest letter writer that I have found so far.
This little boy writes,
"Dear Mr. President, every night I pray for your health.
Mommy always tells me that if I'm a good boy,
Jesus will bring me the most beautiful gift
from Mr. President," which is an exemption.
I would like to talk to you a little bit
about this piece of propaganda that is behind us.
It says, "It is he. You know him by the star.
It is he who grabs everything for himself.
It is he who acts against the state and its friends."
The wearing of the yellow Star of David
was mandated by the Jewish Code.
The Slovak press touted it
as the most strict racial law in all of Europe,
even stricter than that of the Nazis.
You couldn't go to sporting events,
parks, restaurants, movies.
You couldn't even go to the market
at the same time as everyone else.
What kind of people, as human beings?
MADELINE: So, these are the things that
your parents would have seen.
And they suggested that the Jews were responsible
for all of the country's problems,
which is impossible,
because they were only 3.6% of the population at the time.
Yeah, I know. It's mind-boggling, isn't it?
To ask me to leave, they didn't come to the home.
They just put out announcements
that the oldest kids from every family
have to come to that place, that evening.
Otherwise, they will take the parents.
It was up to me to go.
So I went.
I was 17 in March,
and in April they had already deported us.
INTERVIEWER: The Slovakian government
came for your parents?
Yeah. Not only for my parents.
For all the Jews.
Because they took everybody they could.
The Slovak government paid 500 reichsmarks
for every deported Jew.
-Were you aware of that? -No.
And they had to pay for "transportation."
That makes it very uncomfortable to be in this country,
right here, right now.
A country that my parents lived in,
their brothers and sisters lived in.
And knowing that the government was happy
to pay for them to be deported.
I would just bring up the point, though,
that not everyone hated Jews.
Right.
But there was tremendous social pressure not to...
not to associate with Jews, and not to aid them in any way.
INTERVIEWER: What was the response of the Jewish community
to these actions?
They had no response.
They couldn't do anything.
Nobody could do anything.
GARY: I feel privileged.
Every survivor needed some luck in their life,
and I'm a reflection of that luck.
GUARD: Keep in line!
Come on, keep moving!
Where are we going?
Poland.
GUARD: Keep moving forward!
I hear they'll train you as a mechanic,
fixing cars, engines.
JONAH: It's funny being back here.
This is where we filmed getting onto the carriages.
And it was such a strange day of filming.
Just me, as Jonah,
trying to imagine what your dad went through,
stepping onto a carriage,
it's almost impossible to imagine.
FILM DIRECTOR: And action!
GARY: But what did you go through
when you walked into the carriage?
JONAH: They slammed the door shut,
and everyone just goes completely quiet.
It was impossible for it not to impact you
on quite a profound level.
LALI: Nobody knew what was going to happen.
Nobody knew where we were going.
He's just this one man,
and he's so small in this enormous scale of this camp.
And he's learning about the horror that's unfolding.
GARY: I can see my dad in your eyes.
I saw my dad in the way you looked at Anna.
That look of love.
GITA: Your eyes...
Are they blue?
LALI: Sometimes.
OFFICER: Is there a problem?
No. Um...
Just getting some more ink.
How difficult would it have been for you
to play my mother
in a Holocaust environment?
ANNA: You know, it was very scary.
I was terrified at first.
I just felt this great responsibility.
I felt the presence of your mom from then.
And, I mean, I still feel that presence sometimes.
-Serious? -ANNA: I do.
How was it for you,
to watch the story on the screen?
So, I'll tell you what my biggest impacts were.
You said, "God isn't going to help."
And this is an ultra, ultra-orthodox woman,
where everything is because of God.
ANNA: Yeah.
That was all Mom.
Lali...
Where is God?
God can't help us, Lali, but we can help God.
We can show him that love still exists, even here.
I was brought up secular.
And I think my mom let go of a lot of it,
maybe because of a disappointment in God.
Because of the war.
How are you feeling generally about going?
-Do you feel ready now? -No.
Even more so not ready.
All of a sudden, that's become...
Look, I'm shaking.
Just look at me. And that's not the cold.
-That's thinking about... -Yeah, yeah.
Walking into Birkenau has a different sense of reality
than it ever did before,
because I know so much now.
If, for any reason,
my parents' souls are not resting,
maybe this will help both of them as well.
This is it? We're getting on here?
Mom's describing her arrival...
in Auschwitz.
"And through the little window in the wagon,
we could see people in striped clothing
working in the field.
And so we talked to each other.
'Well, they must be some criminals.
Definitely not for us.'
But when we arrived,
we had a very, very bad surprise.
The SS came in, and they started screaming,
'You are not going to get out of here,
and you are going to die.'"
GUARD: Halt!
Women this way, men over here. Thank you. Move along.
GARY: I want to know now.
