Ep. 42: Interviewing Holocaust Survivors with Hank Greenspan

How does one talk with a Holocaust survivor about their experiences?  What is the role of survivor testimony in understanding the Holocaust?  In this episode, I talk with psychologist, Holocaust scholar, and playwright Hank Greenspan about his lifetime of talking with survivors and what he has learned from that experience.

Henry “Hank” Greenspan is an emeritus psychologist, oral historian and playwright at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who has been interviewing, writing about, and teaching about Holocaust survivors since the 1970s.

Greenspan, Henry. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (2010)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.517)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, wait, when born and today we are talking about testimony or maybe as we talk to our guest, we may not use that word. We'll see what, what he says about it. but we're talking about the act of interviewing survivors, talking with survivors about their experience. And for most, for many of our listeners, we may end up growing up in a world.

where we have no more Holocaust survivors alive. And so I think it's really important to think about the stories that they tell, but also how they tell them and what we can learn from interacting with those stories. And I can't think of a better guest to have on here than someone that has been doing this for more than 50 years, writing about it, creating plays about it, capturing these histories and stories. And that is Hank Greenspan. Hank, thanks so much for coming on.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:01.038)
Pleasure. Pleasure.

Waitman Beorn (01:02.635)
So can you start by taking us all the way back to sort of your origin story and maybe in general how you got interested in the Holocaust and your background professionally and then specifically how you got into sort of the interviewing, the oral history part of it.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:21.848)
Okay, well, you know, if I was really to tell the origin story, you know I'm a psychologist, so I would have to go back to my family and all of this. I'm not a child of survivors. I had relatives, like many American Jews of my generation, cousins who were survivors who would every now and then join us for Sunday brunch or something like that. But, you know, it was not a big part of my life. I just noticed, I noticed my parents' anxiety when they came over.

Waitman Beorn (01:28.141)
Yes.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:48.526)
It's like, don't upset them. There was that sort of sense of their being fragile. And I was drawn to their, to me, whatever I am, seven or eight years old, their accents. They didn't sound like most people I knew. And then I met some of those relatives again years later when I was in college, so I was a little bit smarter. But I got interested in their history.

They survived by getting out into the Soviet Union during the war and then working their way down to Iran and then eventually to Israel. But even then, the real beginning was more accidental than that. I was working, I'm a psychologist as you know by background. I was working on a psychological study as an interviewer, nothing to do with this topic. But I went out and was talking with a guy.

who in the course of our discussion early on mentioned that he was a survivor of the Holocaust. I had never spoken to than to my family with a Holocaust survivor. So what would have been a two hour interview became a 10 hour all day event because I felt this was an opportunity, I mean it clearly was, for me to have an extended conversation and he

I think felt the same. I'm not sure that he had spoken. Well, in fact, he hadn't, of course he had spoken with other survivors, and this is a common history that we hear. In those days, anyway, survivors often said that they had spoken with other survivors a lot, I mean, since the war. Maybe they'd been involved in a few other projects. But in general, talking with called outsiders, especially young outsiders, was unusual.

That really struck me. mean, here we are in those days.

Henry Hank Greenspan (03:48.236)
was 1970. So here we are 25 years after liberation and I'm the first quote American is what he said the first American with whom he had spoken. mean he was American of course but not by birth and I really stayed with me but it wasn't like I was trying to make up for something it was like holy cow what does that mean? So that 10-hour conversation

I still didn't really make a choice to go into this more, but it stuck in my head and I...

started to read and by the mid seventies one thing led to another and I was like you know what I really want to pursue this by then I'm in graduate school I was an Americanist you know by background American history I thought I would still do something I was in a department actually of sociology but it was like sociology I was interested in psycho history so the line between psychology on one side history on the other

This is kind of a relevant piece. When I first spoke with my would-be graduate committee, my doctoral committee about, you know, maybe I'll do a dissertation on Holocaust survivors. And I was interested, as I still am after all of these years, not only in what people experience, but how they talk about what they experience. The how of retelling as much as the what. Or sometimes say retelling as a verb, or one could say testimony as a verb. Something one constructs one.

puts together and as you well know, in different ways with different people under different circumstances of different projects, it's multiply mediated and so on. But I had no any of that yet. That's what I was interested in. How did they talk with their kids, with someone like me, with anybody? How did they find words? How did they find imagery? What memories were important? All of that. What my would-be committee said

Henry Hank Greenspan (05:55.022)
and this was the first three people I spoke with, almost verbatim, they said, Hank, the thing is all the survivors are dying. anyway, so you should talk with people who'll be around for a while. And they also said all the work on survivors has already been done. So that's also, you now again, I want to emphasize this was 1975, right? 1975.

about 50 years ago, all the survivors are dying. That gave me a clue that stayed with me, not to mention a good story. But what stayed with me was, you know, maybe we don't listen quite as much as we think. So that in conjunction with the guy who's told me a few years earlier that I was the first American suggested that maybe we think we listen to survivors or have listened to survivors, maybe not so much, maybe not so well.

Maybe they're not quite real to us would be a more extreme way to say it. So, know, as is typical for me, that just made me more determined to go forward. And I did. you know, most of the survivors whom I did start speaking with fairly soon before I go there, I should say there were a couple of professors who did support it.

So maybe the first three didn't, interestingly the two who did were themselves, we'd say survivors now, they were refugees, we used to say, people who got out of, in both cases, Austria in the 30s, before the Anschluss actually, but not too much before. They supported it. So I was not all on by myself. And I started in those days to interview also,

you know, as I've often described, because this was pre-video camera era, so I used audio tape, I still use audio tape, I find the camera to be intrusive in an interview, and for other reasons that I'll quickly say. And because there was no clear model of what an interview with a survivor was sort of supposed to look like,

Henry Hank Greenspan (08:20.118)
Of there were those early projects in the historical commissions shortly after the liberation. So it's not like there were no interviews of survivors. But certainly there were that model that we now have of the two three hour testimony in front of the video camera. That didn't exist for the most part in those days, which was great in the sense that it freed me up and the survivors up to make it up. To make up our own methodology as we went along. And that's really what happened.

So in some form or other, survivors would say, so hey, so come back next week, we'll talk some more. Okay, you know, I was a grad student, I had time. So I came back next week and one thing led to another, and I guess has become relatively well known about my own work. I rarely stopped at a single interview. In most cases,

Waitman Beorn (09:02.358)
Right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (09:17.294)
I talk with the same survivors, same individual survivors, over a period of months in some cases, not every week, but maybe eight, 10, 12 times over a few months. With other survivors, it was over a period of years. Again, not every week or every month, but it was different for each person. And with a few, these were conversations that went on for 30 years.

So you get to know people pretty well in 30 years or even five or 10 years. And so the discussion and reflection about the war and experiences during the war was part of a whole relationship and a much wider conversation. And indeed, we talked about pretty much everything. mean, certainly, you know people well. That's what happens. And I think, so it's...

Obviously, I have nothing against the big testimony projects. I just think that's one. And I've always argued there's more than one way. And there's more than one way it can be. There's more than one way it had to be. my view, yeah. Yeah, please.

