Transcript of Irene Weiss: The Soul Never Forgets

Three years after my brother died by suicide, I started going to wars. A friend made a phony press pass for me. I borrowed a video camera, bought some wireless microphones, and snuck into Myanmar to shoot a story about young people fighting the Burmese government. Months later, I went to Somalia to report on a famine in civil war. I'd never seen suffering and death on that scale. I was in a town called Baidoa, where about 100 people were dying every day. As When the dusk fell, I watched a man and his wife in a hut made of twigs fill a kettle with what little water they had. Between them lay their young son who just died. His body was covered in a dirty cloth. The man held the boy's head in his left hand. The woman poured the water over her son to wash him. They'd already watched their three other boys die. This was their last. He was five years old. It was in Somalia on that a trip 32 years ago that I knew I'd found my calling. I couldn't stop the starvation. I couldn't save people's lives, but I could bear witness to their struggles.

I could tell their stories. I'm not sure if it's been healthy for me to do this year after year, decade after decade, but I do think in a way, it saved me. Seeing what others have been through, telling their stories, it's put my own pain into perspective. It's helped me survive. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. Laura Schmidt is a leading expert in the field of sugar studies, and what she's going to teach us is that the truth about how much sugar we should eat and when we should eat it is far more complicated than you might think. If you're already struggling with craving an addiction, turning it into a big boogie man probably isn't the greatest idea. Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts. My guest today is Irene Weis. During World War II, she was a child living in a village in what was then Hungary. When the Germans occupied Hungary in the final year of the war, they deported nearly half a million Hungarian Jews to extermination camps, mainly Auschwitz and Poland. When they got there, 80% of those people, mostly children and their mothers and the elderly, were killed immediately in gas chambers.

The rest were forced into slave labor or used for medical experiments. This interview was conducted originally for CBS's 60 Minuts. We only had time to use a few things Irene said, so 60 Minuts kindly allowed me to use the full interview for this podcast. You can watch a video version of it online and see pictures of Irene and her family at cnen. Com/allthereisonline. Irene Weis was 13 when she arrived in Auschwitz along with her parents, Maher and Leah Fogel, her sisters, 17-year-old Serena and 12-year-old Edith, as well as her three brothers, 16-year-old Mosha, 10-year-old Ruven, and Gershon, who was eight.

What happened in our little town, there was actually a town crier with a drum. He went up and down the street, which sounds very quaint, and he would hear you, hear you, and he'd tell you, What is the news? This day, the news was that all Jews in this pack your suitcase and report at the town hall tomorrow.

People came to your house and demanded any valuable possessions that your family had. Yes. Before you would be shipped away. These were people you knew?

Oh, absolutely knew my father. It was the principal of the school that we attended.

Your school principal came to your door.

Yes, because he wasn't Jewish. They came and said to my My father, Give us all your money and valuables. My father began to give them something, and they demanded more. Suddenly, you became a nonperson, a non-citizen. What you owned wasn't yours. The civilization that we lived in turned upside down.

Somebody I knew, General Michael Hayden, talks about the thin veneer of civilization.

Very thin.

That we all think that the society we live in, there are rules, there are laws. You have seen how thin that veneer of civilization is.

Well, the most dangerous animal in the world is man. Other animals will hurt you if they're hungry, but man can turn into an animal in no time, in minutes. The instinct to kill is so strong in man. All he needs is permission permission from the society. As soon as he's given permission, he's the most dangerous animal.

I can't imagine you as children looking to your parents for answers.

That's right. Parents couldn't protect their children, and yet we were looking towards them. You can't describe it. From family life to sitting on the floor of a cattle train with 100 people in there and a bucket for toilet. I can't explain it, but I do remember. Did people talk?

Was there silence?

Total silence at this point, yes. Even the children didn't cry. Children didn't make any noises because there was this heavy air trapped. When the trains opened, there were screaming and yelling orders to get out and leave everything behind. The men were told to go to one side. My father and 16-year-old brother lined up there. Women and children and older people, line up here. We are in front, and all of a sudden, the crowd is moving, and there are about 10 Nazi soldiers. I remember walking towards this man who is motioning people to go this way or that way. This one man held a stick. He held life and death with that stick.

