CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash travel to Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They tour the Nazi death camp where they both had Jewish relatives die at the hands of Nazis. #CNN #News
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God bless you both and all those who suffered at the hands of the Nazi’s. Not just those from the Jewish faith but also Romanies, People if colour, mental illness, Prisoners of War and those with genetic diseases.
it is not your fault. The difference is your empathy. Much of what happened, happened without the full knowledge of the German public. That’s not to say they were not told to hate Jews and partisans, they were and they did but were not told the full truth of what the Nazis were indeed carrying out beginning with the Eisazatgruppen in June 1941. 3 million people were shot and buried in mass graves in places like Baby Yar. The book burning was a distraction but many people focus on that event which is what the Nazi’s intent was. The German people at the time were some of the most educated in the world, they were duped by an autocratic psychopath with men around him that were more fanatical and more extreme than even Hitler himself.
you forgot the russians
Wow, didn’t know Wolf Blitzer’s family was from Poland! (Poland was at that time occupied and divided for more than a century by Russia, Germany, and Austria but this was all old Polish territory) Polish Jews were really very special, all their descendants usually were/are outstanding artists, journalists, and doctors and contributed so much to the development of the countries in which they settled (fun fact: Polish Jews actually created the film industry, Hollywood – all the big producers like Warner Brothers, 20 fox century, etc., who founded Hollywood were Polish Jews, all born several kilometers from Warsaw, check it out; there is this joke that it should have been called Pollywood). I’m from Poland as well and I have Jews in my family too. Poland lost so much by losing Jews, all humanity lost great people. May such hatred, murder, and war never be repeated in history… And yet it is still happening, now in Ukraine, or in Asia, in Africa. We must always fight against hatred! I am sending everyone love. ❤
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 very well said Naticzka , can i ask how old you are ?
Are you from krakow ? The Jewish quarter there is one my favourite places to visit in krakow , lovely restaurants and a synagogue still there ♥️ I visited auschwitz in 2011 and bought a copy of schindlers ark in 2017 in a bookshop in kazimierz
@Conor Smithvery nice place
I can’t imagine how people could be so cruel. The people that survive suffered so much after so did the next generation. 😢And people still haven’t learned to love one another . So sad this world .
@MitzyEditz
Hi.
I was talking about not allowing the hateful commenters here to desecrate this solemn time.
It’s a time of remembrance. A time to honor those who were taken.
Complete evil. May this NEVER happen again.
Israel is doing the same thing now!
The worst events in history have happened by people thinking they were doing the right thing.
Thanks, Dana and Wolf, for doing this to help the world remember “Never again.”
@Kikiandjasmineonthetrailoflove I truly believe that if our very own hair furor, aka donnie dodger had his way he would be more than willing, even delighted to repeat all of his hero Adolph’s actions against all perceived enemies. I also believe that the maga cult would be enthusiastic in their endorsement of his directives. Just a thought..
Heartbreaking. 😢. Bless you both.
Thank you! History should never be forgotten.
Vote Blue in 2024.
Seeing Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash recount their grandparents and great grandparents tragic fate really hit home…I am inspired by their inner strength to find resilience from this cruel past and seek solace in not just surviving but thriving!
I didn’t know that Wolf and Dana had relatives who had died here. Sad AF right there, but thank you to the both of you and CNN for bringing this tragic story come to light as a commemorative 80th anniversary of the deadly Warsaw.😢😢🙏🏿😢😢🙏🏿😢🙏🏿😢📺
I am not even Jewish, but I’m not sure I could bring myself to enter those gas chambers as you did. It holds so much grief, I respect your bravery to enter a place that holds such horrid history.
Thank you for this segment, and the stories of your families. It makes it harder for people to deny when there are personal remembrances and family histories. It is also important to share the stories of our military members, especially those who liberated the death camps.
I am not a Jew, a Roma, a Slav, gay, communist, or any other of the minorities that the Nazis deemed sub-human, but I have seen, read and studied the horrors perpetrated in the camps. This film, of Wolf and Dana walking through perhaps the most famous of these killing factories is one of the most emotional films I have seen because of their direct connection. LET US NEVER FORGET.
I was fortunate enough to be stationed in Germany. I have been to Auschwitz. Very emotional experience…
Except communists
@ItalMiser117 been playing with that home lobotomy kit again have you?
I’m german. Born 21 years after the war. And I don’t understand until today how on earth our grandparents could do this horrible crimes to others. Such a shame I feel!😢
@Larry rubin Your father and other have learned the wrong lessons from the past from what the world is seeing!
The lesson here is to realize how strong social pressure can be. We can see very similar radicalization in many countries going on today. I am sad to say Israel is one of those countries.
As a Jew and an ex-Israeli, it’s sad that this is what they are doing, but it is a strong example of how no person is immune, not even the very people who’s parents and grandparents went through these atrocities from the victim’s side.
