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Ron Klain Announced as New Ebola Czar; Wolf Blitzer Discovers His Roots; Boko Haram May Release Kidnapped School Girls
Aired October 17, 2014 - 13:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: What kind of person is appropriate to fill this role? The fact of the matter is this is much broader than just a medical response. The response that you've seen from the administration is a whole of government response to ensure we're leveraging the necessary resources to protect the public. USAID and Department of Defense and CDC have been involved in responding to the outbreak in West Africa. You've seen the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol play an important role in this effort which is to monitor our borders and screen passengers from airplanes who are entering the country. There ware additional measures put in place within the last couple of weeks to make sure we're protecting the American public. There's a need to communicate with state and local leaders, including public health officials to protect the American public. There is a significant medical component here as well, of course, but it's not solely a medical response. That's why somebody with Mr. Klain's credentials, somebody that has strong management experience, both inside government but also in the private sector, he's somebody that has strong relationships with members of Congress and obviously strong relationships with those of us who have worked with him here at the White House earlier in the administration. All of that means he's the right person for the job. And he is the right person to make sure that we are integrating the interagency response to this significant challenge.
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WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR; The White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest effectively announcing that Ron Klain will be the new so- called Ebola czar. Ron Klain is the former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden.
Let's bring back Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn as well as Congresswoman Diana DeGette to discuss what is going on.
I want to ask you, Congresswoman DeGette, do you support a travel ban, that the United States should basically prevent people from those West African nations coming to the United States at least during this crisis, to which you say?
Congresswoman DeGette?
REP. DIANA DEGETTE, (D), COLORADO: I'm sorry, I didn't hear the second half of it.
BLITZER: Do you support a travel ban on people coming to the United States from Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, the so-called hot zone where Ebola really is focused?
DEGETTE: I think if it's a travel ban for a medical purpose, we should certainly consider it. But Americans should not fool themselves that simply by making a travel ban will make them safe. The World Health Organization estimates that if we don't deal with Ebola in these countries, we could have up to 1.2 million cases in that area in a month. There's no travel ban on earth that will stop people from moving around the earth. And we will have Ebola in the United States. So it seems to me the top priority in West Africa needs to be work as part of the international community to stop Ebola right there.
BLITZER: How do you feel, Congresswoman Blackburn, about a travel ban?
REP. MARSHA BLACKBURN, (R), TENNESSEE: I think a travel ban right now would be a good thing. We have about 35 countries that have one. I've also supported having a quarantine there. If they are not going to do a travel ban, then we're having our military over, let's set up something like a forward operating base, have people report 21 days before they are to leave the country, go into quarantine.
BLITZER: In those West African nations?
BLACKBURN: In those West African nations. Then, on day 22, they're clear, they have no symptoms, they're allowed to fly. I think that would go a long way to settling this situation and helping us to get our hands around it so we can manage our way through this.
BLITZER: Congresswoman DeGette, a lot of people in the United States are worried about what eventually will probably be 4,000 U.S. military personnel, including National Guard, Reservists, the president signing papers to activate them, being deployed to those countries in West Africa. Are you worried about them?
DEGETTE: Well, we need to -- again, we need to realize Ebola is not transmissible if we follow appropriate protocols. And I assume we'll have strong protocols for those military personnel. Again, I don't know if you're trying to quarantine people there. I don't care what you're doing if we, as part of an international community, don't stop Ebola in West Africa, it will be coming here no matter what we do.
BLITZER: All right.
DEGETTE: I admire those troops for going there and doing what they are going to do. I've got to say.
BLITZER: They're very courageous and we hope they all come back safe and sound. I know their families are deeply worried.
You have a base, Ft. Campbell, in Kentucky, where there's a whole bunch of people heading over there to Liberia, right? BLACKBURN: I've got about 700 constituents heading over. And I can assure you, being in touch with the command team on post, talking with some of the families, people are very concerned. They want to make certain that our troops will not be in contact with people that have Ebola, that have been exposed to Ebola, that are in a controlled group, a surveillance group. And they also want to know how those troops are going to be handled if someone does contract Ebola, what the expectations are. So we're watching this closely.