Irene says the Nazi with the stick was Dr. Joseph Mengele, who was known in Auschwitz as the angel of death. In addition to selecting who would die in gas chambers and who would be sent to slave labor, Mengele also conducted experiments on prisoners, many of them children. He had particular interest in twins.

If you were a child in Auschwitz, you had to die. They had to kill the children so there will not be a new generation. They discovered that if they also killed the mothers, then they didn't have to worry about the chaos that that would create, separating.

The children wouldn't be upset by being separated.

And the mothers wouldn't be upset. So the mothers and children very calmly went to the side that they were shown to go, which went to the gas chambers. This had to be done very fast, and they had to finish and clean up the platform for the next train.

Because there was another train waiting.

It was train after train after train because they had a half a million more Jews to kill.

Irene's sister, Serena, was selected for slave labor. Her mother and two younger brothers were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Irene approached Dr. Mengele holding her sister, Edith's hand.

And the stick came down between us. It's an instant, and she was separated from me. Edith was sent towards where our mother went. And he motioned me to where the young adults went. The terror hit me. Fright and terror and confusion.

There are not many photos of in Auschwitz, but on this day, a Nazi photographer was on the platform and took a picture seconds after Irene had to let go of Edith's hand. She's looking off camera, trying to see if Edith will be able to catch up with her mother and brothers.

This was just more than I could bear. That was my original grief and shock that she was taken away from me. I It felt like I should have held on tight or I should have said something. I should have... No. That really was terrible. After we were processed, we didn't have to wait very long to find out where our families went, the women and children, because we met the people who had come before us. The very first thing we asked them, When is the reunion with the families? They looked at us, we were crazy, and they told us where our families went. They've been pointed to chimneys, belching, smoke and fire.

They showed you the gas chamber.

They showed us. They told us, But where is this place? Where is this universe? Who is in charge? Who is doing the killing? Why is the killing going on?

None of it made sense.

No, you can't. It's very interesting how you can block it out.

And that began right away, blocking it out.

More right away than after. The denial was... Your brain didn't allow it. It just didn't allow it. You don't vision thousands of people getting off a train and walking into a gas chamber. And within an hour of arrival, everybody's dead, especially women and children. You see it, but you don't believe it. I thought that it'll be over, and when I go home, everybody will be there just like before. When I was 13, I could easily daydream and reject it. But the adults were also rejecting it because the suddenness, the strange otherworldliness, if you enter a closed world of killing, oppression, and a lack of human feeling.

What happened to your father?

My father, he was taken to work in the gas chambers, pulling the bodies out, getting it into the crematorium. Very strenuous, constant work. My father didn't live very long there, which if I lived to be 200 years The pain will never go away or the horror that a gentle person, father of six children, he should come out of a train and witness what was going on to his people and his family and everybody he's It's incomprehensible. I can't go there. However, my 16-year-old brother, we have absolutely no idea what happened to him. He most likely got ground up in the system. He was a young 16-year-old boy.

You talked about the silence on the cattle cars to Auschwitz and the shock of being there. Did you cry when you were there?

Did other people cry? No. And that's a really interesting question on your part, because we, by accident, ran into my mother's two sisters who were in their 20s, my aunt Rose and Pearl. They came from a different town, a different train. My sister and I, we survived. I survived because of them. They saved you. They saved me and they saved her because they did protect me emotionally in so many ways, and I could put away that terror. I began to grow up a little bit, too. These guards, they did look at us as subhuman, and I don't think I can explain it to normal people. Because to be considered subhuman, it's a devastating feeling. If you fall for that, that they're superior and I am inferior, then they're going to be lost. I all of a sudden realized, wait a minute, I am not a subhuman. There is a reverse thing here. These German guards, they are doing things because they were actually subhuman people. People.

