a section of it where as somebody was being led away they'd learn they turn back to those who they read behind and said tell my story my guest today is steve investment and he's not telling his story but he's telling his mother  for most of my time there i was responsible for a small department that took feature films films that people would see in the movie theaters that were eventually sold licensed to television and i was responsible for the preparation editing and promotion of close to four hundred feature films and way time at c b s must have been interesting work it was good work back when they had more views of the week and yeah exactly  see tell us about the film well only number is the story of my parents my parents war of holocaust survivors my mom was from hungary in my dad was from poland and the circumstance of the holocaust was actually how they met they met in a concentration camp in germany they were both imprisoned and they fell in love through a barbed wire fence without the aid of a common language and they were liberated about two or three weeks after they met by the u s army as they were being transported out of the camp with hundreds and hundreds of other people and prisoners and and they were to be annihilated it was at the end of the war and the nazis were losing and the the edict that came down was to vacate the camps and destroy the evidence so to speak so what prompted you to take on telling your mother story well that's a great question and you know people often ask me how long it took me to make the film and i tell them thirty five years because it actually began i was not a stranger to  fact that my parents were holocaust survivors and and what that meant and it explained a lot about my family explain why my parents had numbers on their arms and and explain why i didn't have grandparents and it just explained a lot about my parents attitudes and behaviors and the way it affected them but so i wasn't a stranger to the subject of the holocaust and the stories of my family but the notion of sharing my mom's story actually came to me that was many years ago when on a visit to my parents my mother shared with me this writing exercise that she had taken upon herself she was always trying to improve her written english and she would select words from the dictionary that she was unfamiliar with and then try and use them in a passage or two and she wrote something down on a piece of paper and she handed me her work and  very innocently asked me you know what i thought of her exercise and and i looked down at this list of words and i looked down at this paragraph and when i read the paragraph which was a very monday night entry she had gone somewhere with one of my aunts and they went to a store and something she so saw on the store shelf reminded her of an incident that happened to her and auschwitz and she wrote about that in the middle of this paragraph  and it was so strong and emotionally gripping to me to see in her very simple language relating this experience she came up to me thinking that i was reacting to her language sexercise and and i just said you know mom i was familiar with this story but somehow when i read it in your words it was really powerful and it makes me want to ask you to do something that's going to be very hard emotionally and physically to capture all of your memories from the time you were growing up as a young girl and when the nazis invaded your country and your experiences during the holocaust and how you met my father and and she very contemplated lee just nodded her head and then six weeks later when i went back for a visit my mom had filled four spiral that was when i knew that i was going to have to find a way to share her story and the notion of the documentary came to me many years later when my mom was diagnosed with dementia and she started to lose her memories including having written all of these diary entries and i knew that i needed to use my skills and experience and talent for filmmaking to go back to all originally you know i had transposed all of these handwritten pages into typewritten pages and put them in order and then filled in the blanks there were some questions and holes in the timing  and certain things that were happening to other people in the family while my mom was you know in different locations and so i needed to just sort of fill in those blanks so i drew up a list of questions but i always tried to keep my mom's voice the film very much in her voice so that's how i started putting together the script per se for the story and then i had some inspiration from  film night and fog which is a film by alan renee who ten years after the end of the war in one thousand nine hundred eighty five he went to three of the death camps that were now desolate and overgrown but there were still remnants of the past in his footage of these long wilting pans of the territories and and very powerful narration of the things that took place there along with archival footage of the findings of the liberat and things and and that really inspired me to make the documentary the way i did which was to go back and walk in the footsteps of my parents and capture the present but finding the remnants of her past and her story in those various locations and i found many how did you tell your mother that you were making this documentary well it was difficult her or her heard dimentia had progressed to the point where it really affected a lot of her certainly her short term memory but even started to affect more and more  long term memory but i told her and my dad also helped you know sort of make her understand that what i really needed to do and wanted to do was to go back to europe and her hometown and the places where she was in ghettos and concentration camps and my father as well and and tell her story and she she at that time had really be forget that she wrote this post facto diary and that was really you know painful for me because it just showed the advancement of her disease but  when i when i told her that i was using her book and her story to make this film i think she related to it a little bit more and then when i finished the film and showed it to where it was in the moment at that point in her disease in the moment she was very cognizant of everything but literally in the moment as soon as that moment had passed she just forgotten what that was what i found incredibly fascinating about the movie was the man and camps your mother had been transferred from and you know when you see the hollywood version of these things  matter of fact my mom in her story in her post facto diary and in the film talks about the same scene that was depicted in schindler's list where they discover some missing food rations or something and gets lined up prisoners and he just went to every other one and he shoots every other one dead as an example to the others  because of you know some missing food ration or something and and my mother describes that very scene as happening while she was in that camp and your mother also came across dr  i will tell you it's a very powerful point in this film how she narrowly escaped death at his hands you know we're going to be showing the trailer from this what was it like for you to go back to these places trace your mother's footsteps it was very it was incredibly emotional and in some ways cathartic for reading many books and many stories of people and visiting museums taking virtual tours of the death camps and auschwitz and