I want to know what it was like for them
as best as I possibly can,
to walk in their footsteps.
I didn't go four times before this trip.
I don't want to make it number five.
This time I'm going.
HE EXHALES
I'm actually surprised at how I'm feeling.
I want to see what happened there.
I want to be close to my mom and dad in there.
I'm ready.
GARY: I can't stop shaking.
HE SOBS
Okay.
MAN: Come here. I've got you. Give me your hand.
I'm okay, I'm okay.
HE SNIFFLES
-Hi, Pawel. -Hi, Gary.
-I'm Gary. Nice to meet you. -Pleasure to meet you here.
And I know it's going to be a challenging time,
but thank you very much
for coming to the memorial.
I suppose we can start, so please follow me.
[CHUCKLING] I can't stop my knees from shaking.
-Okay. -Okay.
From 1942, Auschwitz becomes an extermination camp.
And what you can see here in front of us
is this iconic entrance
with the "Arbeit Macht Frei" inscription,
"work makes one free."
LALI: They took us to Auschwitz.
I looked up.
I saw "Arbeit Macht Frei" in the German language.
And when we came in, the hell started there.
I'm not ready to walk in yet. Sorry. [EXHALES]
I can't stop my legs from shaking.
Okay.
No. [CHUCKLES]
All right, let's do it.
LALI: When we came out and we saw the SS
and we saw the dogs and we saw the beating,
then we knew what time it is.
PAWEL: Most of these blocks
were places where prisoners were sleeping.
The number of people inside such a building
could exceed 1,000.
Do we have any idea which one my mom might have been in?
No.
We don't have documents related to your mother.
The SS, before the evacuation,
they ordered prisoners to burn the documentation.
And our estimation is
that even up to 95% of the camp documents were destroyed.
GARY: So, over here,
what we have is a collection of children's shoes.
Some of these would have been for kids
that were less than one year old.
I'm trying to imagine Aviva's feet.
Shocking, isn't it?
PAWEL: We have to remember
when we look at every single object here,
it is one person.
Yes.
There's always one story, one name, one person, object.
GARY: And this is a bit close to home as well.
It's got my dad's first name on it, Ludwig.
HE EXHALES
The scale of that just...
INTERVIEWER: Did they give you a number?
LALI: Yes.
32407.
When people think about Auschwitz survivors...
I'll think about tattoos.
The tattoo is something essential.
Survivors' children remember the tattoo,
sometimes without understanding what it was.
Because they don't want to explain to them.
In this bureaucratic world of the SS,
they didn't know who...
-GARY: Who was who. -PAWEL: Who was who.
Then they thought,
"It will be more useful if this number will be permanent."
And therefore they needed tattooists,
and your father was one of them.
End of the wood was two needles, right?
One was longer.
The other one a little bit shorter, right?
And that's how we did the numbers.
GARY: My mom,
I remember her coming home one day
with a big bandage on her arm,
and she had just had her tattoo, her number, removed,
because she just couldn't look at it anymore.
LALI: The SS, they took you there.
One day, I came to the bunker number 11.
And they took me in.
And they tortured you, right?
They beat you.
PAWEL: We don't know exactly
how this investigation that led to his incarceration...
It is likely that he could have been here.
First, you will see the standing cells,
which is a particularly harsh punishment.
Up to four people standing in basically one square-meter space
for the entire night.
Each standing cell looks like this.
It was bricked up.
People crawled inside,
and they were standing the entire night.
And that's the only entrance of air.
You can see there's a very small hole.
It could be covered from the outside.
So this was one of these extreme types of punishments
that we have here.
GARY: They had different designations.
Standing cells,
starvation cells,
death by suffocation.
PAWEL: This is the execution yard
of the prison building.
And they were shot in the back of their heads.
So, this is a site which is a commemorative site,
as you can see.
And there is always this flag above,
with the stripe pattern.
-GARY: The uniform. -PAWEL: The uniform pattern.
So it symbolizes the prisoners.
But there was sand
and sawdust that they were throwing here
to drain the blood.
And the blood reached meters into the ground.
LALI: The gassing was separate,
and the burning was separate.
HE EXHALES
LALI: They couldn't burn them that quick.
There was a conveyor belt from the gas chamber
which came into the crematorium.
And the conveyor belt was working non-stop,
24 hours a day,
and bringing in those gassed people, naked.
HE SOBS
GITA: In July, we went to Birkenau.
That's where the real trouble started,
the real killings and disappearings.
Here we go. There's the building.
There's the train tracks.
My heart's racing.
GARY BREATHES QUICKLY
So, this is the space that you can see...
Just how vast.
...of basically...
maybe not the entire,
but the majority of the Birkenau site.
But there's more?
PAWEL: There are some parts in the forest
that are difficult to see from here.
But, basically, we can look at this around-500-acre space.
