Donning a mask, Van Sise, a 2005 Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate, made himself comfortable in Werner Reich’s living room. For the next two hours, he listened to the 92-year-old engineer talk about life in the United States, his home since 1948, and he watched as the father of two and grandfather of four performed magic tricks. As a teenager, he’d survived three concentration camps, including Auschwitz, the deadliest Nazi death camp. There, he’d learned card tricks to entertain the guards—a skill that had kept him alive. When he finally left the camp, Reich endured a frigid death march and suffered frostbite so severe that he’d later have to amputate a toe.

By the time World War II was over, Reich had no formal education, no home, and both his parents were dead. He was 17 years old and weighed 64 pounds. He had nothing. So he created a new life for himself.

This complete revival was what Van Sise had come to learn about.

After the war, Reich fled to England, where he got himself through high school and married a fellow Holocaust survivor. He and his wife then moved to the United States, where he put himself through college and became an engineer. Through it all, Reich dabbled in magic tricks, a passion that had once kept him alive and now simply brought him joy.

Van Sise was struck by Reich’s vitality, his humor. After they spoke for two hours, Reich posed for a photograph. His silhouette against a black backdrop, he smiled ever so slightly at the camera, his eyes tired but kind, and held out the palm of his hand. After that meeting, Van Sise knew that his journey would continue—and ultimately take the shape of a book.

“The experience of meeting survivors was such an unbelievable experience for me—the joy in survivors, the impressive lives they lead, even if sort of the common life,” Van Sise said in February at the launch of his book, Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust (Schiffer, 2023). “That became the biggest motivator for me, that greed to absorb this experience, and to be inspired by these people.”

As Van Sise kicked off his road trip during the summer of 2020, COVID-19 cases were peaking and most Americans steered clear of each other if they could help it. And yet Van Sise was on a self-imposed mission that would lead him to the homes of 103 strangers, whose average age hovered around 85.

He’d been warned that no one would want to meet. But this cohort was not the type intimidated by a global pandemic. As children, they had lost family, friends, and homes in a spiral of viscious violence. They’d suffered through the Holocaust—and survived. They were not about to shy away from life now.

They opened their homes to Van Sise, introducing him to their spouses, children, and their children’s children. In turn, Van Sise took every precaution to protect them: from taking multiple COVID tests each week to remaining fully masked during interviews.

‘How Did You Come to Live in America?’

Back in 2015, Van Sise, a photojournalist for The Village Voice, had pitched his editor a photo spread that would document refugees who’d made a life in the United States after World War II. The feature was meant to draw a parallel with the current refugee crisis—the largest since World War II. But the Voice collapsed just around then. Instead, his photographs, a mélange of intimate portraits that tell tales of the human experience with a poet’s sensibility, were exhibited at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and elsewhere.

And Van Sise—a photojournalist, poet, fiction writer, essayist, and wedding photographer who speaks a mile a minute and doesn’t seem to know limits—moved on. “Specialization is for insects,” he said. “I like to keep myself varied in what I do.” He wrote travel essays, humor pieces, short stories, and book reviews. In 2019, he published Children of Grass (Schaffner Press), a collection of portraits that featured notable American poets.

But then COVID set in. A dread of the unknown led to fear and panic, a global paralysis. Van Sise, like much of the country, felt demoralized, a sense of powerlessness he couldn’t shake off. Looking for inspiration, he thought back to the dozen Holocaust survivors he’d photographed a few years back. As he recalled the remarkable personalities he’d encountered, their verve for life, Van Sise decided to revisit the project and find as many Holocaust survivors as possible.

He reached out to Holocaust museums across the country for their help contacting potential subjects. And off he went. After meeting Reich, Van Sise met multiple concentration camps survivors, others who as children had been hidden away for years, or transported to safety—at the expense of leaving their parents behind. They’d all missed much of their childhood due to war. Many lost their parents, grandparents, and siblings. But Van Sise was most interested in what had happened after: the rebuilding of a life.

“There’s been plenty written about the war. I can’t add to that,” said Van Sise. “And nobody ever really asked them about their American lives.”

So he drove his dark blue hatchback Hyundai (dubbed “Mildred”) from New York to California, to Alabama, Ohio, and Louisiana. As he sat on living room sofas across the country, he began each interview with the same question: How did you come to live in America? Each visit, each life story, fed him a sense of wonder—and possibility. Each tragedy was singular, every American experience an original.

In a Manhattan apartment, Van Sise met Eva Kollisch, who’d fled Vienna at age 13 through the Kindertransport (Children’s Transport), a refugee effort coordinated by the British government. Years later, in America, she was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War. In his book, Van Sise describes her as a tireless “feminist lesbian peace activist.” Her photograph, at age 96, features her 102-year old wife; the women wear contrasting parkas, their freckled hands grazing over one another’s.

Van Sise’s farthest drive was to Southern California, where Sam Silberberg, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor, challenged him to a hike on the local hills followed by arm wrestling. Agile and muscular, Silberberg led the way across rocky trails, with Van Sise trudging behind with his assistant, camera equipment in tow, while trying not to slip. Later, Silberberg, whose forearm had been tattooed in Auschwitz when he was enslaved at age 10, won their arm wrestling contest.

During each of these encounters, Van Sise spent at least three to four hours with the person, first listening, then using his Nikon 850 to preserve their image on film. He wanted to show them in a simple setting; for the most part, he photographed each person inside their home. The resulting images are black and white, each survivor distinct under a soft light, a lyrical rendering. After each meeting, Van Sise wrote the vignettes that would accompany the image, the survivor’s voice still fresh in his mind.

In Invited to Life, an Auschwitz survivor becomes a bespectacled magician, a puff of smoke rising from his palm; a concentration camp survivor becomes a musician pounding at one of his drum sets, cymbal quivering; a boy who once escaped a death march becomes an athletic warrior standing barefooted on the beach after conquering the hills of Southern California.

‘We Are Going to Live in This Book Forever’

Van Sise’s journey to chronicle these lives came in the nick of time. The youngest Holocaust survivor alive today would have been born 78 years ago, just as the war ended. Several of those featured in Invited to Life have died since posing for the book. Werner Reich, the magician, died on July 8, 2022, at the age of 94.

Yet at the standing-room-only book launch in February, a swath of Holocaust survivors and their families flocked around Van Sise. At the Strand’s Rare Book Room in Manhattan, he ran a panel with two of the subjects featured in the book: fellow Fordham alumnus Michael Bornstein, PHA ’62, and Tova Friedman.

