0:05 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm back with Troy Fiers, Executive Director at Candle's Holocaust Museum and Education Center and Tara Hought and Diana. 0:15 [SPEAKER_02]: 20 years ago, this museum was fire bombed by a domestic terrorist. 0:21 [SPEAKER_02]: Today it's stronger than ever, hosting thousands of visitors every year, including school groups and educational workshops. 0:35 [SPEAKER_02]: But more specifically, it educates people about Holocaust survivors. 0:40 [SPEAKER_02]: It takes this massive, horrific, global story that makes it personal. 0:46 [SPEAKER_02]: It puts faces on that suffering, and it offers hope. 0:51 [SPEAKER_03]: The Holocaust itself is a, 0:54 [SPEAKER_03]: horrific story and the atrocities that happened are incredible, but here at the museum we tried to tell again Eva's story which is one of hope and healing and perseverance to be able to go through everything that they went through at such a young age but then to come out of that and to be able to live the life that she led and not just her but as other survivors as well. 1:19 [SPEAKER_03]: pretty powerful and empowering story that we want folks to we want folks to leave the museum with a feeling that they can their challenges and whatever they're going through if even can do what they can do it type of thing. 1:32 [SPEAKER_03]: What artifacts do you have here that would be from Auschwitz? 1:36 [SPEAKER_03]: But it's interesting in the R Museum, we don't have a lot of artifacts from Auschwitz, because R Museum was fire bombed in 2003, and it was in that fire bombing, which is the same location that the museum was at now, but they lost a lot of the artifacts that they had in that fire bombing. 1:57 [SPEAKER_03]: It was a total loss, and they were able to rebuild a couple of years later. 2:01 [SPEAKER_03]: in the current museum where we're at now, but we do have some artifacts now, we have a male prisoner jacket from Auschwitz that is unique and we also have a couple letters that were handwritten by Dr. Mingula to his wife at the time and they are very interesting as well to read they are not they don't tell anything about any of the experiments it's really just a day-to-day 2:30 [SPEAKER_03]: life that he was living there in Auschwitz, but he was writing to his wife and telling her about those activities. 2:39 [SPEAKER_02]: Apart from the charted exhibits from the original museum, these letters might be the most drawing thing on display. 2:48 [SPEAKER_02]: And what makes them so terrible is what they don't say. 2:52 [SPEAKER_02]: They don't say anything about the actual horror of Joseph Mangala's day job. 2:59 [SPEAKER_02]: At the time of their writing, Mangala is one of the most sinister serial murderers in history. 3:06 [SPEAKER_02]: One letter reads, 3:08 [SPEAKER_00]: My dear, sweet, butsy. 3:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Once in a while, there's a small ray of light in my bleak daily routine in this concentration camp business. 3:17 [SPEAKER_00]: This afternoon at 4pm, I was ordered to the commanding officer and I was awarded a medal. 3:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Even so, this is not the rare honor. 3:23 [SPEAKER_00]: And even so, I already possess more valuable decorations. 3:26 [SPEAKER_00]: I was touched by the acknowledgement of my work in my dedication. 3:30 [SPEAKER_00]: I have already mentioned my visit to Lambert's to you. 3:33 [SPEAKER_00]: He is still the same. 3:34 [SPEAKER_00]: He pretends to be audacious, but in reality, he's just shy and inhibited. 3:39 [SPEAKER_00]: He still hasn't found a nice girl. 3:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Even though he has a casual relationship with the waitress. 3:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Please keep this to yourself, and never ever let a nose that I told you. 3:48 [SPEAKER_00]: I want to introduce him to Schlicks. 3:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe Ms. Schlick can introduce him to nice girls that she knows, or something like that. 3:55 [SPEAKER_00]: How are you, Brutzilla, and how is the boy? 3:57 [SPEAKER_00]: I hope everything is just fine. 3:59 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sending kisses for me to both of you. 4:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Yours, Papi. 4:06 [SPEAKER_02]: and this from the man known in the camps as the angel of death at the high point of his killing career. 4:15 [SPEAKER_03]: So those are fascinating pieces of history that we have. 4:18 [SPEAKER_03]: We're always looking for other artifacts that we do have quite a few Nazi artifacts because as I tell people the US soldiers would who are over there at the time would come back with Nazi artifacts. 