Get Used to It: Ep. 67, "Homosexual Victims of the Holocaust"

oh [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your erstwhile hostess and today we have a really special show on the united states holocaust memorial museum and the question and the decision and the inclusion of our gay and lesbian community in this larger museum today i have a number of guests i'm going to introduce you to two of them first first of all roberta bennett who is a well-respected and busy attorney here in the los angeles area but more importantly she is the first gay or lesbian person to be appointed and was appointed by president clinton to the united states holocaust memorial museum council welcome bobby thank you thank you for being pleasure to be here and my other guest in this first half hour is david mixner uh we know him as a prolific writer an activist in our community a friend of bill today today yes good still a friend of bill good and more important i think for purposes of this show co-chair of the gay and lesbian project for the memorial museum which created and raised almost two million dollars to establish the uh gay and lesbian presence at this museum welcome david thank you it's nice to be here sheila now david start out by telling us a little bit about our community and the third reich i don't know that very many people know about it you know well one of the reasons we don't know about it unlike the jewish community which went to great extremes during the roundups to hide the torah to hide the synagogue records and underneath the basement a lot of families who had lesbians or gays or transsexuals or bi sexuals arrested destroyed the letters of their children or their brothers and sisters because they were ashamed that they were arrested so putting together our history has been a very difficult process gay men were rounded up and taken to the concentration camps many of them singled out to be brutal victims of the medical experiments especially the lesbians were rounded up and taken to the russian front and forced into prostitution to service nazi soldiers they also were taken to breeding farms and forced to breed children for the third right the other thing that a lot of people don't know about our involvement in this whole period is that we were in many nations leaders of the underground and and countries like france and the netherlands now what sparked your interest in this i think a little bit to know where i came from what my history was that we have been involved in a great struggle for liberty and justice in this country today and i wanted to know what i was a part of what people before me had had been through and when i went to the march in washington in 93 i went to the holocaust museum and never in my life have i seen a more powerful statement what happens when intolerance goes unchecked it tells us and every i believe every school child in the country should go through the holocaust museum it tells us the consequences of silence and of people being quiet in the times of oppression and and i knew that that we had to be a part of that museum and bobby so you and david i think ended up co-chairing this uh project how did you get involved in it through david like i usually get involved in things and all of us uh and all of us do this is true also at the march on washington it happened to be the weekend prior to the museum opening up to the public and one of the researchers at the holocaust memorial museum who happens to be gay did across the street from the museum a kind of candlelight type vigil and told the story of gays and lesbians in the holocaust and what happened to them and i listened and i was absolutely amazed but what really grabbed my heart was that after the liberation of the camps gay men because of laws that were on germany's books found themselves in prison again and what's kind of amazing about the whole thing is prior to the nazi regime in germany gays and lesbians were [Music] fairly well accepted assimilated had their own clubs uh and germany was one of the more progressive countries when it came to our community and until hitler came to power i think that's one of the most horrifying things that i've learned for the holocaust that when the allies liberated the camps that many gay prisoners were re-arrested some of them put in cells with their campguards who were waiting for trial at nuremberg but how did um how did you then connect with the museum i mean we were all many of us in in washington for the march uh wanted to go through the museum was there already a part of an exhibit having to do with our community i had a friend named david ishen uh who was heavily involved in raising money for the museum who i had worked with in the anti-war days and he's the one that arranged for me to have a tour during the weekend of the march and we sat down and said that this is a perfect opportunity not only to raise money for the holocaust museum but for jews and gays and lesbians to work together to get to know each other in a joint project and we very systematically and carefully put together meetings with board members of the holocaust museum with people like luganda who roberta and i met with here in los angeles and miles miles lerman a chicken farmer from vineland who heads the the museum and held meetings to get to know each other first of all to learn our mutual histories build respect and then started this project and what is the exhibit like now what is that what is the experience like to go through for people to how do they come upon information about our community and our our communities experience uh and victimization by the third