Waitman Beorn (10:27.991)
And I should, I should, I should jump in really quickly just for, for our listeners who, who may not be fully familiar. And again, I think Hank can make a great point already that sort of the, the standard script for Holocaust survivors that we all sort of have in our head as, you know, straight out of, know, if, if, if a Hollywood movie is making a movie about testimony, what it's going to film didn't exist for a very, very long time.

Henry Hank Greenspan (10:51.63)
Right. Right.

Waitman Beorn (10:57.095)
And, and even, even the sort of survivor coming to your school trope, you know, is a thing that didn't exist for a very long time. and the one, and what you're referring to sort of with the big projects, you know, the things like the show foundation, which is great. but it does have, it literally has for, for its interviewers, it has a script on the script, you know, recommended questions in an order that you should go through them. And the interviewers tend to.

only speak to the person in a one shot sort of long duray interview. And I just want to, I just want to lay that out because what you do is, fundamentally different. And I was going to ask in conjunction with that, what were you, what are, what were you trying to accomplish in your interview and how might that be different than what things like the show foundation is trying to accomplish?

Henry Hank Greenspan (11:29.902)
Right, indeed.

mature.

Henry Hank Greenspan (11:49.262)
Absolutely. Yeah. It's probably easiest to say what I was not attempting to accomplish was to create or contribute to an archive. And almost all of the large projects like Shaw and the others. The goal is to create an archive of testimonies about people's experiences in a range of contexts during the war. That was not my goal. My goal was to understand as well as I could, especially that question about retelling.

how, when, where did survivors choose to talk about it? Of course, that meant beginning with how they talked about it with me, right? Because that would not always, but sort of naturally lead to the question, so is this the way when you're spoken with your kids, have you said the same essential thing? Or when those larger projects began to develop, you I often had the chance to see and hear how survivors were told

their experiences with an interviewer, say in the Shaw Project or in earlier ones, the Yale Project, and how that compared with how they spoke with me and what they did or didn't say or how they said it and all of that. But my goal really had most to do with exploration. comes back to that word testimony, which people also think I'm allergic to. I'm not.

My argument is not that there's any testimony is a very very important thing and it's it's for purposes of documentation of witness This is what I saw This is what I want the world to know for later future generations, you know testimony is about Declaration I declare this is what I believe. This is what I saw. This is what I witnessed. This is what happened What I did I call exploration

as compared with declaration. So that happens, then all the questions arise, which are typically what our students often want to know. So do you hate Germans? How do you get to sleep at night? What do you think of the world? Could it happen again? That whole range of questions, how did it impact you? I mean, which kids want to know all the time.

Henry Hank Greenspan (14:12.588)
Now again, I'm a psychologist by background and so it's natural. So testimony in the sense of wartime experiences rather than being the end was in my work the beginning. It was very important for me to try to get as good an understanding or at least a hearing of where people were, some sense of order, who was with them, what happened, who did they lose, et cetera.

over the period. But that was the beginning. And then all the wider questions about talking about it, mention and meaning or lack thereof. so that's, I guess what allowed these conversations to go on forever in some cases, because as we all do in life, know, ultimately we're talking about that history, but we're talking about what it is to be a human being in a world where, you know, evil of that kind.

exists and continues to exist of course and is perpetrated and has endured, sometimes survived, often not survived, more often not survived. So it was really as full a discussion of all of those things. say, yeah, some of it's oral history, what I do, but it's no less oral psychology, oral philosophy.

or old narotology, which is the questions about how do you talk about it anyway, et cetera. So all of those things, I guess if you want, you could want this testimony, but I would say testimony as I understand it is one genre of talking about it. Again, for the purposes of declaration, for the record, for past therapy, whereas exploration is a different genre.

it's collaborative in a different way. Every interview is collaborative in the sense that someone's asking questions, someone else is answering them, so it's an interaction just like you and I are having. The collaboration that I developed was a little, it was more specific in this way. Between interviews, I would listen to the previous one, and you know, if anyone who's listened to their own interviews,

Henry Hank Greenspan (16:37.038)
You hear, my God, I wish I hadn't asked that or I sort of missed the boat there or there was an opportunity. But knowing I would likely be back provided the chance to follow up and get clarity. And that's exactly what I would do with this. I would say, you know, at the next meeting. And they often have things too they wanted to come back to. know, I was talking about this, but I forgot to tell you this or or I would say, you know, I'm not sure I understand XYZ.

often I started to bring, say very easy to do with audio tape, segments from prior interviews, usually the most recent, to the next interview. And I said, you know, we were talking about this. Is it okay if we listen to this part of our last interview? Just a few minutes. Where I knew there was something going on that I didn't quite get and I thought, it certainly was interesting to me, might well be interesting.

So this is real collaboration, because it would be the survivors and I pouring over a segment of a previous interview. they, I will say, the survivors, as I often say, are like everybody else in this and other ways. there's people would say, I don't like the way I sound on that recording. But whether they like their voice sound or not,

They found it fascinating. And it was an almost tell me that we did together of how it went down in the prior interview, what people said, what they said, what I said. This would trigger typically new insights, new reflections that were not in the earlier interview, sometimes entirely new memories that people had not shared in the earlier interview, or most typically new.

explanations and understandings of some of what they had shared, which were very often, this is what people said to me, it's not like they were in their heads, you know, it's like they discovered it, when I talk about exploration, they discovered in a sense or came upon, we'll say, these meanings in the course of these collaborative deepening conversations.

Waitman Beorn (18:53.517)
And this is something that I wanted to jump in again here because, in a lot, in a certain sense, what you were doing then, that approach is a very sort of modern and complex approach. because one of the things, you know, again, you know, this, course, but our listeners may not is that, and really this, is for all of us, whenever we're asked to tell a story about our past, our history, it has a beginning and middle of an end to us. And we, we sit down and we tell the story.

Henry Hank Greenspan (18:56.236)
Yeah, please. Sorry.

Waitman Beorn (19:23.305)
Usually in sort of a narrative chronological and often survivors, some survivors would sort of, for example, I used the school trope earlier, you know, like they go to a school, they tell the story. It's the same story as beginning and middle and end. has a part where people laugh and has a part that is traumatic. It has a lesson, you know, it's, it's all very structured and it becomes almost a rut. And so there's a lot of discussion about oral history in general, but obviously with Holocaust as well, about how to kind of gently bump people.

Henry Hank Greenspan (19:43.928)
Right. Right.

Waitman Beorn (19:53.397)
out of those ruts to get to other places. And that sounds exactly like what you are what you were doing.

Henry Hank Greenspan (19:59.884)
Partly, yeah. I mean, I think at that point, survivors, as you're suggesting, have a kind of a repertoire of stories about important things in their lives. And they tend to, the ones that have worked, in whatever work means to them, some survivors are very keen on audience response, and especially young audiences. So they'll know. yeah, in those days, I'm not as sure because people...

Waitman Beorn (20:27.425)
Hadn't done the school stuff.

Henry Hank Greenspan (20:27.828)
except whether it hadn't done as much, but still to some extent, yes. And they were aware of it, by the way. One survivor who was the equivalent of my mother in my life, mean, or my sister, mean, someone I was very close to, named Aghi Rubin, we wrote a book together eventually. And so I quote Aghi every five seconds when I speak about these things.