We live short lives, we don’t have the time for too many mistakes. Let’s evolve as a species and not repeat the past.
I grew up in Germany when my dad was serving with the Canadian army during the cold war in the 1980’s. I have been asking myself the same question over and over in both English, German et français. Pourquoi??? Why people who invented aspirin and modern printing allowed themselves to commit such unimaginable evils. La logique humaine ne comprendras jamais cette tragédie de la part du peuple allemand.
This is profound and deeply moving. For Wolf to stand in the actual gas chamber where his grandparents perished was a raw and painful moment for him to share with us. Thank you for bearing witness in this way, Wolf, and for honouring them. The letter that Dana read from her great-grandmother and to also be standing where they likely were killed was very emotional. Thank you for bringing this to us.
Lies
Shoulda turned it on for him
It’s very hard for ultra-sensitive people like me and my 33 yr old son, to live in a world with such cruelty. My dad was born in 1939 at the old charity hospital in New Orleans, and was given up for adoption. A few years ago I found out his parents were a Jewish couple from Eastern Europe. For a Jewish couple to give up a child, they must’ve been truly destitute. I can only imagine what they had endured to get here. I wasn’t raised Jewish, but it’s weird, I always felt like I was. Hard to explain. Seeing Dana and Wolf standing in that awful place made me cry so hard. It’s hard to watch but we owe it to them to SEE and remember.
This is an important video. Thank you both for sharing this deeply personal and tragic story. We all need to see this.
This is a great piece, a sad, but at the same time in a sense wonderful and very powerful personal testimony. I deeply thank you for that, and I want to tell a bit of my personal story.
As a young member of the German Parliament, born myself in Wet Germany in 1959 and being brought up by our parents with that “Never Again” instilled into us (the Nazis had sent my father to the frontline at the age of 15 only, to the bridge of Remagen; he just ran home when the U.S. troops luckily crossed the river Rhine. My mother was evacuated at the age of 16 together with her family to a small town in Thuringia where she later happened to translate the take over of that city due to her little knowledge of English) I had to decide to break the silence and the taboo, meaning asking for Germany getting involved into military affairs for the first time after World War II.
When the Serb genocide against Bosnia started in 1992 (during which people were literally selected to be killed based on the 1991 census one year earlier; from that the perpetrators knew professions and addresses, and they started selecting doctors, lawyers and others to kill them in order to destroy the very fabric of that communities. Non Serbs in the Bosnian town of Prijedor were forced to wear a white ribbon to be easily identified, akin to the David star the Nazis had forced upon Jewish people; more than 3000 of them have been killed in a systematic extension campaign)
When I got the gruesome reports of later Pulitzer price awarded American journalist Roy Gutman about concentration camps in Bosnia, and talked to him, later also to personalities like Matek Edelman, Simon Wiesenthal and others, I started an intense campaign loving my own government for action.
At a certain point, just ahead of the day of human rights, I took the floor in my political caucus of the CDU party of Helmut Kohl and told them about horrific examples of unspeakable atrocities in the Bosnian concentration camps. I wanted to shock them, to accuse them of doing nothing, and I wanted to make them feel uncomfortable, guilty for just watching.
And I would ask them, being one of the youngest members of Parliament back in the days: ” What did you bring us up for with Never Again, if this is happening again and we are doing nothing about it ?”
And I told the story our mom had told us. That she had to throw up as a 16-year-old when she had brought along with a lot of other people to the local cinema war (no TV back then) and had to watch how the people in the concentration camps looked like after liberation and how many, very many corpses of killed Jewish people, Germans and others, were so difficult to bury by the liberating U.S. troops
It got as silent as it could get. Many of the colleagues would stare down the desks, and many would stand up and support my position. Unfortunately, parts of the junk government rejected to take action. Germany was not ready in 1992 to engage in military actions, exactly due to its dark history. I made the case that it was just the other way around that we had to make good on our promise of Never Again and that we had to be on the side of the victims of genocide now because of having been a perpetrator of the worst crime of humanity, the Holocaust.
Later I would take part, along with Marek Edelman and others at a rally of Jewish and non-Jewish demonstrators at the German concentration camp Buchenwald requesting support and rescue for the Bosnians subjected to genocide at that time.
Throughout our German international actions for support of the Bosnians, mainly Muslim Bosnians I experienced no stronger support for our efforts in Germany, the US and around the world than by the Jewish community, especially in the United States. It was the déjà vu they had what did not let them rest put pressure on President Clinton in the US administration to take the lead in defending the next European victims of genocide. Unfortunately it took very long to take action, and more than thousand lives, innocent lives, from babies to seniors, have been murdered, often the most brutal way. As a European I felt and you still feel guilty for our being too late again.