reich in the museum before we get to our community i have to tell you that going through that museum and i've been through museums all over the world is the most overwhelming and heart-wrenching experience that i have ever been through you cannot get through that museum without weeping without thinking about it for months and years afterwards and it's interesting that so many people cannot get through it the first time they get halfway through they leave they come back in two days they come back in a year and a half and even for people who do get through the museum there are always new exhibits to see traveling exhibits etc and even if i wasn't on the council when i am in washington dc i go through that museum and what it teaches about bigotry hatred and what david said the consequences of being silent is just unbelievable with regard to our own community there has been research by the museum as to other victims of the holocaust not only us but gypsies the disabled political dissidents etc so even before our community became involved the museum was interested in what happened to us as a community and the how we access now when visitors go through the museum they are given a card they get a card and that card is somebody who was in the holocaust who may have survived or not now one of these cards is a gay person that's one way another way is they have a research center computerized and you can punch in homosexual you can punch in gay and there's a tremendous amount of information there are also of course in the gift shop books about the gay and lesbian experience and the holocaust as well as the resistance and there are videos that have been done that chronicle not only gay survivors and let's face it we're running out of our survivors they're pretty much up there in years and that is still going on right now what's interesting i think about our survivors is let's go back to 1940 and what happened to them and the re-arrest and it's still not okay in a lot of places to be gay or lesbian and convincing some of these survivors to go on tape as an openly gay person telling their story is much more difficult than getting a jewish survivor to go on tape and tell their story you know the museum is rich in our history i mean i know that i went into the research center and found out the story of wilhelm iranius a dutch resistance fighter whose last words when he was executed in 1943 for burning down the hall of records in amsterdam to save jewish lives as an openly gay man his last words upon execution in the sand dunes of irvine was just tell them that we were homosexual and we saved jewish lives and in june july 14 1943 those kinds of story gives our lives meaning it tells us that we come from a great deal of courage heroes and heroines who stood up to fascism in europe in the in world war ii who make us richer by their by knowledge of their presence and the museum is loaded with those kinds of stories they have lectures uh dr claus mueller from amsterdam comes over and lectures a lot uh and as part of the effort uh so it it it it's it's a rich wonderful experience for our community to be part of this museum now was our was it difficult to convince our community that we should support such a project or a monument no everybody stepped up to the plate it was the easiest money david and i have ever raised interest i mean we had a wonderful wonderful committee and i can't remember we gave ourselves two years we gave it to us well over a period of five years but basically we were finished with the commitment and the pledges i think it was 19 months 18 19 months it was it was amazing we finished three years ahead of schedule and gays and lesbians and bisexual and transgender people understand depression we live it every day of our lives and they also like myself have this incredible curiosity of those who came before us to validate our journey and also to get strength you know and to draw upon the courage of those who were previous to continue you know i also want to point out that on the founders wall where there's just over 100 people it is the only official memorial in the united states that has the word gay and lesbian on the wall it's gay and lesbian family and friends right there as you entered the museum uh in the founders wall of the museum and and that was a remarkable inclusion for us as a community you know it's interesting the it seems to me that people in this country especially are just beginning to focus on some of the connections uh between the various hatreds um we were in sacramento in session when we heard that a gay couple had been murdered in redding and very shortly after that several of the synagogues in sacramento were burned and we discovered that the same young men who burned the synagogues had killed the gay couple in redding and the the members of the assembly we almost didn't know what to say because it was living proof of the connections of hatred and it seems to me that also in in a recognition because the jewish community has suffered so much from the third reich in the holocaust to sort of share the understanding that other victims as it were of the holocaust that there's a connection there about you know who is right who is pure and who is not uh in in some haters mind and i think there's a lesson a current lesson otherwise i don't i don't know that there'd be these thousands and thousands of people going through the museum it's not just old people going through connecting to a past i mean it seems to me to have a very salient message for the president it's the most visited memorial in washington d.c i mean you all you know the lines are