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Shep Zitler, Isak Borenstein, Jeannine Burk, and many other survivors show photos of them after the holocaust, and share photos of their families, numbers, and artifacts.

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Holocaust Survivors, an excellent educational resource about the Nazi Holocaust of Jews in World War II, includes interviews, photographs and audio recordings of survivors. Other features include interactive discussions, a Holocaust encyclopedia and a bibliography. The site is both emotionally moving and factually informative.

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“Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Ahead of you lies a long road paved with suffering. Don’t lose hope. You have already eluded the worst danger: the selection. Therefore, muster your strength and keep your faith. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life, a thousand times faith. By driving out despair, you will move away from death. Hell does not last forever … And now, here is a prayer, or rather a piece of advice: let there be camaraderie among you. We are all brothers and share the same fate. The same smoke hovers over all our heads. Help each other. That is the only way to survive.”

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Article on the Anti-Gay program in Chechnya

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Article on the Anti-Gay program in Chechnya

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Many people explain the current anti-gay situation in Russia. There are accounts from gay men who were tortured with electricity and beaten. These men were often lured in by people they thought were their friends who had given them up. There were also interviews of human rights programs in Russia that aimed to help gay men, although many gay men fear seeking help because it could lead to more torture. Not only this, but there were also reports of Russian officials both admitting to and denying the events occurring in Chechnya.

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Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, first reported the pogrom, saying that at least 100 gay men had been arrested and three killed in the roundup. Human Rights Watch corroborated those findings.

The sweep has been widely condemned by Western governments, the United Nations and rights groups. Activists in Russia have set up an underground network to spirit the victims out of Chechnya and to protect them from potentially violent reprisals from their families and others. The victims use assumed names in their everyday dealings.

The following account is based on interviews with Maksim, who is in his 20s, and two other gay men who were detained by Chechen security agents.

Homosexuality is taboo in Chechnya and the mostly Muslim surrounding areas of the Caucasus region in southern Russia. "This society is highly homophobic," said Ekaterina L. Sokiryanskaya, Russia project director for the International Crisis Group and an authority on Chechnya. "Homosexuality is condemned. It is believed Islam considers it a great sin."

Nevertheless, before the crackdown, gay men in Chechnya could at least lead social lives, if heavily closeted ones, Maksim said. They met largely in private chat rooms on social networking sites with names like the Village or What the Mountains Are Silent About.

"When two gay men meet, they don't tell one another their true names," Maksim said. Men met at cafes or at apartments rented for a night, he said. "Nobody suspected my sexual orientation, not even my best friends."

The crackdown began after GayRussia, a rights group based in Moscow, applied for permits for gay pride parades in the Caucasus region, prompting counterprotests by religious groups, the men said. In Chechnya, it became something even worse - a mass "prophylactic" cleansing of homosexuals, the security service agents told the gay men as they rounded them up.

The men were held for as little as a day or as long as several weeks, according to Human Rights Watch and to interviews with gay men who later escaped the region. Some "returned to their families barely alive from beatings," said Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director for Human Rights Watch.

Among the fatalities documented by the organization were one man who succumbed during torture and two others who died in "honor killings" by relatives after the police released them.

"Human Rights Watch has been getting numerous reports about attacks by security services under Ramzan Kadyrov's control, and those reports are extremely disturbing," Ms. Lokshina said. "This is another opportunity to reinforce the culture of fear."

The Chechen authorities' response to the global outrage over the pogrom has provoked new incredulity. In a telephone interview, Mr. Kadyrov's spokesman, Alvi Karimov, said the reports of an anti-gay pogrom had to be false because such men did not exist in Chechnya.

"In Grozny, have you ever noticed people who, by their appearance or manners, resemble people who are oriented in the wrong way?" Mr. Karimov asked.

"A policy is developed for a problem," he said, referring to a report that said the arrests were official policy. "I can officially say there is no policy because there is no problem. If there were a problem, there would be a policy."

In a televised meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday, Mr. Kadyrov characterized as "libelous" news reports that the security services in Chechnya had been persecuting gay men.

And on Thursday, Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told journalists that the Russian authorities had found no evidence that the Chechen police had arrested gay men.

But it quickly became clear to Maksim and the other men that the Chechen authorities were applying the same tactics used by Russia and by Mr. Kadyrov to suppress an Islamist insurgency in the region over the past decade.

Security service agents took to posing as gay men looking for dates on the Village and in other chat rooms, or persuaded those they had already captured to lure acquaintances, those arrested said in interviews.