But describing one of her, I want you to, it doesn't matter which project, but describing her interview in one of the big testimony projects, she essentially retold a version of her experiences that she indeed tells in schools. I was often with her when she went to schools, so I'd heard it. And, then she reflected on that experience in the big project and she said,

gotten in trouble, but she said it. She said, well, I just told them the usual spiel. That was her phrase. I gave them the usual spiel, as I do in schools and so on. But the part that was interesting was, then she added, and the interviewer in this particular project said, you were wonderful. I didn't have to ask you a single question. Right? And my sub rosa translation was, that's because it wasn't an interview.

Waitman Beorn (21:51.637)
Yeah, right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (21:52.386)
performance, you know, to an audience of one or in this case, because it was a one-on-one interview. So, yeah. I don't think in those days I was consciously trying to get beyond sort of a usual spiel. I guess there were cases when I was, you know.

Waitman Beorn (22:11.299)
Well, I what were the questions? Because you mentioned you would go back and I think you didn't mention this, but I've seen you talk about elsewhere. You transcribe, so listen and you write down what the people had said, which I think, by the way, for everyone out there is an amazing way of getting out of source, beyond just listening, it's even more active than that. But you said you would come back with questions. And I'm curious, where were those questions coming from in terms of what you were

Henry Hank Greenspan (22:14.486)
All right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (22:21.036)
Right. Right.

Waitman Beorn (22:40.131)
Was it about memory? Was it about the event itself? it, or was it you as a psychologist, how do you turn off treatment or, know, that you're, you're, you're helping them in some way, or did you try to, mean, how does that work?

Henry Hank Greenspan (22:46.541)
Yeah.

Henry Hank Greenspan (22:53.868)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's all good questions. You know, I think if I were to put those possibilities in a kind of a pyramid, the most typical thing I'd want to know more about, if people talked about talking about it, again, that process of retelling, probably the thing I came back to is they said,

you know like the story of that interview and so on that I just mentioned that Auggie mentioned. But on the other hand it varied sometimes it was about the experiences one survivor whom I got to know well was one of the very few survivors of Trublinka. He was not there long I don't know even what it means to be in Trublinka long but he was there for a few days and he managed to hide in an outgoing train and a few people escaped that way.

among the bundles of victims clothing. So he was interlinked with that for not but, but anyway, but 340.

knew and knew enough history to know that you know there are very few Treblinka survivors as you well know compared with say Auschwitz survivors both hells but you know Treblinka's death toll is but depending on who's saying it maybe 900,000 people maybe a little less Auschwitz 1.1 so almost the same in if you're speaking in north numbers like that out of Auschwitz talking Jewish prisoners

Henry Hank Greenspan (24:36.942)
maybe 70,000 survivors, I think, out of Treblinka, something like 60 or 70, compared to 70,000. So I was very interested, particularly with him. I I read everything I could, which wasn't that much in those days about Treblinka. And to get whatever fluency I could about the nature of the camp and when he was there, he was there, you know, when the...

machines were beginning to dig up prior murdered people before burning them on pyres on a horrific scene, some of which he witnessed. The very fact that I knew certain things, I mean, knew it in a very superficial way, but he said, for example, through some corpses, people were shot when they first, or were already dead when they arrived, and their belongings into a big pit. And I said, was that

The lazarette, was, lazarette of course is a euphemism, literally means an infirmary, was anything but an infirmary, right? But it had a little red cross banner on it, you know, it was part of Nazi humor. And the very fact that I knew that word mattered. It's like, how do you know that? I mean, well, because I read it, right? But I mean, that's also part of a connection.

Henry Hank Greenspan (26:10.016)
It's not just sitting and.

being an interested person, you know, that helps, of course. But knowing history really matters, I think, to do these interviews, including whether it's my doing it or anybody doing it. Or else you don't necessarily know what you're hearing and what might be significant about it and what is and isn't known about it. I, well, you know.

Waitman Beorn (26:37.953)
But I think it also, it also encourages your interview partner because I think a lot of times you can see this sometimes in some of the large scale, you know, projects where the person, you know, they're almost like, why am going to invest my emotional time and effort in telling the story if you don't know like the basics of what we're talking about, you know, because I don't want to necessarily explain to you.

Henry Hank Greenspan (26:58.84)
Yeah. All right.

Waitman Beorn (27:04.371)
exactly what every single thing is to give you the background to get to the thing that I think is actually important about my story.

Henry Hank Greenspan (27:11.246)
No, indeed. I'm thinking of one survivor, as you're saying that, who literally said to me, so I was like, I don't want to start with saying, okay, there's like the globe. And then there's like North America, and then there's like the other hemisphere, and then there's Europe, and then there was this country called Germany. And anyway, to start effectively with Genesis, and then work their way to the war was not what they wanted to do. And...

Waitman Beorn (27:34.199)
Great.

Henry Hank Greenspan (27:40.074)
even to the degree, another story related to this particular guy who was a brilliant man and he'll sound like a little more sardonic than he was, but he was picky and he tended not to go to schools because he knew and he told me that people or to speak on Holocaust remembrance days because he said, well, the rabbi expects me to

tell some kind of inspiring story about survival and I ain't gonna do it. It's not what I, it's just not reality. I'm not gonna do that. Or do these sort of superficial things and finally, and I learned this, he had died and I went to be with his family during Shema, the week after he died. And his wife told me that late in his life, he did agree, he went to a school, but he didn't use his real name. He actually,

in my writing he's known as Leon that's actually a pseudonym because early on a number of people didn't want me to use their actual names so when he introduced himself he introduced himself as Leon not his real name why did he do that his wife told me he did that because he the way he put it he didn't want a line of kids to be at his door because their teacher assigned them to interview a holocaust survivor

It's just not what he wanted to do. So yeah, a little politically incorrect, but he had no problem being politically incorrect. In fact, perhaps like me, he enjoyed it a little to that extent. He didn't want to be treated like a thing. Again, I'm going to quote Aghi who once exclaimed, I'm not a quote unquote capital S or capital H Holocaust survivor.

I'm not a category, I'm not a thing, I'm me. And then she would usually say, because this is her style, I'm just me, whatever that is, whatever and whoever that is. But she was in a certain sense phobic and she rightfully, she said, you know, we have enough experience being categories, know, and being treated as a thing. I don't want that. And even, you know, with all the goodwill, of course, that people do bring.

Waitman Beorn (29:38.125)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (29:56.631)
Mm.

Henry Hank Greenspan (30:05.848)
to these projects and interviewing survivors. She didn't doubt that. But it still was very important, understandably. She got that. She wasn't offensive in any way. She appreciated the interest when it was genuine and sincere. But she also insisted, you know, I'm who I am. I'm not a survivor in that category. It says, yeah, I survived. Yeah, I was there. Yeah, I lived through it.

But that's not the sum total of who I am. And let's engage as people. Let's just have a good conversation. That was her orientation. And I guess she's very much one of the people who, in a way, I learned the method that I wanted to pursue from. know, that just let's just get down and have a conversation. Let's explore, et cetera.

Waitman Beorn (31:00.579)
And were you, were you tempted to sort of do therapy? mean, like, you know, this is like, you're, you know, as a psychologist, I suspect that, you know, you're, you're kind of always listening to people and I see, kind of see what's going on here, or I see how this is, is bothering you. And I suspect that it must've been difficult at sometimes to not be, to not interrupt and say,

Henry Hank Greenspan (31:07.246)
Yeah.