And that helped you?

Enormously. It really helped me because to be considered subhuman, I don't think I can explain it to normal people. It's a devastating feeling.

You mentioned you were grieving. Did you feel... Were you able to grieve while you were there?

A mixture of denial and grieving. A denial and grieving. You see, there were stages. When I first got in there, we couldn't absorb it. But then my sister and I and my two aunts and a thousand women, we were assigned to work day and night. For eight months next door to a crematorium and gas chamber. Just an electrified fence separated us from gas chamber number 4. The belongings that came out of the train by the thousands and thousands were brought to this place to be repackaged to send back to Germany for the German population. Our job was separating, taking off labels and so on. But we saw these columns of women, mothers and children, going into the door there. They would walk by and speak to us in Hungarian and Yiddish, and they're told they're walking into a bath house. They're asking questions, Where are you from? How long have you been here? We're talking to them, and a half hour later, the chimney is belching fire. We just talk to them. That went on day after day and night after night. But that doesn't explain the feelings. Seeing and absorbing and understanding and wondering where you are.

I've had many feelings of being on a different planet, actually, because I thought, well, if anybody knows this, they wouldn't allow it. And if nobody knows this, then it's not on this planet.

So in terms of grieving?

Yes, you deny, you deny. But I know my parents, my mother went the same route. You asked about crying. I didn't answer your question. I was told by my sister later that the first night when we were in the barrack where we slept in layers and everybody was cold and unhappy and that I was crying a lot. I said, No, I was never crying. Yes, you were crying that first night. That's what your sister told her. Yes. So she must have been right because it was a terrible change of life. But after that, seeing the thousands of women walking in and having spoken to them and, We couldn't cry. Not only I who was young, my aunts and others, crying was not helping. The tears are for normal pain. This is beyond crying. This is beyond comprehension. We didn't cry, and talked about not crying.

We'll be back with more of my conversation with Irene Weis. We're back with Irene Weis. 1.1 million people are estimated to have been killed in Auschwitz. When Soviet forces finally liberated the camp on January 27th, 1945, they found only about 7,000 prisoners left. Irene was not one of them. She, her sister, and two aunts were among an estimated 60,000 prisoners who had been forced to evacuate by the Nazis as Soviet forces closed in.

They took us into Germany from Poland. Walking. Walking. But it doesn't really make sense because they abused us on the road It was winter and very, very cold. They didn't feed us. We were starving. They shot people who sat down. People just died left and right there. It literally was a death march. We ended up near Hamburg in another concentration camp for five more months. This camp didn't have a gas chamber, but they never stopped selecting people for killing. Every day, they were lined up. They selected people out, and a truck would come to pick the ones that were selected to a nearby camp that had a gas chamber. My two aunts were still with us. One of them got typhus. And one day, my aunt was selected, and we watched her being walked up onto the ramp to the truck.

Were you able to say goodbye?

No, no, no. The next selection, they picked my sister out. Because she was skin and bones. I was, too, but somehow she was hurt. And so then my other aunt was desperately ill. She had a pneumonia. She was lying on the floor. I knew that she would be next. But here my sister is being picked out, and I thought, I can't stay alone. I can't survive alone. I volunteered to go. I said, I'm her sister. I said, You can go, too.

You said that knowing what that meant.

Absolutely. I just remember thinking, who will I belong to? It's exactly the words I was telling to myself. One of my aunts is gone. The other one is desperately ill. Who will I belong to? Who will I belong to? I can't do it.

You were okay with dying in that?

Yes. Well, part of it was that The extreme starvation. You really can't take it anymore. It's very painful. It seemed right. I really didn't know how to be alone. They locked us in a room with others that were selected, waiting to be taken when the truck comes.

How was it that you finally got away?

My sister and I both survived because the truck didn't come that day. The Russian army was very close, and they were on the highways. And that day, the truck didn't come. That was it. The door opened. We went back to our places. And after that, the truck never came again. The Russian army came so close that the Germans fled, and the camp was abandoned.