When the SS moved the killing from Auschwitz-I,
which is some three kilometers from here, to Birkenau,
they're building an industry of murdering people.
We have around one million Jews murdered in Auschwitz.
In fact, in Birkenau,
there were six homicidal gas chambers
and four crematoria.
GARY: Just in time for my family to come, yeah.
LALI: The headquarter was Auschwitz.
The factory killing was done in Birkenau.
In the whole world, they mention Auschwitz,
but the real McCoy was Birkenau.
PAWEL: Here you can see a historical freight train car.
And most of the Jews were deported in freight train cars.
Sometimes people talk about cattle train cars,
but cattle would get a lot of air.
In many testimonies we have people who have lack of air,
and it's overcrowded, around 80 people in it.
GARY: Oh, God.
So that's all they had?
Yes. There's one for the air on one side.
There was something on the other side.
Many survivors talk that finding a place near this little window
would be...
-Lifesaving. -Because you would get air.
Right.
PAWEL: And this is the place where the selection happened
when the transport of Jews arrived,
because non-Jews do not go to the selection.
And we estimate that around 75% of Jews
are murdered immediately.
Not everybody came into the camp.
Only the stronger people came.
The rest went straight away to be killed, to be gassed.
If you had a little pimple on your hand,
you went to the left.
Most of the girls from my town were taken
for nothing, nothing.
PAWEL: People have no idea
that they will never see each other again.
And then, some of them become prisoners.
They get to a place where someone makes the tattoo,
and then they enter into the camp.
And they learn in a moment
that the others were taken to the gas chambers.
The prisoners do not have...
You know, they don't sugarcoat it.
They tell them the blunt truth.
And for many of those people,
it is simply too much to take in.
In the early days, people couldn't take it.
They ran to the Postenkette,
and there were 3,000 or 4,000 volts in it.
They grabbed the wire,
and they would be killed straight away.
The power killed them.
And that was on a daily basis.
Those were the early days in Birkenau.
GARY: It's so massive.
When you look down this row,
and there's row after row after row.
The effort they put in.
You know, all the logistics
that went into building and killing
and transporting.
I have nothing else to say, Stephen.
You can't get blood out of a stone.
I'm kind of, like...
Yeah.
My dad, when he said, "I want to apologize
to the people whose lives I couldn't save,"
his only curiosity about all the gas chambers was this one.
Crematorium III.
PAWEL: This is a place where tens of thousands
would walk down.
And I know you wanted to specifically say a prayer here.
PRAYS IN HEBREW
HE SOBS
GARY: So, what are we entering now?
PAWEL: So, we are entering into one of the smaller sections.
And this was called the Zigeunerlager.
It was the camp for the Roma and Sinti prisoners.
In the family camp,
your father stayed for some time in one of the wooden barracks,
and it's over here.
Unique in the stories that Lali said that he lived on his own.
GARY: Yes.
PAWEL: What we think
is that he lived as part of the larger group
of this whole unit.
Maybe their conditions of life were better.
So this is maybe,
kind of the reason for this isolation, or the feeling...
But that makes no sense.
I can understand some of his memories would be very vague
as an 89-year-old man,
but one thing that is impossible to be vague
is not knowing if you are in your own room or not.
That's...
And I can still distinctly remember
my mom yelling at my dad
when he was describing the room.
Yelling at him that it wasn't a six-star hotel.
But maybe they had enough space
that they would be able to have
their own kind of sleeping places.
Maybe that's the explanation.
GARY: Or he just had his own room.
-PAWEL: Maybe that also. -GARY: Yes.
PAWEL: But there could be maybe several of them.
This sector at the very back of Birkenau
has a German name, Effektenlager.
Your mother worked here, and that was considered to be,
somehow, privileged work.
GARY: Yes, correct.
And then something that is unique for this place
is that on the other side of the fence,
you can see this red line.
This is the ruins of Gas Chamber number 4.
So they were also close witnesses
to the killing process.
GITA: We heard the screams from where they went...
to the gas.
All my friends were taken.
GARY: When you look across everything,
it's mind-boggling, the vastness of this.
Walking in my parents' footsteps is very special.
I don't think I could ever have been closer talking to them
than I was here.
When you put it in perspective
of all my family members that didn't survive,
I feel honored that, for whatever reason,
my mom and dad were lucky enough to survive.
I'm going back to Melbourne,
and I can talk to my children in a whole different way
about their family.
I remember my mom and dad saying
that they wanted to get as far away from Europe
as they possibly could.
And you can't really get much further away than Australia.
-Welcome. -Nice to meet you.
-Thank you so much.
This is Mali, my youngest daughter.
Yes.
MAN: Shall we go in?
MAN 2: Yes, let's move.
MAN: Puts on some beautiful music,
and they do a dance of tango.
GARY SPEAKS IN HEBREW
Twinkle Toes.
