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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Learning to Live All Over Again; A Month After Tsunami, an Ordinary Hero Comes Home; 60 Years After Horror of Auschwitz

Aired January 26, 2005 - 22:00   ET

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

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


AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone.
At first blush, you might see the program tonight as two heavy, too much sorrow, too much dying. We ask you to look again. Beyond all that is sad in our effort tonight, there is something good in virtually every piece.

You will find strength of character that defies words, resilience beyond your wildest dreams, heroics, kindness and decency. It is all there even if the headlines of each seem unacceptably grim.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): After the battle fighting their way back.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't reach out for nothing. I can't grab nothing. It drives me up a wall.

BROWN: Learning to live all over again. In this battle everyone is human and everyone is (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

A month after the tsunami an ordinary hero comes home, except there's nothing ordinary about what he saw and what he did about it. We meet Bob Bell again.

And 60 years after the horror of Auschwitz came to light, the people who survived it remember.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here I am 60 years later. Every day, every day that I am alive that I wake up is a day that I stole away from the mountains.

BROWN: Finding the spark of humanity in a place where humanity was sent to die.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So, it is not an easy program tonight. We gently submit these are not easy times. Our first stop, Brook Army Medical Center in Texas, is a case in point. At Brook these are boom times, no gentle way of putting that.

Recently the hospital dedicated a new center for amputees, new beds to meet a growing need, no gentle way of putting that either, none at all except that to say sometimes in seeing people at the worst moments of their lives, we also catch a glimpse of the best. We begin tonight with NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They keep coming from Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, too many for Walter Reed Army Medical Center to treat.

COL. MARK BAGG, M.D., DEPT. OF ORTHOPEDICS AND REHAB: We have had about 220 to 230 major limb amputations in this conflict. About one-third have lost their arms and hands. About two-thirds have lost their -- have lost their legs.

NISSEN: Most of the amputations are the result of blast injuries from improvised explosive devices or IEDs, mortar rounds, grenades.

COL. ROBERT GRANVILLE, M.D., DIR. OF AMPUTEE SERVICES: These are painful injuries and usually these patients have multiple injuries, you know, not just the amputations.

NISSEN: Surgeons here say most of their patients arrive with limbs already amputated either by the blast itself or by surgeons in field hospitals or at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Other patients have their amputations done here, like Specialist Matt Houston (ph). He was wounded back in November of 2003 when a 50- caliber weapon in his Humvee accidentally discharged.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it went off and it took off my leg, most of the leg. From Baghdad to Tikrit to Landstuhl they all wanted to take my leg off because it was barely on in the first place but that wasn't a choice of mine to make at the time.

NISSEN: Houston suffered through 13 months of painful surgeries and treatment of infections before it hit him. His fiance is due to give birth to a baby girl in February and he could not stand or walk without crutches.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to, you know, go to her crib at night when she's crying and pick her up and cuddle with her and then walk over to a chair and, you know, give her a bottle or something like that. I was afraid that somebody was going to wake up and, you know, give her to me. So, I didn't want to do that at all.

NISSEN: He had his leg amputated the Friday before Christmas and was measured for a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg within three days. Four weeks later he is standing, walking on a $45,000 computerized leg, custom programmed to control walking cadence, speed, helping him descend stairs and ramps.

JOHN FERGASON, PROSTHETIST: Everyone's goal is exactly the same whether it's the orthopedic surgeon, me as the prosthetist, the physical therapist, occupational therapist. We've all got the exact same goal for these folks. Get them going.

NISSEN: Prosthetic limbs work well for two out of three amputees here, those who have lost legs, above or below the knee. It's harder for those who have lost arms, hands.

FERGASON: The upper extremity we just don't have the ability to do this at this point. It's just, it's not available technologically at this point.

NISSEN: Special Daniel Reed (ph), a National Guardsman from Tennessee, lost his right hand when a mortar exploded during a live fire training exercise in Mississippi last June.

It's taken him months to heal from surgery. He was custom fitted and refitted with a prosthetic hand, practiced using it for everyday tasks like making himself a bologna sandwich in the kitchen of a one- bedroom apartment set up at the center. Like most patients here he tries to concentrate on what he can do, not what he can't.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've kept a pretty positive attitude about all of it, you know. I've seen guys that are in so much worse shape than me, you know, so I'm like if these guys are going to make it, you know, I'm going to make it.

NISSEN: No one here is more determined to make it than Specialist Dusty Hill. His life changed in a blast of flame and metal September 21st in Baghdad, a car bomb. He was badly burned on the head, face, neck and arms, lost his right eye and both his hands.

And then there was shrapnel throughout the hand it burned off the fingers. This one it was just all burned, so they had to amputate it off. I can't reach out for nothing. I can't grab nothing. It drives me up a wall.

NISSEN: He's been fitted with a myoelectric arm which he can control with practice, painstaking practice.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Go ahead. Do you want to give it a go?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sure.

NISSEN: With no sense of touch, it takes all his concentration to hold onto a Cheetos without crushing it to powder, to do at 22 what a toddler can do, feed himself. This is a good day. He's not in pain. He got up this morning. He's managing. He tries not to think about the way things used to be, the way he used to be.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What happened to me that happened, I'll deal with it.

NISSEN: Dealing with such profound injuries takes heavy toll. Most amputees cycle in and out of depression, bitterness, anger.

GRANVILLE: Everybody is angry, angry at the world, angry at God, angry at the enemy.

NISSEN: It's especially hard for those who are young who were so physically strong, like Corporal Jacob Schick (ph), proud U.S. Marine.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're top of the line and I was the best of the best and here I am now, you know in this freaking wheelchair.

NISSEN: An anti-tank mine did this to him Humvee in September and did this to his legs. His right leg had to be amputated. His left leg is mangled, causes him constant pain. It is a terrible effort to walk just a few feet.

FERGASON: It can be very frustrating to be a young athlete and now your big deal today is I went ten steps on my own.

NISSEN: It helps those who are struggling to see those who are further along in rehab in recovery, one of the advantages of treating amputees together in a specialized center.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not the first person in the world to ever lose a limb and have the other one pretty jacked up. There's been many, many, many, many more before me.

NISSEN: Are there more to come?

GRANVILLE: Sadly I think that there are. I don't think this is over yet.

NISSEN: The new center has already treated more than 30 war amputees, is expecting at least that many transfers from Walter Reed, patients whose home base, family support is west of the Mississippi.

FERGASON: We may have 30 more absolutely. It breaks my heart but we're going to take care of them.

NISSEN: Do what can be done to give them a hand, get them back on their feet.

Beth Nissen, CNN, San Antonio.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on the program tonight a month after the quake, a month after the flooding we visit again with Bob Bell, who heeded a call to help and bore witness to the need, his story in still pictures.

And later, children finding the humanity in a number and in themselves, the holocaust as seen from a small town in Tennessee a second time, a break first.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A couple weeks back when we were in Aceh covering the tsunami, we introduced you to Bob Bell, a New Englander normally in one of those financial services jobs I never really understand.

As a kid he learned emergency medical skills. As an adult he kept up. When he heard of the tsunami he bought a ticket for Indonesia. He knew no one, had ties with no group. He had what most of us have, access to a phone and the Internet. He also had what few of us have, an absolute belief that in this tragedy he could do something good, make a difference. He did and now he's home.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): We first met Bob Bell in the stifling heat of Banda Aceh, a guy who would describe himself as ordinary, who talked his way into an extraordinary circumstance.

Now he's back, back in the snow of New England, back in time for a daughter's birthday just as he promised. The pictures he took begin with his first day in Indonesia, his first encounter with those beyond help and with the pain of bearing witness.

BOB BELL: But at that time there was no pain medication to give these patients on the transport ride. Every bump that we hit, it was -- it was a tough -- it was a tough sound and a real tough scene and it was just so cruel.

This is an Australian I believe he was a surgeon, and you can see him not able to look at the patients in the back of this ambulance. That was a rotten, rotten first day.