On stage, Friedman and Bornstein, who’d been photographed together as children liberated from Auschwitz, riffed off each other and Van Sise. Bright and charismatic, they were optimistic, even as shadows of their tortured past lingered. Bornstein’s recollections of his childhood are dim, he told Fordham Magazine in 2017, “a blessing and a curse.” He was 4 years old when he was tattooed in Auschwitz. After the Soviets liberated him, Bornstein was reunited with his mother, but his father and older brother were murdered in a gas chamber.

At age 10, Bornstein and his mother emigrated to the United States. He’d go on to earn a partial scholarship from Fordham, work odd jobs throughout his studies, and eventually earn a Ph.D. in in pharmaceutics and analytical chemistry from the University of Iowa. Still later, he’d write a New York Times bestselling memoir.

Friedman, who by age 7 had experienced starvation and been hidden among piles of corpses, was lucky: She survived the war alongside her mother and was reunited with her father. After emigrating to the United States with her parents, she earned an advanced degree, became a therapist, and started a family.

More recently, with the help of her grandson, Friedman has become a TikTok sensation, with more than 500,000 followers; one single post has amassed 8 million views. In two-minute videos, Friedman answers questions about the Holocaust from among the hundreds she receives each week. Her eight grandchildren are her legacy, she said, but Van Sise’s book is now part of her legacy, too.

“We are going to live in this book forever,” Friedman said. “We’ll be there forever with our stories.”

‘Soul-Fullfilling’ Projects

Sitting across from Bornstein and Friedman at the Strand event, Van Sise seemed to have accomplished what he unknowingly set out to do. When he had arrived at Fordham as an undergraduate about two decade ago, he’d intended to study early Christian theology. But in his first year, he responded to a Craigslist ad for The New York Sun seeking a cub reporter or photographer. He got his father’s old Canon FT and launched a career.

He credits Joseph Lawton, his photography professor, for changing his life and inspiring his career. Lawton, who’s taught photography at Fordham for more than 40 years, has a relatively simple philosophy. He asks students to find beauty in their own lives, to enjoy the simple pleasure of sight, and then share what they see.

“If you look even now at his work versus mine, you will see there is a kinship there,” Van Sise said. “He also has a certain sense of the poetry of life, and the little moments.”

As Van Sise travels the country to promote Invited to Life, he continues to meet with the survivors whose lives he’s recorded inside the pages of his book. Together, they speak at panels and receptions. For Van Sise, it has been among the most “soul-fulfilling” projects of his life.

His next production, a film slated to appear as major museum installation in the fall of 2024, will portray disabled American veterans, a group he feels a particular kinship with, having served in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve and having a father and grandparents who served in the Navy and Army, respectively.

Naturally, he has more on the burner. Lately, Van Sise has been documenting speakers of 80 endangered languages across America. In this creation, he is incorporating language, poetry, and images—to remind us, once again, not to forget.

—Keren Blankfeld is a long-form journalist who teaches reporting and writing at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her book Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story, based on a 2019 article she wrote for The New York Times, is scheduled for publication by Little, Brown in February 2024.

This was the challenge that a panel of experts—together with one Holocaust survivor—addressed at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Jan. 26.

The event, “Remembering: Talking About the Holocaust in the 21st Century,” took place on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945.

Fred de Sam Lazaro, a correspondent for PBS NewsHour and director of the University of St. Thomas’ Under-Told Stories Project, moderated the evening, along with Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs Books.

The discussion began with a screening of de Sam Lazaro’s 2022 PBS NewsHour segment on Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued (Norton Young Readers, 2021). Written and illustrated by Peter Sís, who was in the audience at the Jan. 26 event, it tells the story of Nicholas Winton, known as the “British Schindler,” who helped 669 children escape from Czechoslovakia just before the Nazi occupation.

One of ‘Winton’s Children’ Shares Her Story

One of those escapees, Eva Paddock, was interviewed by de Sam Lazaro at the event. She spoke just before the panel of experts addressed diminishing public awareness of the Holocaust amid a rise in disinformation and revisionism. In 1939, when she was 4, Paddock and her sister were placed by their parents on the last Kindertransport train leaving Prague and taken in by a foster family in England. Unlike the majority of “Winton’s children,” as they came to be known, Paddock was reunited with her parents in 1940.

Because she was so young, she needed people like her parents to help her fill in the gaps in her memory, she said. When they talked about their experiences, they did not dwell on the evil that drove them from their home, but on the gratitude they felt toward the British people.

She also shared the harrowing details of her father’s escape, which was made possible only because of the altruism of individuals, from an S.S. officer who looked the other way when he encountered him, to a stranger who paid for his flight from Brussels to London when he was told his Czechoslovakian money was no good with the country in enemy hands.

Educating Young People About the Holocaust

Holocaust education, which is mandated in schools in only 27 U.S. states, is due for a change, and her and her father’s stories should be a part of that change, Paddock said. Both stories show how even a single person has the potential to do enormous good.

“It has to come out of the history books and be made relevant to today’s generation, and I believe the way to do that is to reframe the way it’s taught,” she said.

“Certainly, it’s important to teach [people] to honor the millions lost, but I think it needs to be reframed to demonstrate the power of altruism and the power of one. Because of course, I look at Nicholas Winton, and here’s a prime example of the power of one.”

The panel that followed featured Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent, PBS NewsHour; Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham; James Loeffler, Ph.D., the Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia; and Linda Kinstler, author of Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (PublicAffairs, 2022).

Their wide-ranging conversation touched on everything from the war in Ukraine and the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia to the challenges faced by U.S. news organizations when newsworthy politicians use extreme rhetoric that was once beyond the pale.

Building a Framework for Memories

Loeffler said that when it comes to sustaining the memory of the Holocaust, it helps to remember that many people are involved—each with a different memory. This partly explains why Russian president Vladimir Putin could make the preposterous statement that Russia was invading Ukraine to fight Nazis and fascism, he said.

“One of our challenges is to build a frame so we can build an ethical response that takes the memory and brings people back together to understand what it was and what it wasn’t,” he said, noting that Paddock’s experience is instructive.

“When she was describing her own experience … she also talked about how her memory had been nursed and supplemented by people explaining to her her experience, describing things that had happened to her family and to her when she didn’t even remember,” he said.