extraordinary to get into this museum you know we all know that hate doesn't have a gender it doesn't have a race it doesn't have an orientation what it comes from is a fear of difference and what we have to do is celebrate those differences and share the journeys of those people who are different to remove remove that fear and that's what the museum does it takes an important step to give people permission to reach in themselves each of us and confront the fear of differences we have so that we can be better citizens but i wonder if it isn't just i'll say something slightly provocative to you i i hope not to just a sort of a an isolated experience don't you find that a lot of people think well that can't happen here that was a very extreme example but you know we're not going to put everybody in prison and all that stuff it's a i mean a museum always seems to have what should we have put people in prison how about the internment of the japanese and you know we like to say never again but the reason we have to keep on saying never again is i think because everybody deep down knows that it could happen again and maybe not here maybe it's in africa maybe it's in the middle east but let's not discount the number of hate crimes that are committed in the united states on a daily basis you know the fact of the matter is it was only 30 short years ago that people were losing their life in this country trying to vote in the southern part of the united states and to gain the right of african-americans right to vote just three decades no time at all and last year more people died in gay and lesbian-related hate crimes than in the worst year of african-americans being lynched it is happening now we are seeing an epidemic of hate directed towards all communities there's only one response to that and that is for all of those communities to stand up together and speak out if there's any message in the holocaust museum it is indeed that silence kills there were people in world war ii who thought they're not going to come for me that it's the poor jewish shopkeepers not the rich german industrialists who they're rounding up and the rich german jewish industrialists didn't think they were going to come for them and guess what they did you know in the jehovah witnesses and the homosexuals and the disabled and women and the political prisoners the fact of the matter is they come for those they come for all unless it's held and checked and that's that's that's the message in this museum i was struck most by a room where there was dissension among uh activist jewish groups in world war ii how much to make it an issue in franklin roosevelt's election about bombing the rail lines to the camps you know and how much pressure should it be public debates should it be quiet to be and clearly the rail lines were never bombed and i learned from that a very valuable lesson about my commitment to gay and lesbian rights and that is never to be quiet in face of great injustice and right now there does happen to be an exhibit in the museum it's called the st louis exhibit regarding one of the ships that did in fact leave europe bound for america and was turned away right on our shores and eventually had to go back to europe i mean these there are so many horror stories all over and the museum does reach out to all victims of the holocaust and wants to include our community as well and the gay and lesbian project is truly not finished we are planning on trying to raise approximately another 1.5 million dollars and a uh the regional director here on the west coast happens to be an openly gay male jeff janice and how he got involved with the museum is a very funny story a gay and lesbian community event a tour of the museum and jeff was one of those people and he was talking to some of the people at the museum and he is a fundraiser and he's always been 501c3 material and they glommed on to him knowing he was openly gay and now he's here and so they have been very supportive very encouraging and want us to participate not only financially which is important to hear but to allow us to use the money in ways that will tell the story of the gay and lesbian communities victimization during the holocaust well i met jeff because i went to a presentation about the passengers on the st louis and the research project that had that has attempted with almost complete success i think only 11 passengers passengers left to trace or find um and he doing his job said you know what you should do your show about this about the holocaust museum and so the very next show we did is this one and he's been very effective but i was interested in your appointment by the president to this council very prestigious council uh you said the first open gay or lesbian person or is there more than one no the only open gay and lesbian person what's that experience like this must be an interesting crowd of people on this council well i must tell you that the staff is so supportive that right before my first council meeting two or three of the staff came up to me and said you don't have to worry about this one this one this one referring to members of the council these three can be educated and forget him it's sort of like the legislature yes right exactly forget him and these three exactly i i have to tell you i i have felt very welcome by i would say 99 of the council um i'm not in anybody's face i don't have to be in anybody's face i'm always prepared to get into somebody's face but it it wasn't necessary and it's really an a very distinguished council in terms of the participation and who is on it and what they want to achieve for our