BROWN: In time, the rush of wounded coming off a helicopter slowed and Bell began to work in a refugee camp checking on patients, tending wounds and getting to know people whose language he could not speak.

BELL: Look at the eyes of these people and there's no need for me to speak. I mean that's what these people are like. The determination and the human spirit in overdrive is what these people are like. They're amazingly calm. They're amazingly strong despite what they look like. They don't complain and they're surviving on just so little.

BROWN: One face, one child stole his heart.

BELL: This is (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and his mom. This kid was doing the very, very best job he could. When I went into the hospital this kid was feeding her most days because the nursing care just wasn't there.

BROWN: The two had come in on a Medivac chopper in the confusion of the first days, the mother paralyzed from the waist down. In the camp, she was slowly starving to death, a 10-year-old, her son, just too little to fight for good. Finally, this desperate boy found a knife and threatened to kill himself and his mother unless they were taken home.

BELL: I mean the kid was really, really despondent about "I want to go home. I want to go home" and we thought at that point he was in denial because there were no homes left.

BROWN: For whatever reason people came together for this tiny family. The Navy gave its permission to fly them home. A Marine pilot struggled to get the boy to find on a map the village he had never left before and the boy, this very brave boy, terrified by the noise of the helicopter was on his way.

BELL: And we were circling and circling and he was pressed right up against the window and, you know, you just watched his face until something happened and nothing happened and nothing happened. All of a sudden he just like beamed and as soon as his face lit up we just, you know, I just -- I just said "Set down."

The entire village came out to meet us. It was unbelievable. You can see the smiles on their faces. They didn't know when these people were ever going to come back.

BROWN: Back to what so many people in Indonesia won't have for a very long time to come, a home.

BELL: That was worth the entire trip, you know. I -- you know you can't always do great things but you can do small things in a great way and this was the culmination of a bunch of people doing something really great so that you knew when you went to bed that night that two people were back where they needed to be and it was very, very cool. That was the best part of the whole trip.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And we should say Bob Bell is back where he needs to be, back home with his family and, as always, we appreciate that.

Margaret Larson is back home where she needs to be. When last we saw Margaret she was looking for Mercy Corps colleagues in a medical tent at the airport in Aceh. Truth be told it was not one of her better days but, as it is with a lot of aid workers, a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) stomach did not long stand in the way of the considerable work there, what was and remains in Aceh.

Ms. Larson is now back in Seattle and joins us tonight to talk about the situation a month later. It's good to see you. How has it changed in a month?

MARGARET LARSON, MERCY CORPS: I think things are better, better being a relative word. I would certainly agree that the Acehnese people are among the bravest and most stoic and resilient people I've ever had the pleasure to work around and they have very quickly gotten back to the business of life.

BROWN: How -- when we were there all the NGOs were sort of trying to figure out how best to operate, how best not to step on each other.

LARSON: Right.

BROWN: Mercy Corps has figured out its strategy it sounds like to me.

LARSON: Well, obviously we work with other groups to set aside certain areas of geography or responsibility. But one thing that we've done that we have found has worked quite well is something called the cash for work concept. And basically we take donations, pool them together to make wages, and then hire local people to do things that need to be done, such as clear away debris or repair fishing boats or open schools and rehab those buildings.

In fact, we opened ten schools today on the one month anniversary of the tsunami and those kids can go back and resume their lives in the classroom. So, that's been a very successful strategy for us. It gets people back to work, gets jobs done and puts money into the local economy and that's the name of the game for recovery.

BROWN: One of the things we talked about when we ran into each other at the airport was whether the intense public interest would continue past the time the heavy media coverage stopped. Is Mercy Corps still getting donations? Is the money still flowing?

LARSON: It's flowing. It's slower, as you would expect, but people have been extremely generous and all I can say is if you've made a gift to a charity you believe in, mark it down on your calendar for a year from now and do the same thing because this is going to be a long haul recovery for these people and they deserve us to stand by them.

BROWN: How long does Mercy Corps expect to be there?

LARSON: Well, for several months and possibly years. We have a plan that stretches out for five years. There's the initial phase that you saw where there's food and water and supplies going in. Now we're into this economic recovery phase that we've just been talking about and then there's reconstruction.

As you saw, the devastation is so huge geographically that the amount of cleanup and reconstruction that needs to be done is a multi- year project. There's no way around it.

BROWN: How many people do you have in there?

LARSON: We have about 150 of our own staff people and then we've hired about 2,000 people in the cash for work program. We're going to amp that up to about 6,000.

BROWN: When you left, which was a couple weeks back I think...

LARSON: Yes.

BROWN: ...did you have a feeling that you were, that you were making a substantive difference or did it seem like you were, you were just barely scratching an itch there?

LARSON: You know it's a little bit of both. I've never seen anything that catastrophic. I've never seen that kind of loss of life or level of destruction or suffering and grief.

But, at the same time, I'll tell you the first day I was there, I saw a woman picking trash up at the edge of this elephantine calamity and I thought, you know what, if she can get down on her hands and knees and pick through this stuff and start picking up, then the rest of us can stick this out too.

BROWN: Margaret, it's good to talk to you. I'm glad you're back home safely. We'll talk again soon.

LARSON: Thanks, Aaron.

BROWN: Thank you, Margaret Larson from Seattle tonight with Mercy Corps.

When we come back, why the Marines seem to be paying the highest price in the mission to bring peace and security to Iraq.

And the latest too from Glendale, California, possible criminal charges after a deadly passenger train wreck today. We take a break first.

This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Not a night goes by when we don't hear the music or read the names and it won't be changing anytime soon. Thirty-seven U.S. troops died today, a very bad day in the war, the deadliest yet, 31 in a helicopter crash about 200 miles west of Baghdad, 27 on board were from the same base in Hawaii.

There were other fatalities as well today, six killed in other action around Iraq, most of the dead in all of the incidents today U.S. Marines, a bad day in a rough war that seems to be getting rougher for the Corps, reporting for us tonight our Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's the smallest of the American combat services, numbering just over 175,000 troops, but the U.S. Marine Corps is more than pulling its weight in Iraq.

The helicopter crash that claimed the lives of 30 Marines and a Navy corpsman Wednesday has added to what has become a grim, growing honor roll of sacrifice. A few simple numbers tell the story. In the first year of the Iraq War, 140 Marines died. Ten months into the second year that number has more than doubled to 295.

U.S. Marines have been handed some of the dirtiest jobs. Clearing Falluja in November was urban combat at its grittiest. Eight-three Marines died that month, the most so far in any month. Their fellow Marines believe the way to keep faith with their fallen brothers is clear to win.

LT. GEN. JOHN SATTLER, 1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: We honor their sacrifice by continuing our mission to bring democracy to the people of Iraq. To the families of these brave men our heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to you in this most difficult of times. MCINTYRE: And while they may be the few, the Marines are proud. "Uncommon valor was a common virtue." Those words said by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz 60 years ago describing Marines who fought on Iwo Jima seem just as apt today in Iraq.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A difficult stretch to be sure and, as we said, today's helicopter crash wasn't all. Four other Marines were killed during a raid in the western province of Anbar.

A correspondent and photograph from CNN affiliate WABC in New York was with the unit, so here now the report from WABC's Jim Dolan and photographer Joe Tesoro (ph).

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Roger, be advised missing in action is being ejected at this time.

JIM DOLAN, WABC REPORTER (voice-over): Night ops, Haclania (ph) a small village outside Haidifa (ph) in remote western Iraq, Marines search but the objective building is empty and they head out.

It starts as a few shots but in seconds it is a full out barrage of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) grenades, small arms fire, machineguns. Tracers light up the night sky (UNINTELLIGIBLE) every direction.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, obviously a technical problem there. We'll see what we can do.