“Memory is not just an individual flame that we nourish. It’s a social endeavor, and one of our challenges today is to figure out how we can rebuild that frame to make Holocaust memory relevant, and also build a common understanding of the past.”

Teaching About Events Leading to the Holocaust

Teter said that discussions with her students have convinced her that it might be better to place more emphasis than in the past on the lead-up to the events of the Holocaust. It’s something she does already and feels strongly about its value.

“That is what makes it relevant because they can see the processes, they can see the mental frameworks, they can see the media environment, the propaganda work that resonates with them, and the world that they are living in,” she said.

“It doesn’t just spring up in 1933. This is an outcome of a longer process. We need to recalibrate that story to include that longer story too.”

Unreliable News Sources with a Platform

Complicating the effort to recalibrate the way that the Holocaust is taught is the fact that those who would muddy the waters with obfuscation and ambiguity have access to more communications tools than in the past. Woodruff said journalists at NewsHour have had to come up with a new construct over the last several years to cope with the shattering of the traditional news delivery model.

“How do you both cover the news, be fair, cover it all, and call out something that is not the truth, that is a lie? I will tell you flat out, I’ve had difficulty with that,” she said, because she believes you cannot call someone a liar unless you know what’s in their heart and mind, an admittedly tricky endeavor.

She and her colleagues have adjusted by explicitly labeling false information as such. But given the plethora of news sources available online now, more responsibility has fallen on us as individual consumers.

“There’s a much larger burden placed on news consumers to figure out, ‘Can I trust this, can I believe this? How do I know?’ she said.

“We’re living in a much more complex, complicated moment when it comes to understanding what to believe.”

The event, which was livestreamed, can be viewed in its entirety below.

The event was held before a live audience on April 11, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and was sponsored by Fordham’s Jewish Student Organization.

Freund answered Ben-Atar’s questions with unfettered swiftness. But while she was up for answering questions about the horrors of the war, she also insisted on underscoring the beauty of life and the importance of hope. Following the interview, she took questions from several students.

In her responses, Freund’s near photographic recall of events was both harrowing and inspiring. In instance after instance she quietly balanced the bad with good. There was the Christmas Night hunting party where the Nazis went out to kill escaped Jews in the woods, where Freund and her family were hiding. Then there was the German woman named Maria who helped Freund and her mother escape from a Gestapo prison run by the famous Klaus Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon.”

“She opened the door and took pity on us,” said Freund.

Freund has been a student in Fordham’s College at 60 program for more than 40 years. She remembers most of her professors by name—in particular John Adams, S.J., former provincial of the Hungarian Province of the Society of Jesus and an associate professor of philosophy.

“I’m very curious, I write a little bit, I read lots of books, and I am very, very happy,” she said. “I can only recommend going to school and continue learning—really that’s the best medicine in the world.”

A child survivor of the Holocaust was reluctant to share his family’s full story, until he saw a picture of himself as a 4-year-old boy at Auschwitz on a website denying the Holocaust

For years, Michael Bornstein, PHA ’62, wished he could wash away the serial number—B-1148—that was seared into his left forearm when he was just 4 years old. He’d mention Auschwitz, if asked about the tattoo, but he wouldn’t dwell on the Nazi death camp where his father, brother, and nearly 1 million other Jews were murdered during World War II. He’d seldom speak of being separated from his mother, who withstood beatings from female guards as she smuggled bread and thin gray soup to him in the children’s barracks, and who later smuggled him into the women’s barracks before she was sent to a labor camp in Austria. He wouldn’t say much about how his grandmother somehow, improbably, kept him alive long enough for them to be among the 2,819 prisoners liberated by Soviet soldiers.

His recollection of those dark days is dim—“a blessing and a curse,” he says. He seems to recall the stench of bodies burning, the smoke rising from crematoria chimneys, the quickening clack of guards’ boots. But he’s also aware of the malleable nature of memory, how the things we recall, especially from early childhood, are shaped by some inscrutable mix of perception, imagination, and the stories we’re told. And so for years he stayed mostly silent about his past, not only because it was traumatic but also because so much of it—the texture of his brother’s hair, the sound of his father’s voice—was inaccessible to him.

He preferred to look forward, with an optimism he says he inherited from his mother. Gam zeh ya’avor, she’d tell him, quoting the motto she and her husband shared during the war. This too shall pass. He can still hear the sound of his mother’s voice because she found him in Żarki, Poland, after the war. In February 1951, when he was 10, they immigrated to the United States, where he’d go on to build a career in pharmaceutical research and—with his wife, Judy—raise four children in what he calls “a life filled with soccer games, birthday parties, and bliss.”

As his kids grew up, they began pressing him for details about his past, but he’d always resist a full recounting. Now Bornstein is 77, and his children have children of their own. Several years ago, when Jake Wolf, the eldest of his 11 grandkids, started asking questions, wanting to use the information for his bar mitzvah project, Bornstein couldn’t say no. He began to open up.

Then he saw something that left him stunned and more determined than ever to tell his story: a picture of himself as a boy at Auschwitz on a website claiming that the Holocaust is a lie, that it never happened. “I slammed my computer shut in disgust. I was horrified. My hands shook with anger,” he writes in Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz, published last March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “But now I’m almost grateful for the sighting. It made me realize that if we survivors remain silent—if we don’t gather the resolve to share our stories—then the only voices left to hear will be those of the liars and bigots.”

Bornstein wrote the book with his daughter Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, a TV news producer who for years had urged her father to work on such a project. She helped him plumb his earliest, darkest memories, and together they searched historical records and interviewed relatives and others who knew his family in Poland. In the process, they discovered a detail that helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of his survival, and he learned much about the resolute, resourceful father he never got to know. Together, they reclaimed a family heritage, illuminating stories of loss and resilience that had been left largely untold for 70 years.

Żarki, Open Ghetto

Michael Bornstein was born on May 2, 1940, in the Nazi-occupied town of Żarki, Poland, the second son of Sophie Jonisch Bornstein and Israel Bornstein, baby brother to 4-year-old Samuel. They lived in a redbrick house on Sosnawa Street.

In some parts of Poland during the late 1930s, Jews couldn’t own land, and their business dealings were restricted. But Jewish-owned businesses thrived in Żarki, where more than half of the town’s population, approximately 3,400 residents, was Jewish. Bornstein’s father was an accountant, and his mother’s brother Sam Jonisch (one of her six siblings) ran his family’s leather tannery in town.