citizenry especially our children because there are more school children that go through that museum on a daily basis and they're on those computers they're seeing it they may get that card they um they certainly see the wall because they the elevators that take you up to the permanent exhibit that's where the wall is they can't miss it and the educational value to children seeing what hate bigotry discrimination and silence does is just invaluable and i'm just tickled pink that president clinton appointed me i could have had other appointments this is the one i wanted this is the one i held out for and i'm really pleased to be there roberta talked about it's impossible to go through the museum without crying i never forget my first visit that was going for the museum and i was doing everything i could to not cry and i got to one of the few remaining pink triangles that exist and there it was on exhibit and i just broke down because i knew someone like me wore that pink triangle that there was a history that there was a face that there was a story there and it just was like a 10 10 pound sledgehammer on my head when i came across that pink triangle and that means that we're part of the museum story the museum does not have many artifacts that relates to our community during the holocaust there just isn't that much but we are amassing whatever we can we do have some pink triangles we have some survivor videos um and and other artifacts as well and we're hoping that within the next five years the museum has traveling exhibitions one of them is something called daniel's room which was here in los angeles a year ago and it follows the story of a young jewish boy from the beginning of hitler's reign right through the holocaust as a matter of fact fact i took nicholas my child through the exhibit here in los angeles and we're hoping that we'll be able to get a gay and lesbian exhibit together which will travel to the bigger cities and be shown the same way for all those people who cannot get to washington dc it is so hard i've been trying to research the story of wilhelm the dutch resistance fighter who saved thousands of jewish lives in the netherlands and he wasn't even honored by the netherlands into the 1950s because the country refused to honor the commando team because they were gay and lesbian so they weren't even acknowledged by their countrymen for their heroism and the lives they save to like a decade or two later many of the family members burn the letters they burn uh the history and so it's very hard at times to put our history together well it's even more difficult it seems to me for us and as you know in the second half of this show we have one of the curators from the museum the deputy director of exhibitions ted phillips and this is a heads up for you as well to talk a little bit about what we have been able to find and also the difficulty of it but i remember in the presentation on the st louis passengers that one of the things that they indicated was the more information we just put out that we were looking but still there are families who can help you find some of the survivors or what happened in the story because they're in the families many times in our community we haven't kept touch with our family we've left our family our family has thrown us out and i can imagine that it might be a more even more difficult time it's even worse than that there is the sister who doesn't want to admit that her brother was gay right there is the parents who don't want to admit that their child was gay there is the child who doesn't want to admit that a parent was gay or lesbian it is very difficult to piece our part of this together for a lot of reasons when gays and lesbians were rounded up their families said that they were fighting at the russian front instead of going to camps because they were too ashamed to admit that their sons and daughters had been rounded up for being gary lesbian what an incredibly awful and dramatic experience i mean bad enough it's terrible to talk about any of it i guess but bad enough when your entire family is taken as a unit you can imagine for a moment that you won't be separated because no one knew what they were getting into when they got to the camps but to be taken as an individual your family is left and you're gone i mean the the terror yeah oh just it must be incredible stories well i hope we learn more and more and i want to thank you both for being here and for your work i mean this is the such important work and i know that everyone watching the show will really really want to contribute to the next uh uh one and a half million because it's a very important thing to do and at the end of the show we will have a little thing that shows people how they can do that but thank you very much david mixner thank you roberta bennett in the second half of the show as i indicated ted phillips deputy director of exhibitions at the holocaust museum we're also going to have a clip a video clip an interview an oral history uh from the collection at the museum so don't go away last night i met the most incredible girl so sexy the way she held her cigarette her clothes wreaked of tobacco her fingernails were kind of yellow later we kissed it was like licking an ashtray and then she whispered the sweetest thing in my ear i think i'm in love this is the story about a city hidden beneath the sea the coral reef is the most important city on earth because it helps our oceans keep the planet healthy unfortunately overfishing and pollution are harming the coral reef seventy percent will disappear in our lifetime unless you help but just think