Fear spread among gay Chechens. "If they caught him, they will get to me," said a 20-year-old student who identified himself as Ilya and who was interviewed at a safe location outside Chechnya. Ilya fled days before the police showed up at his home, he learned later.

The authorities briefly detained another young man, who identified himself as Nohcho, after a friend informed on him during an interrogation. "I don't blame him," Nohcho said of the friend. "We are not heroes. We're just gay guys. They starve you. They shock you."

That, it seems, is essentially what happened to Maksim, who had been corresponding with his gay acquaintance for some time. "One day, he suggested we meet for a drink," Maksim said. "And because we knew each other a long time, I did not suspect he would be capable of something like this."

When Maksim entered the apartment where they had agreed to meet, security officers roughed him up. Five other men were already in the apartment, lured by the same ruse, he said. His account of the deception used to detain him was consistent with others documented by Human Rights Watch and with the accounts of the two other gay men interviewed separately for this article.

All six of the men in the apartment were transferred to a makeshift cell in an abandoned building, where they were tortured with electricity one by one, Maksim said.

After 11 days, he was released to a male relative, who was told that Maksim was gay. The security officers told the captives' male relatives that, if they had any honor, they would kill the young men, Maksim and Ilya said.

Maksim's father threatened to beat him but refrained when his son showed him the bruises he already had. Instead his father said, "I should kill you."

Fearing for his life, Maksim turned to a gay rights group, the Russian LGBT Network, based in St. Petersburg, which has established an emergency, round-the-clock volunteer group to help gay men escape the region.

To reassure the victims they are trying to help, the activists have taken extraordinary precautions, operating virtually as a partisan cell behind enemy lines, though they have done nothing illegal under Russian law.

"These people don't trust anybody," said Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center, a support group for gays that is part of the volunteer network helping gay men flee Chechnya.

After arriving at the safe location outside Chechnya, several young men said they had suspected that the volunteer group was also a trap but had no other option but to accept the help, Ms. Baranova said. "They say, 'We didn't believe you were real,'" she said. "'We thought this was the last effort to round up whoever was left.'"

The network bought airplane tickets for Chechen gay men, found safe houses and arranged for doctors to treat those who had been badly beaten.

"Gays in Chechnya and the North Caucasus are in lethal danger," Igor Kochetkov, director of the Russian LGBT Network, said in a telephone interview. "People whose partners are detained have every reason to believe they will be arrested. It is very hard not to name the names under torture."

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human rights and human rights violations

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police brutality  misconduct and shootings

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'They Starve You. They Shock You': Inside the Anti-Gay Pogrom in Chechnya

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Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, first reported the pogrom, saying that at least 100 gay men had been arrested and three killed in the roundup. Human Rights Watch corroborated those findings. The sweep has been widely condemned by Western governments, the United Nations and rights groups.

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A 101 year old woman, Salibian, is interviewed and recounts a few of the things that she went through during the genocide. A man later explains that California has a large Armenian population because it is a state that formally recognizes the genocide, unlike many places. Salibian's granddaughter also explains the need for Armenians to gain recognition about what has happened, and Salibian ends the interview with a prayer.

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Yevnige Salibian remembers peering through the wooden panels of her family home in Aintab, Turkey, as a young girl and seeing throngs of Armenian women, children and elderly being marched out into the desert to their eventual deaths.

Listen to the Story.

"I saw the Turkish people, long whips in their hands ... and the children were crying, 'Mama, I am hungry. I want some bread. Mama, I am thirsty. Mama, I cannot walk,'" Salibian says, sitting in her wheelchair at the Ararat Nursing Home in Mission Hills, California. "These sounds come in to my mind now. ... It doesn't go."

At 101, Salibian is among the last remaining survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Empire's systematic deportation and killing of nearly 1.5 million Armenians during, and shortly after, World War I. This month marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide, when some 250 Armenian intellectuals were arrested in Istanbul by Ottoman authorities and later executed.

For the Armenian community in Los Angeles, the largest in the United States, the centennial commemoration carries with it an uncomfortable, and often maddening, truth: The genocide still lacks uniform international recognition.

"The Armenian Genocide is as alive in L.A., if not more, than anywhere else in the world," says Alec Mouhibian, an L.A.-based Armenian American filmmaker and co-director of the new feature film 1915. "We don't think 100 years ago is 100 years ago."

The Turkish government concedes vast numbers of Armenians were killed between 1915-1923, but they deny there was ever a systematic plan to wipe them out. Here in the US, 43 states have passed resolutions recognizing that what happened to the Armenians, was genocide. Pope Francis recognized it as genocide earlier this month. But the official US government position falls short of calling the event a "genocide," despite President Barack Obama's comments in 2006 that the genocide was a "fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence."