In the meantime, every man and woman fighting in Iraq knows the fear many of us will never understand. Tomorrow at 10:00 we bring you a special edition of "CNN PRESENTS: UNDER FIRE" an hour of eyewitness reporting from CNN correspondents covering the insurgency from the frontlines, stories you have not heard, stories we're telling for the first time. That's tomorrow, a special edition of "CNN PRESENTS" 10:00 p.m. Eastern. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: At some point before the week is over, prosecutors in Southern California will have to decide what the crime was. Whatever it was, the result is clear; 11 people are now dead after a man apparently drove his car on the train tracks in what was to be a suicide attempt. He changed his mind and jumped to safety, an option the dead did not have.

CNN's Ted Rowlands is where it happened today, in Glendale, California.

Ted, good evening. Kind of lay out quickly, I guess, how this tragedy played out today.

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, Aaron, the individual you're talking about, 25-year-old Juan Alvarez, is being described as a transient. He is being cooperative, according to investigators. And according to investigators, he told them he didn't think that his vehicle could cause this much damage.

He is hospitalized tonight for self-inflicted wounds. Those wounds are not life-threatening. He stood by, say investigators, as a commuter train barreled into his Jeep Cherokee. That train then derailed and crashed into another commuter train in the Southern California city of Glendale early this morning. As you mentioned, 11 people are now confirmed dead. The 11th body just found within the last hour here. Of the other 10, nine are adult males, the other an adult female.

There is one sheriff's deputy who was on his way to work, a father of four, and a husband. This is a common -- this is common tonight here in Southern California. These stories, these tragic stories are being played out here. There is also concern that there are more dead inside the wreckage. In fact, there are more missing people here, and investigators say it is very, very -- there's a very good chance that, as they continue to sift through this tonight, they may find more victims -- Aaron.

BROWN: Just, can you give us a sense of how prosecutors are looking at this?

ROWLANDS: Well, it's a difficult thing to look at, in that they're going to look at intent. Did this individual intend to cause harm and what was his state of mind? Apparently, he was suicidal. That'll factor into this.

Then there's the outrage and the community outrage of what his actions has done. And 10 people -- or 11 people are now dead because of this one individual's actions. It's up to the district attorney of how they want to proceed from here.

BROWN: And, just quickly, any idea when they'll file, if they file, or what they'll file?

ROWLANDS: They said they are moving along very quickly. In fact, they say the charges could come as early as tomorrow and as late as Friday.

BROWN: Ted, thank you -- Ted Rowlands in Glendale, California.

In Florida this week, testimony began in a lawsuit over a raid by federal agents in Miami five years ago, the pictures impossible to forget, a screaming child in the arms of federal agents as they removed him by force from the home of relatives. The child was Elian Gonzalez. And his saga had begun months before the raid, when he was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Florida.

As part of CNN's anniversary series "Then and Now," a look back tonight at the international custody battle that followed and where Elian is today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LUCIA NEWMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Who can forget the face of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez when federal agents snatched him out of his Miami relatives' home in a predawn raid.

The most politicized custody battle of the century made the little Cuban rafter boy, whose mother drowned at sea, a poster child on both sides of the Florida Straits.

After a nine-month tug-of-war, Elian was returned to the custody of his father and sent back to communist Cuba.

Today, back in his hometown of Cardenas, Elian looks like any normal 11-year-old. He goes to school, and lives in a bigger house with his father, two half-brothers and his stepmother, whom he now calls mom. But Elian isn't like other boys. President Fidel Castro goes to his birthday party at school, and you often see him in the front row next to the communist leader at special functions, all telltale signs that no matter how much he may want to be like everyone else, Elian Gonzalez remains a political symbol, even today.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Throughout the year, CNN looks back at the major stories of the last quarter-century, as we mark 25 years of bringing you the news. We'll bring you the stories that changed our lives and see what happened to the people who made the news.

Now back to the piece we started a few moments back. Correspondent and photographer from CNN affiliate WABC in New York with a unit under fire in Iraq.

So here now, the report from WABC's Jim Dolan and photographer Joe Tesoro (ph).

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Roger. Be advised. Commencing actions on the objective at this time.

JIM DOLAN, WABC REPORTER (voice-over): Night ops, Haklaniya (ph), a small town outside Haditha in remote western Iraq. The Marines search, but the objective building is empty, and they head out.

It starts as a few shots, but, in seconds, it is an all-out barrage, rocket-propelled grenades, small-arms fire, machine guns. Tracers light up the night sky from, it seems, every direction. A transformer gets hit, and for a moment there is quiet.

(on camera): But it was a costly mission. In the gunfire that followed, three Marines were hit, none of them apparently seriously. Right now, they're rushing to get them back to the base so they can get medical attention as soon as possible. (voice-over): But it is so far from over. The RPGs and gunfire start up again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They must have come out of some hiding positions, fallen on equipment that they had already prepositioned, and then they waited for the word for the initial boom. When that first RPG shot went off, that's what would signal the ambush.

DOLAN: That one hits the vehicle armor between photographer Joe Tesoro (ph) and me. Finally, the echoes fade under a full winter's moon, and there is quiet. But the casualties are high. The injured are medevaced out, but four Marines died out there in the firefight, young men, young American men, a world away from home.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These Marines served together. And they fought their way out together. The casualties that we took last night, our wounded and our KIAs, it's something that we carry with us forever.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Jim Dolan of WABC TV here in New York.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, 60 years ago, this week we had no idea of the unimaginable horror that allied and Soviet troops were about to uncover. First Auschwitz, then 245, the other death camps, wholesale murder of an entire group of people classified by Hitler's government under the tiny heading of the final solution. How it came to be and the survivors, too, after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We said at the top of the program this wouldn't be an easy night. The past, as well as the present, is part of the equation.

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Few survived the death camp, but for those who did, this anniversary will be one of the last opportunities for their voices to be heard. In a moment, one survivor's story.

First, though, the story of how this nightmare came to be.

Here's CNN's Jeff Greenfield.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As the Red Army approached Auschwitz at the end of January 1945, the camp was evacuated.

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST (voice-over): What they found at Auschwitz 60 years ago is beyond words. But tens of millions of words have been used to try to understand it, a plan to exterminate a whole people bearing the label of a supreme euphemism, the final solution to the Jewish question, as if even its designers could not speak the truth to the world. Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

RABBI MARVIN HIER, FOUNDER, SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER: I think that Hitler himself was feeling his way to see if he could get away with a bold idea to do away with a people, which has never been done in the history of mankind.

GREENFIELD (on camera): Was the final solution, the extermination of the Jewish people, something that Hitler had had in mind from the beginning, or did it grow like some cancer in the years that Nazism spread across Europe? Historians still debate that question, but the answer to one question is clear. When did the final solution become a specific policy of the Nazi government of Germany?

(voice-over): The National Socialist Party, the Nazis, came to power in Germany early in 1933 on a program to disenfranchise German Jews. The Nazis specifically labeled Jews an inferior race. By March of that year, a boycott of Jewish businesses had been launched. By 1935, the Nuremberg laws drove Jews out of all public offices and virtually all professions.

On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, night of broken glass, saw officially encouraged mobs smash Jewish-owned stores. Thousands were beaten, sent to concentration camps. But even as Hitler was beginning to swallow up Europe, Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, there was no official policy of killing Jews.

Instead, Hitler reserved that threat in case of war. That, he said, would mean the annihilation of the Jewish race. And the world's indifference to the plight of the Jews, says Rabbi Hier, may well have encouraged Hitler to believe that even this step would not be resisted.

HIER: There never would have been a Holocaust if, in 1937 and in '38, the world would have reacted.

GREENFIELD: By September 1939, war in Europe had broken out. And in the spring of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. It was then that the wholesale killing of Jews began at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing machines. Now the trap was closing.

Jewish immigration from occupied Europe was forbidden. Instead, Jews were rounded up, shipped east to Poland and to western Russia. By the summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler told a top Nazi official: "The fuhrer ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. And now whatever Jews we can reach were to be eliminated."

It all came together at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, at a conference on January 20, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the security police, summoned officials are from all key ministries to discuss the systematic organized killing of Jews. A 36-year-old chief of the Jewish office of the Gestapo, Adolf Eichmann, was charged with implementing the plan.