And when the Kosovars, the Albanians have been subjected to genocide only three years later after the end of the Bosnian war, the Europeans and the United States would once again not accept the reports of the warnings about what was going on and what was unfolding. Of course we look the other way when putting in Russia were committing atrocious crimes in 2015 in occupied Ukraine and did not want to see the writing on the wall. As we are very much looking the other way regarding the atrocities and the slowly but steady extension of the Uighurs by communist China.
I simply do not know why humanity, why the powerful ones in the world are learning that lesson so slowly, and how we do not feel compelled to do more.
I’m writing this being impressed and very touched by the story of Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash of whom I did not know that they have such a family history and had to suffer such tremendous loss.
Not having been able to become guilty because of my birth I nevertheless feel the responsibility as a descendent of a nation that committed such unimaginable crimes on an industrial scale.
When during the first Gulf War in 1991 the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein threatened and in fact send rockets against Israel I decided to fly to the Jewish state in order to send a signal of solidarity by the post war German generation. The Israeli ambassador called me, and he was very personal, very informal, talking about his son who would be serving in the IDF to protect his country. In the end the fight to Israel was no longer possible because the Israeli airline suspended any flight before I could get there.
Still, I feel compelled to tell such stories and the reaction to what Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash were exhibiting about the very personal biographies and about the proud and unique Jewish people and how they did everything possible to survive Nazi Germany’s attempt of extinction.
Most people in Germany celebrate the defeat in World War II as a liberation. Most people in Germany still feel the guilt, even if the generation of people who lived in the Nazi terror is dying.
My father passed away on March 6 this year. Some maybe when I have year ago he looked at our youngest daughter, then at the age of 15, and told her in a very conscious and straightforward way some stories about his experiences when he was 15 and had to witness war on the frontline, about his friends being killed and about the Nazis trying to blow up the Remagen bridge, luckily unsuccessfully. (For which Hitler personally ordered to kill the officer who did not manage to achieve that goal since the bridge was lifted by the detonation but settled back into its original pillars across the river, thus allowing the US troops to use it for bringing thousands of troops and equipment across that strategic bridge before it really crumbled).
He then said to our daughter: ” The most important thing our generation has drawn a lesson from that is keeping the peace. It seems to me that this is no longer very much cherished.”
My father was active in reconciliation and commemoration with the Jewish community. Also Jewish people for my little village have been murdered in concentration camps. My father would continuously stay in touch with parts of the family and survived and had left was well. As a politician he traveled to Israel several times and the personal basis visited that family.
When he passed away the youngest daughter of the family, meanwhile in their 70s, asked us to arrange a bouquet of flowers at my father’s funeral which we of course did.
We are humbled and lucky that this has become possible at all. Despite all critical comments on current or former decisions of Israeli governments it is truly a historic obligation of only Germany to never again but it happened that the Jewish people or any other people is being subjected to systematic genocide or other systemic oppression of minor dimensions. If we had not learned that lesson from the German atrocities committed before and mostly throughout World War II the world would have of learned much.
Today and in the future have to continue that struggle to keep humanity, dignity and democracy over those forces detest humanity and dignity.
Thank you very much again for this very, very compelling personal piece of biographical background combined with telling a very compelling story of a proud Jewish people and self-defense.
Wow. Thanks for sharing. It is always good to read about how non-Jewish Germans were affected by the Holocaust and how you are trying your best to never let such things happen again anywhere in the world. This is what the world needs, to reflect on our painful pasts and for good people to never stand idly by.
Powerful responses to growing up in the shadow of such an unspeakably dark period by continuing to stand up against genocide and oppression.
Thanks for sharing. well documented experience and a wonderful family you have
Thank you for your response. It’s frustrating that no one seems to be listening. Personally, I felt that we (I’m American) should have gone into Ukraine with all we had right away. It makes me think of a traffic situation where many people comment that there will be a bad accident on a particular corner one day. No one does anything until there is a bad accident and several people get killed. Then, they put a red light on the corner. I don’t know if it’s false hope that nothing bad will happen if we ignore it, or if it’s because we don’t want to spend the money, or if we’re afraid, or what.
No words could ever express the inhumanity and horrors that took place here. It breaks my heart and should never be forgotten. I pray for all of the tortured people slaughtered by these barbaric monsters. My condolences to all of the survivors, family and friends who carry scars that will never heal from this pure, sick evilness.
Most of the tortured there were Polish, not Jewish.
The war camp is in Poland, & ” Israel ” never even existed at that time.
Thank you Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash for sharing your family pain, so the world never forgets.
So powerful. My heart aches for the victims and soars for the survivors.
This is an important time to share this. I’m so sorry humanity has trouble bearing witness and creating a better culture and not letting this kind of thing happen again. I’m so sorry for your loss. May kindness to one another be our guiding light.❤