THEY LAUGH
We dance a lot in here.
Fantastic.
Are we hungry? Yes? Good.
Well, we've got lots of food. Why don't you come in?
GARY: Shall we go in?
We forgot the pickles. How can we forget the pickles?
GARY: You can sit down with Mother.
Your parents never talked about the Holocaust?
-A few stories, you know? -Yeah.
We grew up with everything, with Dad telling us
from when we were really young.
Yes, I did a lot to survive,
but I still consider it was 99% of luck
because every moment of the day, you could be shot, killed,
beaten to death or sent to the gas chamber.
CHARLIE: But whatever question we ever had
was always answered.
-Brilliant. -CHARLIE: Always.
When I was ten, I turned around to Dad one day
and I said to him, "Dad, do you hate the Germans?"
And he said, "Don't you ever use that word,
because once you give in to that emotion,
what is it that you become?"
-As bad as that. -CHARLIE: Yeah.
So, to me, that was a lesson in not only survival,
but survival with your humanity and your dignity intact, yeah.
GARY: That's the right message.
He's an amazing man, this one.
INDISTINCT
So, really, this trip has been amazing for you.
Just phenomenal.
You're telling everything to your children now.
I don't want them to have that same emptiness that I had.
HELEN: It's quite profound on me
how you're telling the stories that you never heard.
It's so important.
GEORGE: Now, having come back, how are you feeling,
to have a lived experience of Auschwitz?
GARY: Relieved.
I'm a different person.
-In what way? -I'm not empty anymore.
Oh!
Maybe I don't know the right terminology,
but it's almost like peace of mind.
-Okay. -If that makes sense?
-Yes. -GARY: I am comforted
and fulfilled by the fact that I now know so much more.
GEORGE: Yes.
How do you think you coped with the emptiness
all the years before?
I think I knew it was there, but I ignored it.
There's a way of looking at trauma
that is not actually a state of mind,
but a state of body.
Now, you're noticing this
and you're saying it's peace of mind.
And many people might say, "What a paradox.
You're going to Auschwitz,
and you come back with peace of mind."
How do you...?
I don't know the answer to that. I just know I have that feeling.
-GEORGE: It's very real. -And I've noticed it.
-It's very real. -GARY: Yeah.
I'm going to have such a different relationship
with my children, as a parent and as a friend.
I think I'm going to like myself a lot more, too,
in the way I relate because of that.
-GEORGE: Please do. -Yeah.
It's an absolute honor to be in your presence.
GARY: Thank you. It's a very warm feeling.
Oh.
-I'm sorry. -GEORGE: Please, please.
-It's a release. -GARY: Okay.
This is not a negative.
MALI: Does it go in order, like in the alphabet?
-No. -No?
No, it's wherever you buy the plots.
Here you go. This is Mom and Dad.
Look at that.
I miss you guys very much.
First time I've brought your grandchildren out to see you.
This is Mali, and this is Aviva.
So, I've got stones from both your hometowns.
So let's all put one on,
just to let them know we've been here.
Dad, look at that. From outside your front door.
So you've got a bit of home to have as well.
Oh!
GARY KISSES
I wish you could have met them.
How my dad would have fussed over you two,
and Mom would have had you in the kitchen,
teaching you songs and watching her bake.
She would have been in heaven.
How you going, choop? Doing good?
Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: How did you find Gita after you were liberated?
I couldn't go by train
because it was bombed.
The train couldn't go through the bridges.
So I bought a horse.
You know?
And I took my horse,
and I was going hundreds of kilometers
to look for her.
GITA: And, one day, turns up a horse
on two wheels. You know, that carriage?
I look back there, and it's my husband.
GITA: Lali!
SHE SOBS
He chased me and found me, and we are happy together.
-GARY: Do you know who that is? -AVIVA: That's...
That's your dad.
-GARY: Who's that? -AVIVA: Your mom.
-And who's that? -You.
Yeah. This is from their 50th wedding anniversary.
I threw a really big party for them.
Pretty good-looking dude, your dad, huh?
-AVIVA: No, he looks better. -GARY: Really? [LAUGHS]
Thanks.
It's okay. I love you still.
MALI: Watch this!
GARY: My parents found each other,
and they got married in Krompachy.
And what I have here just shows you how much they were in love.
So, this is a photo from the Tatras mountain range,
and my parents went there on their honeymoon.
Have a look.
This is post-war, with hair,
just so, so very happy and in love.
So I'm the result of one of the most amazing romances
in the most horrific place that ever existed.
I mean, even the fact that I'm around
is also seriously good luck.
Wahoo!
It's amazing!
I love it!
GARY: I have two beautiful girls.
They will be able to continue the story,
and that is my greatest happiness.
MALI: Go run.
AVIVA: Go for a run. Get some exercise in.
THEY LAUGH