Shooting, it was decided, was too inefficient, so gas chambers were designated as a more efficient method. For the next three years, this became the central obsession of Adolf Hitler.

HIER: In a way, he wanted to achieve his objectives, even at the expense of losing the war, instead of saying, look, the main thing is to try to defeat the allies. But, no, it became an obsession with him to basically do in the Jews.

GREENFIELD: Since the day 60 years ago when the world first saw the results of this final solution, there have been countless commemorations, memorials, ceremonies, all rooted in the hope that such events would never happen again.

And since those days, not a decade goes by when the news from some other place, Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, the Sudan today, reminds us that there are always people who feel for others such intense hatred that they will pursue a final solution of their own, as long as the world lets them.

Jeff Greenfield, CNN, Los Angeles, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: If the Holocaust is a measure of man's capacity for evil, and it truly is, it also proves the re -- resilience, rather -- of the human spirit. Much has been written about both over the years. But even 60 years later, fresh examples astound.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Each of the people you see in these photographs died in Auschwitz. But to try and grasp the magnitude of what happened there, think of this. Each of these faces needs to be multiplied by 5,000 to represent the one million people murdered at that one camp.

Max Garcia, a now retired San Francisco architect, does not need these pictures to remind him of that camp.

MAX GARCIA, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: Here I am 60 years later. Every day, every day that I am alive, that I wake up is a day that I stole away from the Nazis.

BROWN: He grew up in Amsterdam. His younger sister died in Auschwitz. His parents died in other camps. Garcia arrived in Auschwitz in July of '43, and 14 months later, he became part of what is preposterous even in his words, a cabaret at Auschwitz, started by another prisoner with good connections, his friends Lex (ph).

GARCIA: He got a little combo together of about five or six of us, and he went to the S.S. officer in charge of his unit, and he said, this is what I want to do. And he laughed at him. He said not a chance in hell. And he persisted. And we finally got the OK to do it.

And every Sunday after that, we had a cabaret performance in Auschwitz, in the main camp. My only task was to be the emcee. My task was to tell the jokes. My task was to introduce what next song they were going to play. Most of the fellows prisoners there had other things to worry about. But the prominent ones had nothing to worry about. They could take time off on Sunday afternoons.

What we didn't expect, and this was a total surprise to us, is that the S.S. guards and the S.S. officers came to the performance every Sunday afternoon. Lex had been told, be sure that you tell your people there will be no jokes about Hitler, no jokes about fascism or Nazism, no jokes about the prison.

BROWN: The S.S. guards would sit in the first two rows.

GARCIA: It was always a high-wire act in many ways. We were always there, but we had to be very cautious in what we did, because once we stepped out of the bounds and we got some S.S. officer pissed off at us, we could be dead the next day. And we didn't know how we were balancing the act until after we were liberated, but we didn't know how audacious we had been, how much chutzpah we actually had to promote this thing and do it.

BROWN: Sixty years later, the cabaret is not something Garcia dwells on. The burden of survival, too complicated for that, too real.

GARCIA: Nightmares are a constant reminder how lucky you are that you're still alive. They waken you. You're full of sweat. You can scream at times. You see the whole thing marching right in front of you, like all over again. And there is not a goddamn thing you can do about it. And you have to relive it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In a moment, remembrance and a little redemption by way of a tiny town in a sleepy valley and paper clips and kids.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: This is just the sort of day when, to borrow a line from an old and dear colleague, we'd all like to run home and hug our kids. Children, if nothing else -- and there's plenty else, believe me -- are always a tonic.

So, after seeing this next story, which deals with the Holocaust, but is anything but grim, you might want to hug these kids, too. They live in Whitwell, Tennessee. We got to know them through a documentary about numbers, compassion and paper clips. We ran this spot a while back. Tonight is a perfect night to run it again.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOE FAB, PRODUCER, "PAPER CLIPS": "Paper Clips" is a film about a small town in Tennessee, 1,600 people who are pretty much, each one, like the others, in that they are all Christian. They are all white. And they have very little diversity. At the middle school there, they noticed that the children were really having problems when they would leave Whitwell, because they had only met people who were like themselves.

LINDA HOOPER, PRINCIPAL, WHITWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL: So, in 1998, we began an adventure.

ROBERTS: We decided that our goal was to teach children what happens when intolerance reigns and when prejudice goes unchecked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I will remind you before we start that what we're going to cover in this project is very, very graphic.

FAB: They decided to start a Holocaust study group.

HOOPER: Of course, one of the first things that the kids had to learn and one of the hardest things for them to comprehend was that Hitler murdered six million Jewish people.

CASEY CONDRA, STUDENT, WHITWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL: The idea for the paper clips came when a student said, what is six million? I've never seen six million. Ms. Hooper is like, well, neither have I. If you can find something to collect, we'll try it.

ELLIOT BERLIN, DIRECTOR, "PAPER CLIPS": They did some research on the Internet. And it came out that the Norwegians invented the paper clip. And during the Second World War, they took to wearing paper clips on their lapels as forms of silent protest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It seemed a the perfect symbol. So, the paper clip project began.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And they came and they said, can we write some letters to people we know?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Originally, the letters they got back were from somebody like Uncle Steve saying, that's a great project. And here's a box of paper clips.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go Tigers.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But everything really changed when a pair of German journalists came to Whitwell, saw what the kids were doing and decided to report on it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Got something for you here from Germany.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now the letters had postmarks from Italy and from Poland and from Germany. And the letters said things like:

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: "Dear students, many members of my mother's and father's families died at the camps. I've enclosed 14 paper clips for four grandparents, a brother, seven aunts and uncles and two cousins."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A group of survivors in Cedarhurst, New York, heard what the children were doing. And they wanted to come down and visit.

SAM SITKO, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: I asked them. I said, please, tell me. We arrived last night. And I arrived with my mother and my brother. Where are they? What happened to them? And that man shows me smoke coming out from a chimney. I did not understand what that means until I found out that that chimney is from a crematorium.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was so much emotion in the room as the survivors talked. You watch the children's faces in the film. You can almost see they're now attaching real human beings with the atrocities of the Holocaust. Other media learned what the children were up to and came and began to report on this project. After that, the mail just flooded in.

CONDRA: Over a period of six weeks, we ended up with 24 million paper clips.

FAB: The idea came to build a memorial, that a railcar, one of the cars that carried people to the concentration camps, might be the perfect way to exhibit the paper clips. It had to be carried across Germany. It had to be shipped to the United States, carried to the school. Now the memorial stands in the schoolyard as a permanent testimony to what happened during the Holocaust.

HOOPER: One of them said to me, Ms. Hooper, when you touch these, can you feel the souls? Well, yes, you can feel the souls, because most of them came with a letter that told you about the soul that paper clip represented.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a description that's been applied to the film that the things that draw us together are actually stronger than the things that separate us. I hope that, for people who go and see the film, that they look at the town and they recognize that, while it might look like an unlikely place for a paper clip project to happen, it's really a perfect place.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Quick morning papers tonight, dominated by Iraq. Excuse me.

"Christian Science Monitor." "In U.S., Patience Over Iraq Goes Thin. The Election Sunday May Sharply Affect U.S. Opinion of the War.

"San Antonio Express-News." This is a headline that's in a lot of papers tomorrow morning. "Bloodiest Day Yet For U.S. in Iraq. Texan Among Those Dead. Marine Lance Corporal Tony Hernandez, 30 Other Americans Die in That Helicopter Crash."

Of course, that's the way "Stars and Stripes" led. "Deadliest Day." And they show you a picture of the helicopter that went down.

"The Detroit Free Press" deals with Auschwitz on the front page. "The Day the Murder Machines Stopped."

Down in the corner, "World's Media Spotlight on Metro Area Iraqi Voters," Julie Hinds, talked to her today. And she quotes me accurately.

We'll be in Dearborn, Michigan, for Friday's program. We hope you'll join us for that. Peek into the Midwest. The weather, according to "The Chicago Sun-Times" tomorrow is "standoffish."

