The Memory Generation
Episode 17: Juan Zambrano
Rachael Cerrotti: Hey Everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next.
We are nearing the end of our first season with just one more episode to go before we take a break and I move on to another project for a bit. I’ll be spending the coming months curating a traveling museum exhibit based on my book and my first podcast - We Share The Same Sky. That project follows my decade-long journey to retrace my grandmother’s wartime history. You can find that show wherever you are listening from now.
So for this episode, I wanted to bring back a short narrative piece that we worked on in 2021. It’s all about the power of sharing our stories with strangers and highlights how we never know how our everyday conversations can have a ripple effect in other people’s lives. In the case of this story – it all starts with an Uber ride.
{sound of a car door slamming & then driving}
Juan Zambrano: I'm a very talkative person. When I get somebody in my car where they catch my attention, I listen.
Rachael Cerrotti: This is Juan. Back in 2017, he’d been driving for Uber for about a year. He loved the job and getting to meet new people.
Juan Zambrano: Anytime I would give a ride to somebody from France or Norway or - or anywhere that had an accent, I'm like, I want you to talk the whole time. I don't care if I don't understand. Just talk.
Rachael Cerrotti: One day, Juan picked up an older passenger, a man named Morris Price.
Juan Zambrano: He had a walking cane. And I got out of my car. He said, no, no, no. And he was one of those that sat in the front seat.
Rachael Cerrotti: This was out of the ordinary for Juan. He told me that during his three years as an Uber driver, he met more than 20,000 people and almost all of them sat in the back seat. But not Morris.
Juan Zambrano: He must have felt comfortable because not everybody is like that.
Rachael Cerrotti: The two men started talking right away.
Juan Zambrano: So he just shared that he was going to a museum. And he said he would volunteer twice a month to talk about his story to children.
Rachael Cerrotti: Morris told Juan that he was a Holocaust survivor from Poland. Juan was immediately captivated.
Juan Zambrano: He just openly shared.
Rachael Cerrotti: Morris was born in 1927 and had been the youngest of six children. He spent his teenage years as a victim of war. He was first in a labor camp and then imprisoned in the Krakow Ghetto - which he amazingly escaped, only to get caught again. Then he was deported to Auschwitz and survived a death march. All that was before immigrating to America in 1949 when he was just in his early 20s.
Like many survivors who share their stories, Morris had become so comfortable with the details of his own life that he was at ease talking to Juan - his Uber driver - a stranger. What most of us may consider difficult to retell, Morris talked about casually and with an air of comfort.
Juan Zambrano: People would always ask me, you know, ‘which one of your riders do you remember the most’ and Mr. Price is always the one I would always talk about.
Rachael Cerrotti: Juan’s interest in the Holocaust deepened. It wasn’t a history he knew much about, but he began to notice when the topic would come up. And one Sunday evening, years later, in the summer of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic when Uber rides weren’t all that needed, Juan found himself at home watching an episode of 60 minutes.
60 Minutes Segment: Tonight, as the world struggles to contain and recover from the novel Coronavirus, we offer a story we completed just before life changed so dramatically. It is a story of history, hope, survival and resilience which has its roots in another time when the world was convulsed by crisis -- World War II.
Rachael Cerrotti: The summer of 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps. The story on 60 Minutes featured USC Shoah Foundation – the Institute that has been supporting this show since I created it. For more than 25 years, Shoah Foundation has been at the forefront of Holocaust memory. They have collected an archive of more than 55,000 testimonies and most of those voices are victims and witnesses of the Holocaust.
60 Minutes Segment: Most of the survivors who remain are now in their 80s and 90s. Soon, there will be no one left who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust first hand. No one to answer questions or bare witness to future generations.
Rachael Cerrotti: Juan thought about Morris. Learning about the testimonies at Shoah Foundation made him curious if Morris had been interviewed for the archive. So he wrote to the Institute and asked. And that email eventually made its way to me. I was already working with Shoah Foundation at that time, helping them tell stories inspired by their archive. So, we checked. And yes, we did have Morris’ testimony. The video was 2.5 hours long.
USC Shoah Foundation Interviewer: Today is October 29th 1995. We are in Culver City, California, USA. Umm, your name? Tell me your name.
Morris Price Testimony: Morris Price, P R I C E.
USC Shoah Foundation Interviewer: Was that your name at birth?
Morris Price Testimony: No.
USC Shoah Foundation Interviewer: What was your name at birth?
Morris Price Testimony: Moishe, Prajs. P R A J S.