4:31 [SPEAKER_03]: That's what they would trade for and so we have a lot of Nazi. 4:34 [SPEAKER_03]: flags and pins and belts and those types of artifacts that we don't necessarily promote here at the museum but we do have them in our archives and we have a few out on display but we're always looking for other historical artifacts that we could use. 4:49 [SPEAKER_03]: When the museum was destroyed, how did Eva react? 4:54 [SPEAKER_03]: We have a quote from her here at the museum. 4:57 [SPEAKER_03]: It says, I've had worst days, but I've also had better. 5:00 [SPEAKER_03]: And she immediately says that they will rebuild. 5:05 [SPEAKER_03]: She wasn't going to let the fire bombing, the anti-Semitism stop her from rebuilding. 5:11 [SPEAKER_03]: and so that's what they did. 5:12 [SPEAKER_03]: They were able to raise a good sum of money, a relatively quickly the community responded really the nation. 5:19 [SPEAKER_03]: People from all over the world actually gave money to that. 5:21 [SPEAKER_03]: It was an article in People magazine. 5:23 [SPEAKER_03]: It got worldwide coverage. 5:25 [SPEAKER_03]: Again, this is back in 2003. 5:28 [SPEAKER_03]: when the firebombing occurred and they were able to rebuild relatively quickly and re-opened in the 2005. 5:36 [SPEAKER_03]: Do you know what type of artifacts were lost? 5:38 [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of the Nazi stuff was lost. 5:41 [SPEAKER_03]: There were some personal items that even had on display that were lost and there are some artifacts that... 5:48 [SPEAKER_03]: that we still have from the firebombing here and that they're on display but here at the museum currently but that they're charred up and obviously you can tell they've been through a fire but I don't know exactly what was lost. 5:59 [SPEAKER_03]: And no one was ever arrested for that right. 6:01 [SPEAKER_03]: Correct. 6:02 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they had a suspect I was told. 6:04 [SPEAKER_03]: And I think believe that person was questioned and but they never had enough to in again back in 2003. 6:09 [SPEAKER_03]: They didn't quite have they didn't have any video surveillance and like we have in the world today, but even here at the museum. 6:17 [SPEAKER_03]: And so they did security was not, obviously, like it is now. 6:20 [SPEAKER_02]: What was it that they painted on the side of the building? 6:22 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they painted a couple of swastikas on the side of the building, but they also painted the phrase, remember Timmy McVay, and for those of you who don't remember or know, Timmythe McVay was the Oklahoma City Bomber. 6:37 [SPEAKER_03]: And he was here in Terroho at the federal penitentiary in the early, or late 90s, early 2000s. 6:46 [SPEAKER_03]: And it was actually executed here in Terroho in 2001, a couple years prior to the fire bombing here at the museum. 6:54 [SPEAKER_03]: That's what they wrote. 6:55 [SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, I remember Timing McVay, spray paint of that on the side of the wall, and then fire bomb obviously the museum. 7:02 [SPEAKER_03]: So this is in 2003. 7:03 [SPEAKER_03]: So it's a couple years after Timing McVay was executed, 7:07 [SPEAKER_03]: But to me, we vee was, obviously, could research him and quickly find out he was an anti-symite skin head, so to speak, and white power type, philosophy, and so they're assuming, obviously, that whoever fireball museum would potentially be the same type of person. 7:25 [SPEAKER_03]: The doctor that was responsible for all these tests he was never found correct correct yeah Dr. Joseph Mingola was again escaped Auschwitz and went under a pseudo name ended up moving traveling to Brazil South America and that is where I've been told a lot of Nazi 7:55 [SPEAKER_03]: But apparently lived under a pseudonym and died in the late 80s and they don't. 8:05 [SPEAKER_03]: They being the government of South America claims that the bones that they found were his and they say that they did some DNA testing, but they never released that DNA testing and even quite honestly never believed that was Dr. 8:20 [SPEAKER_03]: Mingle's bones that they found in South America. 8:24 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, a long story short. 8:26 [SPEAKER_03]: He was a very charismatic gentleman. 8:30 [SPEAKER_03]: Good looking guy. 8:30 [SPEAKER_03]: And but he did some nasty things there at Auschwitz. 8:34 [SPEAKER_03]: Experimenting on twins. 8:36 [SPEAKER_03]: That was his fourth day. 8:37 [SPEAKER_03]: So to speak is the experimenting on twins. 8:39 [SPEAKER_03]: I think. 8:41 [SPEAKER_03]: 3,000 twins went through Auschwitz, but only about 300 were able to survive. 8:46 [SPEAKER_03]: And again, they don't know what experiments they would never found any documentation from Dr. Mingerler or Auschwitz in general to know what experiments were done on those twins. 