The Memory Generation

Episode 3: Stephen D. Smith

INTRO

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. Today we are talking with the co-creator of this show – oral historian Stephen Smith.

Stephen and I met many moons ago on Instagram of all places. He noticed the work I was doing with my grandmother’s survival story and reached out to me. He wanted to know if she had been interviewed by USC Shoah Foundation. The Institute is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide, but I didn’t know much about it then. Only that it was started by Steven Spielberg after he made Schindler’s List. So I said to Stephen, Smith not Spielberg, “I think my grandmother was interviewed, but I’d never seen it.”

A few hours later, Stephen sent me a file. It was a 4.5 hour-long testimony - on video - of my grandmother – Hana, telling her life’s story. At that point in time, I had spent over 7 years following my grandmother’s story around the world. I had moved in with the strangers whose family saved her life during the war. I had pieced together her story through her writings, her photographs, primary source documents and a series of conversations I had with her before she died. But this testimony that Stephen sent me was different. It was formal. It was professional. It was well researched with curated questions. There was methodology behind it. 

Here she is, my grandmother, answering one of the questions that all survivors get asked.

USC Shoah Foundation Testimony (recorded 1998)

Interviewer: Is there anything else that you would like to say about why you chose to do this taping for The Shoah Foundation? 

Hana Dubova: Well, I really didn't do it for the Shoah foundation. I really do it. I think most of us do it for the kids. And when I look, like, I went through this picture albums and I said, you know, when I'm gone, nobody will know who these people are, what they are, who they were, how were their lives. So at least they will have that. 

When Stephen reached out to me he was the executive director of USC Shoah Foundation, but he just recently left that position after 12 years to be the CEO of Storyfile, an immersive storytelling company he started with his wife, Heather. Throughout his career, Stephen has been at the forefront of memory work. He has dedicated both his professional and personal life to preserving the memories of genocide because as he says, he has made it his mission to study death so he can help protect life. 

Stephen and I recorded this conversation on February 24, 2022 not far from where he lives in Los Angeles, California.

INTERVIEW

Rachael Cerrotti: Are we going? Are we recording? Perfect? OK, umm First of all, how nice is it to be in a studio and not on Zoom?

Stephen Smith: I love it 

Rachael Cerrotti: So, Stephen, thanks so much for being here with me.

Stephen Smith: It's great to be here, Rachael. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Let's start off by being entirely transparent, this show, the idea of The Memory Generation is something that you and I created together. 

Stephen Smith: We did. Mmhmm.

Rachael Cerrotti: And so before we go back in time and start to dig into how you grew up and what has influenced you. I want to know that for you, who is The Memory Generation?

Stephen Smith: Oh, The Memory Generation is all of those that care to listen to our past in the context of their own present. So that can be anybody, actually. It's not limited to millennials that happen to be walking around with a device stuck to their hand. It's also not about, you know, folks that go and spend their time in cardboard boxes in archives. It's not about that. It's about the fact that we all live with a part of the past in our own present, but sometimes we don't recognize it fully or we compartmentalize it in ways that are convenient to contain it and so it doesn't really challenge us in the way or illuminate things about us in the ways that it could do. So I'm really interested through The Memory Generation of saying, how do we make the past more present in our present? And in what ways might we do that in a shared experience with others? That, for me, is The Memory Generation.

Rachael Cerrotti: So I want to go to your growing up, what is a memory that you lived or memory that you inherited that you feel like has shaped who you are today?

Stephen Smith: I think memory of our family history has not had a big impact on me possibly until more recently. On my father's side, both of his parents died by the time he was 17, 18. And so I didn't really know that side of our family. And on my mother's side, it's only very recently that I've been able to actually talk to my mother who is now 87. Mainly because interestingly, when I did 23&Me, it turned up the fact that I'm 20% Indian and I’m going OK, mom, is there anything you want to tell me about my grandfather? What did transpire, though, is she's been doing further digging into her family past which she's been doing recently, is that actually it looks like that 20 percent comes from both my grandfather and my grandmother which means the plot is thickening even as we speak. 

Rachael Cerrotti: And you grew up in this home that was deeply dedicated to religion, to theology, as well as to human rights. 

Stephen Smith: Yeah. 

Rachael Cerrotti: And you've talked about going on – if I could use the word missions, would that be a correct word with your family? 

Stephen Smith: That would be a good word. Yeah.

Rachael Cerrotti: OK.