That changed on Friday, September 1, 1939, when German forces invaded Poland, reaching Żarki the following day with an aerial attack that torched some homes and businesses. Sophie, newly pregnant with Michael, wanted to check on her parents, who lived nearby. But Nazi storm troopers had already moved onto the streets. On Monday, when all Jewish men in Żarki were ordered to report for labor shifts, Sophie left Samuel with her mother-in-law, Dora, and set out to find her parents. As she neared the Jewish cemetery, she saw German soldiers command a family she recognized from synagogue to strip naked. As mother, father, and young daughter huddled together, the soldier fired three shots, and the family fell dead in the ditch the father had just dug. It was a scene that haunted Sophie Bornstein her entire life.

The Nazis murdered more than 1,000 Jews in Poland that day, including 100 in Żarki. Such atrocities brought out the worst in some gentile residents, Bornstein and Holinstat write. “Many Catholics had not liked living among Jews before the war. Now they blamed the town’s Jewish people for making them the target of German bombings.”

In October, as Nazi soldiers went door-to-door confiscating Jews’ money and jewelry, Israel Bornstein sought to safeguard his family’s valuables. He gathered what he could in a burlap sack—a string of pearls, a stash of banknotes, the family’s small silver kiddush cup—and buried it in the backyard.

Żarki was still an open ghetto at the time, which meant that it wasn’t surrounded by fences, but Jews couldn’t come and go as they pleased. The Nazis shut down or took over Jewish businesses, enforced a strict curfew, and made Jews wear white armbands with a blue Star of David on them. They also forced them to create a Judenrat, a council of Jewish leaders. The town elders elected Israel Bornstein to serve as president. It was not a coveted role. Many Jews in Eastern Europe came to see Judenrat members as traitors, simply doing the bidding of the Nazis, and in Żarki people viewed Israel with suspicion.

But in their research, Bornstein and Holinstat found a collection of essays and a detailed diary written in Hebrew that told of Israel Bornstein’s heroic, often successful efforts to make conditions more bearable. In Survivors Club, they describe how he collected money from fellow Judenrat members and used the funds to bribe Gestapo officers, helping to obtain 200 legal travel visas for families trying to leave Żarki, for example, and saving the life of a teenager who faced execution because he was too sick to work one day.

“Though it’s sometimes seen as a very negative position, my father used it to save people. He set up soup kitchens. He was a very good man. And it made a lot of difference to me knowing that he was a good man,” Bornstein says. “That’s one reason we called the book ‘Survivors Club,’ because my mother’s six siblings all survived, and part of it has to do with my father, who encouraged them to go into attics, basements, wherever they could go to survive.”

By October 1942, however, the call had come for Żarki to be made Judenrein, “clean of Jews.” Most of those remaining were sent by train either to labor camps or to extermination camps. The Bornsteins and approximately 120 others were allowed to stay behind as part of a cleanup crew, but eventually they too were sent away, to a labor camp in Pionki. And in July 1944, when that camp closed, they were packed onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

“Sickness Saved My Life”

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, like all families, they were split up: Israel and Samuel were assigned to the men’s side. Michael initially stayed with his mother and grandmother until guards shaved his head and tattooed his arm. He was sent to the children’s barracks, where some older kids looked out for him, warning him to hold his nose as he drank down the smelly gray soup. Other kids stole his bread. Sophie was sent to the women’s barracks with Michael’s grandma Dora. She risked her own well-being to find her son and eventually bring him into the women’s barracks, where he hid under straw, in corners, scattering at the sound of guards approaching to take roll call.

While Sophie was able to protect Michael, she was helpless to save her husband and young Samuel, who died in September from the effects of Zyklon B gas—the Nazis’ preferred method of execution at Auschwitz, where as many as 6,000 people per day were killed in gas chambers. “[My mother] later told me that her heart literally felt like it had been gouged from her chest with an ax” when she learned of their fate, Bornstein writes. Soon, however, she was sent to a labor camp in Austria, and Michael was left alone with his grandma Dora.

By January 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on Auschwitz, the Nazis started to evacuate the camp, forcing an estimated 60,000 prisoners on what came to be known as a death march to concentration camps in Germany. Many prisoners, already frail from malnutrition, died from exposure in the harsh winter. But Michael and Dora evaded the march, and Bornstein always wondered how.

Not long ago, while visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, he discovered a document that solved the mystery. Nazi records indicate that he was in the infirmary at the time, diagnosed with either diphtheria or dystrophy (the writing is unclear). And his grandmother was with him. “The name doesn’t really matter,” he writes in Survivors Club. “That piece of paper recovered by a museum years after the war made one miracle clear. Sickness saved my life.”

On January 27, nine days after he found refuge in the infirmary, Soviet troops arrived. A couple of days after liberation, Dora carried Michael out to freedom, a scene captured on film by Soviet cameras. “Of the hundreds of thousands of children who had been delivered by train to Auschwitz, only 52 under the age of eight survived. They were the world’s best hiders,” Bornstein writes. “I was one of them.”

Postwar Dangers and the Cup of Life

Bornstein’s freedom brought with it a new set of dangers. “I would like to tell you … that all of us went home and lived happily ever after,” he writes. “But it wasn’t like that at all.” Four out of 10 Jews who survived the concentration camps died within a few weeks of the arrival of the Allied armies. Those who did survive found much of Eastern Europe unsafe for them, particularly in Poland, where anti-Jewish sentiments led to a series of murderous pogroms.

Soon after liberation, Michael and Dora returned to Żarki, where they found the family home on Sosnawa Street had been seized by a Polish family who now saw it as their home. Dora took Michael to a farm on the edge of town, where they found shelter in a chicken coop. They would periodically head into what had been the Jewish quarter, where they met relatives who were, miraculously, among the few dozen Jews (out of 3,400 six years earlier) to return to Żarki after the war. One day, as Michael and Dora walked in town, he spotted his mother, who had made her way back from Austria. “If we had both seen more horror than the world knew it could hold—then this moment was the opposite of that,” he writes. “This was the opposite of despair.”

Sophie realized that there was little opportunity left for them in Żarki. But first she tried to recover the valuables her husband had buried. “At night, even though the house was occupied, she went digging with her bare hands to try to find these things, jewels and money, and the only thing that she found was the kiddush cup, which is a cup that you make blessings with,” Bornstein says.