Henry Hank Greenspan (31:13.74)
Right.

Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (31:27.937)
Here's what's happening to you. Here's what you can do to...

Henry Hank Greenspan (31:29.922)
Yeah, yeah, mean, partly maybe it helped that I was was a my training was psychoanalytic. So not formal psychoanalysis, but, know, basically the kind of therapist who says very little, particularly the old joke of, know, right, right, whatever comes to mind and then sleeps for three years. But so I was used to not saying much. But, you know, I would say it's true that

Waitman Beorn (31:45.035)
Right, right. Yeah. Tell me more about that.

Henry Hank Greenspan (31:59.906)
Early on, you know, I had the fantasy, as I think many of us do, who go into this work, whether it's interviewing Holocaust survivors or war history more widely, that we want to help people. We want to give, sometimes just give voice to the voices, which is kind of, know, almost a creepy way of saying things, in my view. But, you know, it's well intended. It's like, and I did have the fantasy.

because I said everything goes back to family. So that somehow it would help. That somehow I would come up with a way of listening or a way of hearing or something that would alleviate something. That was disabused pretty quickly. I said, no, no, no, no. I'm not good at, that's way beyond anything I can do. Do I think these conversations were useful? Yeah. I mean, useful in some form or other. mean, again, in terms of

survivors learning themselves more about their experiences. Again, Auntie said, know, in interviews, not just like with me, but other interviews that were memorable for her, she said, whenever I think I'm teaching, I'm learning at the same moment, learning about her own thinking, learning about her own experiences. And then she said, and that's the part that makes it so gratifying, we're learning together. You know, that notion of learning together has become a kind of mantra of my own work.

for me, it's not different, right, than a good seminar. You know, when things are really cooking and students are going back and forth and whatever they come in with, it's not just like everyone is taking a foul shot, you know, throwing out what they think they know, but they're listening to each other and thoughts build and things emerge that were in nobody's head going in. But as a result of their engagement and their listening, putting things together, they came to places that were genuinely new.

Waitman Beorn (33:40.514)
Right here.

Henry Hank Greenspan (33:58.51)
about whatever the topic. And so again, yeah, in the best interviews. Certainly, so it was that helpful.

Waitman Beorn (34:07.235)
Yeah, I mean, I was going to say, can you give us some specifics of like, you know, one of the, some of the things that you uncovered in this way, because, you know, one of the things that, you know, as somebody that uses oral history and is not very good at doing oral history in the couple of times that I've done it, you know, it's, I can totally tell how beneficial it is to able to go back and, and talk again and, and reflect and all of that.

Henry Hank Greenspan (34:14.817)
Thank

Henry Hank Greenspan (34:21.441)
Ahem.

Waitman Beorn (34:37.257)
What kinds of things sort of came out of these conversations that you learned, they learned, you learned together?

Henry Hank Greenspan (34:48.578)
Yeah, let me give you one.

very specific things. In one case, again, Leon.

in the first three of our meetings.

he retold the same story each time, particular episode. It was clear in the way he introduced it each time that he didn't recall having told it to me before, because he said, is the kind of thing I never tell anybody. And then he tells me the same episode again. So clearly he told it to me, but he didn't remember that he had told it to me.

By the third time, I'm thinking there's something about this episode that must be important. And this is a sort of psychologist thinking, but I don't know what it is. So by our fourth interview, I guess I felt I knew him well enough to say, this is also what you learned as a psychologist. How to say things without scaring people out of the room, if you're good at it. But we had a relationship by then, a sort of professional relationship in a way.

Henry Hank Greenspan (36:08.142)
But was not there. But I said something like, you know, however I said it, I've noticed that we've come back to this. I didn't say you repeated this, but a few times. And I asked myself, why? then this was a, for me, memorable moment. He said, well, yes, there are a few things I didn't tell you that will, let me explain.

So what he explained in brief is that this particular episode.

was the moment he was in a small work camp in the Rado area in Poland.

They killed a guy who had been a favorite prisoner, a privileged prisoner, because of a, as he, Leon said, a small infraction. They just took him out and shot him in the back of the head. What that meant to him was that if they can kill this guy, we're all, we're all cooked. And so it turned out to be a turning point, as he recalled.

It was the moment when he realized, even in the midst of it, because he was later at Auschwitz, but this was the moment when, for him, as he recalls it, that he realized that nobody's safe, there's no protection, even in a relatively seemingly safe work camp, he was probably doomed. And then he went on and described his feelings.

Henry Hank Greenspan (37:56.366)
at that moment when this other prisoner was shot. And it is still, again, I guess as a psychologist or anybody, it's the most vivid description of the experience of what everybody calls trauma now than I'd ever heard. It still is one of the most vivid. It's physical sensation, that sort of sense of everything became unreal. It sort of went on. yeah.

It just was one of those moments. So to have that from the inside description, not only what happened, but how it felt, how it was, just, well, it stayed with me. You know, it's pretty rare. There are a few other descriptions. Philip Nutter, know, who was on the commando, and there are times in his memoir where he describes the experience.

Waitman Beorn (38:53.891)
What was thinking of what reminded me of what you're just describing was Jean Amélie when he was talking about, you know, the first time you get hit or physically touched, you lose your faith in sort of humanity and society.

Henry Hank Greenspan (38:58.614)
Yeah, Amirine. No question. You got it. Help us this. We have loss of trust in order. Amirine, who I teach, used to teach, you know, what's obsessive care. mean, it's that 18 pages on the torture essay, I think, personally, is even though, course, Amirine never uses the word trauma. I don't even know if it was around then.

It was in psychoanalytic circles, but it is the single best description in my view, certainly of an individual experience of trauma that I know. And when he talks about the helplessness, they can do with me whatever they want. I am toast. There is no escape. There is no exit. That's the essence of trauma. And the helplessness, which he underlines. know, Emily, unlike some of us, doesn't write with his hands.

So when he italicizes something, you know it's important. And helplessness is one of those words. Loneliness also is another. And you can cry, you can scream, doesn't matter, nobody's gonna come help. You are toast. That's the core of it. It take us to another arena, but that's to me.

the specific and most useful definition or understanding of trauma. These days, like testimony in my personal biased view, trauma is used in such a generalized way, almost to talk about any bad thing that can happen to folks, not just Holocaust survivors, God knows, but the trauma of going through a thunderstorm or, know, I think we err.

I think trauma is so important as this particular experience is. And here again, I am a psychologist talking that if everything is trauma, then in a way nothing is. If nothing is, then we miss what's so important about the specific experience that it is. And there are all kinds of other anguishes which are not better or worse, are other anguishes. Loss, shame, all the physical suffering that people endure, starvation, exposure.

Waitman Beorn (40:59.8)
Right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (41:18.904)
freezing as Primo Levi's own winter, Charlotte Delvaux's thirst. And you know, maybe in a more widely traumatic context, but not necessarily. Not necessarily did one feel that sense of no exit of helplessness as Emily describes. These are all different kinds of anguish.