Stephen Smith: My parents were missionary types, even if they did that in their backyard. They were always on a mission about something. They thought globally even before the time of globalization. And I think it was partly because they were driven as evangelical Christians to evangelize the world and they took that literally. So we'd literally go and travel the world. Some of that was just fascinating and I'm deeply appreciative to them for teaching me a very important skill. And that is, be fearless when you have a mission and go and fulfill what you want to do, including getting in a car and traveling into the Soviet Union. We literally spent our summer holidays in Poland and Hungary and the Ukraine. Also spent time in India. I would go there and learned a lot of things really quickly about how to adapt to new cultures and be respectful of them. and how to work in difficult circumstances. 

Rachael Cerrotti: So in many ways it was these exposures and the travel and the people that you met and these experiences that you had that started to pique your interest in anti-semitism which is where your career as you know it now started, but I will say that you started wanting to be a farmer, which just will always be a fact about you that I'm really going to appreciate. 

Stephen Smith: So between the age of 13 and 18, the only thing I wanted to do was farm. So I was on tractors every day. And all I wanted to do was plow fields and I could do it well. On my 16th birthday. I went to go and get my tractor license. Bizarrely, like most kids want to go and get a motorbike and I wanted to get a tractor. And I was like trundling down the freeway with a 15 ton trailer of corn at the age of 16 and one day. And I loved every minute of it. And then one day I realized, Hey, I actually need to get an education. And so I really only studied theology because I just thought it would be fun and interesting, not because of the career I thought it would lead me into. 

Rachael Cerrotti: So from farming to theology

Stephen Smith: Mmhmm.

Rachael Cerrotti: I also should note that I too can drive a tractor. 

Stephen Smith: Yay, let’s go and do it.

Rachael Cerrotti: Or let's say I've driven a tractor once. I can't drive a manual car, but I was successful at lifting some hay bales when I was living on the farm in Denmark. So, but so, so this feeling of like, OK, I need to go back to school. I'm going to study theology paired with all of these experiences that you had as a kid with your parents. Take me through, or walk me through like your first experience, really starting to understand the history of the Holocaust. Like when that as an event became a piece of your life?

Stephen Smith: Well, it's interesting because I was really most interested in Judaism and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. And it’s probably worth saying because if you look at my, you know, career, my trajectory, it just involves so much violence and death and genocide – I must have some kind of morbid fascination and the opposite is true. I'm actually really most interested in, you know, the world in which we live and in beauty and creativity and music and the arts. It's because the killing and the violence so riles against what I really believe in that I feel that I have to do something about that because it's spoiling so much for so many people for absolutely no reason. And we're given this beautiful world to live in and then what a mess we make of it and how hurtful and harmful we are. And it's that sense of this is a futile waste of our energies and our opportunity as human beings to appreciate one another and appreciate what we've got. That's what attracts me to this. So, through my teens, I wanted to learn a bit more about Jewish history and culture. So I went to the library and said, Do you have any books about Judaism to the librarian? And she said, No, I don't think so, but let me go and look. So she goes in the back, she comes out and she brings two books. Martin Gilbert's Atlas of the Holocaust and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. And I went, mmm, I'm actually not interested in Holocaust. But that looks really interesting. And I took The Chosen and read that and then The Promise and then My Name is Asher Lev, and then there was a 14 year old from this mining village in Nottinghamshire, England, fully immersed in the dilemmas of these Hasidic teenagers in Manhattan. There was a parallel there in a way because they were trying to find their identity in this very conservative and, you know, rigid religious environment. And I kind of related to that. I just enjoyed finding out about this world. And then the more I learned and the more I engaged with learning Jewish history, I just saw this repeated violence after violence after violence after violence. Century after century. And I just went, there's something really wrong here. And again, to the same point I made a moment ago, because I appreciated Judaism so much and Jewish history and culture. Then when I saw the violence, it hit me so hard. So that was really what drew me into trying to understand how is it even possible that the Holocaust happened? And what are we going to do about that?

Rachael Cerrotti: So then if we fast forward like an entire podcasts worth of information, you and your brother James, with the support of your parents actually started the National Holocaust Center in the UK.

