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Indiana Alumni Magazine

Six months after graduation, journalist uncovers the painful past

By Lee Ann Sandweiss

ANNIVERSARY OF LIBERATION

On Jan. 24 — six months after graduating from IU — reporter Mitch Blacher, BAJ'04, boarded an LOT /Polish Airline jet bound for Krakow, Poland. His assignment: an in-depth story on the journey of Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor and a group from Terre Haute, Ind., as they take part in an international commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp.

Prior to this trip, Blacher's assignments at WTWO, the NBC/Fox affiliate in Terre Haute, had been strictly local news stories — everything from murder investigations to 4-H Club stolen rabbits. But even if the Auschwitz story took Blacher much further afield than his typical stories, the project nonetheless shared a great deal with Blacher's other work.

"In this market, much of the news has to do with personal stories and what is happening in people's lives," he says. "That's exactly what the Auschwitz experience was, only to an extreme."

Blacher's journey to Auschwitz actually began several months earlier, when Kor contacted WTWO to see if it could send a reporter with the group she was taking to Poland. Kor, an internationally known Holocaust educator, had been a prisoner at Auschwitz when the camp was liberated by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945. With her identical twin sister, Miriam, Kor was subjected to experiments conducted by the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The rest of their family perished in the gas chambers.

"I wanted a reporter to cover the journey of the citizens from Terre Haute, but the station said that it couldn't afford to send someone," says Kor. "I told them that C.A.N.D.L.E.S. would cover the costs, providing the organization could have the rights to the story after it aired on television."

C.A.N.D.L.E.S., the Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors, is a nonprofit organization that Kor founded in 1984. In 1995 she opened the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute. The museum came to national attention in November 2003, when an unknown arsonist set fire to the building and destroyed its contents. Interviewed in front of the smoldering ruins, Kor vowed to rebuild. The outpouring of support from around the world that followed the televised broadcasts and Associated Press coverage of the story resulted in more than $300,000 in donations.

Blacher, 23, was an IU senior at the time of the fire and vividly remembers how he first heard of Eva Kor and C.A.N.D.L.E.S. "I was working at the Daily Student, and I remember reading the story about the museum being burned," he says. "At that point, I never thought I would be able to meet the players in the story. It's interesting how things work out."

Last December, when Blacher's news director gave him the Poland assignment, he arranged a visit with Kor at her home. "I thought I would stay about an hour, but it turned out to be about three hours," he says. "I met Eva's husband, Michael, who is also a Holocaust survivor, and she loaned me several of her personal photos, including the one of her and Miriam walking through the gate on Liberation Day."

ARRIVING AT AUSCHWITZ

After their nine-hour flight, Kor's group, comprising 25 people from all walks of life, from teachers to World War II buffs, boarded a bus and headed directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gray skies, blowing snow, and freezing temperatures that greeted the visitors acquainted them with a fraction of the physical hardship that the poorly clad and often barefoot prisoners had endured 60 years earlier. The vast compound is actually made up of three distinct camps, with Birkenau the port of entry for many European deportees during World War II. Developed solely to serve as a killing center, Birkenau had gas chambers and three crematoria, which disposed of an estimated 1.5 million people between 1941 and 1945.

Kor's group spent two days at Auschwitz-Birkenau before the international ceremony. During those days, Kor told the group of her experiences as a 10-year-old prisoner and experimental subject. As Kor recounted the horrors of daily life in the death camps in a way that made the experience chillingly vivid to her listeners, Blacher shot hours of footage and interviewed group members, capturing their reactions to what they were seeing and hearing.

In a stark building with a sign that reads "Physical Evidence," the group encountered the staggering volume of artifacts of institutionalized genocide — mounds of human hair, a room of mangled eyeglasses, piles of shoes and suitcases that reached the ceiling. They entered the gas chamber and crematorium where hundreds of thousands of innocents were slaughtered. But perhaps the most horrific spot at the camp was the "selection platform" at Birkenau, where deportees were sorted into two groups — those who would live and those who would die.

Standing in six inches of snow with more falling, Blacher filmed Kor as she told the group what happened on that very spot on a spring day in 1944, when her family, which had been deported by train from Transylvania, stepped down from the boxcar.

"I looked around and my father and two sisters had vanished. I never saw them again," Kor said. "Then an SS officer approached my mother and asked in German if Miriam and I were twins. Someone translated the question and she nodded 'yes.' Then, Miriam and I were directed to the right, and our mother was shoved to the left. I saw her turn back toward us, and her arms were stretched out in despair. That was the last time I saw her."

After Kor related the story of her arrival, Blacher interviewed Tommy McGregor, a Vietnam veteran who had seen his buddies blown apart in combat. "This is just way too much to handle," McGregor said as he stepped away from the camera. Blacher stopped shooting.

Heavily emotional moments such as these made the Auschwitz experience a personal and professional challenge for the young Hoosier reporter. For two days, Blacher saw members of his group stifle tears and shuffle silently in disbelief as they encountered the horrors of Auschwitz. But concentrating so intently on filming and getting the story, he found that his own emotions were oddly distant.

"Because I was seeing everything through the eye of the camera, I wasn't aware of absorbing it on a personal level as much as the others probably were," he says. "Every time I set the camera down, I saw something I needed to shoot."

View A Return to Auschwitz, a video produced by Bloomington, Ind., middle- and high-school students (approx. 9 min.)
Video presented as a streaming Real Media file

THE LONGEST DAY

On Jan. 27, the eyes of the world turned to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the international ceremony commemorating the camp's liberation. The snow that had fallen continuously since the group arrived had reached blizzard conditions, with the help of strong blowing winds. It would turn out to be a 20-hour day for Blacher.