Soviet troops, fearful of catching diseases from prisoners, did little to help. Irene, her sister Serena, and and her aunt, walked in hitch rides, eventually getting to Vienna, where they met up with a few surviving members of their extended family. It was then she learned just how many relatives of hers had been killed.

In my family, there were six children, parents, and two children survived, my sister and I. My mother's sisters who were married, all of them died. My mother had Two brothers who were married, each had two children. They're wiped out. Grandparents were killed. My father's sister, something like 13 cousins were killed. I mean, Everybody was killed. In my hometown, out of something like 30 children, out of the 10 Jewish families, there were no children left. My sister and I were the only two who came back.

You ultimately went back to your house in the village?

Yes, I went back.

There was a family living in your home?

Oh, yes, sure. Somebody was living in every Jewish home that was empty.

Did you say anything to them?

No. There was a woman there with children. When I walked in, I didn't have to introduce myself, although we never met before. She took her children and went over to the side and just stood there. She knew who you were? Oh, yeah. It was very interesting. She just went to the side and I went through the house. Sounds strange, right? I went to every room. There was nothing ours at all. That I remember. But I went down to the very big garden in the back. We had fruit trees, and there was fruit all over on the trees and ready to be picked. It's the first time I cried. I thought, Here is all the fruit. No one to pick it, not my family. It was very strange that I finally broke down Because, again, the pain was too big for crying. It was some other way it had to be handled because crying tears didn't help.

It had 15 months since you had left that house. Yeah. Did it ever occur to you prior to that how one's life could change so drastically in 15 months?

No. There's a lot written about Auschwitz, and it can never be fully described. There is no way to get the feel of a subhuman prisoner in Auschwitz.

It's impossible to explain to somebody who was not there.

It's impossible to explain Auschwitz. It is. Somebody labeled it the metropolis of death, and that's what it was. It was a metropolis of death. It worked like an assembly line factory, and it just ground up people, mainly families, mainly children. That's what bothers me, I think, the most. Smart people planned this, architects and with scientists. This was designed and kept secret. Then they filled the Jewish children of Europe into it, systematically.

Irene came to New York in 1947 with her sister Serena. That's where she met and married her husband, Martin, two years later. She had three children, studied often at night to get a college degree and became a teacher. Now, 93, she has six grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and is a survivor volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

How do you live with this?

Well, I am 93. There hasn't been a day that I have not lived with it. It's very difficult. I was a teenager, and then I got married, and I had children. I had new responsibilities. Life, it makes you do that job because that's important. But there is something about what this experience, the relationship with mankind, to reconcile that, that man can be so cruel, so like an animal, really changes your way of thinking of mankind and life daily. Because I know that people can turn on you, can turn on you because of a label. It's very frightening. And there is this huge disappointment in that aspect. That veneer that you're talking about of civilization is extremely sin.

Have you been able to cry in subsequent years?

Still not. But that brutality from fellow mankind is so deep that... People say broken heart. The heart keeps working, but the soul never forgets. There is a soul that does not forget any of it. It's imprinted on the soul that keeps the memory, the pain, the grief. It's just always there.

The 13-year-old girl that you were, do you still feel that little girl at times? Or did you bury her early on in that?

No, that's a good question. That's really a very good question. I am stuck there. I am really stuck there. That's really the biggest fight because I attempt to read a lot. I have analyzed this many years, but I'm really stuck there, and that's where all the grief is. How could that have happened? As quiet They were devoted, lovely family. Somebody comes along and tears it apart in a matter of days. How could that have happened to my family? They were not guilty of anything. They never did anything. Why? Why? Why? Why? Definitely, your question is deep in... I am stuck there, but I can't be stuck there because I have grown up responsibilities.

I ask that because my dad died when I was 10. In my little world, it was... My voice even cracks now talking about it. I realized I'm stuck there at that age.

So you know that. You know that can happen.

But I can't even imagine. When you went through, is that multiplied by a thousand?