Special edition of "CNN PRESENTS" tomorrow night at 10:00. We'll see you tomorrow.

Good night.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com


Aired January 26, 2005 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone.
At first blush, you might see the program tonight as two heavy, too much sorrow, too much dying. We ask you to look again. Beyond all that is sad in our effort tonight, there is something good in virtually every piece.

You will find strength of character that defies words, resilience beyond your wildest dreams, heroics, kindness and decency. It is all there even if the headlines of each seem unacceptably grim.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): After the battle fighting their way back.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't reach out for nothing. I can't grab nothing. It drives me up a wall.

BROWN: Learning to live all over again. In this battle everyone is human and everyone is (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

A month after the tsunami an ordinary hero comes home, except there's nothing ordinary about what he saw and what he did about it. We meet Bob Bell again.

And 60 years after the horror of Auschwitz came to light, the people who survived it remember.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here I am 60 years later. Every day, every day that I am alive that I wake up is a day that I stole away from the mountains.

BROWN: Finding the spark of humanity in a place where humanity was sent to die.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So, it is not an easy program tonight. We gently submit these are not easy times. Our first stop, Brook Army Medical Center in Texas, is a case in point. At Brook these are boom times, no gentle way of putting that.

Recently the hospital dedicated a new center for amputees, new beds to meet a growing need, no gentle way of putting that either, none at all except that to say sometimes in seeing people at the worst moments of their lives, we also catch a glimpse of the best. We begin tonight with NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They keep coming from Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, too many for Walter Reed Army Medical Center to treat.

COL. MARK BAGG, M.D., DEPT. OF ORTHOPEDICS AND REHAB: We have had about 220 to 230 major limb amputations in this conflict. About one-third have lost their arms and hands. About two-thirds have lost their -- have lost their legs.

NISSEN: Most of the amputations are the result of blast injuries from improvised explosive devices or IEDs, mortar rounds, grenades.

COL. ROBERT GRANVILLE, M.D., DIR. OF AMPUTEE SERVICES: These are painful injuries and usually these patients have multiple injuries, you know, not just the amputations.

NISSEN: Surgeons here say most of their patients arrive with limbs already amputated either by the blast itself or by surgeons in field hospitals or at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Other patients have their amputations done here, like Specialist Matt Houston (ph). He was wounded back in November of 2003 when a 50- caliber weapon in his Humvee accidentally discharged.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it went off and it took off my leg, most of the leg. From Baghdad to Tikrit to Landstuhl they all wanted to take my leg off because it was barely on in the first place but that wasn't a choice of mine to make at the time.

NISSEN: Houston suffered through 13 months of painful surgeries and treatment of infections before it hit him. His fiance is due to give birth to a baby girl in February and he could not stand or walk without crutches.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to, you know, go to her crib at night when she's crying and pick her up and cuddle with her and then walk over to a chair and, you know, give her a bottle or something like that. I was afraid that somebody was going to wake up and, you know, give her to me. So, I didn't want to do that at all.

NISSEN: He had his leg amputated the Friday before Christmas and was measured for a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg within three days. Four weeks later he is standing, walking on a $45,000 computerized leg, custom programmed to control walking cadence, speed, helping him descend stairs and ramps.

JOHN FERGASON, PROSTHETIST: Everyone's goal is exactly the same whether it's the orthopedic surgeon, me as the prosthetist, the physical therapist, occupational therapist. We've all got the exact same goal for these folks. Get them going.

NISSEN: Prosthetic limbs work well for two out of three amputees here, those who have lost legs, above or below the knee. It's harder for those who have lost arms, hands.

FERGASON: The upper extremity we just don't have the ability to do this at this point. It's just, it's not available technologically at this point.

NISSEN: Special Daniel Reed (ph), a National Guardsman from Tennessee, lost his right hand when a mortar exploded during a live fire training exercise in Mississippi last June.

It's taken him months to heal from surgery. He was custom fitted and refitted with a prosthetic hand, practiced using it for everyday tasks like making himself a bologna sandwich in the kitchen of a one- bedroom apartment set up at the center. Like most patients here he tries to concentrate on what he can do, not what he can't.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've kept a pretty positive attitude about all of it, you know. I've seen guys that are in so much worse shape than me, you know, so I'm like if these guys are going to make it, you know, I'm going to make it.

NISSEN: No one here is more determined to make it than Specialist Dusty Hill. His life changed in a blast of flame and metal September 21st in Baghdad, a car bomb. He was badly burned on the head, face, neck and arms, lost his right eye and both his hands.

And then there was shrapnel throughout the hand it burned off the fingers. This one it was just all burned, so they had to amputate it off. I can't reach out for nothing. I can't grab nothing. It drives me up a wall.

NISSEN: He's been fitted with a myoelectric arm which he can control with practice, painstaking practice.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Go ahead. Do you want to give it a go?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sure.

NISSEN: With no sense of touch, it takes all his concentration to hold onto a Cheetos without crushing it to powder, to do at 22 what a toddler can do, feed himself. This is a good day. He's not in pain. He got up this morning. He's managing. He tries not to think about the way things used to be, the way he used to be.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What happened to me that happened, I'll deal with it.

NISSEN: Dealing with such profound injuries takes heavy toll. Most amputees cycle in and out of depression, bitterness, anger.

GRANVILLE: Everybody is angry, angry at the world, angry at God, angry at the enemy.

NISSEN: It's especially hard for those who are young who were so physically strong, like Corporal Jacob Schick (ph), proud U.S. Marine.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're top of the line and I was the best of the best and here I am now, you know in this freaking wheelchair.

NISSEN: An anti-tank mine did this to him Humvee in September and did this to his legs. His right leg had to be amputated. His left leg is mangled, causes him constant pain. It is a terrible effort to walk just a few feet.

FERGASON: It can be very frustrating to be a young athlete and now your big deal today is I went ten steps on my own.

NISSEN: It helps those who are struggling to see those who are further along in rehab in recovery, one of the advantages of treating amputees together in a specialized center.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not the first person in the world to ever lose a limb and have the other one pretty jacked up. There's been many, many, many, many more before me.

NISSEN: Are there more to come?

GRANVILLE: Sadly I think that there are. I don't think this is over yet.

NISSEN: The new center has already treated more than 30 war amputees, is expecting at least that many transfers from Walter Reed, patients whose home base, family support is west of the Mississippi.

FERGASON: We may have 30 more absolutely. It breaks my heart but we're going to take care of them.

NISSEN: Do what can be done to give them a hand, get them back on their feet.

Beth Nissen, CNN, San Antonio.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ahead on the program tonight a month after the quake, a month after the flooding we visit again with Bob Bell, who heeded a call to help and bore witness to the need, his story in still pictures.

And later, children finding the humanity in a number and in themselves, the holocaust as seen from a small town in Tennessee a second time, a break first.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A couple weeks back when we were in Aceh covering the tsunami, we introduced you to Bob Bell, a New Englander normally in one of those financial services jobs I never really understand.

As a kid he learned emergency medical skills. As an adult he kept up. When he heard of the tsunami he bought a ticket for Indonesia. He knew no one, had ties with no group. He had what most of us have, access to a phone and the Internet. He also had what few of us have, an absolute belief that in this tragedy he could do something good, make a difference. He did and now he's home.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): We first met Bob Bell in the stifling heat of Banda Aceh, a guy who would describe himself as ordinary, who talked his way into an extraordinary circumstance.

Now he's back, back in the snow of New England, back in time for a daughter's birthday just as he promised. The pictures he took begin with his first day in Indonesia, his first encounter with those beyond help and with the pain of bearing witness.

BOB BELL: But at that time there was no pain medication to give these patients on the transport ride. Every bump that we hit, it was -- it was a tough -- it was a tough sound and a real tough scene and it was just so cruel.

This is an Australian I believe he was a surgeon, and you can see him not able to look at the patients in the back of this ambulance. That was a rotten, rotten first day.

BROWN: In time, the rush of wounded coming off a helicopter slowed and Bell began to work in a refugee camp checking on patients, tending wounds and getting to know people whose language he could not speak.