Stephen Smith: Yeah, we did. My brother, James and I went to Israel and while we were there, when to Yad Vashem: the World Holocaust Center. And we were very moved by what we saw, but came away with a real challenge because we went in thinking of the Holocaust as being a Jewish issue, something that the Jewish people talk about, share, represent, you know, have to remember. And while we were in there, we said, OK, this happened to the Jewish people, but it was not the making of the Jewish people. So where is everybody else? How come the perpetrators and the bystanders can just simply create this crime of all crimes and then walk away as if nothing happened? And what are we going to do about West European civilization because this was a product of it. So therefore, if it did happen, it shows it can happen and therefore it might. In other words, it may not just be in our past, it could be in our future too. And how are we going to deal with that? So that was a sort of a wake-up call that then led us ultimately to create the Holocaust center in the UK.

Rachael Cerrotti: So as you're working on this, you're also starting to look at the world around you differently. You're starting to see current events through a different lens. Through a more complicated perspective. And the war in Bosnia was happening and this makes you question, how are you doing the work you're doing and are you doing it in the right way? Can you just take me through some of that just questioning you were going through at the time?

Stephen Smith: Our desire to commemorate the Holocaust in the UK was very sincere. We felt that it was extremely important that there was a place of memorial, a place where you could come to to reflect on what was and who was lost and what that means. And we were very focused on that to the point that when the ethnic wars were going on in the Balkans, including the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims, we really didn't see it. And then when genocide happened in Rwanda, it was being reported as a tribal conflict. And, you know, I was coming home from this project. I had a business. I had a philanthropic effort going into building the Holocaust center. I was getting home at 11 o'clock at night, exhausted, switching on the TV and seeing bodies floating down the river and thinking, that doesn't seem like a civil war to me, but not enough time or capacity to take it in. And then suddenly it was like, oh, this is genocide. And then it was too late. And so then I became the next generation of bystanders. And that was the critical moment for this project to create the Holocaust Center, which was we need to remember the past, but it only makes sense if it makes sense in the present. Because if you say, Oh, I want to tell this story about your family who were shot, gassed and burned, but I may or may not be there for you today, depending how busy I am or how politically expedient it is. Well, essentially what you're doing, you’re dishonoring their memory, what you have to say is I want to remember you and your family. And in honor of their memory, I will be on guard and I will be alert and I will use my voice because that's what they needed then which was absent and now somebody else might need that now. And so you can't, in my view, you cannot have a Holocaust center that does not instigate action in the present because if so you are dishonoring the past.

Rachael Cerrotti: I want to bring in a quote that you said about what your parents taught you. You said that, “One of the things that they taught me more than anything is when there is persecution and there is conflict in the world. Go there.” 

Stephen Smith: Yeah, absolutely go there. Physically go there. And if you can't go physically – mentally, go there. And definitely spiritually go there. And by that it means, be present in your world. We can't take on all of the burdens of the world and nobody's asking you to do that. But from time to time, being able to connect yourself in the right moment in the right place and be present can make the world of difference. Even if the outcome still is horrific. And so it's not, try to solve all problems and be there for all causes for 24 hours a day because that's more than I can ask of myself and I wouldn’t certainly want to ask of anybody else but just be present in your world and when you can – do.

Rachael Cerrotti: But you do end up physically going to Rwanda after the genocide there?

Stephen Smith: I had a very profound sense of being a bystander to the Rwandan genocide. It's really easy to point your fingers at the past and say, well, they could have done this and they should have done that during the period of the Second World War and if only somebody had done something more. And then you find yourself in the same situation and then you don't do what you think others should have done. And that is exactly what happened to me. I was a voting member of the British public who voted in a government who voted to withdraw U.N. troops from Rwanda, leaving a million people to die. That's not even an indirect link. That's a direct link. That's what democracy is for. You choose your governments to make decisions on your behalf. And so therefore, I'm not going to say I am guilty or complicit in the Rwandan genocide. But sure as anything, if I then don't use my voice within that democracy to say, you got it wrong and change that right now, then I become a bystander. So, after creating the Holocaust Center, my brother and I being acutely aware of the fact we just lived through this period decided that we would create a traveling exhibition about the genocide in Rwanda to alert the British public to what had happened. The Rwandan government learned about this, and they thought that we might be able to help them to tell their story in Rwanda and asked us to bring the exhibit to Rwanda which eventually did happen. And my brother and I during that visit went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial which was a site outside of Kigali at the time where they had taken the corpses from the streets and placed them safely outside of the city limits because of fear of epidemic. And the mayor of Kigali at the time said, you know, we were going to display all these bones, we realize we have a story to tell and we don't really know how to go about that. And so my brother and I had created a genocide prevention organization called the Aegis Trust and one of our methodologies was that memory is a part of prevention. In other words, if you provide acknowledgment and you remember the past in an appropriate way, it becomes a tool for education. And that education doesn't result in the further division and the further violence within the country, but actually brings people together. And so we had this feeling that we could help and we ultimately did develop and open the Kigali Genocide Memorial which is the National Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. 

