hello hello hello and welcome back to cannes like here at princeton community television i'm a chef on the hill and here with us today we have steve besser min he is the chief storyteller at ari joe productions and he's the author of this fabulous and stunning documentary about his parents experience in the holocaust and also before we jump into our first question i'd just like to say that jenny our third leg of the storm she's not here today because she has previous do you find out about the still well i found out about the stories at a very young age i would say you know when i was four or five years old was the first time i was hearing the stories mostly from my mother my father was pretty quiet about it he was one of the survivors that preferred to you know keep it suppressed because he had lost so much and it was a very painful experience for him and he couldn't bring himself to talk about it but my mother was very vocal about her experiences and as a child the holocaust explained a lot about my family i mean first and foremost my parents had numbers tattooed on their arms so  being as inquisitive as children are she truthfully answered my questions about why she had a number on her arm and it was also the explanation for why i didn't have grandparents  because they were lost to my family in the holocaust so so i did learn about it directly from my mother and she would tell many stories about what happened to  her prior to the holocaust in terms of her growing up and when the nazis invaded her country which was hungary my mom was from hungary and my dad was from poland and and she would also tell me some things about  what happened to her during the holocaust and how she lost her mother she was separated from her mother and together with her sisters she was in the camp so  just was a way of communicating my family history to me at the same time as learning about the atrocities and the horrors that occurred for a lot of people during that more than thirty five years because that's when it really began my mom again would always tell my sister and i these stories of her experience and  was when i was in my twenty's that i went to visit my parents and with my wife i was newly wed and and my mom had taken  to performing this language exercise she wanted to improve her written english and she spoke with a very thick accent but she spoke english very well but her writing was a little bit hampered by  education that she had she only went to school up until about the sixth grade and but she would write notes and things in what i call the hunger wish it was you know kind of english letters with you know hungary and internation some things in them and she wanted to improve that so the way she did was she would take a dictionary and she would look up words that she was unfamiliar with and then she would write the words down and spell them correctly and then write their definitions and them and then she would try to use the words in the paragraph you know like a diary entry in them so on this visit to my parents one day many years ago my mom came over and proudly displayed her work for me  spiral notebook and i looked down and on one side of the page was this list of words and on the other side of the page was a paragraph using those words and it was a very monday night and tree she had gone to a store with one of her sisters one of my  aunts but she saw something on the shelf in the store that reminded her of an experience that she had in the auschwitz concentration camp and there were these three sentences that just sort of captured the story and i was familiar with the story because i had heard her tell me that before but somehow seeing it written on the page it was very powerful for me and my mom very innocently came up to me she wasn't aware that i was reacting to that you know she was just proud of this exercise that she had accomplished and and and she said well what do you think of my work and i said well this is terrific you know first and foremost but but when i read these three sentences about your experience in auschwitz it makes me want to ask you to do something that's going to be very difficult it's going to be difficult physically because it's going to be a lot of work for you but it's going to be difficult emotionally because what i would really want to have and treasure for my children when i have them then their children when they have them is you capturing all of your experiences of what it was like for a young girl growing up in hungary and and have you  experienced the holocaust when the nazis invaded your country and took your life away in and how you met my father and and how you came to america in that sector would really be a treasure for me to do that and she she just sort of stopped for a moment and nodded and didn't really say anything and then when i came back six weeks later she came into the room and handed me six notebooks filled on both sides of the page with all of her memories and they were in a in a you know in the sequence of how things happened but it just you know sort of came to her and stream of consciousness and she wrote all of these memories down and it was at that moment that i knew that i was going to have to find a way to share the story but the notion of doing it as a documentary came to me many years later my mom was diagnosed with dementia a form of alzheimer's and and she began to lose her memories and that coupled with some inspiration that i took from other films that i've seen in other books that i've read led me to making the documentary by going back and using the words from her diary to tell the story in visiting and capturing all of those places today while unveiling some of the memories from the past so that's a experience it was that was all horrible she was actually in after the twice and if if i did pinpoint an instance where i should would have been the most horrible for her and the worst part of her experience for two reasons probably the first time she was now with i mean that was the first time that she would after spending some time in the ghettos i mean here she was transported to this insane world where you know she lost her life she lost her identity upon arrival and hours which her and her sisters were separated from their mother her mother was let off she did the prisoners come before him and he would look them over and determine who he thought was healthy enough to work so they would be sent to the right or if they were sickly were older or of no use to the nazis he would send them to the left and that meant that you were going to the gas chamber in the crematorium you would be immediately executed and my mom sisters were sent to the right and she was sent to the left and it was only due to circumstance of some commotion that was going on that she was able to escape and reunite with her sisters that were was putting them on a train taking them to yet another camp and work in a factory and things like that so it was a very very narrow escape so that's why i would say that auschwitz was the worst for her first because her first time there was just that  thrust into madness and the second time was a narrow escape from death so going back trying to find all the stuff to put into your documentary was it hard to put together hard to get all the information that's a good question it was it wasn't hard per se i mean hard in the sense that it took a lot of effort i mean my my mother's  well organized way captured what happened in in which place and where that was located and so that enabled me to really perform pretty