if you do you might just save the world [Music] hi welcome back to get used to it in case you missed the beginning i'm sheila cuell and i'm your host as always uh and today we have a special and wonderful show uh talking about the united states holocaust memorial museum as you know the first half of the show we talked to david mixner and roberta bennett about the project that raised some money to provide inclusion of our community at the museum or an expanded inclusion about the history of our community in the third reich and in the second half here in the show very pleased to have as my guest ted phillips who is the deputy director of exhibitions at the center now joined at the museum now joined the museum in 94. prior to that was a professor in russian history at the university of maryland his training as a history buff welcome happy to have you here ted thank you i'm intrigued i guess as many people are when they go to any museum but i think most especially a museum that creates an experience for the people going there about how how you make the decisions to create that experience or that history or to show the community and especially in our case where i'm not sure there's very much out there that we found so far the challenge with developing the main exhibition at the holocaust museum was to tell a comprehensive story of an extraordinary time period in european history to make that story accessible to an american audience and to make sure that the american audience came away with a very strong powerful sense of exactly what had happened and some very strong lessons as well about what it is to stand by and not participate or let things happen for the gay and lesbian community we were eager to have them as part of the overall experience of the holocaust because the holocaust did not involve just jewish victims as the so often thought we have identified six or seven other groups that are rarely mentioned in the context of the holocaust including the gays and lesbians of jehovah's witnesses the handicapped the roma and the sentai which is a another name for gypsies we look at the polish victims as a separate group because they too were subject to a very difficult history as being the first country invaded by the germans in september 1939 the effort then to tell this whole story in a way that the americans understand it and also in a way that is comprehensive and carefully thought out and what draws a russian historian who specialized in the time of empire in russia to a museum that really dealt with a much more modern time in german history from my own coming into the museum actually i came through kind of a separate entity coming through publications having just finished my own book um getting involved in the exhibition side was sort of because i got moved along as the museum was growing in 1994 we had only been open for a little over a year and the museum had just pretty much gotten gotten its feet on the ground after opening this major exhibition and opening the museum itself and it was in the process then of where do we go from here lots of changes in the museum hierarchy and i find myself in an exhibitions division and i too learning from the ground up just how extraordinarily complicated it is and how wonderful it is to build an exhibition around these topics now for me as a gay man it was particularly wonderful because i could be a part of the history itself in 1997 as the conclusion of the fundraiser that david and roberto were talking about uh the first million two or nearly two million dollars that were raised they had a concluding event a memorial service in fact for the gay and lesbian victims of the holocaust at the museum it coincided with the last presentation of the quilt on the mall in washington and i was asked the exhibition division was asked to put together some sort of exhibition on the materials that we had found thus far at the museum to deal with the story of a gay and lesbian person i was asked to curate it which to me still remains one of my great memories of the museum of my working there of taking the combination of being a historian of being a gay man and working out to me one of the most important institutions in the country and all three stories came together in one place now tell us about the exhibition you curated the exhibition brought out a collection of papers that had been brought to the museum by our chief european uh researcher dr klaus mueller uh klaus has been working extraordinarily hard for several years and i'm not sure exactly when he's joined the museum but it was before i've been part of it working very closely with the gay and lesbian community in europe attempting to find as many papers as he can he brought to us a collection we call the joseph k collection it was papers that were offered to the museum by joseph k's surviving husband that be the word i believe um in the collection itself were a number of letters documents personal papers that joseph k had kept after his liberation from flossenburg it was a camp in germany joseph k had been arrested in vienna on under paragraph 175 which is the legal basis on which all homosexuals were arrested in germany or in the reich would be germany austria and other occupied territories that were absorbed into germany under nazi regime he was arrested under paragraph 175 and sent both into prison and ultimately into the concentration camp one of the wonderful parts of the joseph k collection are several letters written by joseph's parents to the camp commandant at flossenburg asking how is my son where is my son is my son fine the letters in fact were responded to by the