BLITZER: As we all should.
BLACKBURN: Yes.
BLITZER: Congresswoman Blackburn, thank you for joining us.
BLACKBURN: Thank you.
BLITZER: Good luck to all your constituents and good luck to all of the men and women heading over there. I know they are going to do critically important work.
And, Congresswoman DeGette, thanks to you as well. We'll continue our discussions down the road.
Just ahead, a very different story. As CNN journalists explore their roots, you're going to see my own very emotional journey to trace my family's history.
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BLITZER: I feel like I've been robbed of an experience of having grandparents. Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
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BLITZER: Welcome back. As part of CNN's series "Roots," I'm about to take you on a very personal and powerful journey home, a journey where I learned more about my family's history.
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(SHOUTING)
BLITZER: It's Saturday in Buffalo, New York, my hometown.
Hi. How are you?
And these guys, well, they're fans of F.C. Buffalo Blitzers.
(SHOUTING)
BLITZER: That's a soccer team that somehow was named after me --
(SHOUTING) BLITZER: -- something I find both flattering and a little embarrassing.
(SHOUTING)
(MUSIC)
BLITZER: CNN has asked me to come here to trace my roots, a task I find daunting.
I grew up here in the 1950s and '60s with my sister and parents. A lot has changed since then. My dad passed away in 2002. And my mom, she's 92 years old and she now lives in Florida.
But some things here never change, like the Anchor Bar, the birthplace of the Buffalo chicken wing.
Brings back memories from my youth. Two weeks ago, I was on the Israel/Gaza border. Now I'm eating Buffalo chicken wings.
My journey to learn about my family's history has been months in the making, delayed in part because of this, the war between Israel and Hamas. I'm in Jerusalem reporting for nearly a month. But a friend suggested I take some time to visit Israel's National Holocaust Museum.
Let's go to my father's side first. Last name is Blitzer.
I knew my grandparents died during the Holocaust, but I wanted to know more.
"Circumstances of death," it says. The concentration camp, Auschwitz.
My dad, David Blitzer, wrote a testimony for the museum detailing what he knew about the fate of his family in Poland during World War II. I didn't know until I came here to Israel this week that on my father's side, my grandparents, died or were killed at Auschwitz.
I feel like I've been robbed of an experience of having grandparents. Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and I saw the documentation there, place of extermination, called Auschwitz, that it really hit me and I knew that's where I wanted to go.
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WOLF: It says (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What will set you free? It was a place for working.
BLITZER: They were slave laborers.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. It was this kind of camp, but work was an instrument of extermination prisoners here.
BLITZER: It's one thing to learn about the Holocaust in school or from books, but to see these places firsthand, some untouched since the war, can be overwhelming.
Most of the Jews brought here --
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Then begun selection.
BLITZER: Who lives and who dies.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Exactly.
BLITZER: My grandparents died here.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Probably they walked in. They really believed they were in the shower.
BLITZER: They thought maybe they were going to get a shower. But instead --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That was the gas chamber.
While many Jews were brought here from far away, my dad's family was unique. He grew up in a neighborhood in the town of Auschwitz.
Arthur Schindler, a local historian, agreed to help me find my dad's childhood home.
ARTHUR SCHINDLER, HISTORIAN: We have some school records. This is information about Rachel Blitzer.
BLITZER: That's my aunt.
SCHINDLER: This is an address.
BLITZER: Now, we've looked over here. It's not here anymore.
SCHINDLER: No. Many houses in this area were taken down by the Nazis.
BLITZER: They were destroyed.
Like much of my journey so far, I'm struggling to find remnants of my father's life.
Did this house exist before World War II?
