We Don't Say Goodbye: Southern Tier People Remember the Holocaust

Radio adaptation of this program to air 5/3/05

Listen to the program now in MP3, RealAudio or Windows Media

We Don't Say Goodbye recounts the story of the Holocaust as told by survivors who settled in New York's Southern Tier. Their first-person accounts encompass the history of the rise of the Nazi regime, discrimination against Jews, the destruction of Jewish property, the concentration camps, death marches and the liberation. This program premiered on WSKG TV March 14, 2005. Further broadcasts will be announced later. The program is available on DVD or VHS as a thank-you gift when you support WSKG's programming.

The combined evils of war, bigotry and obsession, propelled by technology, led to the loss of millions of lives in Europe in the 1930s and '40s. More than six million Jews were murdered or perished in the Nazi death camps with the holocaust remembered as one of the most horrendous crimes in world history. It is important to understand the causes and outcomes, and the best source of this knowledge is the people who witnessed or experienced these events. But survivors of the Holocaust, many of them displaced from their homes after WWII and then obligated to find a new life, didn't want to recall (and mentally relive) the worst experience of their lives - until now.

As the generation that survived the Holocaust has begun to pass, many of those who were reluctant to tell their story have become willing to speak about it. The following are just a few of the moving recollections found in We Don't Say Goodbye:

• Leopold Gruenfeld of Ithaca remembers Kristallnacht - the "night of broken glass" - when windows were smashed and Jewish property burned in his native Berlin. He helped rescue sacred Torah scrolls from a burning synagogue and then he and his family went into exile in China.

• Binghamton resident Doris Zolty recalled that the infamous death camp Auschwitz often smelled like meat cooking.

• The late Dr. Edmund Goldenberg of Vestal was a recent medical graduate who offered to serve as a physician to others at a slave labor camp and was told, "We won't need any doctors."

The survivors have contrasting recollections of their liberation. Peter Komor of Ithaca remembers "complete confusion" when the German captors fled from the camp. Mary Ferber, previous resident of Binghamton, recalls "handsome American soldiers" and that "life was in front of us."

Most of the interviews were recorded by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, an institution created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg to preserve eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. Over the past decade, more than 50,000 have been interviewed for this project - approximately two dozen of those interviewed are from the Southern Tier.

We Don't Say Goodbye produced by WSKG's Bill Jaker, was an accompaniment to the exhibition Daniel's Story, an interactive display at the Roberson Museum & Science Center located in Binghamton. Daniel's Story is a traveling exhibit from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and was designed to convey to young people that the persecution of the Nazi era extended even to the most innocent.

Much of the visual material in We Don't Say Goodbye is also from collections of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jersusalem, Israel.