The Railway People

Krakow, situated on the Vistula River,

and dating back to the 7th century.

This is Poland's second largest city.

With its cosmopolitan bars and restaurants,

it's become a magnet for tourists and day-trippers

touring Eastern Europe.

But it hasn't always been so inviting.

Just 70km west of Krakow lies the small town of Oswiecim.

At first glance, you'd never know its secrets.

You'd never know that it played an imposed yet integral role

during the worst chapter in human history.

Over 1.1 million people perished here in the most notorious

of Nazi death camps.

Cattle cars carrying Europe's Jews arrived through the gates

of Birkenau, only then to be ordered out and confronted with the

nightmarish scenario of seeing their families separated then stripped

and murdered in the gas chambers.

This was Auschwitz.

My name is Eva Kor.

I am a survivor of Auschwitz.

A survivor of medical experiments conducted by Dr Josef Mengele.

And now that I am 82 years old, I am trying to survive old age.

Along with her sister, Miriam,

Eva was subjected to a relentless series of operations and experiments

which often left them close to death.

Against all odds, Eva and her sister survived.

In December of 2015,

Eva received an e-mail from Glaswegian songwriter Raymond Meade.

He had been to Auschwitz and was so affected by what he'd encountered

that he'd written some poetry that he wanted Eva to recite

for inclusion in a collection of words and music he was writing

to mark what he had seen.

I had no intention of doing a project,

I'd just always wanted to visit Auschwitz.

It had such a big effect on me and I think it's a sensitive subject

and the best way to approach it -

it took me to come to the idea of an EP of a couple songs and spoken word

stuff and some string arrangements that are now happening on it.

It's going to be called The Railway People.

The first trip I had been there, it was lashing rain, it was pouring.

When we got to Birkenau, and there's a famous watchtower

which stands and overlooks the whole camp.

When I got to the top, it was...

..one of the most frightening things I think I have ever experienced.

There was no-one there, there was nothing.

It just was almost sort of stuck in a moment in time,

nothing had changed.

The view over the camp, over the train line, everything,

I had a flashback to what it must have been like

to be stood there and the evil that happened in that room.

It was sort of palpable, you could feel it.

I came straight back down and I had the idea for the songs straight away

and thought something was stirring.

But I don't know where songs come from but there was definite moment

of, "Get your notepad," and on the flight home

I started to write it and within a day or something I had it.

The basic sort of first version of it was ready.

Is it too Oasis?

It definitely is his chord.

I don't know how a lot of things happened when I went to see it.

It was just... How could this be, how could this happen?

Pondering how people could be so cruel to each other.

And, you know, this isn't 300 or 400 years ago.

This is very, very recent.

I don't know, that was the title of it.

The song is called At The Top Of The Stairs.

But the poem is How Could It Be?

Raymond is friends with viola player Annemarie McGowan,

who leads the Cairn String Quartet.

Like Raymond, Annemarie knew this was no ordinary project.

She visited Auschwitz herself to get in the mind-set and to somehow

musically reflect the ultimate horrors to be found there

at the end of the Second World War.

There's railway tracks the whole way up the right-hand side as you come

in on the road and the footage they show you on the film,

was all these people being shipped in and these trains.

And all I could see was this railway track and this freight train

just going so slowly up beside us and that was just vividly with me.

And when we got through those gates,

the first thing you see is the railway tracks on the ground.

You just see where the trains could go right in.

You are already a bit shocked from the video.

It was a kind of sunny day,

and everything was a little bit surreal about it.

Massive groups of people shuffling in and out of here,

there and everywhere. All these identical-looking houses.

They are all red brick, I don't think I was expecting that.

I think I thought it was going to be some kind of cement.

You visit Auschwitz first and then Birkenau, the killing camp, basically.

And that's really where, I think, that was what inspired Raymond.

But it's definitely almost the most chilling part.

They tell you that the worst part of the tour is much earlier on,

it's the bit where you see the hair of 30,000 people that's kept.

But it's the shoes, you see so many shoes.

You think that that would be the worst bit but it's not,

it's actually Birkenau. It's just such a chilling, chilling place.