Do you remember, by any chance, a family by the name of Blitzer?
None of the neighbors remember the Blitzers or the House in which they once lived. But I did find a place where my family once stood, the town square.
The testimony that my father provided. He had three sisters. Only one sister survived the war. Rachel survived the war. But two of his other sisters, when the Nazis came in, they were brought to this area. Two sisters, they were killed. They were young girls. It's pretty much the same story on my mother's side. She survived but
her parents died during the Holocaust.
I'm named after my grandfather, Wolf. The most frequent question I get asked, is your real name Wolf? Yes, it's my real name. I was named after my maternal grandfather.
That's my cousin, Peppy Dotan (ph). She grew up with me in Buffalo.
What number was it?
PEPPY DOTAN (ph), COUSIN OF WOLF BLITZER: Number 12.
BLITZER: Whatever house they had is gone.
DOTAN (ph): Yeah, it's closed.
BLITZER: Together, we found what's left of my grandfather's old factory that produced clay pipes. Not far from that factory was the slave labor camp where my mother, her sister, Paul, and two brothers, Mike and Yurick (ph), worked.
This was the land where the labor camp, Camp A, was.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: In this camp, 24,000 Jews came in for labor. Almost 18,000 died here. There was no crematorium here, but they simply burned the bodies and buried the ashes in this place. So it's conceivable that our grandparents, their ashes are here.
BLITZER: We have no idea.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have no idea, no.
BLITZER: When you look at my mom now, she's 92 years old, you really realize how courageous she was when she was liberated in 1945 from the slave labor camp. They told all the Jewish workers, you're going to be marching on this death march. My mother knew if they were on this forced death march, they would die.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This remarkable woman took her siblings and hid in the basement of the factory and they stayed there for a few days until they were finally liberated by the Russians.
BLITZER: Yep. Pretty amazing story.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Amazing woman.
BLITZER: To this day, I'm very aware of the really courageous moves my mom made. She's obviously a very wonderful woman.
Before we leave Poland, we visit the only Jewish cemetery that's left in the town of Auschwitz and I see a tombstone that says "Blitzer."
I don't know if this woman was related to me, but I do what my father would have wanted, I say the special prayer for the dead.
(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
So after the war, after my parents were liberated, my mother, by the Russian troops, and my dad, by the French troops, they did what most Holocaust survivors did once they were strong enough, they went and started looking for family members who may have survived. So they were on a train and, all of a sudden, they saw each other. Their eyes met and they fell in love.
Within a few months, they were married by an American military chaplain, a rabbi. My dad found work in Germany where my sister and I were born.
My dad always said, in those days, you didn't know what was going to be happening a week from now or two weeks, and after the years of what they went through during the war, they said, you know, you had to grab life when you could.
When my dad was visiting nearby Munich one day, he saw a long line so he got in it. It turned out it was a line for visas to America, the result of a law signed by President Truman to bring Holocaust survivors and displaced persons to the United States. A few months later, we were moving to Upstate New York.
When he came to Buffalo, people help him get that job. You'll make money. They thought it was pretty cool. But it was awful.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ungodly hot. It's going constantly and it will not stop if you're injured.
BLITZER: My dad hated the steel mill and left after a year or so. He and my Uncle Sam Friedman decided to open a small deli.
It used to be Blitzers Delicatessen and now it's Buffalo Airbrush Tan.
Jessica, nice to meet you.
This was the deli. I used to pack eggs here. I would come in on Sunday mornings and pack eggs. So I would walk in over here. Keep going. Work. We're working. So this was where we used to pack the eggs.
A lot of memories. Blitzer's Deli. Hard to believe.
My dad didn't like the deli business much either. One day he was talking to friends he knew from the concentration camp. They were buying land.
All these homes.
And building homes for G.I.s returning from the war. My dad decided to give it a try.
My dad actually built this house. This is one of the houses he built when he became a builder.