BELL: Look at the eyes of these people and there's no need for me to speak. I mean that's what these people are like. The determination and the human spirit in overdrive is what these people are like. They're amazingly calm. They're amazingly strong despite what they look like. They don't complain and they're surviving on just so little.

BROWN: One face, one child stole his heart.

BELL: This is (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and his mom. This kid was doing the very, very best job he could. When I went into the hospital this kid was feeding her most days because the nursing care just wasn't there.

BROWN: The two had come in on a Medivac chopper in the confusion of the first days, the mother paralyzed from the waist down. In the camp, she was slowly starving to death, a 10-year-old, her son, just too little to fight for good. Finally, this desperate boy found a knife and threatened to kill himself and his mother unless they were taken home.

BELL: I mean the kid was really, really despondent about "I want to go home. I want to go home" and we thought at that point he was in denial because there were no homes left.

BROWN: For whatever reason people came together for this tiny family. The Navy gave its permission to fly them home. A Marine pilot struggled to get the boy to find on a map the village he had never left before and the boy, this very brave boy, terrified by the noise of the helicopter was on his way.

BELL: And we were circling and circling and he was pressed right up against the window and, you know, you just watched his face until something happened and nothing happened and nothing happened. All of a sudden he just like beamed and as soon as his face lit up we just, you know, I just -- I just said "Set down."

The entire village came out to meet us. It was unbelievable. You can see the smiles on their faces. They didn't know when these people were ever going to come back.

BROWN: Back to what so many people in Indonesia won't have for a very long time to come, a home.

BELL: That was worth the entire trip, you know. I -- you know you can't always do great things but you can do small things in a great way and this was the culmination of a bunch of people doing something really great so that you knew when you went to bed that night that two people were back where they needed to be and it was very, very cool. That was the best part of the whole trip.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And we should say Bob Bell is back where he needs to be, back home with his family and, as always, we appreciate that.

Margaret Larson is back home where she needs to be. When last we saw Margaret she was looking for Mercy Corps colleagues in a medical tent at the airport in Aceh. Truth be told it was not one of her better days but, as it is with a lot of aid workers, a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) stomach did not long stand in the way of the considerable work there, what was and remains in Aceh.

Ms. Larson is now back in Seattle and joins us tonight to talk about the situation a month later. It's good to see you. How has it changed in a month?

MARGARET LARSON, MERCY CORPS: I think things are better, better being a relative word. I would certainly agree that the Acehnese people are among the bravest and most stoic and resilient people I've ever had the pleasure to work around and they have very quickly gotten back to the business of life.

BROWN: How -- when we were there all the NGOs were sort of trying to figure out how best to operate, how best not to step on each other.

LARSON: Right.

BROWN: Mercy Corps has figured out its strategy it sounds like to me.

LARSON: Well, obviously we work with other groups to set aside certain areas of geography or responsibility. But one thing that we've done that we have found has worked quite well is something called the cash for work concept. And basically we take donations, pool them together to make wages, and then hire local people to do things that need to be done, such as clear away debris or repair fishing boats or open schools and rehab those buildings.

In fact, we opened ten schools today on the one month anniversary of the tsunami and those kids can go back and resume their lives in the classroom. So, that's been a very successful strategy for us. It gets people back to work, gets jobs done and puts money into the local economy and that's the name of the game for recovery.

BROWN: One of the things we talked about when we ran into each other at the airport was whether the intense public interest would continue past the time the heavy media coverage stopped. Is Mercy Corps still getting donations? Is the money still flowing?

LARSON: It's flowing. It's slower, as you would expect, but people have been extremely generous and all I can say is if you've made a gift to a charity you believe in, mark it down on your calendar for a year from now and do the same thing because this is going to be a long haul recovery for these people and they deserve us to stand by them.

BROWN: How long does Mercy Corps expect to be there?

LARSON: Well, for several months and possibly years. We have a plan that stretches out for five years. There's the initial phase that you saw where there's food and water and supplies going in. Now we're into this economic recovery phase that we've just been talking about and then there's reconstruction.

As you saw, the devastation is so huge geographically that the amount of cleanup and reconstruction that needs to be done is a multi- year project. There's no way around it.

BROWN: How many people do you have in there?

LARSON: We have about 150 of our own staff people and then we've hired about 2,000 people in the cash for work program. We're going to amp that up to about 6,000.

BROWN: When you left, which was a couple weeks back I think...

LARSON: Yes.

BROWN: ...did you have a feeling that you were, that you were making a substantive difference or did it seem like you were, you were just barely scratching an itch there?

LARSON: You know it's a little bit of both. I've never seen anything that catastrophic. I've never seen that kind of loss of life or level of destruction or suffering and grief.

But, at the same time, I'll tell you the first day I was there, I saw a woman picking trash up at the edge of this elephantine calamity and I thought, you know what, if she can get down on her hands and knees and pick through this stuff and start picking up, then the rest of us can stick this out too.

BROWN: Margaret, it's good to talk to you. I'm glad you're back home safely. We'll talk again soon.

LARSON: Thanks, Aaron.

BROWN: Thank you, Margaret Larson from Seattle tonight with Mercy Corps.

When we come back, why the Marines seem to be paying the highest price in the mission to bring peace and security to Iraq.

And the latest too from Glendale, California, possible criminal charges after a deadly passenger train wreck today. We take a break first.

This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Not a night goes by when we don't hear the music or read the names and it won't be changing anytime soon. Thirty-seven U.S. troops died today, a very bad day in the war, the deadliest yet, 31 in a helicopter crash about 200 miles west of Baghdad, 27 on board were from the same base in Hawaii.

There were other fatalities as well today, six killed in other action around Iraq, most of the dead in all of the incidents today U.S. Marines, a bad day in a rough war that seems to be getting rougher for the Corps, reporting for us tonight our Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's the smallest of the American combat services, numbering just over 175,000 troops, but the U.S. Marine Corps is more than pulling its weight in Iraq.

The helicopter crash that claimed the lives of 30 Marines and a Navy corpsman Wednesday has added to what has become a grim, growing honor roll of sacrifice. A few simple numbers tell the story. In the first year of the Iraq War, 140 Marines died. Ten months into the second year that number has more than doubled to 295.

U.S. Marines have been handed some of the dirtiest jobs. Clearing Falluja in November was urban combat at its grittiest. Eight-three Marines died that month, the most so far in any month. Their fellow Marines believe the way to keep faith with their fallen brothers is clear to win.

LT. GEN. JOHN SATTLER, 1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: We honor their sacrifice by continuing our mission to bring democracy to the people of Iraq. To the families of these brave men our heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to you in this most difficult of times. MCINTYRE: And while they may be the few, the Marines are proud. "Uncommon valor was a common virtue." Those words said by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz 60 years ago describing Marines who fought on Iwo Jima seem just as apt today in Iraq.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A difficult stretch to be sure and, as we said, today's helicopter crash wasn't all. Four other Marines were killed during a raid in the western province of Anbar.

A correspondent and photograph from CNN affiliate WABC in New York was with the unit, so here now the report from WABC's Jim Dolan and photographer Joe Tesoro (ph).

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Roger, be advised missing in action is being ejected at this time.

JIM DOLAN, WABC REPORTER (voice-over): Night ops, Haclania (ph) a small village outside Haidifa (ph) in remote western Iraq, Marines search but the objective building is empty and they head out.

It starts as a few shots but in seconds it is a full out barrage of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) grenades, small arms fire, machineguns. Tracers light up the night sky (UNINTELLIGIBLE) every direction.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, obviously a technical problem there. We'll see what we can do.

In the meantime, every man and woman fighting in Iraq knows the fear many of us will never understand. Tomorrow at 10:00 we bring you a special edition of "CNN PRESENTS: UNDER FIRE" an hour of eyewitness reporting from CNN correspondents covering the insurgency from the frontlines, stories you have not heard, stories we're telling for the first time. That's tomorrow, a special edition of "CNN PRESENTS" 10:00 p.m. Eastern. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: At some point before the week is over, prosecutors in Southern California will have to decide what the crime was. Whatever it was, the result is clear; 11 people are now dead after a man apparently drove his car on the train tracks in what was to be a suicide attempt. He changed his mind and jumped to safety, an option the dead did not have.