Rachael Cerrotti: When I've heard you speak about working on this project, I know you had some reservations going in because of your own identity. 

Stephen Smith: I believe very strongly that we have no right to culturally appropriate others genocides. Yet here I am some white guy in England who was a bystander to the genocide. Now what? Writing the history? Are you kidding me? So when actually the Minister of Culture first approached us and sent a fax – the days of the fax – this fax came through from the Ministry of Culture. Would you help – help us to think through a memorial? I said, no. Just because I created something to do with the Holocaust didn't qualify me to speak to the issues of the Rwandan genocide. And then three months later, the identical fax came through with a different date on it. Basically saying, please come to Rwanda and help. And that's where my brother James said, OK, I'll go and see what I can find out. And then from there we started working together. My principal here, Rachael, is this – if you want to engage with the memory of others and particularly traumatic memory of others, you have to approach that in humility. It's necessary to learn. And, it's necessary to come alongside the other parties – that is those who have been traumatized by that memory – as a co-subject. And, to live alongside them literally to be able to really understand what their life is like, what their day is like, what their view of the world is like, how they cope with their pain and their suffering. How they are rebuilding their lives. Because you can only really represent them  through the work that you do together and it must be together if you really understand something of what they've been through. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Hmm

Stephen Smith: Let me give you an example of how this goes wrong. So there's a place in Rwanda called Ntarama. You've seen pictures of it. It's where all the corpses were spread across the church. The corpses were left on the floor of the church, and eventually it was a pile of bones and skulls and empty clothes because the corpses just rotted where they had fallen. I had a plan for that place and it was based on a conversation with a lady called Dancilla. Her child was among those corpses. So I said to her, ‘Dansilla, Why did you leave your child to rot?’ And she said, Well, if you had come along and said, we need to do a memorial, we’d buried them in a grave and we'd planted flowers. What would happen is you would have flowers and you would forget. She said, but when you look at the church floor covered in the bones, you can't forget my child. And so it's a stark memory that needs to be in front of our eyes for all time. So there she is. She's a survivor. And she's saying, leave my child alone because that's the way in which you will be forced to remember.  The British government came along, sent a consultant who built memorials in London to the war and what they did - they picked up the bones and they stuck them in a shed and buried most of them and then covered the church with a giant barn and destroyed everything that was important to that woman's memory. And that's because that consultant didn't sit with her and talk to her about her child. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I think I've heard you refer to this idea as the colonization of memory. 

Stephen Smith: It's absolutely the colonization of memory. And by the way, we've been very good at it. The British, in particular, colonizing others. We have this pompous idea that just because it worked in the British Empire it’s going to work in Rwanda. This is complete nonsense. And the only way in which we are going to be successful in The Memory Generation that is, is when we listen to one another and come alongside each other whether we've had that experience or not. I divide memory into three areas. There is the specific memory that you have as an individual that is the person that went through the experience. Then there is memory as witness that is putting yourself into the public domain to say this was my experience and I am acknowledging that in the public domain. It does not have to come with words or a form. It's just here I am. And then there’s testimony which is the form of memory and that's not audio visual testimony or audio testimony, it’s any representation of that person's life when they witness and give it a form. It can be art. It can be dance. It can be music. It can be narrative. And so when we come alongside the individual who's had these experiences in the past, it's not for us to decide what they say or how they say it or if they say it. Because actually there is an absolute right to privacy. What right have I got to even demand of you that you speak about the murder of your family or the destruction of your home? It's entirely your right to remain private and silent. And anything that you choose to share with me is a privilege for me to hear. And therefore, I have to treat that – not you as a sacred object, but your life as an extension of who you are when you share – to treat it like a sacred space in which I respect who you are and don't claim it as my own.

Rachael Cerrotti: I know that you work with a lot of survivors of genocide and individuals who are going through conflict right now. There's the families that are left with such a wealth of inheritance of memory that it's nearly overwhelming because they don't know what to do with it, how to pass it to the next generation. But then you have this other group of families who feel burdened by the silence. That their parents didn't talk about what they went through or their grandparents never left behind any writings or photographs. Do you encourage it? Do you encourage the storytelling? 