It's this struggle over semantics that Mouhibian says is an elemental part of the collective Armenian identity.

"For us, it's not just a chapter in a history book, or a lesson in a classroom," he says. "It's something that drives Armenians in L.A. crazy, and it's something that connects them to their heritage."

The mania caused by the lack of recognition has made it nearly impossible for the Armenian community to move on from its past, says Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, which houses tens of thousands of witness testimonies from genocide survivors.

"For the Armenian community, it feels like it still has to legitimize its past because it's being denied," Smith says. "Its efforts have to go into that, rather than into healing, participation and full integration into the community in which they live."
This piece originally appeared on KCRW's Which Way LA blog here.

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101-year-old Armenian genocide survivor tells her story

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Even at 101, Yevnige Salibian remembers clearly the shouts and separation of Armenians in what was the first genocide of the 20th century. For her and much of L.A.'s Armenian community, the largest in the United States, a traumatic past is not even past.

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American GIs and cameramen worked hard to get good film of the Holocaust. They got lots of film showing the suffering, death, and survival of those in the Holocaust.

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"In the spring of 1945," says the narrator, over bucolic springtime shots of the German countryside, "the allies advancing into the heart of Germany came to Bergen-Belsen. Neat and tidy orchards, well-stocked farms lined the wayside, and the British soldier did not fail to admire the place and its inhabitants. At least, until he began to feel a smell ..."

So begins a British film about the Holocaust that was abandoned and shelved for 70 years because it was deemed too politically sensitive. The smell came from the dead, their bodies burned or rotting; or from malnourished, often disease-ridden prisoners in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, near all those thriving German farms.

As allied troops liberated such camps across what had been German-occupied Europe, the British Ministry of Information's Sidney Bernstein (who later founded Granada Television) was commissioned to make a documentary that would provide incontrovertible evidence of the Nazis' crimes.

Bernstein assembled a remarkable team, including the future Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman, who wrote the film's lyrical script, and Alfred Hitchcock, who flew in from Hollywood to advise Bernstein on its structure. They set to work on a documentary entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. As they worked, reels of film kept arriving, sent by British, American and Soviet combat and newsreel cameramen from 11 camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. As well as the dead, the footage showed starved survivors and human remains in ovens.

In one piece of film, from Majdanek concentration camp, we see huge bags containing human hair. Collected from the murdered, it would have been carefully sorted and weighed. "Nothing was wasted," says the narrator. "Even teeth were taken out of their mouth." Bernstein's film then cuts to a large pile of spectacles. "If one man in 10 wears spectacles," we are asked, "how many does this heap represent?"

Now, 70 years on, director and anthropologist André Singer has made a documentary called Night Will Fall, to be screened on Channel 4 later this month, telling the extraordinary story of filming the camps and the fate of Bernstein's project.

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A US combat cameraman, featured in Night Will Fall. Photograph: Richard Blanshard/Channel 4

Singer tracked down and interviewed survivors who appeared in the original footage. Among them was Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 89, who recalled the day British troops arrived at Belsen-Bergen. "It was an unbelievable moment. Suddenly, you hear English spoken. 'You should remain calm. Don't leave the camp. Help is one the way.' That sort of thing."

Lasker-Wallfisch and her sister, Renate, had been moved from Auschwitz as the Nazis retreated from the advancing Red army the previous year. At Auschwitz, Lasker-Wallfisch had been a member of the camp orchestra, playing cello as the slave labourers left camp for work each day and again when they returned. She also performed at concerts for the SS.

"It is difficult to describe," Lasker-Wallfisch says of her liberation. "You spend years preparing yourself to die and suddenly you're still here. I was 19. Every British soldier looked like a god to us. It was not what we expected, to be still alive - but there we were." The sisters settled in Britain after the war. Anita played in the English Chamber Orchestra and became renowned as a solo cellist.

The sisters were exceptional. "I should have known this but didn't," says Singer. "Some of those who were liberated remained in those camps for five years after liberation. Often they had nowhere else to go - certainly not to Britain or the US. We didn't want them."

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A British soldiers spraying DDT on a woman liberated from Bergen-Belsen in May 1945. Photograph: George Rodger/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Singer also interviews another illustrious Holocaust survivor, a Croatian named Branko Lustig. He was a child in Belsen, so sick at the time of liberation that when he heard a strange noise he thought he'd arrived in heaven to a chorus of angels' trumpets. In reality, they were the bagpipes played by Scottish soldiers.