commandant your son is here he is fine very simple very perfunctory the letters will return them to joseph's parents those papers were then turned over to joseph by his parents after the war so he too had a personal record then of his own experience included also were documents that connected with his efforts after the war to have this arrest expunged from his record because he felt it unfair to have been arrested under paragraph 175 so this way we know for sure that he had in fact been a homosexual and had been arrested by that by those terms of that law for the exhibition then i was able to take these documents that set them side by side we went to the national archives in washington where they have records from the concentration camps that were seized by the allies at the end of the war and found the page of the flossenburg registry that has his name his prison number 1896 i believe explained right there on the line that he was a prisoner under the terms of paragraph 175 also in the collection was his prisoner badge it was the piece of fabric that he wore that had his prisoner number and a triangle to indicate that he was in this case actually a political prisoner but it had his number and it was all linked together now one of the questions that we're often asked is about pink triangles the pink triangle as we have on the badge that we've done at the museum comes out of the concentration camp experience this was a way that the germans were able to mark who was a homosexual yellow triangles for jews they were often but pair of triangles overlapped each other so he looked like a star of david red triangles for political prisoners green were for criminals a whole series of different color coding in this case i don't believe joseph k had a pink triangle in his collection but we have to assume that he had one at one point one of the issues that roberta raised earlier was the fact that homosexuals often were re-incarcerated after the war after liberation because they were homosexual the laws in germany did not change until the late 1960s to take criminal charges off of homosexual behavior so that in fact it is my guess we are still attempting to research this but it is my assumption that as soon as joseph k was liberated from flossenberg that he destroyed his pink triangle because it would have served as evidence that he in fact was a homosexual and therefore could in fact be rearrested in the post-war period so given the constraints that we have on our research i mean i i we discussed in the first half of the show how difficult just the trail is to figure out who was arrested for what reason and as they indicated a number of families destroyed all the evidence about their children because they didn't want anyone to know that they had a gay child and were lying about them going to the russian front or whatever how much information have we been able to unearth people we know were victims of the third reich very very little about the gay and lesbian victims much of it comes out of the numbers involved um estimates unlike in 1928 that there were 1.2 million gays in germany now one of the important factors that needs to be addressed in this is the that that the law dealing with the arrest of homosexuals for homosexual behavior only applied to germany after 1938 when austria was involved merged into it then that what law was expanded to cover austria as well there was very little effort by the nazi regime to actually be locating and persecuting and arresting homosexuals in other countries that they occupied so we're mostly looking at those who were victims in the country of germany and austria ultimately 1.2 million in 1928 we have specific and uh clear records that about 100 000 of that 1.2 million had been arrested specifically for the crime of homosexuality of that hundred thousand fifty thousand were found guilty of those fifty thousand most ended up with prison sentences in ordinary prisons current estimates indicate only between five and fifteen thousand homosexual men very few lesbians under and lesbians were not part of this paragraph 175 of the german law but five to 15 000 homosexual men then found themselves incarcerated in concentration camps research has revealed that about 60 percent of any homosexual who went to a concentration camp died in the concentration camp so with his death would be the end of any of his records any personal papers so immediately you have reduced the possible numbers of survivors of those who survived the concentration camp nearly 20 percent an additional 20 percent died in the immediate aftermath of liberation at the end of the war simply because there was no infrastructure there was very little medical care all the sorts of challenges in a completely devastated nation to try to help those who now were even set free from the camps so we're dealing with a very small handful of numbers of possible survivors now making our case more complicated is the fact that the average age of a concentration camp in turned homosexual mail was probably late twenties early thirties now we are fifty-five sixty years later it's very unlikely that too many of them are still alive so trying to find the individuals themselves who are survivors we simply have the uh the problem of mortality catching up with the pool from which we can even begin to extract materials so have you found any survivors um i believe the the last numbers i have seen indicate that between the united states holocaust moral museum's research efforts and the efforts by the showa foundation based here in washington the steven spielberg's film project we have about 15 interviews oral