I sent a poem out to Eva Kor.

To my surprise, she came back to me and said...

Dear Raymond, first of all you are the first singer/musician to contact

me for a unique project and I want to thank you for thinking about me.

It could be a most uniquely inspiring project and I will

cooperate with you to help you create a most meaningful song.

I said, "Would you like to do voice-over in a song?"

And she said, "Yeah, I'd like that."

I sent the song to her, she liked that, too.

We're going to meet in July at Auschwitz-Birkenau where she lost

her family, to do a reading of this poem.

After months of e-mails,

the day has finally arrived for Raymond to meet the extraordinary

Eva Mozes Kor and her son, Alex, in Krakow.

-Hi, Eva.

-Hello.

-Nice to meet you at last.

How are you feeling?

I am feeling pretty good.

-Sit down.

-Nice to meet you.

-I'm Alex.

-Raymond. Nice to meet you.

You all right? How are you doing?

You're tall and young.

Do you think so? I feel old.

I was 34 on Friday so I'm getting old.

34.

I am more than twice your age.

So when did you get here?

We got here yesterday. Yesterday afternoon.

I was in Spain, playing some music in Spain

on Friday - Thursday and Friday.

And I flew in yesterday so...

You look very nice.

-Thank you, so do you.

-I won't check your tattoos out.

Oh, no, I hide them.

You hide them.

That's terrible, I'll sit like that all night.

How did you come up with the idea that you wanted to meet me

and do a song about Auschwitz?

I guess songwriting is how I've dealt with my life.

It's how I tell people how I feel.

I'm not very good at talking...

What touched you about Auschwitz?

When I got to Birkenau, it was...

It took my breath away.

I couldn't believe the organisation of it.

The size of it. The silence of it.

You know, I felt a presence.

Normal people, so to speak, did that.

Yeah. Exactly.

It was more... It was a real human issue for me,

I couldn't believe people could do that.

Art brings to life, music more so than drawings.

I can see children sometimes drawing Stars of David, swastikas,

barbed wire.

I guess that's a very primitive way of expressing themselves.

I am not sure of what we want a piece of art to do.

What kind of a response to we want?

I would say I am definitely against any art that is very scary.

Very correct in depicting deaths.

Because I think that evokes anger.

I can remember at the age of five or six,

knowing that something bad happened to both my parents -

my dad is also a survivor.

And I just thought that was normal.

And I didn't think any of her ideas were all that great cos I was

a 14-year-old know-it-all, and so really until...

..I was in my late 20s, I didn't think it was a big deal.

Eva Kor has dedicated her life to educating the naysayers

and youngsters about the evils of the Holocaust.

Despite failing health, she undertakes lecture tours around the world,

from schools to universities to synagogues.

Eva describes her time in Auschwitz with her late twin sister, Miriam,

mesmerising audiences,

leaving them in disbelief at the human cruelty she witnessed.

She also tells them about her own path that led her to controversially

forgiving the perpetrators so she could move on with her life.

Alex took her to one lecture in a school.

Eighth graders don't have a great attention span,

and there wasn't a sound for over an hour because they were just...

Every word she said was just an amazing experience for them

and I just couldn't believe it. So that's when I kind of realised

that there was something special about the way...

Her ability to capture a young audience,

and I think because of that -

and I've always been involved -

but because of that I saw that this was something really special,

and so from that point on for the last 26 years or so,

I've been very involved.

How do you start on forgiveness?

You are tired of hurting.

You are tired of being angry.

And most people will get, eventually, tired of that.

Take a piece of paper.

Write a letter to the person or people who have hurt you.

And you can say in this letter anything you want to.

At the end, you must say, "I forgive you," and you must mean those words,

otherwise it has no merit.

This generation of maybe

18-plus is very ignorant about World War II.

And the best way, in my opinion, to reach them,

is through music they can relate to.

So I think it's very good, very powerful and very well written,

it comes from the heart and any time something comes from the heart,

and it's not...

His words are not scary and the music I have heard

in the trailer of...

..People Of The Railroad, it was beautiful music.

So I think it will hopefully... That the young...