organized research and contact people in those areas of poland and germany and hungary and and literally set up a situation where i could trace her footsteps so to speak and then walk in those footsteps and go there so i had a contact in each country that was helping me go to those places in advance and send me photographs so that when i got there i knew exactly where i was going and what was most relevant to my mom's situation and her story at the time so i started with her hometown and where she was born and raised and and then all of the ghettos and my mom in the film is very much from my mom words and i always want to keep her voice which was very evident in the way she wrote her experiences  she helped me actually capture my dad's story because when they when they fell in love through a barbed wire fence and were married after the  got to know a lot about you know what my father experienced and what his family life was like growing up and so i got my dad story from my mom and then he would later  corroborate and expand on the things that happened to him so so i feel like i did get my story never sent and since i made the film my father has been a lot more vocal about you know some of the details of his story but his story is kind of summarized in the film by my mom so some people believe that the holocaust never happened why do you think the well you know unfortunately you're always going to find people that are either denying out of guilt or denying because they want to justify their own prejudices and their own hatred and they want to sort of you know denounce things that you know that really prove their their culpability in their and their guilt so certainly people who had participated you know you hear things all the time where they discover that somebody was a nazi guard or a nazi soldier and they're trying to bring them to justice after all these many years and and you know they'll deny it you know because it makes them guilty and i think others are just blinded by prejudice and hatred and ignorance and you know it now there's there's just so much evidence  you know all around the world with the you know the museums the artifacts the films that have been captured the stories that have been told and that it's it's just you know asinine for you know anybody to deny it i mean i think i think they look pretty foolish and ignorant to you know to deny something that exists it's like denying something else in history you know saying pearl harbor never happened or you know i mean it's just it's just ridiculous speak you know nazi gods on trial but what about this trial in germany were  yeah i mean people were you know guilty of very heinous you know heinous crimes and you know if they were responsible for other people's  was really a key objective of mine with the film you know the first thing i wanted to do was really do it for myself and my family so that  was you know it was just something that i was carrying around with me for many many years and i just needed to find a way and with my experience and training and i'd like to think talent in  filmmaking that became the way that i would share my parents story but the next the next most important objective for me was to share the story with as many people as possible so that i can contribute to the you know the vast library of facts and information that prove what happened to people and to tell it in a very personal geared toward for educators to how they should share the film and some questions they can asked students after they've seen the film to sort of you know provoke some thinking and  internalizing of the story but what it means in the grander scheme of things and the danger of prejudice and the dangers of hatred when carried to an extreme so the film and the study guide  now distributed to all middle and high schools in new jersey via the commission and i've shown it to many classes i've been the guest lecturer at universities and shown the film and talked about it and it's been a film festivals and it's been on public television so i've tried to get it out there as much as i can and by now many thousands of people have seen the film and know the  story and so it is important to keep it alive and i encourage everyone who has a story to capture it in whatever way they can whether it's in a book or whether a letter or you any plans on on telling those stories you know unless somebody wants to needs help in telling their stories and you know wants to engage me to help them tell their story then  i would consider i would consider doing that but it was important for me to tell my parents story because their story is my story it's my family story i am  helping other people tell their stories that that may not have anything to do with you know the holocaust or genocides or but i'm kind of a human ist at heart  so i find people's stories very interesting and i recently completed a short documentary called bunny about a woman at the time she was turning ninety seven when i filmed her this july god bless or she should be turning ninety nine and she had a very interesting life her husband who died about twenty interesting life she was a bit of a performer and a dancer a singer and and so i just found her story particularly interesting so i made that film money and trying to do that for people that want to tell their stories and interesting stories in this video documentary storytelling that i do but it was my film only number about my parents that started our job productions but everybody called her ari and my father was joseph and everybody called him joe so i made the company ari joe productions but since making the film i've expanded our your productions to employee this approach to video documentary storytelling for small to mid sized businesses that have a story to tell for nonprofit organizations i did a piece for home front if you're familiar with the hope for an organization that provides you know homes and shelter and food for people who are homeless and in central new jersey and and and then i made a bunny which is an example of the film for people who are interested in sharing their family histories and capturing those four for their own families and to share with friends and so those are the kinds of short documentaries that i'm making now and that's what  determined to have holocaust education in this thing where she lived where they didn't have it so she went around changing the people on campus and asked them questions about the whole class and nobody knew anything except the people from new jersey and the area around here so it's super so she she got the education for where she lived and she wrote a book about her mother's experience just like you know documented in your parents experience so i think it's super important  for having such a great program and having great guests on your program i've seen a couple of of your programs and i think it's great to be part of princeton community television and there's a lot of stories out there and in a way super interesting story and amazing work here and i really love the name tim telling him right my mother's choice for the title because in the film in her diary and in life she would always say that she said we were only a number we weren't even considered to be human beings the nazis just you know branded us and then that was our only identity we were my mother has dementia and many years before this insidious disease began to eat away at her memory as 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 sorters 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