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Seventy Years Since Auschwitz Liberation; Greece Elects Anti- Austerity Government, Will Stay in Eurozone; Imagine a World

Aired January 27, 2015 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: the horrors of our past, 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust survivor and

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel tells me the lessons we still must remember today.

Plus one survivor's incredible journey to track down his long-lost twin brother.

Also ahead, Greece unveils its new cabinet; the beginning of the end for the Eurozone?

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AMANPOUR: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

World leaders are gathered at Auschwitz in Poland today to remember the defining moment in our modern history, the horror against which all horrors

are judged. Six million Jews were killed by the Nazi death machine, that network of railways and gas chambers, furnaces and chimneys.

When Allied forces eventually reached these places, neither the liberating soldiers nor the journalists with them could fully comprehend what they

saw. BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby's desperate radio report painted the awful truth in 1945.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

RICHARD DIMBLEBY, BBC CORRESPONDENT: I find it hard to describe adequately the horrible things that I have seen and heard, but here, unadorned, are

the facts. I passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of a nightmare. Dead bodies, and some of them in decay, lay strewn about the

road and along the rutted tracks.

On each side of the road were brown wooden huts. There were faces at the windows, the bony, emaciated faces of starving women, too weak to come

outside, propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before they died.

And they were dying, every hour and every minute.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: That was discovering Bergen-Belsen. A few months earlier, 70 years ago today, Auschwitz had been liberated by the Soviet Red Army. And

even today, it's hard as a reporter to put this into words.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Concentration camps ran day and night like assembly lines. Here at Auschwitz, more than a million people were killed.

AMANPOUR (voice-over): Jews arrived packed into trains. The Nazis sorted them on the platform; sent the doomed to the gas chambers; stripped, shaved

and tattooed the rest.

Elie Wiesel was number A7713.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: And joining me right now from Florida is Elie Wiesel.

Welcome back to this program, Mr. Wiesel.

ELIE WIESEL, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: Let me ask you what you make of all these world leaders who've gathered in Poland today and all the commemorations that are going on

around the world.

WIESEL: Well, I wish I had been there (INAUDIBLE) but I couldn't -- my condition was not good enough to travel that far. But it's an event. It's

an important event. After all, Auschwitz will be remembered in history as a place where human beings had done to other human beings things that have

never not -- never should be done in history.

And of course, what I remember is, especially now in January, it was not only Auschwitz itself but the evacuation, the march, the death march. I

was there with my father the last few weeks of his life were together there, marching and in that first week in Buchenwald.

But Auschwitz is a symbol of the 20th century with all the great victories that humanity has recorded and the sciences and literature and philosophy.

At the same time, it's also Auschwitz. It's a 20th century phenomenon, 20th century treasury, 20th century crime.

But all of a sudden, in Europe, civilized Europe, of all places in Germany, which used to be the most cultural, the most elegant, the nation in the

world in literature and philosophy for so many centuries. There we heard (INAUDIBLE) and his acolytes (ph) and his spokesmen preaching hatred,

preaching murder, mass murder.

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: Mr. Wiesel --

WIESEL: But it happened.

Yes?

AMANPOUR: Can I ask you, as you remember, can I ask you what you remember about being sent to the camp and what you remember about being there.

WIESEL: Well, being sent, we didn't know that. I lived in Hungary. Hungary used to be Romania before. But Hungary, we didn't know about

Auschwitz until we came to Auschwitz, despite what it is to me to this day, a source of shock and astonishment.

The night we came there, of course, 1944, 1944, we, in Hungary, didn't know that Auschwitz existed. Had we known, believe me, had Roosevelt, had

Churchill, on their radio stations turned to Hungarian Jews saying, Hungarian Jews, don't go to the train because the trains will lead you to

Auschwitz, people, many of us, would not have gone. Many wouldn't have believed perhaps, but wouldn't have gone.