history interviews that have been done attempting to find others is still somewhat of a challenge roberta and david both pointed out very clearly the challenges of locating survivors simply because family would have been loath to identify or recognize that their own children or other members of their family would have been arrested under paragraph 175 well i know you brought a a brief portion of one of the oral history interviews today and we'd like to show our audience um three or four minutes of that interview will you tell us about the men that we're about to see the gentleman is name is teophil kasmirsky he is uh i'm sorry kosinski he was arrested he's actually polish which is somewhat unusual as i say most the time the laws dealt with arrest of germans a polish homosexual victim is quite unusual but his story was quite unusual in that he actually fell in love with a member of the german army who was occupying poland at one point during their relationship or their friendship um the soldier was then forced off to go to fight on the eastern front in russia they had promised each other they would exchange letters but the soldier never wrote back teophil wrote a letter to the soldier at the eastern front expressing again his love for the man his great concern about him the letter was captured and in the letter unfortunately teofit also included his return address so it basically opened andre for the gestapo to come back and find teophil the charges that would be ultimately lobbied against him was demoralizing the german army because it was basically quite quite against the german military's ideas of german manhood that a military soldier would be having a relationship with another man so in fact the guilty party here is the young pole now who's conducting the oral interviews i believe this oral interview here is done by dr klaus mueller again he was quite the leading source of doing a lot of this research for us he has traveled throughout europe in fact he is based in amsterdam doing his research there so he's been the one who has been at the forefront of doing the research projects for us at the museum good well let's take a look at this excerpt from one of the oral histories a survivor a gay survivor of a victim of the third reich i remember in this uniform this black yeah black uniform with this red here and this arm he asked me first for the name i told him that and then he said he took a typewriter he started to write i was he write i was sitting so in front of him when the paper came through down i read from from other side and i never forget the words it was written haft befell in german in english it is order for prisoner like this oh the first moment i thought i will fall down and then he said you'll stay now what for i began to cry don't play here theater don't play it will be everything don't and then he called somebody they took me to the cell it was downstairs in the color let me say yes to the cell and there was on the furnishings only wooden bed and some top for as a toilet and that's all even the door was escaped with wooden so that i could put the handle like this and i had to wait and the whole time i was sitting the night and was thinking what happened what fall what and the next day when i was called again to him he showed me the letter this letter which i read wrote to vili this is your letter i was very honest of course i said this is my letter i wrote this to him you you wrote this letter to german you are you you loved him you had i wrote him was very good yes and then said where did you meet him he wanted to know exactly where we met us what we have done in which way we have we've seen only once or twice i never i i lied i tried to light but then you'll see me and other pew he showed me some uh pictures all the pictures of soldiers not only soul and seville and he wanted to know you you cannot remember you will remember they came to men with uh how you say this girdle you know the trousers yeah to beat with especially with them you know the climber it's terrible it was well i and i cried they put it in my trousers and my eyes and they pray they beaten me when i couldn't when i couldn't breathe nothing i couldn't speak they bring they brought water they poured water in me and began once more again and again all right and this and and always i heard only the um you pick you saw pulley you thought you uh so many bad words i cannot translate this into english especially in germany terrible so many words i have never heard before there and every day i was sending to the celt there was given only once per day something i don't know from there they brought first on the beginning i didn't eat nothing i wanted only to drink only water sleep i couldn't also because i was so big and swollen and my back and ash was so full of warm wonders with blood i and when i was lying then only on my my stomach and so happen maybe i don't know exactly i lost even the dates maybe about two weeks every day the same and every day the same question at the last one they gave me something to sign i don't know what i was soon so tortured for me it was everything i could sign everything only to be to be free how i then set me always tell through me tell through when you tell the truth you will be early free and i i was so stupid i said them also about the hitler what the village said that the hitler is also homosexual he wrote this yes and you are a fewer you you them of it was very now i'm smiling but it was not for smiling it was for crying and it's happened so two weeks after two weeks as i told you i signed well it's it's uh it's very hard to watch uh really and uh