Many years later, Steven Spielberg chose Lustig, by then a film-maker, to be a producer for Schindler's List. Lustig has a theory about why British authorities suppressed Bernstein's film. "At this time, the Brits had enough problems with the Jews." By that, no doubt, he means that Britain was dealing with Zionists agitating for a Jewish homeland in the British mandate of Palestine - and seeing the full extent of Jewish suffering would only inflame them.

Singer says he's already had flak for including Lustig's theory. "Why the film was scuppered is not very well documented," he says. "But Branko may well have a point." Singer points out that in 1945, the incoming Labour government's foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was anti-Zionist and unsympathetic to the foundation of a Jewish state. But he concedes there is no strong proof. "The only documentary evidence we have is a memo from the Foreign Office saying that screening such an 'atrocity film' would not be a good idea."

Part of the reasoning for that memo, Singer argues, is that the British thought the Germans needed to be nurtured as allies against the growing power of the Soviet Union. But were such compunctions realistic? Would showing the film to postwar Germany have been a propaganda reverse for the British, serving to alienate the Germans and tip the emerging cold war in the Soviets' favour? Singer doubts it.

No matter. The film, which some have called a forgotten masterpiece of British documentary, was shelved for 70 years. Bernstein died in 1993 and, according to Singer, one of his regrets was not completing his Holocaust documentary.

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Josef Kramer, AKA the Beast of Belsen. Photograph: Imperial War Museum

Footage from his unfinished film, however, proved key to the prosecution of camp commandants at the Nuremberg and Lüneburg trials in 1945. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch recalls testifying at Lüneburg against, among others, Bergen-Belsen commandant Josef Kramer, known as "the Beast of Belsen". Her evidence was supported by film that contradicted the accused's defence. "Kramer had said he didn't have the food to feed his prisoners and that was why they were in such a state. The footage destroyed that," says Singer. Kramer and other officers from Bergen-Belsen were hanged that year.

Bernstein's film never got the chance to be as revered as later Holocaust documentaries, including Lanzmann's Shoah, Resnais's Night and Fog, and Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity. As Singer explains, an incomplete version was shown at the Berlin film festival in 1984 and on PBS in the US in 1985 under the title Memory of the Camps. Only recently did a team from the Imperial War Museum complete and digitise the picture.

Into the gap left in 1945 by the suppression of Bernstein's film came another documentary, made by the great Hollywood director and exiled Austrian Jew Billy Wilder. But Wilder's Death Mills was a hectoring piece of propaganda, keen to indict Germans, while Bernstein and Crossman had attempted to make their film a warning to all of humanity. "Bernstein's was a work of art by comparison," says Singer, "mainly because of Crossman's lyrical script."

Certainly, German audiences didn't enjoy Death Mills. Wilder recalls that when it was screened in Würzburg, there were 500 in the audience at the start and only 75 at the end. Whether German Concentration Camps Factual Survey would have had a similar reception is debatable. It would have been anything but easy viewing, not least when Crossman's script indicted those who lived near Dachau concentration camp but affected ignorance of the barbarism that took place there: "Germans knew about Dachau but did not care."

Crossman's script ends with these words: "Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall. But, by God's grace, we who live will learn." Does Singer go along with that? "I wish they had proven to be correct, but since 1945 there have been a number of genocides that have not been stopped by lessons from the past."

That said, Singer still thinks such deeply upsetting and horrific images should be seen. "I was born on 4 May 1945, so I'm of a generation who knew about these things, but I have sons of adult age who knew little. We need images like this for the new generation."

So does he think Night Will Fall should be shown in schools? "I do," he says, "but there's a strong body of opinion against. It's seen as too upsetting. But we're in an age where such imagery is so prolific. I think the imagery in Bernstein's film and mine, if used in the right context, can only help understanding.

"We can only truly understand the horror of war if we use images like this."

* Night Will Fall is on Channel 4 on Saturday 24 January at 9pm.

Read Peter Bradshaw's review of Claude Lanzmann's The Last of the Unjust.

A video of the making of Night Will Fall, to be broadcast on Saturday 24 January. Source: Channel 4

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The Holocaust film that was too shocking to show

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In 1945, overseen by by Alfred Hitchcock, a crack team of British film-makers went to Germany to document the full horror of the concentration camps. Despite being hailed as a masterpiece, the film was never released.

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Adeline, a young girl recounts the suffering she went through as a Tutsi in Rwanda.  She faced horrible things like raping and beating, similar to beatings in Night.  This recount of events is hard to read, especially when she was unable to help her sister and when she begged for death. Despite everything she went through, she was able to survive and speak out about what happened to her.