But nobody warned us and nobody came to our help. It happened late in the war. Germany had already lost the war in 1994, spring 1944. And yet they

still had enough resources and, of course, the will, the desire, the determination to kill the Jewish people.

To this day, I don't understand it. It doesn't even in their own self- interest, in their own national interest. Why did they do that? To me, it remains a mystery.

AMANPOUR: What gave you the strength, what was life-affirming that gave you the strength as a 15-year old when you were sent there to keep going

and to survive?

WIESEL: Well, in the beginning, of course, because I was together with my father -- we were in the Birkenau, Auschwitz and (INAUDIBLE) Buchenwald

with my father in the beginning, and as long as he was alive, I wanted to be alive just to keep him and help him, you know, to share a piece of bread

with him.

And after he died, this was actually in January, late January 1945, and I was already in Buchenwald, I didn't live. I was in a barracks for

youngsters in Buchenwald and believe me, I don't even remember a day of that -- it was three months what were empty, empty, just empty of anything,

empty of happiness, empty of joy, empty of hope, empty of life.

Well, that was Buchenwald. But in Auschwitz, of course, that place was a place for the first time in history, a place that was created by Germany,

the German government and army, created just to bring there people who were living and kill them, just like that, kill them. I don't understand it to

this day. It wasn't even in their national interest, what interest could they have to kill millions of Jews?

But it happened.

AMANPOUR: You know, obviously, with each passing year, the number of Holocaust survivors gets smaller, gets less. And people ask who's going to

remember and who is going to remind and I also have read so many stories of people who say they could never talk about this until they were later in

life, survivors, who wanted to get on with building their own life and building a new life.

What made you talk and write and how long did it take you after liberation to be able to tell about this?

WIESEL: Well, it took me 10 years. I knew I was going to write. I had written before, but I had written about mysticism when I was a youngster.

I was 13, as I found -- I found -- I went back to my hometown and found my manuscript that I had written at age 12-13 on Jewish mysticism, of all

things.

And I knew I was going to write. But I knew one day I will have to write. And I didn't find the words. I was afraid that I could not find them. I'm

not even sure about the way that I did find them. Maybe there are no words for what happened. Maybe somehow the Germans, which means the cruel

killers, have succeeded at least in one way, in that it prived us, the victims, of finding the proper language of saying what they had done to us.

Because there are no words for it.

AMANPOUR: And what about never again, we have seen it happen again, whether it be Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda or Darfur? I would like to play

a seminal moment amongst many of your seminal moments, at the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., when you spoke about the

genocide in the Balkans.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WIESEL: And we have learned that when people suffer we cannot remain indifferent.

And, Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As

a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country!

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So there were you, telling then-President Clinton that they had to do something in Bosnia.

When you see what's happening in the world today, have lessons been learned?

And if not, why not?

WIESEL: Some lessons have been learned, which may be that whenever a real atrocity occurs, there are -- there are voices being raised against them.

The people are more sensitive than before. Does it mean that there is no evil in the world? Of course there is still some evil somewhere in this

world of ours. Does it mean everything is good? No. Are there people who don't suffer? Of course there are people who suffer. Are there people who

are not victims? Of course there are victims. Do we know about them? We could know because today the age of cultural information delivered in an

age of information, we know everything if we want to know. But we are afraid to know. So therefore our mind works in a strange way, maybe self-

protecting. We don't want to know. But we should know.

There are enough people who suffer, enough people who are victims, victims sometimes of each other, of other groups, of other systems. Who knows?

There were times when communism was not only Nazis, (INAUDIBLE) communism and God knows I have devoted many, many years of my life against Communist

dictatorships in Asia (ph) and the other countries.

But today, it doesn't exist anymore. So strangely we must say that history is going through a good period. Communism is gone. Communism is gone. So

what is there today that should actually worry us simply because there are people who suffer in the world. And I believe that we must be aware of

their suffering.

AMANPOUR: And on that note, Elie Wiesel, thank you so much for joining us on this important day.