Stephen Smith: Well, I think the starting point is to respect the privacy of memory and it's everybody's right to remain silent. My observations are that providing the safe space and the ability to be able to talk in an authentic way allows survivors of violent crimes and specifically genocidal crimes to be able to find themselves in a new way. It's re-humanizing and generally has a very good impact. Like all good medicines, there are side effects, though. Like, you know, take this pill and by the way, you're going to vomit, you're going to get a headache and all the rest. So it's like, you know, when you get the disclaimer on the pharmaceutical commercials – it's a little like that. It's, you’re gonna tell your story, but it might be disruptive in your life. It very often triggers nightmares. It could change relationships. Usually for the better. Sometimes not. 

Rachael Cerrotti: It can be misused as well. 

Stephen Smith: It can be misused. It can be taken out of context. You may not be ready to tell the full and whole truth. And then later on, it might be pointed out that it wasn't the full and whole truth. I mean, there are many, many layers of complication to this. And so I think it's about giving informed consent, providing an opportunity and a pathway and most of all, finding a safe place where there is trust. That's what happened with the USC Shoah Foundation. 

Rachael Cerrotti: So before we go there, let's do an introduction to your work at USC Shoah Foundation because you went from creating the Kigali Genocide Memorial to eventually coming to L.A. to run USC Shoah Foundation. So can you just give us in a couple of sentences, how did you get here. 

Stephen Smith: I was working in Rwanda, I was pleased to learn that The Shoah Foundation was interested in taking testimonies. I was not pleased to learn that those testimonies would have a Hollywood release form associated to them which would effectively mean The Shoah Foundation would come and take testimony out of Rwanda to Los Angeles and it would become the property of a university in California. So in fact, I wanted to talk face to face and politely with colleagues at The Shoah Foundation to say, I think there is a different way to do this. And that's when I discovered the position that I ultimately occupied was going to be open. So, I came to the USC Shoah Foundation And the very first thing we did was change the contracts with IBUKA which is the survivors association in Rwanda, such that the testimonies would stay in Rwanda and be licensed by the Shoah Foundation who would take responsibility to manage them and look after them and preserve them and make sure that they're for the future generation, but not own them. Because you don't own another people's history. 

Rachael Cerrotti: So when we say they were collecting testimony. What's testimony?

Stephen Smith: Testimony is the expression of memory. It’s a form of witness to say, I am here. And I was there. And to provide a gateway through eyewitness representations to give us the opportunity, those of us who were not there, to understand what it meant to live through that. So testimony for me is changing and dynamic. It's not history. It contains information and it contains history, but that's not its purpose. Let's say, for example, we take a document from the Second World War. Maybe it's the document that depicts the number of people that were on a transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz. And there's a list and we put that into an archive. That's an object. It's a document which we can refer back to. It's fixed in time and place.

Rachael: Mm-Hmm. 

Stephen Smith: The story of being on that train, what it meant to be inside that wagon and one of those 1,500 people on that list will result in 1,500 versions of that same journey. Of course, of those fifteen hundred people, maybe only 150 survived the first couple of hours at Auschwitz and maybe only 20 of them in total survived the entire war. So that you end up then with 20 versions of what happened in those cattle wagons. But because testimony is dynamic, what you say about it on the 8th of May 1945 when the Holocaust ends and what you experience and what you will say about it maybe when you're giving testimony in 1961 at the Eichmann trial or when you're making a family documentary on your grandchild's bar mitzvah trip to Poland in 1994, they're going to be three completely different narratives. 

Rachael Cerrotti: And then the way that the child of that survivor and the grandchild of that survivor inherit and retell that story –

Stephen Smith: Retell that story will change. Now what will happen is two things. First of all, we have what I refer to as the washing line, The washing are the bare facts. I don’t know what we call it here, a laundry line or what you call it? 

Rachael Cerrotti: Like a clothesline. 

Stephen Smith: A clothesline. OK 

Rachael Cerrotti OK. 

Stephen Smith: So the clothesline. That’s a set of facts. What you'll find is if you look at a testimony of a Holocaust survivor 1945 or 1946, the facts will be the same as they are right now. But what happens is things get hung on it over time and it becomes more reflective. So you don't just say we lived in a little village in the Carpathian Mountains, you name the village, you name the rabbi, you name the teacher. You talk about going to the school. So you've hung something on that fact which gives it color, which gives it dimension and reflection. And so you can imagine you go all the way through that history and that's how you end up going from a six page, what looks like a police statement in 1945, which we would call a testimony through to what how come that person come 2020 has written three 250 page books on the same facts. Well, it's because there's a lot to hang on it. And so, that's how testimony develops over time. One of the things that I have learned over 30 years is to always trust the source. It doesn't mean the source is always accurate.