That's my house. Someone is living there. It turns out, my father a knack for home building, and with a lot of
hard work, became a successful developer.
I went to school here. This is where they taught me to be a journalist.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Awesome. Really?
(LAUGHTER)
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: This is my roots. That's right. That's exactly what it is.
That's really Wolf Blitzer, Wolf I. Blitzer. Student council secondary representative, concert band, dance band, Debate Club, German Club, Humanities Club, advertising staff, marching band, National Honor Society, football J.V., that was me.
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BLITZER: After months of following my family tree, I'm back where I started, my hometown.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We watch you every day.
BLITZER: It's a place where I grew up, where I went to college, where I met my wife, Lynn, and where I also learned a lot about eating good food.
How can we not have -- we have to have Anderson's frozen custards. We're here, right?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wolf, where are we going right now?
BLITZER: Ted's. What you want on it. Mustard, relish, pickles. Cool people say everything you got.
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: Yes, we would. We'd like all of the above.
It's amazing my parents, after all they went through and losses that they went through, I never sensed a vindictiveness. They wanted to move on. My dad, when he died in 2002, he was 82 years old, he was always upbeat. Whenever he would see me on television, my mother would see me on television, they would always say the same thing, this is the revenge. This is the revenge to Hitler and the Nazis.
I'm very proud of the new roots my parents planted here in America. Those roots have grown. And during this visit back to Buffalo, and throughout my life, I realize a lesson I learned from my parents. Like them --
(LAUGHTER)
BLITZER: -- I try to grab life wherever I can.
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BLITZER: That's my hometown Buffalo.
As you saw, this was really a powerful experience for me discovering more of my roots. I was a bit uncomfortable when CNN asked me to undertake the project. I didn't know what to expect and how I would react. I'm glad they asked and that I did it.
I want to thank my producers and photographers who made it possible. Certainly, among the best in the business.
Finally, I want to thank my parents who struggled. They survived. They wound up building a wonderful new life right here in the United States.
That's my family story.
Up next, 200 families get some good news, finally. We'll have breaking news on the possible release of more than 200 kidnapped school girls.
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BLITZER: More than 200 school girls kidnapped in Nigeria earlier this year could soon be returning home. That's because the Nigerian government has reached a cease-fire agreement with the militant terror group, Boko Haram.
Let's go to CNN's Diana Magnay, joining us in Johannesburg in South Africa.
Diana, what do we know about these school girls? Are they about to be released? We can only hope.
DIANA MAGNAY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, we have been hearing from Nigerian officials that it is a part of a cease-fire agreement that they have struck with Boko Haram, and that in the part of northeastern Nigeria where almost a war has been fought over the last few months and years, Boko Haram have agreed to put down their weapons and the Nigerian government has done so also. The next stage is to release the girls. Officials said this would happen over a period of time and that we might expect to see one batch of girls being released at some point in the future. But he was vague on details really.
I think the best approach would be cautious optimism on this deal. It's difficult to understand why Boko Haram, who really has been waging a huge insurgency in the northeast of Nigeria, and is after an Islamic State, should lay down their weapons on any kind of a permanent basis. Perhaps this deal is just to release the girls. We'll have to wait and see -- Wolf?
BLITZER: Do you know any terms of this deal, what the Nigerian government may be giving up?
MAGNAY: There have been so few details, no, not at this stage. Just that this is just about laying down weapons. Now, President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria has been under pressure internationally to make some headway on the release of these girls.
But I think it's also important to note that there are so many more who have been abducted and that these murders and these killings have been continuing by the hundred in the months before and after their kidnap also -- Wolf?
BLITZER: Diana, thanks very much. Let's hope these school girls are freed and freed soon.
Diana Magnay joining us from South Africa.
That's it for me. Thanks for watching. I'll be back 5:00 p.m. eastern in "The Situation Room."
"Newsroom" with Brooke Baldwin starts right now.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Wolf, thank you so much.
