Saving history one story at a time

0:00Eighty years ago, Allied forces marched deep into the interior of Nazi Germany. CBS News chronicled their advances. Front reports from Germany tell us that British troops of the Second Army are now within seven miles of two important German cities. World War II was coming to an end in Europe, but the world was only just beginning to discover the horrific scale of the Holocaust. Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you're at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio.

0:37CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow was one of the first journalists to report from the Buchenwald concentration camp, an experience he shared with his radio audience. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. The Buchenwald Memorial estimates more than 50 ,000 people were killed at the camp. According to CBS, Murrow was so disturbed by what he saw that it took him three days to write his report.

1:15And still, he worried listeners wouldn't believe him. I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words. Eighty years later, Murrow's fear that people would deny the atrocities he witnessed is becoming more of a reality. Once fringe ideas of Holocaust denial are spreading, multiple members of President Donald Trump's administration have expressed support for Nazi sympathizers and people who promote anti-Semitism. And fewer survivors of the Holocaust are around to share their stories. That worries historian Rob Williams.

1:57There are so few of the greatest generation or the survivor generation who are still with us. And if we are unable to not only record their stories but share them with the world, there are aspects of this history or opportunities to build connections that may forever be lost. Consider this. The stories of those who lived through the Holocaust are in danger of being forgotten. and there's a race against time to record as many as possible. Coming up, the story of a Jewish man who survived Buchenwald and an American soldier who helped liberate the concentration camp. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

2:51It's Consider This from NPR. An estimated 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime. With the passage of time, there are fewer survivors who can tell the stories of what they witnessed and endured. Last month, an American soldier who helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp met a Jewish man who was almost killed at the same camp. NPR's Tom Dreisbach has their story. Andrew Roth was born in Hungary in 1927. He's nearly 100 years old, and he recently arrived for an interview in a wheelchair. Then he met Jack Moran. Are you the soldier? Yes. Can I hug you? Roth grabbed his cane and stood.

3:36And the two men embraced. Moran was born in Wisconsin in 1925. He turns 100 later this year. I was about to share this. How are you, yeah? How wonderful that you survived. Yeah. The Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California brought Andrew Roth and Jack Moran together to share the stories of what took them both from their homes as teenagers all the way to the Nazi concentration camp known as Buchenwald. Moran's journey was with the U.S. Army, where he went through some of the worst fighting during the Allied march to Germany. I saw so many nice young fellows laying in the dishes of France in the woods of Germany.

4:17They're just 19 years old, 20 years old. Their lives cut short. What sticks out for Moran's story is loss. In one battle, Moran said four of his best friends were killed. He said for some reason, God spared him. Life was so cheap and death came so easy. It's so, so sad. During the brutal Nazi offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge, Moran said he was stuck for days in a frozen foxhole surrounded by the German military with no food. He said, thank God it snowed, because that meant they at least had some water. He survived that battle, but that just meant moving on to fight again and again. I saw grown men after the battle crying like a baby, saying, I can't take this anymore, I can't stand this anymore.

5:06And I felt the same way. We all did, but we had to continue. We had no choice but to keep going forward. Along the way, Moran also started to see signs of another kind of horror perpetrated by the Nazis. In railroad yards, we found boxcars. We'd open up the door, and inside would be 600 or 700 suitcases that the owners never got back. The Nazis and their collaborators were known to take belongings stolen from Jews and send them back to Germany to help with the war effort. On the other side of the continent, in Hungary, was Andrew Roth. He and his family were Orthodox Jews and targeted by the Nazis.

5:47They were taken from their home and sent to a ghetto, and then eventually deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi camp that used gas chambers to commit murder on an industrial scale. When Roth and his family got there, he said a Nazi guard was directing the new arrivals into two lines. With his little flag, rechts links, rechts links. Right, left, right, left. Roth's mother and four of his siblings went to the right. The guard told him to follow. But his uncle was sent left. And Roth said that without thinking, he followed his uncle. Not realizing that I made a life and death choice. All those who went to the right were gassed the same night.

6:31And I went with my uncle the other way. And here I am. With most of his family murdered, Roth was forced to do hard labor in the camp, and death was everywhere, every day. It's so routine, you get immune to all that stuff. Just as the Soviet army was about to liberate Auschwitz, the Nazis sent inmates to another concentration camp in Germany, Buchenwald. Roth says the fight for survival often boiled down to a fight for warmth and for food. He remembers figuring out at one point where the camp guards fed the German shepherds, and he risked his life for just a little bit of dog food, enough to keep going.

7:12I was just very resourceful and very lucky most of the time. Then, as the Nazi regime was collapsing in April 1945, Andrew Roth and Jack Moran's journeys landed them both at Buchenwald, survivor and liberator. Unreal, unreal. Unbelievable. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. How man can see so mean to his fellow human beings. We're all created by the same God and we're all brothers and sisters. Roth says he now considers the day of liberation, April 11th, his birthday. In the days afterwards, Roth said he spoke to Germans and told them what the Nazis had done. They kept saying, We did not know, they said.

8:00Roth did not believe them. It's a blatant lie, okay? There was no way of ignoring it. Roth said that when the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims, you could see it and smell it for miles. Back then, many people closed their eyes to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Historians worry that's happening again. By and large, knowledge of the Holocaust is decreasing, even in some of the countries responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust. This is Rob Williams. He's a historian and leads the USC Shoah Foundation. Williams told me that understanding the Holocaust is crucial to understanding the modern world, how it led to the United Nations, international treaties on the treatment of refugees, and against genocide.

8:45And Williams worries that as the world begins to lose that understanding, we are also losing those values. I hate to be pessimistic, but I don't think it's any coincidence that just as we are casting doubt on the value of democracy or on the value of human rights, that we're also beginning to witness a decline in understanding and memory of the Holocaust. There were two recent violent anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S., in Boulder, Colorado, and in Washington, D.C. Popular online influencers with millions of followers have promoted Holocaust denial and even have ties to officials in the Trump administration.

9:23Now, William says an estimated 200 ,000 survivors are still alive, but their memories are fading and time is running out to gather their stories. Williams says that process can be helpful not just for historians, but also for the survivors and witnesses themselves. Jack Moran thought so too. Anybody survives those camps is a wonderful thing, and I'm so happy to meet him. After the microphone stopped recording, Williams also showed Roth official documents he managed to find, the questionnaire Roth filled out when the Americans liberated the camp. Williams was the first person to show the documents to him in decades.

10:06And being able to share those documents with him is, in a certain sense, a way to let him reclaim his own history, a history that was ripped away from him by the Nazis. The documents list the dates of his confinement at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. And then there's a question. Reason for arrest. In cursive lettering, it says only being a Jew. Tom Dreisbach in PR News. That was NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach. This episode was produced by Monika Ostatyeva, Kai McNamee, and Matt Ozug. It was edited by Barry Hardiman and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR.

10:52I'm Ari Shapiro.