Holocaust Survivor Nina Gottlieb Breaks 80 Years of Silence

HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDANT: Christiane, thanks. Daniel Lombroso and Nina Gottlieb, thank you both for joining us.

So Daniel, what, what made you want to do a film about this?

 

DANIEL LOMBROSO, FILMMAKER: 

I’ve spent a lot of my career focused on far-right extremism and, and it’s dangerous. I – my first film, White Noise is about the rise of the Alt-right movement. I was one of the first reporters in the country to start covering that group eight years ago. And part of that reason was because of my grandmother’s story. You know, she taught me – both, both my grandmother’s are Holocaust survivors, my mom’s mother Nina, and also my father’s mother Shulamit.

So I grew up I think with an understanding and a vigilance about how dangerous these ideas can be. So I responded quickly back when Trump was a candidate eight years ago, and I realized that his base, people who were my age were being radicalized by far-right, racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic ideas. So my editor at the time at The Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg encouraged me to pursue it. And that kind of organically became a feature film from, you know, from then to Charlottesville and beyond. And then now at the New Yorker where I’m on staff, I, I just kind of realized – it dawned on me that the generation that survived the war is disappearing very quickly. You know, my grandmother is – she says the film should have been called The Vanishing Breed. That’s what she tells me. And it’s, it’s sad because they’re the living memory of what happened, of how, how awful humans can be. And it’s really the last opportunity to do a project like this. So, I brought it up to David Remnick, the editor in chief, and he encouraged me to pursue it. So I called my grandmother and she said, come over and made a film.

===== CLIP  =====

[Nina] The war broke out September 1st, 1939.

[crowd cheering] From the minute the Germans drove in, they started picking up Jews in the street.

[suspenseful music] My father decided we are not staying here. He figured out somehow that maybe if he went to a priest and the priest would give us a paper saying that we are studying to become Catholic, that that will save us. The only problem was that we really had to pretend that we’re not Jews. So we had to go to church. [church bell rings] [soft music] And all the Jews went to the ghetto and it was bad news there.

 

(END CLIP) 

HS: Nina, did you have a reluctance to talk about all of this over the years and the decades?

 

NINA GOTTLIEB, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: 

Well, the thing is, nobody was interested, you know, nobody spoke about the Holocaust. And I never discussed it. I, my kids never probed me when they were little. I thought, well, it’s too horrific to tell them about it. So I figured, okay, a future, a future, future never came till my grandson here decided that there is a story to be told. And that’s what he did. And he approached me and I said, okay, go on. Yeah, and you better hurry. Because, you know, I’m 91 years old, though I was 90 at the time. You know, I’m not staying here for a long time.

==== CLIP ====

 

[Nina] I was born in Kielce which is a town between Warsaw and Krakow. [clock ticks] We were way above middle class, and if anybody thinks that I come from a shtetl I get very upset because I have never seen a shtetl in my whole life.

My sister was six years older. Supposedly I looked like Shirley Temple. I had blonde curls and she was Deanna Durbin. Once she heard a tune, she could sit down and play it.

My sister had friends and I, she wouldn’t let me in. She would close the door and they would talk about different things. So I would listen through the peephole and then what if I heard something bad? I would run to my mother: ‘You know what she’s doing in there?’ If we were eating something and she wanted what I had, she would say, you want to eat that? Ew, disgusting. How can you have that? You know this, the minute I pushed away, she would take it and eat it.

And her name is Irene?

What?

[Interviewer] Her name was Irene?

Irena.

[Interviewer] Irena. Irena.

[Interviewer] And when was the last time that you saw her?

[Nina] In April of 1943.

(END CLIP)

 

HS: What do you remember about your sister growing up? What, what kind of sister was she?

 

NG: Speaker 3 (02:02):

Well, there was a six year difference between us. So, you know, we were not friendly, friendly, but I looked up to her. And we, like we, we had a relationship like two sisters, you know, and I never thought about that – I’ll never see her again.

HS: Do you remember what she said to you, what she did when she left?

 

NG: 

All she did, she sent us a postcard saying that she’s going – we were at that time under, in the suburbs of Warsaw, they said, she said, I’m going towards Lwow. Lwow is, was called – now Ukraine, Lviv, where we had family. And she said, she said in the postcard, I’m going to see if there’s anyone left there. And that’s the last time I heard of her. 

To me, she just went on the train and went there and eventually she’s going to come back.  And so, you know, my parents, after the war, my parents tried through the Red Cross and the Yad Vashem and all this, and there was no trace of her. We think that possibly when she was on the train – the Germans used to go through the trains asking for papers and everything – and something must have happened. And they probably took her off the train and shot her because there’s no record of her being in any concentration camps or anything.

 

HS: So Daniel, did you know all of this going into the film of the story that she just shared with our audience?

 

DL: 

You know, I know, but I didn’t know I had a sense. You know, her piano, which you see in the film, is filled with family pictures. Her two kids, her six grandkids, her five great-grandkids, the life that my grandmother rebuilt from the ashes of the war. But in the center is a small cutout of a, a black and white photo of a beautiful young woman. And I never spent – I never asked who that was. I mean, it’s my si – it’s my grandmother’s sister, Irena. And I never spent a moment in my life asking who that was. In the room next to us, there’s a painting of her sister. I’d never asked or wondered who that was. I didn’t know that my grandmother lost 25 family members. She lost all four of her grandparents. Every aunt, uncle, and cousin, for the most part. The only ones who survived were her, were her mom, her dad, and, and her. And then they came to America in the, in the fifties. So, you know, I think I had a sense, and even, you know, my mother, who is my grandmother’s daughter, we all understood that she was a survivor, but we didn’t probe and, and we didn’t wanna push her to go there. And you know, it’s a shame that we waited this long, but I’m glad that we had the chance to do it while she’s still here.