9:00 [SPEAKER_02]: Mingerler also worked for Gastroombers. 9:04 [SPEAKER_02]: He administered the drug, Zyklombi, a cyanide-based poisonous pesticide, through the roof of these chambers, and also hand-selected victims. 9:18 [SPEAKER_02]: Most SS doctors struggled with that part of the process. 9:23 [SPEAKER_02]: It's one thing to drop a canister of poison through a hole in a roof. 9:28 [SPEAKER_02]: It's another to walk up to those people, look them in the eyes, and sentence them to death. 9:34 [SPEAKER_02]: by all accounts, Mangala enjoyed it. 9:38 [SPEAKER_02]: He whistled while he chose who would die, and would give candy to the children, and dote it on them before cutting off their limbs, and their heads. 9:50 [SPEAKER_02]: He was a fall-on, evil psychopath, almost too evil to imagine. 9:58 [SPEAKER_02]: One survivor remembers him personally killing seven sets of twins on a single night by injecting chloroform directly into their hearts. 10:12 [SPEAKER_03]: would go on later in life to be very much an activist to try to find Dr. Mingla and her big goal was to, again, define the records, define those experiment records and define Mingla and even when South America said these are his bones, she wanted to have them tested independently. 10:33 [SPEAKER_03]: She wanted to get blood from Dr. Mingla's son who was still alive and 10:37 [SPEAKER_03]: was working in Germany and living in Germany at the time and she would protest. 10:41 [SPEAKER_03]: She actually went to Germany and protested outside of the sun's war. 10:46 [SPEAKER_03]: to try to get him to give donate blood, so they could test his DNA with the bones DNA. 10:51 [SPEAKER_03]: That never happened, but Eva was a big proponent of trying to find Dr. 10:56 [SPEAKER_03]: Mingle and his record. 10:58 [SPEAKER_02]: I could see how that would be important even today. 11:00 [SPEAKER_02]: We want to know our own medical records, and even for our kids' sake, so if you have testing done, that would that change, maybe even the disease that might run in your family. 11:11 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly. 11:12 [SPEAKER_03]: It's important, especially when you're 10 years old and you don't know what was done on you What was into your body at any age? 11:19 [SPEAKER_03]: You want to know that but especially as you have health issues going on later in life You would like to know and so that was the kind of the cruel 11:29 [SPEAKER_03]: part of the whole story is that they've never been able to know what was done on them. 11:33 [SPEAKER_02]: The final section to my questions would be unforgiveness. 11:37 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure you get asked this a lot being that Eva was such a big person here, but Eva forgave the Nazis. 11:45 [SPEAKER_02]: She did. 11:46 [SPEAKER_03]: She forgave Dr. Mangala, she forgave Hitler and the Nazis, and it was 11:52 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, very compelling and how it started is she was asked in 1993 to give a presentation in Boston College of Medical Ethics Professor was asked her to come and speak at a conference. 12:08 [SPEAKER_03]: and he half jokingly apparently asked her at the end of the conversation that they were having was hey if you can come and if you can find a Nazi doctor to come with you that would be great we'd love to have that and jokingly even since humor she said where am I going to find a Nazi doctor last time I looked they were not advertising in the yellow page 12:28 [SPEAKER_03]: And that was true, obviously they weren't. 12:30 [SPEAKER_03]: And but she remembered a Nazi doctor that was in a documentary, a couple years prior to this. 12:37 [SPEAKER_03]: So this was early 90s, the doctor by the name of Hans Mooch, who was in a documentary that Eva and her sister Miriam were in at the same time. 12:47 [SPEAKER_03]: And she remembered him and she didn't know him, but she was able to reach out to him in this doctor. 12:54 [SPEAKER_03]: said, well, I'm not coming to Boston for the conference, but if you want to come to Germany, I'll be more than happy to talk to you. 13:01 [SPEAKER_03]: And so Eva does. 13:02 [SPEAKER_03]: She goes to Germany. 13:03 [SPEAKER_03]: She's very, obviously scared about that, but she ends up getting along with this doctor very well. 13:10 [SPEAKER_03]: He says he knows nothing about Dr. Minglum and what he did, but he was at the gas chambers. 13:16 [SPEAKER_03]: He does. 13:16 [SPEAKER_03]: He admitted to that. 13:17 [SPEAKER_03]: This doctor. 13:19 [SPEAKER_03]: and long story short, she says to herself, wow, I can't believe I'm getting along with this Nazi doctor. 