“And so this cup has been in our family ever since. It’s been at my wedding, at our kids’ weddings, at their bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and so on. It’s not worth much if you buy it for the silver, but we cherish it quite a bit.”

In Munich, Waiting on Passage to America

After the war, Dora decided to remain in Poland, but Sophie determined that she and Michael would apply for visas to the United States. “She said the word ‘America’ the way a child says the word ‘candy,’” Bornstein writes. “She told me America was the most wonderful and welcoming place you can imagine.” That was not the case for them in Żarki or in Munich, where the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society assigned them to a displaced persons camp and, later, to a one-room apartment in the city.

“The German kids were bullies,” Bornstein recalls. “I had no hair on my head, I was skinny, and I didn’t speak the language, so I was bullied quite a bit.” Sophie bought flour and nylons from American soldiers and sailors in Munich, and sold the goods on the black market. It was a risky way to make a living, and Bornstein feared that she’d be arrested and he’d lose his mother again. But after nearly six years, they received their visas and set off on the USS General M. B. Stewart, arriving in New York City in February 1951.

With help from aid organizations, they eventually settled in a small apartment on 98th Street and Madison Avenue. Sophie worked as a seamstress, making $30 a week, and Michael attended P.S. 6. “I was this little kid who didn’t speak much English and had a tattoo on his arm. The teachers didn’t say anything, so I was pretty much alone and didn’t have friends,” recalls Bornstein, who soon found a job that would prove to be consequential. “I worked at Feldman’s Pharmacy, at 96th and Madison, getting 50 cents an hour,” he says. “The head pharmacist, Victor Oliver, was very good to me. He kind of took me on as a father figure and sparked my interest in science.”

Oliver even attended Bornstein’s bar mitzvah, held at Park Avenue Synagogue, after which his mother gave him a gift that she’d been saving for years to buy him: a gold watch. “You have to wind it a few times a day to make it work, but it’s great,” he says. “And on the back, it has a gimel and a zayin, which are the Hebrew letters for gam zeh ya’avor, ‘This too shall pass.’”

“A Can-Do, Get-It-Done Type of Guy”

Bornstein’s mother also instilled in him a deep appreciation for the value of education. Like faith, she’d tell him, education can’t be taken away. In 1958, he enrolled at Fordham’s College of Pharmacy, just as she embarked on a new chapter in her life. “My mother remarried and moved to Cuba because her sister was there,” he says. She would later return to the States and settle in South Florida, but at the time, Bornstein says, “I was pretty much homeless, and Fordham didn’t have any room in the dormitories, so they put me up in the infirmary.” It was the second time in his life that an infirmary saved him, he says. “I would probably have skipped college if it weren’t for that.”

In addition to providing Bornstein with room and board, Fordham gave him a partial scholarship. He spent summers working in the Catskills to help pay any remaining tuition costs. “I was a chamber maid, then a busboy, then a waiter, and finally a head waiter,” he recalls. “The salary was only about twelve dollars a month, but the tips made it.” On campus, he found a niche on the fencing team.

One of his former Fordham classmates, William Stavropoulos, PHA ’61, recalls Bornstein as a “nice, friendly guy.” He says he and his friends in G House at Martyrs’ Court never would have suspected the horrors Bornstein had been through. “I remember distinctly sitting around one day and a guy asked Mike about his tattoo. He mentioned the camp and said his mother used to hide him here and there, keep him out of sight of the guards, but he didn’t say much else. He was always upbeat.”

After graduation, Bornstein enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics and analytical chemistry. But he says his greatest achievement there was meeting an undergraduate named Judy Cohan. “We obviously hit it off. He had the same interests I did, and he was persistent,” recalls Judy, who was studying special education. They attended movies and plays, and he accompanied her on visits to the children’s ward at local hospitals. “He was very caring of the children, and that was important to me.”

They were married nearly 50 years ago, on July 9, 1967, after Bornstein began his career at Dow Chemical in Zionsville, Indiana. While there, he reconnected with Stavropoulos, who had earned a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry at the University of Washington and would go on to become chairman and CEO of Dow. The two, both newlyweds at the time, would see each other socially, and Stavropoulos even helped the Bornsteins move into their new apartment. But they lost touch over the years. “He went to work for Eli Lilly, and I stayed at Dow,” Stavropoulos recalls. In the late 1980s, Bornstein and his family moved to New Jersey, where he worked as a research manager for Johnson & Johnson, eventually rising to director of technical operations, a position that took him to Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, France, and elsewhere.

“He was a streetwise guy, and I always knew he was going to be a success,” Stavropoulos says. “When I think of Mike, I think of a positive, can-do, get-it-done type of guy. At Dow he was that way, and at Fordham too. It’s an incredible story. He’s obviously a courageous man.”

Fighting Intolerance with Compassion

Holinstat says her dad’s courage was especially evident during the process of writing the book. “My father is such a positive man, and he’s gone out of his way his entire life to show his kids and his grandkids nothing but positivity, so for him to dig deep and be willing to open up and talk to me about the deepest, darkest places in his memory was difficult for him, and it was hard for me because I knew how hard it was for him.” But the process has been well worth it, she says, explaining that they wrote Survivors Club with readers as young as 10 years old in mind.

“For my dad, a big piece of this was making sure that his grandkids understood the atrocities of the Holocaust. So it was really important to us to write something that the kids could grasp at this stage in their lives, and that they could share with their peers, because this next generation, most of them will grow up not having met a Holocaust survivor.”

In March, shortly after the book was published, it became a New York Times best-seller. The paper’s reviewer noted that the book combines the “emotional resolve of a memoir with the rhythm of a novel,” and that, although the book is marketed for young readers, “the equal measures of hope and hardship in its pages lend appeal to an audience of all ages.”

Holinstat waited decades for the opportunity to help her father tell his story, but she feels the timing of the book’s publication could not be more poignant or pointed, coming amid a recent surge in anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments in the U.S. “I truly believe that this story is being released now for a reason, to remind people what happens when bigotry goes unanswered,” she says.

The core moral lesson of the Holocaust, she and her father believe, is the ease with which any group of people can be dehumanized. “The world can never forget what happens when discrimination is ignored,” Bornstein said last April at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis. “And it’s not just discrimination against Jewish people but against all minorities, and that includes Muslims, Mexicans, and African Americans. It’s time for compassion; it’s time for empathy.”