WIESEL: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: During that war, another atrocity took place in Thessalonica, an ancient home of Greek Jews. But almost 98 percent of them, around 50,000,

were shipped to the camps and almost all would perish there.

And the people of Greece swore never again. Imagine then, in this week's recollections, far right parties like Golden Dawn with its neo-Nazi-style

insignia did well. One far right party, the Independent Greeks, has even joined in the new governing coalition. The far left, Syriza, won the most

votes.

Is an ugly new world rising in Europe?

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

Now the rise of far left and far right populist parties threaten a political earthquake across Europe and one took place in Greece this

weekend. The new Greek prime minister, the leader of the left-wing Syriza party, has formed a coalition with a far right party and today he named his

cabinet. Their mandate: to end the nation's crippling austerity program. But what will that mean for Greece? And what could a Grexit mean for

Europe?

Kevin Featherstone is a professor at the London School of Economics and a former adviser on reforming the Greek government.

Welcome to the program.

KEVIN FEATHERSTONE, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS: My pleasure.

AMANPOUR: So everybody talks about Greece getting out of the Eurozone.

Is that possible right now?

FEATHERSTONE: It's possible; but I think the risk is actually pretty low, Christiane, because you have remember certain constraints overwhelmingly

the Greek electorate wants to stay in the euro. It's a party Syriza (ph), which has professed its commitment to staying in the euro.

But as you say, as you imply, with the negotiations -- and they must be very difficult negotiations -- you can't remove the risk, but

overwhelmingly, the probability is that Greece will remain in.

AMANPOUR: How, then, does Prime Minister Tsipras have his cake and eat it, too?

How does he stay in the Eurozone?

How does he forget about austerity, try to renegotiate the debt?

He seems to want it all.

FEATHERSTONE: Yes, Greece is making a judgment about this poker game that Alexis Tsipras will have with Angela Merkel. About a week ago, Christiane,

there was an opinion poll in the Greek newspaper which asked the people the question, who do you think will blink first? Who will concede first?

The majority of Greeks thought Angela Merkel would concede first.

Now as your facial response suggests, that's not a judgment that most people in Europe would make.

Angela Merkel hasn't become popular and preeminent in Europe on the basis of being tremendously flexible and without a position.

AMANPOUR: What do you think, though, of the argument that actually if the euro economy were to grow again, perhaps one to do that is to maybe let

them renegotiate their debt, inject a little strength into their economy.

FEATHERSTONE: Well, I think there are two issues. And we attempt to focus on one issue since the election. Clearly Sunday was a major revolt against

austerity measures. But I think there is a serious argument, a reasonable argument to be made about easing the debt burden on Greece.

Many economists from different political persuasions would accept that the Greek debt is unsustainable. You must do something about the debt.

What we're missing, though, is that the second dimension, the second agenda, is Europe's likely insistence that Greece must contain -- must

continue with domestic structural reform. And it's that second agenda that Syriza has major difficulty with. But it is a distinctively Greek problem

of the need to make the economy more competitive, improve institutions, clean institutions, clean the public administration.

AMANPOUR: Get tax revenues.

FEATHERSTONE: Get tax revenues.

There were certain aspects that Syriza might actually be able to achieve more than previous governments. It repeatedly says that it was -- would

tackle the hypocrisy and that it would go after the rich, who were evading taxes. If it's successful, of course, they -- Europe will celebrate.

But there's other issues; only last Thursday, in his last election rally, Alexis Tsipras was saying that we will renationalize Olympic Airways (sic).

This, by any stretch of the imagination, was a basket case for successive governments.

So an opposition to privatization, an insistence that they will reappointment to the state administration all those recently sacked, this

begins to be a conversation where people are talking a different language.

AMANPOUR: And people are really trying to figure out where does ideology end and pragmatism start?

And an early test might be in February, when there is a meeting about all of this.

Can I ask you, in context of what we're talking about today, Holocaust Memorial Day, 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, does it -- we

talked about a political earthquake because of these populist parties -- I mean, how dangerous is it that this government has gone into coalition with

some people who've got a pretty questionable platform?