Rachael Cerrotti: Hmm. OK, I break that down for me.

Stephen Smith: Right. So because I'm not coming to that source for historical information, it's my job as the historian to figure out the history. It's not the job of the person that’s telling the story to get all the historical facts right. What they're doing is giving me insight into those events and it's my job then to interpret and say, OK, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put together the list of the train with the stories of what happened in the train. And then that becomes the way in which I write history. Even if they say there were two thousand people on the train and in fact there were 1,666. Well, is the person wrong when they say two thousand? Not really, they weren't counting them on and off. They were just trying to give an idea of the magnitude.

Rachael Cerrotti: They’re painting a picture

Stephen Smith: Just like every story that I tell about my life, they're more or less factually true. But if I was to give you every single detail, we would need a whole season of podcasts. Now imagine Holocaust survivors. Let's just say the shortest of them was like maybe a year from when the Germans invaded Hungary, from Nazi occupation through to liberation. Then there were the Poles that had a full six years or 5 and 3/4 years. And then there were the Germans that went from 1933 to 1945 plus their years in DP, and so it might be 15 years of history they've got to talk about in two and a half hours-ish on average. So what are you going to do? You're going to tell the highlights. You're going to put together a story that's intelligible, that has a beginning, middle and end, and takes us through the arc of their experience because it's a literary form, it's a narrative form that they are sharing their story through. And so we as the historians, the listeners of this, it's up to us to make sense of that. It's not on the interviewee because in a sense, we've put them in the position where we're saying, tell me about your 15 years of experience in which your entire family, entire home, entire language and tradition and culture were completely obliterated and your entire life thereafter completely altered. And by the way, I'm here for the afternoon. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah, I also think, so often when we curate our own stories, what we leave out is just as important as what we put in. And sometimes we leave things out because we just can't go there emotionally. But also sometimes it requires so much background information that you're like, I would just get so tangential that I'm just going to skip that. And I think that the greatest gift that I've been given by these oral histories is the patience of listening to the full story, because so often in conversation, especially dynamic conversation, we're formulating our response before we finish listening, but also we're filling in a lot of answers for the other person. But in watching these testimonies, you have no choice but to sit there beginning to end. And by the time you get to the end, you're like, how many preconceived ideas were disrupted along the way. And then you start to use that when you start listening to people in real time. 

Stephen Smith: Yeah. To make it slightly more complicated. My practice is a practice I call listen and listen again. So listen is listen to the facts, the trajectory of the facts and then go back and ask, What does that really mean? And listen to the entire thing again because it's on the second listen, you begin to hear what the testimony is really about.

Rachael Cerrotti: Do you have a particularly memorable interview or, most impactful or maybe most challenging? 

Stephen Smith: So one that sticks with me that was relatively recent was with a woman who was in the Hitler Youth as a child. I think we've completely overlooked necessary interviews with those who were close to National Socialism and lived their lives there. She was four years old when her daddy, like, put on high boots and the uniform and a swastika in 1933, when Hitler came to power and she was just mesmerized and amazed by this event as a four year old. So her entire childhood is taken up with this Nazi world and she's been gracious enough to share her story about what it meant to be ambitious within the Hitler Youth and want to be a part of that world. I found that compelling because we can easily look at this history and say, I would never have done that. I am not like that. It's all about them. The Germans, the bad people, the evil people. But actually just to show how easy it is that anybody can just be molded to behave in such ways. 

USC Shoah Foundation Testimony (recorded 2019)

Stephen Smith: This is Stephen Smith, I am with Ursula Martens, it's the 26th of august 2019. We’re in Los Angeles, California and this interview will be conducted in english. 

Ursula Martens: Then I heard Hitler for the first time talk. And I asked my mother what are these and she said, these were Nazis. And I said, whats  a Nazi. You know, and she answered me that Nazis are good people  and communists are bad people. I had heard the word communists, communists. So that was my first introduction to Hitler. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I had a chance to meet her as well. I worked with her for one of the first stories I produced for Shoah Foundation and I got to go to her home and it took some convincing, but I got her to watch Jojo Rabbit with me. And I think that will remain one of the most important experiences I've ever gotten to have to be able to sit there and, like, watch her watch that film. And she was so hesitant to watch it. She only liked watching true stories like she only really wanted to watch documentaries about World War Two. She didn't want to watch anything that was fiction or feature. And I remember when it finished, she was like, ‘that's what it was like.’ And it was as you said, so generous with sharing her history which she knew and understood was problematic. 