 

HS: So how do you feel now that you’ve seen it, that your story’s out there?

 

NG: I’m glad I’m getting a very warm reception. People when they are in the audience, when it’s a Q and A come up to me, and, and they’re so grateful to me for sharing it. And I, I don’t know. It seems that people like to hear the story, and, and I’m glad if I made somebody happy, they, or whatever it, it has some value. And I feel that you know the young people nowadays don’t know. They, they – some don’t even know that, that there was a Holocaust. Yeah, Holocaust. What, what, what’s that? And now with the antisemitism rising, you know, it’s an important story to tell. So when Daniel approached me, I felt, yes, let’s go ahead. You know, and he did.

 

HS: Daniel, this film premiered, really kind of in the wake of October 7th what has, what’s that done to how the film’s being received and, and talked about?

 

DL: 

You know, I think the film is more urgent than ever. October 7th was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, 1,200 Israeli civilians massacred, no, no matter what you think about the conflict, I mean, the, the, the vast overwhelming majority were, were civilians, were, many of them were peace activists, were artists and filmmakers I know who were personal friends of mine who were, were injured or killed. It was a catastrophic day. And we saw that a lot of people didn’t even take a moment to mourn. You know, they spurred into action. And I think a lot of people in the, in the Jewish world were, were shocked that those who they considered allies who, who we’ve marched with and stood with, you know, couldn’t even take a second to mourn, irrespective of what you think about the current Israeli government, which I’m personally not a fan of.

 

You know, half the Jewish world is in America, roughly, and the other half is in Israel. And this was a massive terrorist attack. And to not take that second, and then now we’re seeing you know, a pummeling response for Palestinians in Gaza, and it’s hard for me to see, I know it’s hard for my grandmother to see you know, in the film she talks about, you know, essentially an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. And that revenge is never a good thing. She watches a German officer be burned in front of her, and she encourages the people as a kid to, to not do that, to stop.

 

==== CLIP ====

13:43 Evacuated as Poles

 

[Nina] We were now evacuated as Poles. We got on the train and we ended up in Prague. The Czechs decide to liberate their town from the Germans because the Allies are very close. The Czech poured tar on the Germans, hung them, and then lit the match.[match crackles] [suspenseful music]I mean, this was terrible.I remember that. The smell of the burning flesh.

 

[Interviewer] But you lost your sister. Surely that’s revenge to burn?

 

[Nina] What?

 

[Interviewer] Isn’t that a kind of revenge, something that they deserved?

 

[Nina] No, no. You don’t do that to other human being. I don’t with you. Come on! We are all born little adorable children…German, Jew, whoever…

(END CLIP)

 

HS: Nina, do you think something like the Holocaust could happen again?

 

NG: I don’t know. I don’t know if, if we let it, if we let it, we have to stop it early enough. We have, hopefully by, by showing movies like about me and, and other people that went through to show the, the atrocities and to – what I’m afraid of. What, what’s happening is that the bullying is, is sort of a beginning of, of a movement of, of being – I don’t know. They, they feel they’re superior to you. And, and that, that started with Hitler with it, that he finally convinced people that their, his race was better than everybody else, and do away with the Jews. Who knows what other lunatic can come around. And it won’t be the Jews, it will be the Italians or, or, or the Chinese or whatever that, that well, they’ll say, well, we gotta do away with them. You have to stop it – when, when you see something that that is not right, you have to speak up.

 

HS: Daniel, given the types of groups that you have been reporting on – the movements around the world, which are really preying on all sorts of sentiments are we out of the woods here? Have we collectively learned enough from Nina’s generation? 

 

NG: No. 

 

DL: 

She says, no. I think she’s right. It’s, it’s really disheartening. You know, we’ve seen an explosion in white nationalist violence the past eight years, January 6th in Charlottesville being the most kind of marquee examples. But there was a shooting at a mosque in New Zealand where 50 plus Muslims were killed by a white nationalist killer at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, which was the biggest killing of Jews on American soil in history. The Tree of Life killing, I think 12 were killed. There’s an attack on Mexican Americ ans in El Paso. And all of those shooters believed in a theory called the Great replacement that, that really Jews they believe are engineering, are bringing in non-whites as a way to displace the white elites of these countries. I mean, it’s a, it’s a sick, anti-Semitic theory that white native born populations, of course, the only ones who are natives here are Native Americans, but somehow white natives are being replaced by non-white immigrants and Jews are the masterminds in doing that unseating. And that has turned into a global network. The US was founded as a place that someone like my grandmother could seek refuge in. She came here as a refugee in 1951. She met my grandfather on the beach at Coney Island a year later. They were married for something like 60 years and built a new life. And that’s the promise of this country. And, you know, once that starts to break down, once we believe that this is exclusively for white Christians, the American project has, has no future. So we have to find a way out of that narrative.

 

HS: Nina, thanks so much for sitting down with us and for allowing Daniel to make this film. Nina Gottlieb and Daniel Lombroso, thank you both for joining us.

 

NG: Thank you for having us

 

DL: Thank you so much.

 

NG: Thank you.