USC Shoah Foundation Interviewer: Was that your Polish name?
Morris Price Testimony: Yes.
Rachael Cerrotti: And, so I sent it to Juan.
Juan Zambrano: It's just surprising watching his testimony. I mean being 12 years old, 13 years old and going through this. You know, when the war started and all that and then finally when it ended, he was like 16. And for him to remember, like, so vividly, like, details of cities and camps and the work that he did and escaping and all this. I was like, wow, I'm surprised he survived all that.
Rachael Cerrotti: One of Morris’ stories about barely escaping deportation particularly stood out to Juan.
Juan Zambrano: I think it was jumping off the truck and then later seeing that everybody on that truck - had he not jumped - everybody on that truck died because they killed them. Had he not escaped from that truck, he would have been one of those to not be sharing the story.
Morris Price Testimony: It was no life. It was just like existence and hoping that the war is gonna end and things are gonna get better. And you were just telling yourself that it's got to improve. I later on found out that there's no limit to the good and there's no limit to the bad. But at that time, we were always hoping things are going to get better because you always thought this is the worst. This can’t get any worse, can't get any worse, but it got worse.
Rachael Cerrotti: When Juan finished watching Morris’ testimony, he went on listening to other Holocaust survivor stories, including my grandmothers. And through these stories, he began to make connections to his own family history.
Juan Zambrano: I'm first generation Mexican-American. My parents are from northern Mexico. Both my parents came to the US, as immigrants, as anybody comes to this country for a better, better life.
Rachael Cerrotti: Themes from these survivor’s stories reminded him of the memories he inherited from his own parents.
Juan Zambrano: A lot of his story kind of reminded me of the many times that my dad tried to cross the border illegally. That's how I connected to it. Him going from Germany to Poland and going back and forth and making his way back and walking six, seven, ten kilometers and things like that. You know, those are kinds of stories that my parents both shared with me. You know, my mom crossed the border via the Rio Grande River. My dad tried to cross the border via the train, so when I was listening to Morris Price testimony, I was trying to picture like all of that -- how my parents survived. Those are things I think about is like what if Morris Price wouldn’t have made it and I would have never met him. You know, same thing, what if my parents would never crossed the border? I would have never been on this earth.
Rachael Cerrotti: This show has been an exploration of memory. And I think so often we think of memories as something that is just relevant to our own history. But a story like this proves that sharing a piece of ourselves with a stranger can open up a world of connection.
When I created this show with my friend and colleague, Stephen Smith who used to run USC Shoah Foundation, we decided to call the podcast The Memory Generation because we knew that inheriting memory is about far more than just your bloodline. The Memory Generation is all of us - at least those of us who care to listen to the past in the context of our own present. Here is Stephen on episode 3:
Stephen Smith on The Memory Generation (episode 3): Human beings are just really, really amazing. And I think we overlook that, partly because our world is very superficial and we don't take time and pause to think about the wonder of each other. But if you take pause and you start to look at the lives of others, it is just an amazing experience to find out more about the texture of what it means to be human.
Rachael Cerrotti: When Juan met Morris, Morris was headed to a museum to speak to students. And while I don’t know what lasting impact Morris had on those kids that day, I know what it did for Juan. We reunited the two men on Zoom.
Juan Zambrano: Because of your story, Mr. Price, I got interested in learning more about my history or my parents, my ancestors and things like that. I think - honestly, it was because of you.
Morris Price: I am really - it means a lot to me if my story and somebody hears me and everything like that, that they’re interested.
Juan Zambrano: That 40-45 minute ride with you, just I listened. I, I, I just, I listened.
OUTRO
Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you to both Juan and Morris for sharing their stories. You can watch Morris’ full testimony on YouTube. There will be a link on our website.
The Memory Generation has been created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. I want to personally thank them for not only their support, but for changing my understanding of memory. When I found my grandmother’s testimony in their archive, it also changed my career. I had already been working on a book about her story for many years – I trekked halfway across the world for it. But now I had her voice. And so I made a podcast. That podcast, which was my first, is titled We Share The Same Sky. It’s a 7-episode narrative series. And in the next episode of this podcast - The Memory Generation - I’ll be diving into my grandmother’s legacy with my cousin Elana. She’s the eldest of my grandmother’s grandchildren and it will be the first time I’ve publicly talked to any extended family member about their feelings about me taking on the family story.
As always with this show, you can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com. Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo and also from Blue Dot Sessions. I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Thanks for being with us.