"I got up at 5 a.m. Poland time, which is approximately 11 p.m. Indiana time, and walked about four blocks to get my press pass," he says. "At this point, I had gotten three or four hours of sleep for several days. All the roads between Krakow and the camp were closed for security, because there were so many dignitaries present — Chirac, Cheney, Putin, Sharon, and so on. The press packed into 10 buses and caravanned to the camp. Normally the ride would have been an hour, but because of road conditions, it took about two hours to get there."

Arriving at Birkenau, Blacher waited with other members of the press for what seemed like eternity to get through security.

"We were standing outside as the snow was coming down," he says. "I was struck by the endless barbed wire. At Birkenau, as far as you can see, there's barbed wire. Soon, the reality of the cold set in. It must have been zero degrees, and the wind was unbelievable. I was wearing long underwear, jeans, three pairs of socks, a thermal undershirt, a regular shirt, a sweatshirt, a jacket, two hats, three pairs of gloves, and I was freezing. It was as cold as I've ever experienced, and I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin!"

Kor and the entire Terre Haute group shared Blacher's discomfort, as did thousands of other participants in the international commemoration. The event's elaborate arrangements had not included the provision of adequate shelter for guests in case of severe weather. Kor and the other elderly Holocaust survivors in attendance were seated in the open, with no protection from the elements. Several days later, when she was told that several survivors had been hospitalized after the event, Kor was outraged — but not surprised.

"We sat through hour after hour of meaningless speeches," she says. "Everything was about the politicians, but nobody thought about the real honored guests — the survivors."

From Blacher's vantage in the press section, he could easily film the more than a dozen world leaders gathered on the speaker's platform. For a young journalist like Blacher, the opportunity to cover well-known dignitaries, politicians, and humanitarians from around the world might seem like a dream come true.

But Blacher shared Kor's feeling that the deepest and most significant part of the story lay in survivors' reminiscences. Footage of nearly a dozen world leaders on the speakers' platform turned out to be nearly irrelevant.

"To be honest, I didn't use much of it, because it wasn't personal," Blacher says. "My story was about the journey of the people from Terre Haute to Auschwitz, not the fact that the vice president of the United States was there for five minutes."

BACK HOME

After returning home from Poland, Blacher spent a week in WTWO's editing bay, going over the footage he had shot at Auschwitz. In those close quarters, as he scrutinized the tape in order to decide what to keep and what to leave on the cutting-room floor, his emotions finally caught up with him.

"I had to reduce seven hours of tape to final pieces that were about 22 minutes long. I watched the footage for hours on end in a space that is about 30 square feet, with two TVs, some tape recorders, and editing equipment," says Blacher. "Being alone in that environment with that material, when I had actually been at Auschwitz, was a very powerful experience. My emotions surfaced in a way that they couldn't when I was in my professional mode in Poland."

Blacher's report ran in five installments on the WTWO evening news during the sweeps month of February and was rebroadcast in its entirety on April 2, the day before the new C.A.N.D.L.E.S. museum opened in Terre Haute. The stories became the core of a DVD, Return to Auschwitz, which is available for sale through C.A.N.D.L.E.S.

The community's reception of Blacher's story was overwhelmingly positive, says Kor. "Many people have told me that they were very sorry that they didn't go on the trip, and others said that the story gave them important information about Auschwitz. Everybody has said that they liked the report and were very impressed with it."

Blacher was pleased — and somewhat relieved — by the community's reaction. "At first I was a bit concerned," he says. "Would a community that is not very diverse and doesn't have a very large Jewish population warm up to the story? On a normal basis it wouldn't have any dealings with people who had been persecuted this way. One of the most rewarding things about this assignment is that I could show more people than ever could have gone on the trip exactly what the experience was like. I guess that's the beauty of television."

That Blacher happens to be Jewish made the trip to Auschwitz more significant on a personal level, but he says he doesn't feel that it had an impact on how he handled the assignment.

"I wasn't there as a Jew; I was there as a journalist," he says. "Growing up I had heard Holocaust survivors tell their stories. I particularly remember one gentleman who had a very thick Eastern European accent. He came to my Jewish summer camp every year to tell his story, and I remember that he was so angry. Then, I heard Eva talk about how she has forgiven the Nazis. The fact that someone could forgive something so heinous is something I just can't comprehend. I'm not sure I could. It makes Eva's story even more amazing. Not only has she gone through this horrific experience, but as she has gotten older she decided to let it go, because she didn't want to be kept a prisoner of pain and hatred."

It was Kor's desire to forgive but remember, and to teach others about the Holocaust, that led her to build the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. museum not once but twice. And when the new C.A.N.D.L.E.S. museum held its grand opening in April, more than 500 visitors attended the event, and the museum shop's sales of Return to Auschwitz, the DVD Blacher helped create, were brisk. Blacher was there, but without his camera in tow.

"That day I was me, not a reporter," he says. "On a trip like that you get close to people pretty fast. It was wonderful to see everyone from the trip and how happy the community is for Eva and how proud they were. It's very rewarding to me to know that I contributed professionally to something I care about so much personally."

Lee Ann Sandweiss, an editor at Indiana University Press, went to Auschwitz-Birkenau with the group from Southern Indiana. This is her first contribution to the Indiana Alumni Magazine. C.A.N.D.L.E.S. is located at 1532 S. Third St., Terre Haute, IN 47802. For more information, go to www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org.

 

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