no matter you know with all that i did going there being there literally walking in the footsteps of my parents on the grounds of these places where such horrific things happened and where i lost relatives in my family and i was just at times it was almost paralyzing i took on the the the feelings that were very much related to the story so for example when i was in hungary in my mom's hometown you know there was this feeling of how you know what a great family she had in a family life that she had and the property of her home in the farm in the small village in the camaraderie of neighbors and you know what a wonderful life it must have been you know for her so that just you know it was exuding this good feeling of being there plus i was there when it was her birthday and singing happy birthday to her on the phone and so that was good and when i was walking the grounds in auschwitz i was just paralyzed i was overcome with the emotion of the things that took place the as the guy who was with us every step of the way while we were filming was expounding upon all of these facts and numbers of people on a daily basis were destroyed and murdered and and then those who were living  under hard labor conditions and tortured and i was just completely downtrodden and and it was certainly more so for me because i had my mom's words swirling around but gerardo was you know pretty much equally overcome with emotion there were times when we had to just sort of stop and just you know let things settle within us because it was very powerful being very familiar with the stories and being very familiar with my mom's diary for all those years you know which i inherited when i was you know in my early twenty's i always looked at my parents as heroes i mean kids growing up you know were you know superman was a hero or the green hornet or whether you know batman was but i never had a look very far from my heroes because knowing that their story and knowing what they went through and just seeing the strength within them and the love that still existed within you know they were my heroes so i don't know if my perspective of my mom changed other than it put me more in touch with that story and more in touch with the experiences because i felt you know i was of like walking through that certainly i couldn't relate to the point of like how could somebody live through this but the other thing it did for me is not in the film but in my mom's diary she said people often asked her how she survived how she survived the starvation how she survived the beatings and the cruelty and seeing other people murdered and losing her mother and how did she possibly survive she said that sometimes i think i survived just so that i could tell about it and and that makes me feel that since  the child of survivors and having made the film there's a reason for that and you know there's like i think i think i was i was born to to do this and think keep sharing the story to tell the story you know we're going to take a look at a clip right now actually and take a look at the trailer for only a number my mother has dementia and many years before this insidious disease began to eat away at her memories a simple self taught language exercise led to the memoir she wrote and created the resulting diary that was the story of how my parents met how they fell in love and what my mom endured during the holocaust my mother can no longer tell her story so i decided to do it by following the path of her journey in the present and looking for the remnants of her past it is a true story of the struggle to survive to love and to one morning as i went to work in the city i saw some strange looking soldiers i asked my boss who the soldiers were and he told me that we were under german occupation and jewish people had to obey the new laws said down by and those of their families there was only one small window in the car we were in there wasn't much air and we felt as if we would suffocate there was a bucket and a blanket in one corner of the car this was how we were to dispose  there was a deadly silence but at times crying screaming and the train kept going for what seemed like there we have a clip from only a number see what is the meaning of the title well the title was my mother's choice she actually on one of the notebooks where she captured her memories  there was one page that's filled with various titles and but only a number came to her because even in the film she says we were only a number you know we weren't considered human beings we were just a number because once they tattooed prisoners with a number that's that was your only identity and my mom recognized that  so that's why the title was chosen for only a number and the graphic illustration which are these two arms clutching i mean that was my concept and those are my parents number one arm has m om's number and the other one has my dad's number and i worked with george p mintel a good friend and wonderful artist to create the title graphic because i said george was familiar with the story for me telling him and i just said i i just see these two arms clutching each other for survival clock clutching each other out of love and depicting the numbers that were they were given that became their only identit to create a company and i i took my lead from the weinstein brothers who had one point name their first film company miramax pictures because their mother was miriam and their father was max productions so i've now expanded our job productions and making short documentary films for small to mid size businesses for nonprofit organizations they did a piece for home front recently and and most importantly perhaps is helping people tell their stories of their lives and their families and so that they could capture preserve and share  ninety eight year young woman whose family was very interested in capturing her life story because so much of her life story is their family history and with all of the move toward genealogy and since i made only a number which captures my family history i can't tell you the countless numbers of people that i've come across who see the film and who just say you know i owe my grandfather was a world war two vet and  you know if i offer only i had sat down and gotten a story or i don't know much about my aunt you know a little un but you know so i think it's really important for people to take the time especially as as we grow older and time goes on to capture it because generations currently and future generations are very much interested in their family histories and and where they came from then and everybody has a story and there are a lot of good out stories out there and i would just love helping people tell their story and share i to counsel people a lot without as you know to find out your grandmother story finance or mother's story because once they're gone those stories are gone you know all you have is a vague recollection it's a great idea for you to be able to sit down with the family and tell their story especially if grandma or mom is still here and you can go through consultation and production estimate so i can talk to people about what would be involved in helping them tell their story with this video documentary storytelling and i do and happy to do that and i try to make it thank you for coming on all the seniors to tell your story and to tell your mother story look for only a number to be running here right on princeton television tom callan thank you for joining us