Bornstein plans to return to Poland this year with Judy, their children, and other family members. Holinstat has been communicating with people in Poland about establishing a Holocaust memorial in Żarki, and the family will be going to Auschwitz, which Bornstein visited in 2001 with Judy and in 2010 with his son, Scott.

In the meantime, Jake Wolf, the grandson who persuaded Bornstein to share his story, is preparing for his freshman year at Syracuse University, where he intends to major in both communications and business. “In our family,” he says, “it’s so important to know how difficult it was for my grandpa. He never had any hate toward the world for what he was put through. And that inspires all of us. If he could get through that with a smile on his face, we can do anything.”

A “Survivors Club” Reunion in the Suburbs

Since the publication of the book, Bornstein has heard from many people who have thanked him for telling his story, including some who understand all too well what he and his family endured. Sarah Ludwig was the 4-year-old girl standing next to Bornstein in the iconic photo from Auschwitz. Tova Friedman, then 6, stood just behind Ludwig as the children showed their tattoos to Soviet soldiers. The three survivors recently learned that they live just miles from each other in suburban New Jersey.

On Sunday, June 4, they gathered with kids, grandkids, and other relatives for a reunion brunch at Holinstat’s home that included prayers of remembrance and celebration, and the use of one precious silver cup. For Holinstat, it was a remarkable coda to the experience of helping her father tell his story after all these years.

“The last time they saw each other, they were kids wearing prisoners’ stripes,” she says. “Now they’re surrounded by family.”

—Ryan Stellabotte is the editor of this magazine.

Watch NBC Nightly News‘ coverage of the reunion.

“I was quite nervous about showing the clip,” said the Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Rose Hill sociology professor. “It ran for about 10 minutes and at the end of it, I didn’t know if I had gone too far in showing it.

“But I wanted the students to see how the worst of humanity can hijack the best of humanity. Beethoven’s music was positioned as perhaps the highest creation in Western cultural history, but it was hijacked by the Nazis, and that was the irony of the performance.”

Looking around the classroom, Spiegelman saw that some of the students were in tears. Others were enraged and saddened by the consequences of the deadliest war in history. Then 100-year-old Holocaust survivor Mathilde Freund, who has been taking courses at Fordham for over 40 years, raised her hand.

“I’m very glad you showed that video,” said Freund, who shared memories about hiding from Nazis at the same time of the performance, crawling in the forests and stables of France with her mother, being captured, and then being tortured in the Montluc prison in Lyon. “Look, how horrible. While they’re performing this wonderful music of Beethoven, they’re murdering millions of innocent people. Unfortunately, my husband was among the people who died at the Buchenwald concentration camp.’”

What Freund and Spiegelman didn’t know was that they were connected through this very experience. Speigelman’s father, Seymour, a World War II army corporal, was among the U.S. troops that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany after Freund’s husband, Fritz, was killed.

“I think it’s telepathy,” said Freund. “I was interested in this course, but I didn’t know that we would talk about the concentration camp or anything like that.”

 For Speigelman, too, this wasn’t a mere coincidence.

“To know that my father was probably within a few feet of where Mathilde’s husband laid just moves me to such great depths,” said Spiegelman, who said his father had been traumatized by what he witnessed. “He wasn’t able to speak about it until years later when I kind of pushed him and he told the story.”

From 1933 through 1945, the Nazi party created numerous concentration camps to incarcerate, torture, and kill Jews and other minority groups. Among them were the infamous Auschwitz in Poland and Buchenwald, one of the largest camps in Germany. Freund, who married her husband in 1937, said within months of marriage her family had to flee their homeland of Austria to France, where the men in her family joined the French Army. While she was in hiding, Freund said her husband managed to send her a postcard.

“He said, ‘I will still survive and when the sun shines, we will be together again,’” she said. “But he was killed.”

Losing her husband wasn’t Freund’s only tragedy. Her only brother was brutally murdered in the Massacre of Lyon on August 18, 1944. In 1952, she arrived in New York with her mother and daughter.

“Some people say we should forget the past and we shouldn’t talk about it, but I say we should never forget because innocent people were killed. It was cruelty beyond imagination. No book or video can ever represent the sorrow that a person who was there saw and lived, like me. Those seven years of my life were the most horrible times.”

Freund said that Fordham’s College at 60 program has helped her make peace with the painful memories of her past.

“It helps me so much because when I’m in the class I don’t think of anything else,” said Freund, who has been taking classes since she retired from social work in 1977. “I concentrate only on what the professor teaches. It’s one of the things that takes me away.”

She said her secret to living as long as she has is that she doesn’t allow herself to be bitter about the things she endured during the Holocaust. Instead, she would rather share her story widely so that such mass genocide never happens again.

“It’s my sacred duty,” she said. “My greatest wish in life is that I can see peace on earth, and that people can understand each other.”

Spiegelman called the special connection he shares with Freund “a living bond” that goes beyond history. It has also helped him to honor his father’s legacy.

“Our shared experience gives voice to what my father couldn’t say,” said Spiegelman.

Dr. Skorton will be awarded an honorary doctorate during the commencement ceremonies, as will eight other people who have distinguished themselves in business, law, the arts, or public service. See here for full details on Fordham’s commencement ceremonies.

Honorary doctorates of humane letters will be awarded to Dr. Skorton and to Judith Altmann, vice president of the Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut; Gregory Boyle, SJ, head of the gang-intervention group Homeboy Industries; Maurice “Mo” Cunniffe, FCRH ’54, a successful businessman and key supporter of Fordham; Patricia David, GABELLI ’81, global head of diversity for JPMorgan Chase; and Sr. Carol Keehan, DC, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

An honorary doctorate of laws will be awarded to Loretta A. Preska, LAW ’73, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Honorary doctorates of fine arts will be awarded to Robert Battle, artistic director for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and to Henry Cobb, founding partner at the architecture firm Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners and co-designer of Fordham Law School’s new building.

Cobb and Preska will receive their honorary doctorates at the law school’s diploma ceremony, to be held Monday, May 23, at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan. All other honorary doctorates will be awarded at the main University commencement on May 21.

Preska will speak at Fordham Law School’s diploma ceremony. David will speak at the Gabelli School of Business’ diploma ceremony for master’s degree candidates, to be held May 23 at the Beacon Theatre. Father Boyle will speak at the diploma ceremony for the Graduate School of Social Service, to be held May 23 at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall.