Waitman Beorn (41:39.619)
I think, and speaking of trauma and guess difficulties, you mentioned in another interview, in another location that sort of not everybody wanted to necessarily go down this road with you. And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about this because, you know, and I might've mentioned this on the podcast before, other episodes, but one of the things that

Sometimes people like us who work on Holocaust and rely on survivor testimony for certain things, when we're looking at one of these one-shot sort of eight-hour interviews, you know, we'll watch somebody and you can see the survivor or the interviewee beginning to approach something that is difficult, intimate, know, uncomfortable, whatever. And the interviewer doesn't track it.

doesn't clock that that's what's happening and moves off on another direction. And as a researcher, you want to reach back through time and like, you know, grab the interviewer and like shake them. Because they've missed a moment, right? And they missed the moment for lots of different reasons. know, in your instance, it sounds like you have the ability to sort of revisit and revisit those, but also

Henry Hank Greenspan (43:04.44)
Yes, right.

Waitman Beorn (43:08.599)
those are may not be comfortable moments because again, as we sort of suggested earlier, sometimes the stories that we tell, we tell them the way we tell them because that's comfortable for us. Right. So can you talk a little bit about some of those more difficult moments with your interview partners?

Henry Hank Greenspan (43:20.066)
Exactly.

Henry Hank Greenspan (43:24.94)
Yeah, indeed, You know, if I may begin with an example that I use in class, which is not from my own interviewing, in Pinkus Guter, who's become well known because he was the sort of the first survivor who became what people call the hologram project or the interactive became well known. Anyway, in his first show, I interviewed

Waitman Beorn (43:49.141)
All right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (43:53.358)
someone told me, actually it wasn't his first, no, Shankar told me there was an earlier one than that, but he was very much not used to talking about it. And he said he can't even look at a map of...

because it would remind him. And there's a moment in that interview in which he starts to go back to somewhere that he, and it looks like he's about to say something quite extraordinary about how he experienced things from, as though he were a camera, know, observing. And the interviewer moved him. And this is a, when my students see it, and everybody wants to be a backseat interviewer, right? Everybody thinks, if I were there, I would have, you know.

Waitman Beorn (44:36.31)
Right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (44:41.41)
But the reality is that while my students were very interested, and I am too in that moment, like how did he express it? A, the agenda for that interviewer was to get the chronology of the history. So the question, well, and then where were you? It kind of made sense in that context. And whether he was protecting Pejas.

whether he couldn't go there himself, we don't know. I mean, I think we would know, but in terms of my own experiences, in most cases, and this also goes with getting to know people, people would say at some point, you know, there was the last time I saw, I don't wanna talk about that. And so people would tell me,

that there were things that I, even the people I knew over 30 years, even Aghi, who I, as I said, was like my mother. She said, as every survivor eventually did, there are things, you know, there things I've never told you. Every survivor I've known has said at some point that there are things they never told me or, I don't know, by implication, anyone. Now, some of those things were not told as I've surmised it anyway.

through the lines because of what it stirred up in terms of unbearable emotion in themselves. But not only that, sometimes because it was about other victims, other prisoners who were not necessarily team players, people who stole bread, people who may have done things that could be shameful years later.

I know at least one case where Aghi's retelling with me over all these years. She was in one of the groups in Birkenau, the so-called camp families of five women. And one of the women she had known before from her hometown apparently did not, was not a, team player in the same way that the other. She didn't want her children to know. So in all of these years,

Henry Hank Greenspan (47:06.67)
there were two sisters, she talked about the other sister like a lot. This sister, like all I heard was her name once. And I can't say I made a conscious choice, but you feel out these things. So I didn't push it, I never asked, well, can you tell me more about this other person? Yeah, Hang on, please.

Waitman Beorn (47:26.659)
But I'm interested in that. I can sort of push back a little bit, mean, like, I'm interested because I think you're highlighting a really important tension between sort of the emotive active listener and a researcher. You know, at least for me, the tension would be, I want to know that thing because that thing might tell us something about the Holocaust, about the experience. But I obviously

Henry Hank Greenspan (47:36.748)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Henry Hank Greenspan (47:44.717)
Right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (47:49.538)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (47:55.969)
I obviously completely understand and empathize with and it's a totally rational and realistic point to say, it's also not in my business if they don't want to tell me about it and I don't need to force them to dredge up something that's going to cause them discomfort. So how do you, how do you walk that line? I suppose. Or do you walk that line or do you have to walk the line?

Henry Hank Greenspan (48:14.326)
Yeah, mean, do I walk it or do I swim it? It feels like, because it feels like a very fluid kind of intuitive thing. And maybe again, maybe this goes back to some of my psychologist's background. You know, there's asking, whatever it may be, and there's timing of asking whatever it may be. Now, in this case, I guess it became clear enough early on.

Waitman Beorn (48:18.989)
Yeah

Henry Hank Greenspan (48:43.734)
And maybe Aghi told me enough to know that she wasn't going to talk about this other person. we knew each other well enough that there's just no way I was going to push. And I didn't see personally a reason. I didn't think there would be necessarily any benefit historically or otherwise for me. We know that there were people who, not every prisoner was a saint. I mean, you know.

Waitman Beorn (48:59.362)
Right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (49:12.344)
as I've said, maybe overly glibly, surviving the Holocaust was not a meritocracy. There were incredibly wonderful, saintly, mean, there are those people, and there are the opposite. And there's most of us, most survivors are like most of us, we're a little of everything. We have our perhaps heroic moments, our not so heroic moments, but, you know.

Waitman Beorn (49:17.112)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (49:37.731)
But was it sorry, one of the things that makes me think about so I, one of the few Holocaust survivors that I've sort of known personally for a significant period of time was a guy named Sam Fried out in Nebraska. And he did the school thing and he came to my class, my Holocaust class at the University of Nebraska Omaha every year. And he didn't want to, but he said, he told me, I don't want to, but I do want to. I don't like doing this, but I think it's important.

And he would always say to the students exactly what you just said. You know, there are things that I'm not going to tell you about my experience. And one of the things he said, one of the things he said, he told them, he's like, I'm not going to tell you about my arrival at Auschwitz with my parents. And you talk all about sort of his experience in sub camps and everything else and his life before the war and after the war. But I'm wondering now based on what you've said, is it, is it actually important to understand or important for them?

that they actually, because you talk about the importance of retelling, that there's something important about them explicitly saying what they won't talk about. You know what mean? Like that's an interesting thing to think about rather than just not, he could just not tell, you know, he doesn't need to tell us that I'm not going to talk about this. So what does it mean to tell us that we're not, I'm not going to talk about this part of my experience.

Henry Hank Greenspan (50:45.838)
I think Right, yeah, right

That there, yeah, yeah. That's a great question. Really interesting and I think multi-layered. I think of one, another survivor I haven't mentioned, whose whole, if I want to say persona, was someone who told us what she wasn't going to tell us. She didn't tell us the what, but she told us that, you know, that was her lead was what she wasn't going to tell. Now, in that case,

And this is someone people sometimes surprised. She was very knowledgeable in literature and theater. And she said, at one point to me, she said, you know, when I speak publicly, I follow the techniques of Stanislavski. You know, we think there are those that some of my colleagues who early on wrote that oral testimony, quote unquote, is somehow spontaneous and not stylized relative to written like a memoir. Well.