13:26 [SPEAKER_03]: He treated me very well. 13:28 [SPEAKER_03]: It is home. 13:29 [SPEAKER_03]: How can I thank him? 13:30 [SPEAKER_03]: And she thinks for months, how can I thank him? 13:34 [SPEAKER_03]: And she ends up 13:36 [SPEAKER_03]: saying to herself that I'm going to think and by forgiving him, I'm going to forgive him for what he did. 13:42 [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not only that, I'm going to forgive again Dr. Mingla and Hitler and everybody involved and it was her way of healing. 13:51 [SPEAKER_03]: It was her way of moving forward, moving past all the drama that she had kept inside and the weight on her shoulders and 14:00 [SPEAKER_03]: That was very controversial at the time, because once she was a very outspoken person, as we've said, she was a activist and spoke her mind and when she went through this forgiveness, she was telling everyone about it. 14:16 [SPEAKER_03]: How she was able to forgive and that helped her, again, move forward and heal from this trauma of Auschwitz. 14:30 [SPEAKER_03]: thought that was a bad idea that there was no way that you could forgive. 14:33 [SPEAKER_03]: How could you forgive when your family was murdered and six million Jews were murdered and five million other people were murdered in the Holocaust and there's no, how can you forgive? 14:43 [SPEAKER_03]: And it's not up to you to be able to forgive. 14:46 [SPEAKER_03]: So that's what some people think and then other people would think that forgiveness is obviously a personal choice and that 14:53 [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what Eva was saying is that she was not forgetting or saying what they did was a good thing because obviously it wasn't, she wasn't. 15:02 [SPEAKER_03]: condoning that. 15:04 [SPEAKER_03]: She was just saying, it's of my personal choice and I'm going to forgive and by choosing forgiveness, I have the power to move forward. 15:14 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not a longer subject to just the pain and agony of what happened. 15:19 [SPEAKER_03]: I have the power to choose how I'm going to control it and she did that through forgiveness and that was a lot of people, again, think that was a great quality 15:31 [SPEAKER_03]: But then on the same side, on the other side, you get a lot of people that think that there's no way that they could do that. 15:37 [SPEAKER_03]: And I don't know if I could do that either. 15:38 [SPEAKER_03]: Personally, if I went through everything that even went through, I don't know if I could forgive. 15:42 [SPEAKER_03]: But that's again, it's a personal decision that each person would have to make. 15:45 [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I think regarding Eva and her relations to students and young children. 15:52 [SPEAKER_03]: is that she would talk about how you can forgive if there's somebody who's a bully at school and maybe you could forgive them and forgiving your worst enemy. 16:00 [SPEAKER_03]: So you can have, again, the freedom to choose what how you react to it and not to have that burden on your shoulders but to be able to be happy and healthy and move forward was her way of, 16:14 [SPEAKER_03]: again dealing with any kind of trauma not just bullies at school but it could be domestic violence just any you name it she would say that forgiveness would be able to help you move forward she was never condoning obviously what Hitler did or mingle did or anybody 16:29 [SPEAKER_03]: associated with the Holocaust, but it was her way of being able to take the power away from them and putting it in an individual person and you have the power to choose how you react and how you want to remember that situation. 16:49 [SPEAKER_03]: And for her, it was, again, being able to 16:52 [SPEAKER_03]: I have the power to choose forgiveness and I'm going to forgive so I can move on and be happy. 16:58 [SPEAKER_03]: And those people who I've spoken to who knew Eva both before she decided to forgive and after say she was a totally different person after she decided to forgive and you could they say you could just see that way lifted off of her shoulders and she became a happier person and she wasn't 17:16 [SPEAKER_03]: didn't have that burden of going through a lot of holocaust survivors that I'm aware of and honestly we're losing holocaust. 17:26 [SPEAKER_03]: We lose one holocaust survivor every day according to an article I read because after they're getting older and passing away but a lot of holocaust don't want to talk about what they went through during the holocaust. 17:37 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but for Eva, it was a way of, again, being able to heal, to talk about it and to talk about the trauma, but also forgiveness was a big piece of that her story as well. 17:48 [SPEAKER_02]: So let's talk about your museum, you call it the Holocaust Museum Education Center. 17:54 [SPEAKER_03]: We deal a lot with now that COVID is passed. 17:58 [SPEAKER_03]: We do a lot of field trips. 