..people who need to be educated will listen to it

and get enough involved to want to know more.

I'm looking forward to visiting tomorrow with you.

I think it will be really special.

Do you feel different when you go back? Is it the same

every time when you go?

To me, when I remember somebody, I remember the last time I saw them.

That is an image that is very deeply ingrained in my soul.

And when I think about my parents, particularly in Auschwitz,

and my two older sisters, that is the last place I saw them

on that selection platform and they just disappeared from

the face of this earth.

So when I go back, I always relive the moment.

They are very clear to me as I am standing there.

And that was the reason that three years ago, I wrote,

that I was saying in my lecture I never got to say goodbye

to my mother nor my father, who disappeared before my mother.

And so I wrote a letter of goodbye and forgiveness to both of them

that I read right there on the selection platform.

-And it felt very good.

-Yeah.

-That's really moving.

-Every year, we have something else.

Yes, that's a poem tomorrow, I guess.

I'm looking forward to it. I can't thank you enough for doing it.

-You're welcome.

-It's a real honour to meet you.

-Did you sleep good?

-No.

-What's your problem?

-To be honest, my problem is we have a pub crawl.

-What?

-It's called a pub crawl and it's when a group of, usually,

British tourists...

..go to every single bar in our street until 5am.

Why?

I don't know why. I don't understand it.

They were having a good time but we didn't sleep.

I have good times without going high on any alcohol.

I am just high on life.

All good?

As good as that will get.

Did you say last night this was your 18th time to go back today, is it?

Yes, this is the 18th time since I was liberated.

How many times have you visited Auschwitz now?

This is the fifth.

-The fifth?

-Yeah.

What is that, the yearly pilgrimage to Auschwitz?

Not quite. I was just interested in it, I felt...

You can read the books and you can only do so much, but I think going...

So you want more and more details?

Yeah, I wanted more and more details.

But that's in one year.

-In less than one year?

-Yeah.

So on the weekend, you say, "OK, let's go to Auschwitz."

Yeah. My wife doesn't think it's a good time, you know...

Yes, and what did she think?

She couldn't believe it. She was the same.

She thought it was just unbelievable.

What is unbelievable is that anybody survived and remained sane.

Whenever Eva visits Auschwitz, she's always recognised,

and people want to hear her story first-hand.

This visit was no exception.

The crowds soon gathered.

We got down from the cattle car and I think, as you can see,

this little car, 100 people in it.

For four days.

No water.

And then the doors opened,

my mother grabbed my twin sister Miriam and me by the hand,

I think she thought that as long as she could hold on to us,

that somehow she could protect us.

It was thousands of people all around us,

pushing, yelling, shoving.

I looked around and tried to figure out what on earth is this place?

And I realised that my father and two older sisters -

I had two older sisters, Edit and Aliz - disappeared in the crowd.

Never ever did I see them again.

So it was you, your parents, your twin sister and two older sisters?

Older sisters. We arrived together.

And then we were holding on to mother and the Nazi was running

right in the middle, yelling in German, "Zwillinge, Zwillinge."

"Twins, twins."

And he noticed us and demanded to my mother, asked, "Are they twins?"

And she didn't know what to say. She said, "Is that good?"

He said, "Yes," and my mother said, "Yes."

I remember seeing her arms stretched out in despair, she was pulled away.

And I always remembered that I never even said goodbye to her.

I didn't understand...

..that this would be the last time we would see her and it only took

30 minutes from the time we get down from the cattle car to the time

that the whole family was gone.

Eva's parents and older sisters, Edit and Aliz,

were killed on arrival at Auschwitz Camp II-Birkenau.

90% of the 1,100,000 victims during the camp's five years of operation

were Jewish, like Eva's family.

This custom-built killing camp was created by the Nazis to make

the mass killing of Jews, Poles, gypsies, prisoners of war,

homosexuals and other ethnic groups more efficient.

When the horrors were revealed in January 1945,

the first day of liberation at Auschwitz,

the Russian Red Army found 600 corpses, plus 7,500 alive,

awaiting the final solution.