David Skorton became the first physician to lead the Smithsonian Institution when he began his tenure in July 2015. He oversees 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoo, and various research centers devoted to astrophysics, tropical research, the natural environment, and other areas.

During his tenure, Dr. Skorton has made arts programming a priority at the Smithsonian, and he continues to advocate for a greater national commitment to arts and humanities education. In an address at the National Press Club in December, he called for reversing what he called our nation’s “disinterest and disinvestment in the arts and humanities” while also preserving the nation’s commitment to science.

As he put it, “This commitment must be based on an understanding that the arts and humanities complement science and that together they us make better thinkers, better decision makers, and better citizens.”

Dr. Skorton earned both his bachelor’s degree in psychology and his medical degree from Northwestern University before completing his residency and fellowship in cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1979. He then joined the faculty of the University of Iowa, where he held professorships in internal medicine, biomedical engineering, and other fields before serving as the university’s president from 2003 to 2006.

In 2006 he was named president of Cornell University, where under his leadership the university joined with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to win a competition to develop a new campus, Cornell Tech, on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. He also won praise as a highly effective fundraising at both Cornell and the University of Iowa.

Dr. Skorton has also served as a professor in Cornell’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and in the departments of medicine and pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is a pioneer in applying computer analysis and processing to improve cardiac imaging, and has published two major texts and numerous other writings on cardiac imaging and image processing.

He is also an amateur flute and saxophone player who once co-hosted a weekly Latin jazz program on the University of Iowa’s public radio station.

Other Honorary Degree Recipients:

Judith Altmann is a Holocaust survivor who shares her story widely in Connecticut and Westchester County schools as a way of encouraging young people to make a better world. Born in 1924 in Jasina, Czechoslovakia, she was confined in Nazi camps at Auschwitz, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, and Bergen Belsen in 1944 and 1945. She is a vice president of the Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut and recipient of the Anti-Defamation League’s Daniel R. Ginsberg Humanitarian Award for 2013.

Robert Battle is artistic director for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which offers a BFA in dance in conjunction with Fordham. Renowned for his challenging, athletic, and lyrical choreography, Battle was named one of the Masters of African American Choreography by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2005, among his other honors. He established the Ailey company’s New Directions Choreography Lab to nurture emerging talents, and continues to expand the company’s community outreach and education programs.

Gregory Boyle, SJ, is executive director of Homeboy Industries, one of the nation’s largest gang-intervention organizations. Hundreds of former gang members have changed their lives by taking advantage of the organization’s work program and its services including education, legal help, and substance abuse counseling. Father Boyle is an internationally recognized expert on gang intervention approaches and author of The New York Times bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (Free Press, 2011).

Henry N. Cobb is a founding partner at the award-winning architecture firm Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners. Along with his colleague Yvonne Szeto, he designed the new 22-story Fordham Law School and McKeon Residence Hall building at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. His many other distinctive projects include the iconic John Hancock Tower over Boston’s historic Copley Square, which earned the prestigious Twenty-Five-Year Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Maurice “Mo” Cunniffe, FCRH ’54, chairman and CEO of Vista Capital, is a successful engineer, businessman, entrepreneur, and Fordham trustee emeritus who is one of the University community’s most vital and longstanding supporters. He played a pivotal role in the expansion of Fordham Prep as one of its trustees from 1983 to 1995, and his extraordinary financial support for Fordham was recognized in 2013 with the renaming of the Administration Building at the Rose Hill campus in his honor. He served on the Fordham University Board of Trustees from 1995 to 2003.

Patricia David, GABELLI ’81, managing director and global head of diversity for JP Morgan Chase, has been widely recognized for integrating diversity efforts throughout the company over the past 15 years. With her help, the company was named to Black Enterprise’s 2015 list of the most diverse companies, and she herself has received honors including the YMCA’s Black Achievers in Industry award. She serves on the advisory board for the Gabelli School of Business and was named the school’s Alumna of the Year for 2015.

Sr. Carol Keehan, DC, is a passionate advocate for expanding health care access. Sister Carol was recognized by President Obama for helping to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, and Pope Benedict XVI bestowed on her the Cross for the Church and Pontiff to honor her humanitarian efforts. Since 2005 she has been president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, a membership organization comprising more than 600 Catholic hospitals and 1,400 other health ministries.

Loretta A. Preska, LAW ’73, is chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In more than two decades as a judge she has ruled on many high-profile cases, such as those involving computer hacking, sentencing of a Somali pirate involved in hijacking a U.S.-flagged cargo ship, and the parody of an Annie Leibovitz photograph. She is a steadfast and generous supporter of Fordham who received Fordham Law School’s Louis J. Lefkowitz Public Service Award and the Fordham Law Alumni Association’s Medal of Achievement. A member of the Fordham University Board of Trustees from 2007 to 2013, she is now a trustee fellow.

Her family had just arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp after a horrendous four-day trip via cattle car. After walking past a sign that read “Work will liberate you,” she said the Nazi physician Josef Mengele separated those who’d stay from those who’d be killed immediately. Altman and her niece were told to move to the left, her father was told to keep moving.

“He put his hand on his head as he did every Friday night when he blessed us for the Shabbos meal and said ‘Judy, you will live,’” she said, her voice quavering.

“These are the words that kept me alive when I thought I could no longer endure.”

Altmann shared her incredible tale of survival “Zakhor…Remember” at the Rose Hill campus on April 4, in an event sponsored by the Jewish studies program.

A native of Jasina, Czechoslovakia, Altmann spent five years living under Nazi occupation before being arrested in 1944 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Essen and Gelsenkirchen labour camps, and the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

As horrific as Auschwitz was, it was only one chapter in Altmann’s saga filled with unimaginable suffering, as well as luck. In one anecdote, she spoke of hurting her arm at a labor camp—which would normally have necessitated a return to Auschwitz, and likely an execution. But in the middle of the night, she said, an SS officer tapped Altman, who knew several languages, on the shoulder.

“She took me to the hospital to put a cast on my arm. On the way back, she stopped off in the factory and she asked her supervisor to provide her with a letter. The letter said, ‘If [Altmann] is taken away, the work is not going to be done if someone needs to be spoken to in Czech, in Hungarian, in Russian, in Yiddish or whatever languages. He gave her the letter, and I was saved,” she said.

“You students are the most fortunate and live in the most wonderful country in the world. Learn all you can, because nobody can take this away from you.”

She said that Bergen Belsen, where she was confined until May 1945 when English soldiers liberated the camp, was so bad that anyone who survived it lived forever.