I was definitely stuck there. It's what that 13-year-old experience that can never be rectified. The pain can never go away. The questions can never go away. Look, it does result in a depression that's constantly there, but I can't let it go too far, control it. There That is a lack of full life.

Psychologists say, because I've been reading about this in my own case, that if as a child, you've experienced a traumatic loss and you're not able to grieve it as a child, that you live your whole life with a melancholy that you can't quite put your finger on. I don't I have not allowed myself to experience great sadness, but I also, in doing that, have not allowed myself to experience exuberant joy. I find myself in this middle ground.

Well, shake hands with me. It's a melancholy. It's not the depression that you could read about in books. It's a pain and it's a melancholy, and you can't experience I'm different. People tell me, Oh, but you're so normal after I said, I'm different, normal. I'm not normal, normal. I'm holding on. Yes, I'm 13 years old most of the time. Very difficult. I can see I'm strange among other women or friends. I think I probably misunderstood, too, that I'm reserved or not friendly or something like that. Very hard to... I see another side all the time. Not fair. Things like that shouldn't happen to 13 But you have a responsibility. I have a responsibility. I can't give in to all that because I got to raise normal children. If I let go, then I'll have to be treated for depression and all that. It's a struggle. I'm willing. I raise normal children, and I've done right by them. I've done it, but the toll, even hiding the toll, it's hard. It's been very hard.

Your family would be very proud of you.

Well, I don't know how to look at that. It's been rough. That's all. It's been very hard. How would any experience like that ever leave you?

It's impossible.

Impossible. Where would you put it and how would you modify it and what would take it away?

One thing I take away from you is that it is possible to get It is possible to build a life and it's possible to have a life.

Yes, because life pushes you, pulls you somehow. It pulls you along. If you don't grow up and live an adult life, then you end up in an insane asylum somehow. But we are really hitting things that are very important. You have to juggle both, and it saps your energy. I have to juggle the fact that I'm a grown up in charge, and there is that other thing that I can't share. I don't want my children to feel the way I feel. Definitely, I decided that long ago, they cannot be made sad, and a mother is not quite right. The struggle is always there. Some survivors will say, for example, a mile, you eat that food. You should know what that food means, how hungry I was and starving. Don't go there. Don't make them think every minute that they're hurting you by their behavior. There is that normal, and then there is that private one. It's a struggle. It really You say you can overcome. I think my own family don't know how much I overcome to make sure that everybody gets normal treatment.

Having seen those things and knowing what man is capable of, even on a beautiful, almost spring day like today in this nice, quiet neighborhood, do you still see everything through that lens?

Yes.

That all of this can change very quickly.

Well, it's subtly, and even not so subtly changing as we watch it in this country. Who is the enemy, who is to be hated, who is to be excluded. It's happening all the time. As soon as permission is given from higher up from government, it accelerates. It's permission is very important, even a hint of permission that it's okay to attack this group or exclude this group or shame that group. It's happening. It's never stopped.

I want to thank Irene Weis for her willingness to talk with me. You can watch a video of the interview at cnen. Com/allthereisonline. That's our new online grief community where you can also connect with other podcast listeners and hear voicemails from some of them as well about their grief experiences. Next week, we'll be taking a break from this podcast because of the election, but we'll be back the following week with an all-new episode. I want to thank the executive producer of 60 Minutes for allowing us to use this interview with Irene Weis, which was originally recorded for 60 Minutes. Bill Owens is the executive producer. Nicole Moritz was the producer on the story. John Gallon, the associate producer Grace Conley, the broadcast associate. The 60 Minutes piece was edited by April Wilson. The camera operators were Chris Albert and Sean Healey. Sound operators were Tim Camerata and Eric Kirschner. All There Is is is aproduction of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Blum. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dizula is our Technical Director, and Steve Ligtai is our Executive Producer. Support from nick Godzel, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Kari Rubin, Kari Pritcher, Chimri Chetreet, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamis Andrest, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namerot.

Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.