17:59 [SPEAKER_03]: We have about 15,000 people that walk through our doors every year. 18:04 [SPEAKER_03]: Last year, I should say, because COVID messed up a little bit of that, obviously, for everybody. 18:09 [SPEAKER_03]: But so in 2022, we had about 15,000 people come through at about half of those are students. 18:16 [SPEAKER_03]: And we have, so we have field trips coming from all over, not just here in the Terrod area, but also they come from Indianapolis and even in Illinois. 18:27 [SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, Terrod's on the border of Indiana and Illinois. 18:31 [SPEAKER_03]: And so we get quite a few Illinois schools, middle schools and high schools, particularly that come each and every year. 18:37 [SPEAKER_03]: We do a lot of teacher workshops every year and we have a Holocaust library here at the museum where we have over 1,500 books all obviously related to the Holocaust that are free to check out for people. 18:51 [SPEAKER_03]: We have four institutions of higher education here in the area and so we get a lot of 18:57 [SPEAKER_03]: college students who are doing research and what not on the Holocaust that will come and check out books in the library or spend time here. 19:04 [SPEAKER_03]: Hit the museum, we give some lectures as well on medical ethics and this Eva's story in general. 19:10 [SPEAKER_03]: So that's our number one goal is obviously to educate folks on not just Eva's story but the Holocaust and 19:17 [SPEAKER_03]: So it never happens again, so people never forget, and that's our number one goal. 19:21 [SPEAKER_02]: When you have middle school students come, how do you go about explaining to them what happened at the Holocaust? 19:28 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's challenging when you have... 19:32 [SPEAKER_03]: Young students, in particular, especially elementary students, it's we do not recommend the museum for anybody over or under the age of 12, but we obviously leave it up to the parents or adults to decide if they want to bring their 10 year old to the museum, we're not going to stop them from that, but we don't recommend it for folks under the age of 12. 19:57 [SPEAKER_03]: So when we get a middle school group here, it does change the story a little bit. 20:01 [SPEAKER_03]: If you've noticed in our museum, we don't. 20:04 [SPEAKER_03]: have a lot of graphic photos. 20:06 [SPEAKER_03]: We don't talk about the mass destruction of the mass murders that took place at the Holocaust visually. 20:14 [SPEAKER_03]: We really talk about Eva's story about the perseverance being able to go through what Eva and her sister went through and what children went through. 20:23 [SPEAKER_03]: They were about the same age as middle school students and to be able to survive and go on and live their life and have families and those types of 20:33 [SPEAKER_03]: Again, and that's been the overall focus of the museum is telling you the story, but we want people to leave here, not crying over the Holocaust, but obviously leaving with kind of a hope and happiness of being able to survive and live your life after going through such a traumatic period. 20:52 [SPEAKER_02]: I asked Troy where to find the candle's museum, an education center online, 20:58 [SPEAKER_03]: Folks can go to our website at CandlesHolocostMuseum.org, everything that they need. 21:03 [SPEAKER_03]: Upcoming events to, obviously, and then going to our social media, we do a lot on the Facebook and Instagram, and that's CandlesHolocostMuseum.org, it's our website, and that's where you can find our social media, but to find up all the updates, we do have the program series where we try to have a speaker every month. 21:23 [SPEAKER_03]: and it could be a local speaker, but it could be someone talking about the Holocaust, it could be someone talking about forgiveness, or other atrocities that are other human rights activities, genocide that are going on, we don't, we're not even though we are a Holocaust museum, we do focus on other genocide and human rights activities that are going on as well in the world. 21:47 [SPEAKER_02]: I'd just like to close by giving Eva the last word to the eyewitness software feature at the museum. 21:56 [SPEAKER_02]: Eva, why do you share your story? 21:59 [SPEAKER_01]: I believe that there are some very important lessons to be learned and particularly for young people. 22:14 [SPEAKER_01]: when they want to give up on overcoming a difficulty or they might be willing to bully a classmate and bullying them prejudice are very low so I want them to focus on that and if they have been emotionally hard I don't want them to remain victims I want them to give them an opportunity 22:49 [UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
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