“Mountains and mountains of dead bodies everywhere. Hygiene? None whatsoever. You stepped over bodies wherever you went,” she said, noting that her niece came down with full-blown jaundice. To earn an extra bowl of soup, Altman volunteered to dispose of dead bodies.

Both she and her niece survived. Her niece returned to Czechoslovakia and Altmann lived in Sweden until 1948, when she immigrated to the United States. She has been speaking about the horrors of the Holocaust ever since.

“Don’t listen to what your friends say. Think for yourself, and see what you can do to make a better world. We cannot change the past; it’s gone. But you can create a better world,” she told student members of the audience.

“When you go home, hug your mother and father and your grandma and grandpa, and thank God that you have them and they have you.”

Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, applauded Altmann’s plea to never forget, and added “never again” to the conversation.

“We must learn to love one another, because that is why we are here,” he said, “and to resolve in our hearts that what happened then never happens again.”

Eric Martin, a doctoral student studying systematic theology, is the recipient of a Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE). Beginning this week, Martin will join graduate students from five different disciplines—business, journalism, law, medicine, and religion—for a two-week intensive study of the Holocaust and its impact on contemporary ethics.

The FASPE program highlights the impact that respected leaders and practitioners in these professions had during the pre-War World II era on designing, enabling, and executing the crimes of Nazi Germany.

“As a Christian, I see my role as a peacemaker, which is what drew me to this fellowship,” Martin said. “I believe this is going to be a powerful and possibly transforming experience.”

The fellows will begin their studies in New York, then travel to Berlin, Krakow, and Auschwitz (the German name for a Polish town called Oświeçim). Over the two weeks, the fellows will consider what roles of each of their professions played in Nazi Germany and how the moral codes of these professions were distorted or dismantled entirely to enable the Holocaust.

Martin will look specifically at how Christian theology—particularly the view of Judaism as a “stilted form” of Christianity—was used to condone Nazi war crimes. By understanding how this occurred in the past, Martin said, we have a better chance at preventing theologically-grounded violence in the future.

“It was this idea that Jews are incomplete in their faith that led to violent ideologies in Nazi Germany. Nazis played on this theology in their rationale for the Holocaust,” Martin said.

“It is important that theologians don’t take doctrine more seriously than human beings and human dignity. If those two conflict, then it is the doctrine that should go. That mistake seems to have been a key element in the Holocaust… and it’s something the church is still working on, especially now in terms of Christian-Muslim relations.”

Run under the auspices of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the fellowship program involves seminars and lectures by FASPE faculty; historical, cultural, philosophy, and literary study; survivor testimony; and workshops in Berlin, Auschwitz, and Krakow.

How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust

Many volumes have been written on the Holocaust, but not one of them, Dan McMillan argues, has provided a “comprehensive analysis of [its]causes.”

He sets out to do just that in this book, focusing not only on a combination of historical causes (Germany’s failure to become a democracy before 1918, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the prevalence of anti-Semitism) but also on the psychological factors that led many ordinary Germans to become mass murderers. To understand is not to forgive. But, he writes, “understanding them should make us think twice before assuming that we would have done better had we stood in their shoes.”

Ask Mathilde Freund her age and she offers a demure response, “It should be a secret!” The 96-year-old Freund has reason to be proud of her age, but modesty forbids. She has met some of life’s toughest challenges and has witnessed history’s darkest moments. She is a holocaust survivor who arrived in New York with mother, daughter, and a wedding ring hidden in the hem of her skirt. Her newlywed husband died at Buchenwald. Her brother was shot on orders from Klaus Barbie.

Freund takes a highly philosophical perspective of these events, much of it culled through literature read as a student in Fordham’s School for Professional and Continuing Studies’ College at 60 program. The program turns 40 this year and Freund has been taking class there for 35 years.

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These were just a few of the questions addressed by author Elie Wiesel and actor John Turturro after the screening ofThe Truce, a 1998 film based on author Primo Levi’s autobiographical book, The Reawakening.

The Oct. 21 screening and conversation were part of the 2012 Forum Film Festival sponsored by Forum on Law, Culture & Society at Fordham Law, moderated by Thane Rosenbaum, the John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law and Forum director.

The film follows a group of Italian refugees, including Levi, from Auschwitz after their release by the Russian army. Their train journey back to Italy wanders through Europe, detouring past destroyed train tracks and deep into post-war chaos. The roundabout journey allows for the reawaking of the senses and a return to humanity for the former prisoners, as the palette shifts slowly from wintry grays to lush summertime greens.

Wiesel, 1986 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, characterized the movie as disconcerting because of its heavy-handed, hopeful approach. It’s not the first time the author dismissed attempts to capture the Holocaust on film: Rosenbaum reminded the audience of Wiesel’s 1983 essay that opposed the trivialization of the Holocaust inherent to television and film.

“The universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness,” Wiesel wrote at the time. “Those who seek to universalize it are dejudifying it in the process. If everybody was a victim, then no one was.”

After the screening, Wiesel echoed his 30-year-old essay.

“They were trying to tell the truth, as impossible as that it is,” Wiesel said of the Holocaust movie genre. “Was it was the same? Of course not.”

Any remake of a book, regardless of its theme, loses something in the cinematic translation, said Turturro in agreement.

“The nature of film is a compression of time,” he said. “ I’ve done a lot of adaptations of books and it can be depressing, because the things you love best about a book—the little details—get lost.”

Rosenbaum said, even in the best-intentioned films, the director’s vision often trumps that of the author’s. He cited a scene in The Truce when the refugee train is routed back to Munich. There, a captured SS officer kneels before Turturro (as Primo Levi), a scene that didn’t happen in the book. Turturro explained that the film director Francesco Rosi felt the film needed a redemption scene, a notion Turturro said he disagreed with.

Wiesel said that over-sentimentalizing the Holocaust was the primary reason he would never sell the screen rights to his books (although he did once consider selling to director Francois Truffaut.)

But he said he couldn’t possibly approach any aspect of the Holocaust from an artist’s perspective.

Watching The Truce was particularly personal for him. To a dead-silent audience Wiesel described the last conversation that he had with Levi a week before his 1987 suicide. Wiesel said he had told Levi that he would clear his schedule so that they could spend a week together.

“You and I will go away alone,” Wiesel told Levi.

“Elie, it’s too late,” Levi responded.