Eva and sister Miriam were among those survivors waiting,

after ten months of being used as guinea pigs by Dr Josef Mengele

as part of his twin children medical experiments programme.

The commitment, bravery and strength of Eva Kor's survival

under the harshest conditions still drives her today.

I need to go. I don't know...

Where are you? Am I talking?

You started talking and then they videotaped it.

So you just work to make the world better, do something in your life,

when you see something wrong, stand up against it.

You are not guilty for anything that happened

but you will bear responsibility if you let other bad things happen.

And the world is in big trouble.

-OK.

-You guys ready?

-Whenever you're ready.

-I am.

-Yeah, OK.

-OK.

"How could it be?

"Read brick walls, uninviting yet familiar.

"A labyrinth of screams and stolen youth.

"And stolen ageing and stolen life.

"Blue and white shrouds consuming memories.

"For all who cry, for the taken of the Shoah."

We are going to take a selfie with you.

OK, you stand here.

Let's see what we can see.

You can stay in the background, that's fine.

Yeah.

OK, smile back there.

No, you want here, here...

With the poem recorded, it's time to go.

But Eva has one more thing she wants to show Raymond.

Where is Raymond? Come on, Raymond.

This is where the gas chambers were.

So people probably would be walked around into the forest and then...

-OK?

-And then...

..people would be walked down there.

It was divided in two.

The first part was where they took off their clothes and that part

right here was the gas chamber.

And then the bodies were taken to the crematorium...

..lifted and taken to be burned.

After showing Raymond the gas chamber

in which her family were killed, it was time to delineate the philosophy

behind forgiving Dr Mengele.

It started with a letter.

I went home, closed the bedroom door, picked up a dictionary,

looked for nasty words.

I made a whole list of them and then I read them out clear and loud.

And I said, in spite of all that, "I forgive you."

It made me feel very good that I, the little victim,

had the power even over the Angel of Death.

So if I have the power over the Angel of Death and I wasn't

hurting anybody, it was an interesting thought that he,

Mengele, could never change my forgiving him.

-No, couldn't affect it.

-No.

-Your decision.

I am in charge of it.

Yeah. It must've been really powerful for you.

It was a very powerful feeling. It was a very powerful feeling.

Now if I forgive Mengele, I decided to forgive everybody who has ever hurt me.

So that is a way, the forgiveness idea again.

See, if every brick here could speak...

..of what they witnessed, what a story they could tell.

I didn't get closure from the point of view that I could forgive

and heal myself and look back at Auschwitz and what happened here...

..not as a tragedy but as a victory.

Because I am no longer hunted...

..or hurt...

emotionally, for the rest of my life, for what happened here,

and realising that I cannot change the past, no-one can.

But the way I can deal with it as a...

Telling myself as a point of strength,

if I've survived Auschwitz,

if I survived being almost dead

in the barrack of the living dead and crawling on the barrack floor,

and on top of that, I can forgive them...

..then I can heal myself and go on.

And I believe that I do deserve that right to live free...

..as I claim it for every human being should have that right.

Young people who never, ever thought about listening to a song

about Auschwitz, but because it is a popular song

created by a young artist, they will listen to it

and touch them and they want to go beyond it.

The whole idea why this song is written is to reach young people.

And then both Raymond, me, have accomplished an important project.

# All the people, all the broken hearted

# All the people with their faith departed

# For the parents that never fade from memory... #

"Red brick walls, uninviting yet familiar.

"A labyrinth of screams and stolen youth.

"And stolen ageing and stolen life.

"And stolen happiness and stolen intimacies.

"Things I take for granted.

"A warm summer night.

"There is victim in all of us.

"We should always be blue and white shrouds consuming memories.

"For all who cry, for the taken of the Shoah.

"For all who see numbers in the dark

"and teach themselves the wrongs of the past.

"To determine future failings

"all reconciled by human solutions,

"human compassion and reason,

"never selection.

"And sympathy and goodness

"and wanting for life

"and moments afforded to us by breathing.

"A wreath atop a train line is silent,

"but for the wind, whispering,

"all it's ever seen, it cries for the lost,

"it tells you if you listen,

"How could it be otherwise?"