CNN's Ted Rowlands is where it happened today, in Glendale, California.

Ted, good evening. Kind of lay out quickly, I guess, how this tragedy played out today.

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, Aaron, the individual you're talking about, 25-year-old Juan Alvarez, is being described as a transient. He is being cooperative, according to investigators. And according to investigators, he told them he didn't think that his vehicle could cause this much damage.

He is hospitalized tonight for self-inflicted wounds. Those wounds are not life-threatening. He stood by, say investigators, as a commuter train barreled into his Jeep Cherokee. That train then derailed and crashed into another commuter train in the Southern California city of Glendale early this morning. As you mentioned, 11 people are now confirmed dead. The 11th body just found within the last hour here. Of the other 10, nine are adult males, the other an adult female.

There is one sheriff's deputy who was on his way to work, a father of four, and a husband. This is a common -- this is common tonight here in Southern California. These stories, these tragic stories are being played out here. There is also concern that there are more dead inside the wreckage. In fact, there are more missing people here, and investigators say it is very, very -- there's a very good chance that, as they continue to sift through this tonight, they may find more victims -- Aaron.

BROWN: Just, can you give us a sense of how prosecutors are looking at this?

ROWLANDS: Well, it's a difficult thing to look at, in that they're going to look at intent. Did this individual intend to cause harm and what was his state of mind? Apparently, he was suicidal. That'll factor into this.

Then there's the outrage and the community outrage of what his actions has done. And 10 people -- or 11 people are now dead because of this one individual's actions. It's up to the district attorney of how they want to proceed from here.

BROWN: And, just quickly, any idea when they'll file, if they file, or what they'll file?

ROWLANDS: They said they are moving along very quickly. In fact, they say the charges could come as early as tomorrow and as late as Friday.

BROWN: Ted, thank you -- Ted Rowlands in Glendale, California.

In Florida this week, testimony began in a lawsuit over a raid by federal agents in Miami five years ago, the pictures impossible to forget, a screaming child in the arms of federal agents as they removed him by force from the home of relatives. The child was Elian Gonzalez. And his saga had begun months before the raid, when he was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Florida.

As part of CNN's anniversary series "Then and Now," a look back tonight at the international custody battle that followed and where Elian is today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LUCIA NEWMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Who can forget the face of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez when federal agents snatched him out of his Miami relatives' home in a predawn raid.

The most politicized custody battle of the century made the little Cuban rafter boy, whose mother drowned at sea, a poster child on both sides of the Florida Straits.

After a nine-month tug-of-war, Elian was returned to the custody of his father and sent back to communist Cuba.

Today, back in his hometown of Cardenas, Elian looks like any normal 11-year-old. He goes to school, and lives in a bigger house with his father, two half-brothers and his stepmother, whom he now calls mom. But Elian isn't like other boys. President Fidel Castro goes to his birthday party at school, and you often see him in the front row next to the communist leader at special functions, all telltale signs that no matter how much he may want to be like everyone else, Elian Gonzalez remains a political symbol, even today.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Throughout the year, CNN looks back at the major stories of the last quarter-century, as we mark 25 years of bringing you the news. We'll bring you the stories that changed our lives and see what happened to the people who made the news.

Now back to the piece we started a few moments back. Correspondent and photographer from CNN affiliate WABC in New York with a unit under fire in Iraq.

So here now, the report from WABC's Jim Dolan and photographer Joe Tesoro (ph).

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Roger. Be advised. Commencing actions on the objective at this time.

JIM DOLAN, WABC REPORTER (voice-over): Night ops, Haklaniya (ph), a small town outside Haditha in remote western Iraq. The Marines search, but the objective building is empty, and they head out.

It starts as a few shots, but, in seconds, it is an all-out barrage, rocket-propelled grenades, small-arms fire, machine guns. Tracers light up the night sky from, it seems, every direction. A transformer gets hit, and for a moment there is quiet.

(on camera): But it was a costly mission. In the gunfire that followed, three Marines were hit, none of them apparently seriously. Right now, they're rushing to get them back to the base so they can get medical attention as soon as possible. (voice-over): But it is so far from over. The RPGs and gunfire start up again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They must have come out of some hiding positions, fallen on equipment that they had already prepositioned, and then they waited for the word for the initial boom. When that first RPG shot went off, that's what would signal the ambush.

DOLAN: That one hits the vehicle armor between photographer Joe Tesoro (ph) and me. Finally, the echoes fade under a full winter's moon, and there is quiet. But the casualties are high. The injured are medevaced out, but four Marines died out there in the firefight, young men, young American men, a world away from home.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These Marines served together. And they fought their way out together. The casualties that we took last night, our wounded and our KIAs, it's something that we carry with us forever.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Jim Dolan of WABC TV here in New York.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, 60 years ago, this week we had no idea of the unimaginable horror that allied and Soviet troops were about to uncover. First Auschwitz, then 245, the other death camps, wholesale murder of an entire group of people classified by Hitler's government under the tiny heading of the final solution. How it came to be and the survivors, too, after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We said at the top of the program this wouldn't be an easy night. The past, as well as the present, is part of the equation.

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Few survived the death camp, but for those who did, this anniversary will be one of the last opportunities for their voices to be heard. In a moment, one survivor's story.

First, though, the story of how this nightmare came to be.

Here's CNN's Jeff Greenfield.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As the Red Army approached Auschwitz at the end of January 1945, the camp was evacuated.

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST (voice-over): What they found at Auschwitz 60 years ago is beyond words. But tens of millions of words have been used to try to understand it, a plan to exterminate a whole people bearing the label of a supreme euphemism, the final solution to the Jewish question, as if even its designers could not speak the truth to the world. Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

RABBI MARVIN HIER, FOUNDER, SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER: I think that Hitler himself was feeling his way to see if he could get away with a bold idea to do away with a people, which has never been done in the history of mankind.

GREENFIELD (on camera): Was the final solution, the extermination of the Jewish people, something that Hitler had had in mind from the beginning, or did it grow like some cancer in the years that Nazism spread across Europe? Historians still debate that question, but the answer to one question is clear. When did the final solution become a specific policy of the Nazi government of Germany?

(voice-over): The National Socialist Party, the Nazis, came to power in Germany early in 1933 on a program to disenfranchise German Jews. The Nazis specifically labeled Jews an inferior race. By March of that year, a boycott of Jewish businesses had been launched. By 1935, the Nuremberg laws drove Jews out of all public offices and virtually all professions.

On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, night of broken glass, saw officially encouraged mobs smash Jewish-owned stores. Thousands were beaten, sent to concentration camps. But even as Hitler was beginning to swallow up Europe, Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, there was no official policy of killing Jews.

Instead, Hitler reserved that threat in case of war. That, he said, would mean the annihilation of the Jewish race. And the world's indifference to the plight of the Jews, says Rabbi Hier, may well have encouraged Hitler to believe that even this step would not be resisted.

HIER: There never would have been a Holocaust if, in 1937 and in '38, the world would have reacted.

GREENFIELD: By September 1939, war in Europe had broken out. And in the spring of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. It was then that the wholesale killing of Jews began at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing machines. Now the trap was closing.

Jewish immigration from occupied Europe was forbidden. Instead, Jews were rounded up, shipped east to Poland and to western Russia. By the summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler told a top Nazi official: "The fuhrer ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. And now whatever Jews we can reach were to be eliminated."

It all came together at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, at a conference on January 20, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the security police, summoned officials are from all key ministries to discuss the systematic organized killing of Jews. A 36-year-old chief of the Jewish office of the Gestapo, Adolf Eichmann, was charged with implementing the plan.

Shooting, it was decided, was too inefficient, so gas chambers were designated as a more efficient method. For the next three years, this became the central obsession of Adolf Hitler.