For this survivor anyway, she knew exactly what she was doing. She was following the techniques of Stanislavski, which has to do with creating a kind of an aura of mystery and this balance between the said and the unsaid. That was part of her shtick. That was part of what we were saying. And indeed. And then she said, in that context, she said, it's not like I want to create awe or something. And OK, the psychologist is thinking, yeah, you do.

Waitman Beorn (52:22.135)
But you do.

Henry Hank Greenspan (52:22.894)
Yeah, you do. And this kind of, it's not a game. mean, God knows many of us do versions of that. But part of her technique, I will say, in retelling, in this case, was indeed to tell us that she wasn't telling us in a way, rightfully, because it's a way of pointing toward, whether it's for her or anybody.

the immensity of these, I don't even call them experiences, I think for her of profound humiliation in her victimization, which included sexual violence and other kinds of, all the other violence that may not happen. And...

And I think she was quite right in feelings. I don't want to, I want people to sit there and pity me. Right? And that, it's one of the things we do vis-a-vis survivors. It goes with Augie saying, I'm not a quote unquote capitalized survivor. Don't treat me like a thing for God's sake, you know? And I think this other woman whose name is Natalie was doing a different sort of fending off us a little bit and getting us into her

theater of retelling in her way. So that's just one example of sort of the power of telling what you're not telling. When Agi told me what she did, I think it was a different thing. Again, I think it was protection. I don't think she was trying to intrigue me or almost bait me to, come on, know, tell me, tell me, tell me. It was different.

Waitman Beorn (54:10.701)
mean, it's also, it also seems like a way of imparting to the interviewer that there are certain things that are just unintelligible for us. You know, was watching this incredible kind of weird documentary about Rudolf Hus's son and it's interviews with him and Rudolf Hus's son and the grandson.

And then there's also, cause they always do this, they pair it with a survivor and her daughter. And the daughter wants to go to Auschwitz and she wants the survivor from Auschwitz to come with her for this experience. Cause they're to go to Auschwitz and then they're going to Rudolph Hus' son. And the reason I bring this up as a short digression is that she, so the, the, the, daughter asks her mom to come to Auschwitz with her. And the woman says, why would I do that? Cause like,

my you can never go to my Auschwitz. My Auschwitz, the one you my Auschwitz doesn't exist. You know, just and I think the reason I bring that up is it sounds like one way of one reason that the survivors might say there are things I'm not going to tell you about is partially because they don't have the vocabulary, but partially because we don't have the ability to necessarily put it in the context that's that's useful.

Henry Hank Greenspan (55:33.966)
Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a paper some years ago, if I can remember, the unsaid, the unbearable, the untellable, and the something else like that. So again, these are different reasons. Sometimes it is like unbearable emotions. Sometimes it's just inexplicable. Just like sensory experiences. How do you explain what

something tastes like it's never tasted it. This is kind of like Delbo talking about thirst. You say the word thirst, Levy talking about winter, these are words from your world, but it's not. When we say thirst, Delbo said, the thirst I experienced there, you know, it was very powerful the way she did it, very in a way dramatic, I would say. Again, I'm thinking.

kind of like a playwright here for a second, you get it. I mean, that she does it so well, and Emery was a genius, I think. know, going back to Emery's torture essay, he says, the only way I could explain to you what it was really like to be tortured would be to torture you. I mean, it's like, come on,

Waitman Beorn (56:52.619)
Yeah. Yeah.

Henry Hank Greenspan (56:56.462)
Be nice, be nice. mean, we're just reading it, right? But you get us.

Waitman Beorn (57:00.455)
But I mean, it's true, though, you know, and it makes me think back to these people, you know, who used to, he used to like offer the ability to be waterboarded, you know, so you could you could see what it was like, you know, I I think, but there's something to that, that at a certain level, there are things that are sort of beyond our comprehension, unless you've just actually done it.

Henry Hank Greenspan (57:20.268)
Yeah. Well, I think it's true, whether sensory or horrific.

Waitman Beorn (57:27.639)
or like how you've never been as afraid as I've been, as I was afraid, or you know, that kind of thing.

Henry Hank Greenspan (57:31.47)
What I have done or tried to do in my teaching is not to in any way torture my students so that they'll understand, but there are semi-analogous experiences that are not trauma. They're not on that scale, but in terms of understanding helplessness, for example, which I do think is the core of I'll ask my kids,

used to ask them to think about nightmares they've had. Not just bad dreams, but nightmares. Literally, nightmares. And we talk about not the content, that's their business, but how it felt. And what's the difference between a nightmare and a bad dream? And what it usually comes down to, maybe with some of my coaching, is that in a nightmare, what's key is not essentially the scary thing that's about to happen, the knife that's going to hit you or the car going off the cliff, but it's the helplessness.

the paralysis in the face of that thing. And people remember that feeling, you know, and classic, almost a metaphor that is often used in Holocaust context. I wanted to scream, Leon says this, but no words came out. The paralysis of voice. When Delbo wakes up at the end of that same passage, I screamed. I felt like I was dying and I screamed. Being able to get voice back, being able to articulate, being able to say anything.

was a kind of a way out. But from that total paralysis, you know, the paralysis of voice, not talking about things, is in a way quite essential in what I will call real actual traumatic experience. It's the paralysis of voice. It's, people freeze. It's what one of my teachers is, who was himself a survivor.

and one of the founders of trauma theory, guy named Henry Crystal, talked about people going into the, here's a formal psychiatric, a catatonic state, like catatonia, meaning frozen. You can't move like the chief in Cuckoo's Nest, right? Absolute deer in the headlight, can't move, frozen with terror.

Henry Hank Greenspan (59:57.239)
Now.

A nightmare in which one is frozen is obviously different than a lived experience in which one is frozen. But it's possible, I think, and was possible for my students to extrapolate from these normal, quote, normal experiences in their own nightmares to what it might have been like when you were living the nightmare and living it every day effectively over a long period than having it one night and being able to wake up

Waitman Beorn (01:00:20.034)
Right.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:00:29.26)
and come back to post-normal life. What if you can't?

Waitman Beorn (01:00:32.738)
Yep.

Yeah, I mean, it's that it's that ability to take a. I mean, I think this is a really important point about the repetitive daily constant state of extreme fear and terror and everything. I mean, that's that's clearly it's if you could take imagine your most frightened moment. And then that's, you know. 18 hours a day or whatever, when you're not asleep, you know, that kind of thing. I want to shift. I want to shift gears slightly.

because one of things that you do, addition to all this other amazing work is you have a literally, literally a dramatic side where you have sort of, you've, created the play remnants, which is a one act play in which you play the roles of survivors telling their stories. and you've done some other sort of these, I say fiction, but I know that it's the survivors that you're talking about. The stories you tell are many of them are from actual people, but.

It is in some sense a fictionalized account because you were imagining it or you're presenting it to the audience that way. And I'm curious, you know, because the first person that had on his podcast was Omar Bartoff and I had him on not to talk about historical work, but to talk about the novel that he wrote. And so, and I thought it was really fascinating when scholars, people who tend to be kind of empirical, you know, thinkers turn to fiction.

or to creative and I'm using that in scare quotes, but creative modes to try to express something. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that and what it means for you and why you do it. And also why, why? you're the actor in some of these. you yourself are embodying these people. I'm curious. It's just fascinating. Can you talk a little about that?