Stephen Smith: Yes, yeah. It's really important to have that authenticity and honesty when we're looking back at the past. 

Rachael Cerrotti: You and I have something in common, which is that we both really love ambiguity, particularly in storytelling. And we like the gray zone – the space that inhabits between the black and the white. And I've heard you put it as this place of human wonder. How does this relate to what you do for work? How does this place of human wonder drive you on a day to day?

Stephen Smith: Well, 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. So in the context of genocide, I'm always very careful to always remember that when we're talking about the lives of people who have gone through genocide, we are talking about people who have been severely severely harmed through the violent actions of others and to treat that with respect. And at the same time, I refer to it as deep ocean. That the deeper you go into the ocean, the darker it becomes, the more foreboding it becomes, a more inhospitable it is to human life. And yet when you get down there and you switch on the lights, there's a whole kind of universe that's going on there and a place to discover and learn and just to see the power of life. In a sense, I see this in the same way. The deeper you go into the history of the Holocaust and genocides more broadly, the more foreboding and the more inhospitable it is to human life. And at the same time, that's when you find the resilience. That's where you find the hope, that’s when you find the humanity and is still to this day is just a complete – I look at it in complete amazement and I meet these people, some of whom have been dead long ago and I meet them through their testimonies and I learn from them and they reveal just how amazing it can be to be human in spite of everything.

USC Shoah Foundation Testimony (recorded 1996)

USC Shoah Foundation Interviewer, Pamela Lane: Alright this is August 24th 1996, our survivor is Helen Colin, we’re in Houston Texas in the United States, the interviewer is Pamela Lane. The interview will be conducted in English. 

Alright, can you tell us your name and spell it for us please?

Helen Colin:  Helen, h-e-l-e-n, last name c-o-l-i-n. I was born in lodz, l-o-d-z, Poland.

Helen Colin: They opened the door from the barracks. And they looked out and the first thing they saw was a British Red Cross tank. And they turned around and I get goose pimples and they yelled so loud, we're free, we're free, we are free. 

Rachael Cerrotti: So, let's move into this this idea about the trajectory of memory – how it changes with time, but also this idea that I know you think about a lot, which is the experiencing self and the remembering self and how we have these different layers of memories. Just walk me through some of that. 

Stephen Smith: Yeah. So let's get technical for just a moment or two. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner, who wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. In there he has a little section on memory, which describes the experiencing self as the self that goes through an event step by step by step. High points, low points. I've never had a child, but let's just say I am now having a child. Labor starts and it's terrible and it's painful, and I'm screaming and I want this thing to be over and then the child is born. And then there is jubilation, and there is this sense of beauty and wonder and life and all that went through as the experiencing self, now is remembered through the remembering self as that was a beautiful thing in sum because now I have this child. And so our memory is divided into these two areas, one that goes through it and then the one that reflects on it. So then you apply that to a violent society or a genocidal situation. I can retrace those steps of what the experience was. But I'm also reflecting on it. We know going into a Holocaust survivor testimony that the person survived. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Mmhmm.

Stephen Smith: And so, we know that all those steps, whatever they are going to lead to the survival of that person, so that preconditions to some extent what is said. Secondly, we also know that that person is reflecting back on it which is why we know that all these stories are going to be loaded with meaning because that person has now had a chance to reflect on what that history has meant. So why does it matter? When I think about testimony? So we'll get technical again? 

Rachael Cerrotti: Ok. 

Stephen Smith: Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher, came with a concept when struggling with the idea of God, with deity and came up with this concept of I thou. Rather than seeing God as an “it” as an object, see a relationship with deity. “I thou.” If you apply that to the idea of testimony, when we collect historical documents and we put them in an archive, they become objects a little like the train manifest that we talked about earlier, it can only ever be an object in the archive. But when the Holocaust survivor speaks about they're experiencing, they're sharing their life. And therefore, even though it is documented on the tape or on the digital medium and placed in the archive, nevertheless it's still is an extension of their being as a person because they are expressing themselves at the point at which they tell that story. It's not a document even though it's documented. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Mm-Hmm. 