HIER: In a way, he wanted to achieve his objectives, even at the expense of losing the war, instead of saying, look, the main thing is to try to defeat the allies. But, no, it became an obsession with him to basically do in the Jews.

GREENFIELD: Since the day 60 years ago when the world first saw the results of this final solution, there have been countless commemorations, memorials, ceremonies, all rooted in the hope that such events would never happen again.

And since those days, not a decade goes by when the news from some other place, Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, the Sudan today, reminds us that there are always people who feel for others such intense hatred that they will pursue a final solution of their own, as long as the world lets them.

Jeff Greenfield, CNN, Los Angeles, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: If the Holocaust is a measure of man's capacity for evil, and it truly is, it also proves the re -- resilience, rather -- of the human spirit. Much has been written about both over the years. But even 60 years later, fresh examples astound.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Each of the people you see in these photographs died in Auschwitz. But to try and grasp the magnitude of what happened there, think of this. Each of these faces needs to be multiplied by 5,000 to represent the one million people murdered at that one camp.

Max Garcia, a now retired San Francisco architect, does not need these pictures to remind him of that camp.

MAX GARCIA, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: Here I am 60 years later. Every day, every day that I am alive, that I wake up is a day that I stole away from the Nazis.

BROWN: He grew up in Amsterdam. His younger sister died in Auschwitz. His parents died in other camps. Garcia arrived in Auschwitz in July of '43, and 14 months later, he became part of what is preposterous even in his words, a cabaret at Auschwitz, started by another prisoner with good connections, his friends Lex (ph).

GARCIA: He got a little combo together of about five or six of us, and he went to the S.S. officer in charge of his unit, and he said, this is what I want to do. And he laughed at him. He said not a chance in hell. And he persisted. And we finally got the OK to do it.

And every Sunday after that, we had a cabaret performance in Auschwitz, in the main camp. My only task was to be the emcee. My task was to tell the jokes. My task was to introduce what next song they were going to play. Most of the fellows prisoners there had other things to worry about. But the prominent ones had nothing to worry about. They could take time off on Sunday afternoons.

What we didn't expect, and this was a total surprise to us, is that the S.S. guards and the S.S. officers came to the performance every Sunday afternoon. Lex had been told, be sure that you tell your people there will be no jokes about Hitler, no jokes about fascism or Nazism, no jokes about the prison.

BROWN: The S.S. guards would sit in the first two rows.

GARCIA: It was always a high-wire act in many ways. We were always there, but we had to be very cautious in what we did, because once we stepped out of the bounds and we got some S.S. officer pissed off at us, we could be dead the next day. And we didn't know how we were balancing the act until after we were liberated, but we didn't know how audacious we had been, how much chutzpah we actually had to promote this thing and do it.

BROWN: Sixty years later, the cabaret is not something Garcia dwells on. The burden of survival, too complicated for that, too real.

GARCIA: Nightmares are a constant reminder how lucky you are that you're still alive. They waken you. You're full of sweat. You can scream at times. You see the whole thing marching right in front of you, like all over again. And there is not a goddamn thing you can do about it. And you have to relive it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In a moment, remembrance and a little redemption by way of a tiny town in a sleepy valley and paper clips and kids.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: This is just the sort of day when, to borrow a line from an old and dear colleague, we'd all like to run home and hug our kids. Children, if nothing else -- and there's plenty else, believe me -- are always a tonic.

So, after seeing this next story, which deals with the Holocaust, but is anything but grim, you might want to hug these kids, too. They live in Whitwell, Tennessee. We got to know them through a documentary about numbers, compassion and paper clips. We ran this spot a while back. Tonight is a perfect night to run it again.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOE FAB, PRODUCER, "PAPER CLIPS": "Paper Clips" is a film about a small town in Tennessee, 1,600 people who are pretty much, each one, like the others, in that they are all Christian. They are all white. And they have very little diversity. At the middle school there, they noticed that the children were really having problems when they would leave Whitwell, because they had only met people who were like themselves.

LINDA HOOPER, PRINCIPAL, WHITWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL: So, in 1998, we began an adventure.

ROBERTS: We decided that our goal was to teach children what happens when intolerance reigns and when prejudice goes unchecked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I will remind you before we start that what we're going to cover in this project is very, very graphic.

FAB: They decided to start a Holocaust study group.

HOOPER: Of course, one of the first things that the kids had to learn and one of the hardest things for them to comprehend was that Hitler murdered six million Jewish people.

CASEY CONDRA, STUDENT, WHITWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL: The idea for the paper clips came when a student said, what is six million? I've never seen six million. Ms. Hooper is like, well, neither have I. If you can find something to collect, we'll try it.

ELLIOT BERLIN, DIRECTOR, "PAPER CLIPS": They did some research on the Internet. And it came out that the Norwegians invented the paper clip. And during the Second World War, they took to wearing paper clips on their lapels as forms of silent protest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It seemed a the perfect symbol. So, the paper clip project began.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And they came and they said, can we write some letters to people we know?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Originally, the letters they got back were from somebody like Uncle Steve saying, that's a great project. And here's a box of paper clips.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go Tigers.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But everything really changed when a pair of German journalists came to Whitwell, saw what the kids were doing and decided to report on it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Got something for you here from Germany.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now the letters had postmarks from Italy and from Poland and from Germany. And the letters said things like:

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: "Dear students, many members of my mother's and father's families died at the camps. I've enclosed 14 paper clips for four grandparents, a brother, seven aunts and uncles and two cousins."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A group of survivors in Cedarhurst, New York, heard what the children were doing. And they wanted to come down and visit.

SAM SITKO, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: I asked them. I said, please, tell me. We arrived last night. And I arrived with my mother and my brother. Where are they? What happened to them? And that man shows me smoke coming out from a chimney. I did not understand what that means until I found out that that chimney is from a crematorium.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was so much emotion in the room as the survivors talked. You watch the children's faces in the film. You can almost see they're now attaching real human beings with the atrocities of the Holocaust. Other media learned what the children were up to and came and began to report on this project. After that, the mail just flooded in.

CONDRA: Over a period of six weeks, we ended up with 24 million paper clips.

FAB: The idea came to build a memorial, that a railcar, one of the cars that carried people to the concentration camps, might be the perfect way to exhibit the paper clips. It had to be carried across Germany. It had to be shipped to the United States, carried to the school. Now the memorial stands in the schoolyard as a permanent testimony to what happened during the Holocaust.

HOOPER: One of them said to me, Ms. Hooper, when you touch these, can you feel the souls? Well, yes, you can feel the souls, because most of them came with a letter that told you about the soul that paper clip represented.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a description that's been applied to the film that the things that draw us together are actually stronger than the things that separate us. I hope that, for people who go and see the film, that they look at the town and they recognize that, while it might look like an unlikely place for a paper clip project to happen, it's really a perfect place.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Quick morning papers tonight, dominated by Iraq. Excuse me.

"Christian Science Monitor." "In U.S., Patience Over Iraq Goes Thin. The Election Sunday May Sharply Affect U.S. Opinion of the War.

"San Antonio Express-News." This is a headline that's in a lot of papers tomorrow morning. "Bloodiest Day Yet For U.S. in Iraq. Texan Among Those Dead. Marine Lance Corporal Tony Hernandez, 30 Other Americans Die in That Helicopter Crash."

Of course, that's the way "Stars and Stripes" led. "Deadliest Day." And they show you a picture of the helicopter that went down.

"The Detroit Free Press" deals with Auschwitz on the front page. "The Day the Murder Machines Stopped."

Down in the corner, "World's Media Spotlight on Metro Area Iraqi Voters," Julie Hinds, talked to her today. And she quotes me accurately.

We'll be in Dearborn, Michigan, for Friday's program. We hope you'll join us for that. Peek into the Midwest. The weather, according to "The Chicago Sun-Times" tomorrow is "standoffish."

Special edition of "CNN PRESENTS" tomorrow night at 10:00. We'll see you tomorrow.

Good night.

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