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:02:23.982)
There I am.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:02:29.934)
Yeah, you know the distinction in theater, which is different, I think, than say writing a novel or a poem, is the distinction between showing and telling. And when you're in a play or any dramatic piece, you are attempting to show. Now, of course, you're telling if you in the role of a survivor.

retelling, reflections, experiences, etc. that were in the case of remnants, for example, things that people did actually say, mean, it's their imagery and so on, you know, reconstituted, reconstructed. So is it fiction? Is it not fiction? know, it's somewhere, it's not just imagined. I have written monologues, by the way, which are absolutely imagined. I've never performed them, and I couldn't say.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:21.559)
Right. Yeah.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:03:30.286)
in fact, that it was grounded in comedy. It was in a broad sense, I suppose. anyway, wasn't, you know, the imagery is not what anyone other than me used, unlike in Remus. But, you know, I think it's, I want to describe it as almost a compulsion that some people have. And I don't want to mystify that. I think of the analogy of

Say we have two friends and one of the friends, Jane, tells us something sort of mind blowing about something that she experienced. And she, it's not a secret thing, but something that we know our other friend would be very interested in, but she hasn't told that person yet. We know we have permission. So we see the friend too sometime later in the day.

And we may say, Jane said this amazing thing earlier. And we may share it. Now, we're almost certainly not going to have a recording of Jane saying it. We're not going to have a transcript of Jane saying it. We're going to, in some way or other, paraphrase what Jane said, reframe it, and if we're inclined in a certain way, we'll do it. We'll retell it in a kind Jane-ish way. We'll take on...

some of her expressions, some of her tenor of voice, some of the ways that she uses her body when she told the story. We're not going to become her or even play her the way an actor might play a part, but we'll take on some of her notes, some of her tones in the way we retell. It was just kind how I see what I do, but it's, I guess I felt this, I scored a composition before and I've had it all my life, not only with survivors.

that it's never been enough for me to just say stuff. I mean, to use an extreme example, I think of Robin Williams sometimes. know, when Robin Williams used to like talk about stuff, he'd say, so there were this space animal, it would become this like space alien, you know, he would show us in some usually comedic way, not only tell us about whatever experience.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:06:02.008)
to embody it. So that's on one level almost a personal quirk. I also think somehow, and maybe I'll just say something about this, there are ways to get, when you get inside the survivor retelling, there are things that you understand, they're almost intangibles about whether it's true to...

that person, feels as though you're embodying and capturing and understanding something through that process. I don't even know the word. I'm a little allergic to the word empathy. I'm not sure what the word is for this process. it's simply, it's like, I

analogy that popped in my head is like trying on someone else's clothes that almost fit and you know or their shoes and you know walk in their shoes as the expression goes it's it starts to feel like you you know something that you didn't before yeah

So, yeah, and the other thing, of course, about, and this would be true of fiction in general, you can explore possibilities that, you know, if you're a historian or in any other empirical discipline, you know, you stick with the facts as you can best know them. In fiction or in other kinds of magitive work, you can try on possibilities. What would happen if the person was like this?

Where would they go? What might they say? How would they experience the world? Maybe. And you do it for yourself, but you also do it, if it's a play, for an audience. how would they, what questions does it raise for them to sort of meet this person and meet their conflict, meet their struggle? What does it light up possibly in their own experience? Which, you know, as a playwright or an actor, you may well never know, right?

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:08:20.354)
But if it's any good in my view, it may light up something of interest and not just entertainment, but something useful, something that raises questions that, you know.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:30.358)
Well, that was, that's what's interesting to me that you choose the play as a, a, because it is a, and you, you sort of, know, when, when you watch remnants, you know, you almost by definition are, are breaking that fourth wall, right? Because you, you are talking directly to the audience in a way that you and your, you and your interview partners would, would interact.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:08:36.354)
Mm-hmm.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:08:50.349)
yes.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:08:54.328)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:00.279)
right, minus the questioning. it's kind of a one way, a one way thing. But, you know, I wonder if there's something to that in the sense of, of you seeing a limitation to sort of the scholarly work and the, and the giving a, giving a lecture, even, even a lecture couched at, for a general audience that there's something.

something that you want to impart to an audience about the Holocaust that you can't do in a sort of academic way.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:09:28.526)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. mean, I think, yeah, you know, this whole issue about listeners that has been very central in my work, and I have been probably too not generous, you know, the issue of our expectations. I one of the things, my favorite comment after people see Revenants is,

People usually say nice things, but my favorite is when people say, it's not what I expected. And inwardly, I'm saying, yes, I want to get beyond because again, it's like I can say, I'm not a quote unquote survivor, capitalist. It's like, I do think understandably again, I should be more tolerant of this, but I'm not always. Our expectations, our rhetoric, our presumptions about who survivors are, what they have to tell us is so

I think, ritualized. That theater provides an opportunity that even if you hear them, or my saying, know, Agi said she told the usual spiel, get it? But if you have her as character saying, in the beginning people were silent, today they're stupid. You know, I mean, then she gets nice. That's part of an actual monologue in Remus.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:27.394)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:50.263)
Well, one of the things that struck me in watching the play exactly that is that it, I think if you're in any way conscientious in watching it, it makes you be more of an active listener, just like you were in your interviews as an audience member. Because, you when I was watching it, maybe I'm missing the boat, but that's also kind of

indicative because I was trying to think, okay, what's the moral of the story? Why has he chosen or why is this survivor as embodied by you telling me this story? And so I'm constantly thinking about what you're saying and how you're saying it rather than just when you're watching a TV show and you're kind of watching what goes across the screen, which is in an interesting way, it puts me in the position of someone that would

that was listening to a survivor talk and maybe having those same thoughts running through my head at the same time, but then questioning as I am now, whether that was the right thing to do or whether I should have just been listening to what you were saying in the first place.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:11:56.078)
Well, yeah, it would be nice if we theater types, if we could control. Well, anybody who writes, right? Like, come on, understand what I'm saying, you and people, you know, you can't, of course, we know. People understand whatever they understand and assume whatever they assume. But going, think, what I, there is, I, realizing it as I'm speaking, you know, what has permission to be transgressive in theater?

in ways that is a little harder to do and I think in a potentially more effective way than just saying, know, we don't have to listen real well. Or when I tell my story about those professors who told me in 75 that survivors are well-died, you I mean that to be shocking. I mean people to hear somewhere, what? What idiots? You know, why would they do that? You know, I know, you know, at least I anticipate that that will be kind of, you know, provocative.

And I like being provocative in the service I hope of pushing beyond some of our usual expectations. It sort of goes with what we talking about earlier about on the other hand with survivors, if they don't want to talk about something, don't nudge, don't push. So it's not just breaking jars. But if it's useful and not overly, I don't know, hostile, it's provocative.