mostly because of thinking of how uh how the experience how terrifying uh the experience not just physically painful as he described it but the the terror of it and the the you know the oppression of it never knowing really i think whether you were going to live or die which was the experience of every victim of the holocaust um are there further exhibitions planned um about gay and lesbian survivors or victims in fact we are setting up a long-range exhibition plan to sort of stake out what do we go our plans are for the next 10 years for doing exhibitions exhibitions are huge complicated undertakings and take a lot of time to set them up it is our goal to do a traveling exhibition program based on all the other victim groups and the first group that we will be working with will be the gay and lesbians it is our hope that we will be doing that in the next year or two so we'll have in fact a traveling exhibition that will be telling the story of gay and lesbian victims including as much reproduction form of photos and any other materials that we have thus far been able to gather that will combine to tell as broadly and as comprehensively as we can the story of the the gay and lesbian victims and what kind of ongoing research is there to try to find more and more stories i'm sort of fascinated because i i go to museums and i go and i look at everything and i think oh wonderful someone got this and put it here but i really never quite understand what what's the work of a museum staff or researcher or curator how do you go about finding information and and putting it together so the public can get the story because we are a national museum but on the other hand actually an internationally based museum because of the story of course of the holocaust takes place primarily in europe we have staff throughout europe who assist us in the search for objects artifacts anything they can find that can help us tell the story from original materials the collections division of the museum is very uh has two or three contractors who are based in europe one is in paris one is in berlin dr mueller as i mentioned is in amsterdam these people are full-time employees we have i'm sorry we also have one in warsaw and one in israel these are full-time employees of the museum who it is their job to go out and contact through every means they have through institutions who also collect historical materials to archives through personal connections as they continue to research through any sort of family links to find anything they can that is relevant to our story as i said doctor it is dr mueller's particular personal effort to be locating anything connected with the homosexual victims and he has brought back this one collection now and i know that he is searching far and wide as best he can but as i say the numbers are pretty much running against him to find significant collections but anything and everything would be a great help at this point and when you curate an exhibition how do you decide i mean it's not just showing people things correct especially in the holocaust memorial museum it's an experiential thing we want you to feel something i suppose every museum actually does but many of them just show you things how do you decide how to arrange and how do you choose what you're going to show to give that experience it's an extraordinarily complicated process but it's a wonderfully dynamic process as well we begin with the exhibition what is the idea what story do we wish to tell in this exhibition what materials are there that help us buttress that story just recently well the example that uh roberta mentioned the the st louis exhibition um that was uh um bringing together a lot of materials from the survivors that our own staff had located as you had you had alluded to the fact that the museum had undertaken this major search is to the fate of all 937 jewish passengers of that ship uh in the course of that search numerous private collections came to us and we were able to then use those to exemplify the story of each individual so we could tell the story of the the people who are on the ship who ended up living in england through one collection of personal materials that that were held by somebody who arrived in england and stayed there we do that with all of our exhibits starting from something very small and a small kernel of an idea we research the story it's often like drawing developing a book we do cutting-edge research finding unique materials that have never been presented to the world before we just recently closed an exhibition after a year and a half that dealt with materials that we got out of the lithuanian central state archives that were only available since lithuania became an independent nation this is the kind of work we do we do it because we know it's so important to be telling these stories and we are so eager to be able to find the materials in the gay and lesbian community to make sure that that story is told as broadly and as carefully and as accurately as we can because it's such an important story to tell ted phillips thank you very much for being with us we're going to show you how you can support the united states holocaust memorial museum as the credits roll so i'm not going to allow you to turn off your tv until you watch that this has been a somewhat different show for us to talk about the homosexual as we say the gay and lesbian victims of the holocaust and something to think about in terms of our own modern history very happy that you were with us and as for oppression i hope we never get used to it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you