Tell me what you know about this coalition.

FEATHERSTONE: Absolutely. And now the independent Greek party, which is the small coalition party with Syriza from the elections, is on record as

being anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant; it is a far right nationalist party.

Why, then, has Syriza got into coalition with this party? It's perhaps a signal of the insistence of being anti-austerity. This is a party that

above all is a fanatic about ending the austerity measures, ending the conditionality from Europe.

But, as you implied, Christiane, this is strange bedfellows. We have a party of Trotskyists (sic), Maoists and left-wing economists -- ecologists

going into coalition with an avowedly far right anti-immigrant party. And the leader of the independent Greeks has suggested in the past that a lot

of the economic problems of Greece is a result of Jewish influence.

AMANPOUR: It's really a sobering, sobering factor, recall today on all days, and particularly what we've been seeing in Europe over the last month

or so and --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: Professor Featherstone, thank you very much indeed for joining us tonight.

And after a break, we return to Auschwitz this Holocaust Memorial Day; a survivor tells our Atika Shubert about a dream that has survived the

darkness of the genocide.

But first, where did that word itself come from?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Today, we call what happened here at Auschwitz and at the other death camps genocide. But back then, there was no name for the Nazis'

crimes. The word "genocide" didn't exist. It was created by a Polish Jew who lost everything he had and everyone he loved.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, imagine a world where even in the most painful of memories there is hope. As our Atika Shubert found out when she

met a man who survived Auschwitz and even after 70 years still dreams against the odds of a different ending to his family story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Menachem Bodner knows this place, this building. He once peeked into a room here and saw an elderly

man covered in blood. At first, he thought they were nightmares. Now he knows they are fragments of his memories at Auschwitz. He struggles with

the emotion.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: His heart is reeling.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): These are children who survived at Auschwitz.

SHUBERT (voice-over): Seventy years ago, Menachem Bodner was one of the children liberated from Auschwitz. Then he was Elias Gottesman, 4 years

old; within days of liberation, he was adopted by a man searching for his own wife and children in the chaos and taken to live in Israel.

But this was also unwittingly a separation. The ID numbers tattooed on his arm showed he had an identical twin brother.

Jeno Gottesman, numbers A7733 and A7734, Auschwitz records show both Jeno and Elias as genetically identical twins that were subjected to the

experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Medical documents after liberation show that both survived.

Menachem had dreams of another boy, blond like him, sleeping beside him, but it took nearly 60 years and the help of his genealogist, Ayana KimRon,

for him to prove his instinct was real.

AYANA KIMRON, GENEALOGIST: I'm really happy for him that he lost his memory, because without memory it's much easier to reestablish a reasonable

life. Even with that, he had nightmares. So just imagine what would have happened to him if he remembered.

SHUBERT: Do you think you will find Menachem's brother?

KIMRON: I really don't know because I'm doing everything I can. But I don't -- the rest of it depends on the brother himself.

SHUBERT (voice-over): Ayana and Menachem have since found first cousins in the United States and this, Menachem's only photo of his birth parents.

"Now I know my mother's face," he says. "Before, I had remembered only her blonde hair; now I can see her."

But he still searches for Jeno and he comes here in the hope he will remember some clue, another survivor might recognize him, maybe even his

own brother. He says he has a new dream now, walking in a forest with his brother, wearing identical clothes.

SHUBERT: Do you think that dream will become real?

MENACHEM BODNER, AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR: My hope.

SHUBERT: Do you think you're closer to making that dream real?

BODNER: I don't know.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Speaking German).

SHUBERT (voice-over): In this, this place of his nightmares, Menachem finds hope to dream -- Atika Shubert, CNN, Auschwitz.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And you can help in the search for Menachem's brother by visiting and sharing his Facebook page, A7734.

And that's it for our program tonight. Remember you can always see the whole show online at amanpour.com, and follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

END