I I'm a contrarian, you know. I mean, I'd like to provoke up to a point, hopefully in the service. That's why in Remnants, whatever happens, I always include a Q &A, a real discussion. You know, in theater, they often talk about talkbacks, which usually go five or 10 minutes, and the actors come out, and a few questions, and the evening's over. Not unusually.

the discussions that follow a Remnants performance are at least as long as the performance. They may be 40 minutes, they may be an hour. And I love that, right? I mean, that's where the action is. It's in the schmooze. It's in the discussion after as much, and I'd say the same for almost anything we write, whether it's an academic paper or a play or whatever, it's the schmooze. It's a good, know, a serious.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:00.429)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:15.083)
No, 100%. I I wish oftentimes when I'm invited to talk someplace, I wish I could just send the talk ahead of time and show up for an hour and a half of questions. That's the stuff, as you sort of suggest. yeah. I mean, I guess one of the things that's positive or that's beneficial about the format of fiction and theater in that sense is that you don't risk sort of harming the person.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:14:21.122)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:43.307)
You know, that you can, you can, you can let people say, you know, and not, not, the supplies to your play, but I didn't really like the Holocaust survivor. You know, like she seemed like a jerk or whatever, you and it's okay because it's a fictional person, even though that archetype of a person may exist or that, that personality may exist or that response to the Holocaust may exist. But nobody wants to say that a Holocaust survivor is a jerk because again, we have this, the sort of sanctifying of, of, you know, these people.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:14:49.869)
Yeah.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:15:01.742)
Yeah.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:15:08.462)
Right, Yeah, I mean, yes, you can get around. I think that's exactly right. I mean, as it happens in the remnants. Well, there are some, but yeah, but they can be, yeah, no, but I think that's right. I mean, it gives you permission and then, know, play on what.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:19.233)
It doesn't really, I didn't feel like anybody in Remnants was a jerk, but I mean, you know what mean, like...

Waitman Beorn (01:15:30.923)
And if you want to invent somebody for a purpose of, of bringing out, for example, if you wanted to talk about the person in the family, he was not pulling their weight in the camp or, is, or is stealing or whatever, you know, you can do that in a fictional way. And that's fine because they don't actually exist. and you don't have to worry about all the other things because, know, it's, we can, and we can learn the lesson, so to speak, without the actual, again,

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:15:41.848)
Yeah, yeah.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:15:47.459)
That's right.

Right, right, they're not names.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:15:55.598)
That's it.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:15:59.928)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:00.385)
damage or discomfort for a person that actually making them go through it, you know.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:16:04.494)
Yeah, I think it's great. Yeah, I think absolutely it's play I'm working on now, the main character was a real person. Rubenstein, the Magister of the Warsaw Ghetto, who was the ultimate provocateur. He was a trickster. So, yeah, maybe I found my persona. He was a street artist and extremely provocative. But even he eventually...

this is important, show some warts. He doesn't have all the answers either. Even if he was a beloved, beloved figure in the ghetto, he was sort of a trickster for the people. wasn't the court jester. He was like people's jester, you know? And his protagonists in the play is, this is all sort of imagined. They certainly knew of each other, but it's Gunsvike in ghetto who was, you know, Gestapo.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:50.435)
Great.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:17:03.95)
Jewish Gestapo collaborator. So like a kind of ultimate villain in all kinds of ways. And even Gunsvike, it turns out, is not as one dimension as that. And that's what makes theater. mean, it be more complicated. Nevertheless, nevertheless, I'm thinking, well, for me anyway, Rubenstein is a kind of model.

as you know to be a trickster in this world we're in not only then but in the world we're in now to bring us to the present and within the midst of our own catastrophes no we're not in Warsaw ghetto thank god for us but we were in our own madness in my view and as in many others and in fact this play ends with a scene in which

Waitman Beorn (01:17:54.423)
Yes.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:18:02.476)
Rubenstein is already dead, but there's a scene, the final scene is in the present. And a character called the Playwright, whoever that is, and Rubenstein kind of meet up in some undefined future space. And basically the Playwright wants to know, so Rubenstein, like I need some help from you, I need to know like why you did what you did and...

In effect, how I can try to do some of that in our own situation. Women's Dying asks, are you dead? Are you dying? Are you?

some people think so, et cetera. So obviously that's another way of using imagination in some of these figures who are themselves imagined. imagination has become another just big hero of mine in general. mean, and this is what Rubenstein says at one point. says, without imagination, there's just this shit in front of you. That's the way he says it.

There's no future, there's no past, there's just whatever that is. And I'm not talking about distraction or escape. I'm talking about, again, imagining other possibilities, imagining...

what might be, what could be, and even who one is, besides going back to Holocaust context, besides a number, besides a quote unquote category, a victim so identified, besides a thing. So, boy, imagination, which obviously goes with memory, which goes with et cetera, is part of how we survive.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:48.301)
Great.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:20:00.398)
in our own time, let alone whatever.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:01.183)
Absolutely, gosh.

And that's just, it's so much to think about. I think that, gosh, that it's been a really fantastic conversation. really appreciate it because I think it's important for everybody to think about, you know, I mean, obviously when it comes to Holocaust survivors, the specifics of our conversation about how and why people remember, but you you can apply this to your own life and your own family's life, you know, because we all do this. You know, we all tell stories.

in certain ways. And I think that it's really useful and I'm really happy to have this conversation. Before I let you go, I want to ask a question that I ask everybody, which is, you could recommend one book on the Holocaust that's been influential or important to you, what would it be?

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:20:51.426)
Yeah, yeah, it's Sam Casals, who will write our history. I mean, they the book on the Ringelblum archive, Ringelblum himself and his whole circle. Yeah, I mean, that book still blows me away. I mean, there's several, but of course, especially for historians, which is, I keep saying I'm not, but you know, what they did.

and how they did it. know, Rahul Aravach is also a quote hero of mine. you know, there's a book that just came out that's unedited of her own writing. But I just think, you know, that whole context of archive and the context of Jewish Warsaw and the politics and the different groups and the way Ringelblum was able to.

bring people together, et cetera. I you know it. So, yeah, I just think it's...

Waitman Beorn (01:21:52.259)
And for our listeners, just to give you a little background, the Ringelblum archive is a massive series of documents, reports, writings, analyses written by a number of people in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust. Some of them were historians. Ringelblum was an historian. There were economists. There were sociologists. There were journalists.

You know, and it's, it's, it's always, it's always poignant to me because it's, again, we, we don't always put ourselves in a situation, but, know, here's a person that is in the context of an event. And again, it gets back to your conversation, your, your, think in a certain sense to your comment about helplessness, you know, what do we do when we feel helpless? Sometimes we just fall back on the thing that we know how to do. And Wrangel Bloom was an historian. And so he says, well, I'm going to write a history.

This, is the thing that I can do in this moment. And, and they, they create this archive and, they bury it in milk cartons. When it becomes clear that, you know, that the Warsaw ghetto is going to be liquidated destroyed. we found likely most of them. anyway, that's, that's the background of the book, but you should definitely get the book because the book tells the story of this and much, much more detailed and better than I do. again, for everyone else,

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:23:15.854)
Well, yeah, that's it.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:19.703)
Thank you for listening. Please go to Apple podcast, go to Spotify, give us a like and a comment if you're finding this podcast to be useful and compelling. And Hank, again, thank you so much for taking the time to explain this really interesting topic and giving us a way to engage with survivors. That's, think, a more powerful and complex way doing things.

Henry Hank Greenspan (01:23:48.334)
Thank so much. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. It's an honor. indeed, good shrews. So, thanks.