Stephen Smith: And so the question is, how can we then turn that from being an object that we analyze? Like we just look at it, we analyze it, we criticize it. We say there’s some factual problems with it, whatever we say about it as an object. But what happens if I treat it, not as an it, but as a thou. And I come alongside that testimony and I experience the person, not the object and understand them from the inside out. Now what happens is you develop trust. It could be between me and a living person or it could be between me and a recorded testimony. It doesn't really matter. What's going to happen is it’s going to be a relationship of trust. When I say I trust the source, which I said a few moments ago. What it means is I know that there is a living person behind this. I know they went through it. I trust them emphatically from the outset. And then in dialog with them, we can encounter each other. And if there are things that we need to tussle with or struggle with about facticity or historicity, we can do that in full trust. And then that person doesn't think that I'm denying them. They don't feel that they're being undermined or attacked. They know that I am alongside them and with them to try and understand it better. 

Rachael Cerrotti: And to bring in a – I want to say it’s your favorite quote about memory. Primo Levi? 

Stephen Smith: Memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.

Rachael Cerrotti: Right. Memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.

Stephen Smith: Indeed it is.

Rachael Cerrotti: How does that play into all of this? 

Stephen Smith: Oh, well, I think as long as we understand that memory is fallible. It's fallacious doesn't mean to say that it's false. It means it's fallible. We can then really get the best out of that, which is marvelous about memory, understanding that it has weaknesses. So I arrive at the Shoah Foundation in 2009. I love this quote because it reminds me of what our work is, right? And I’m like oh great, I'm going to put this above the reception in The Shoah Foundation. So I have it etched in plexi and put it behind so when you walk into The Shoah Foundation, it says memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument – Primo Levi. My colleagues walk and say, What are you doing? Well, you can't put that. We are – we are the heart of memory. I said no, but that's the whole point. We have over 50,000 marvelous, but fallacious testimonies that are fallible because we're all human. And our job is to be able to reveal them to the world and to allow them to speak their truths, but without making them sacred. Because as soon as we make them sacred, they become a myth. So if we say that testimony is always right. If we say that it's undeniable. If we say it's infallible, we are actually creating a myth. And what we have to be able to do is struggle with it. So yes, I like ambiguity. And yes, there are hard facts, so we have to know what the hard facts are. But the real struggle to understand this past is in the gray zone. Those things that we do not yet understand, those things that we struggle to piece together. And we have to learn to live with those because as soon as we say we understand them or they are sacred or they are fixed, we will have turned the Holocaust into a myth. Not a history. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Stephen, I'm so grateful for you. I think that it took all the years up to discovering the power of testimony in its living, breathing form that really made me understand why I do the work that I do. And you are to thank for that. 

Stephen Smith: Thank you, Rachael. It's a pleasure working with you always. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I feel the same. So I want to end with a question about today. I'm curious what is happening in your personal world that you believe will be a memory that outlives you?

Stephen Smith: I've been thinking a lot about legacy. Maybe it's because I'm approaching 55. Maybe it's because I had a heart attack. I don't know – start to think about mortality in a different way when you get to a certain point and what you begin to realize is that actually you’re really only here for a couple of things. One of them is if you're privileged enough to have children that they become your legacy in many regards. They're going to be their own human beings, but there's a kind of a handing down. And I think that's partly why we talk about The Memory Generation because we're talking about children and grandchildren often in our conversations who are the inheritors of the kind of memories that we're talking about. The other thing that outlives you is your body of work. That is what you publish, what your imprint was. That could be a digital imprint. It could be a written imprint. And I've been thinking about that a lot. I don't want to be just basically a pile of books in somebody's closet when I'm gone. But I do hope that the experiences that I've had and the enrichment that I have been given through the people I have met and had the privilege of learning from can be passed on in some way. And so I am hoping that that will be a more enduring memory than me as me.

OUTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Thank you to Stephen for joining me today. This show and this community of The Memory Generation wouldn’t be possible without him. 

Stephen left his role at USC Shoah Foundation to launch a company with his wife, Heather, called Storyfile. Storyfile is the world’s first AI conversational video platform and allows for anyone around the world to record their own story in a way that actually allows you to interact with the interview. So imagine being able to speak to a family member or even a historical figure long after they are gone. That’s what this type of storytelling allows. Check it out at storyfile.com and see how Stephen is setting out to collect over a hundred million stories from around the world. It is certainly a library of human wonder.

This show was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.

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 today’s guest –  Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.

I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We’ll be back next week.