The Effect on Us - Eliane Goldstein's Podcast: Recent Episodes
Eliane Goldstein
The Effect on Us is a podcast on controversial subjects for people of all ages (kids and teenagers are especially invited to listen). The first season is about the Holocaust and the ties it has to people nowadays. You will be able to hear the stories of Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren and the effects the Holocaust had on people from generation one to generation three. The host is Eliane Goldstein, a 13 year old young lady from Montreal, Canada, who is interested in raising awareness and educating people on controversial issues and topics without sugar-coating it.
In this episode I am talking to Joseph (Joe) Sabrin, one of the youngest Holocaust Survivors, who was born on December 21, 1942, in the Vilna Ghetto, in Lithunia .
Years later Joe wrote the book "We dared to live" a story of survival and courage during the dark days of WWII based on his father's memoir.
In this episode, I am talking to Lee Sterling who tells me how his family escaped and how in 1939 Jews, gypsies, communists, and gays - everyone that the Germans wanted to annihilate, walked towards Bordeaux France so that they can run away from the Nazis.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes the Portuguese consul-general in the French city of Bordeaux , France, he defied the orders of the Salazar Portoguese regime, and in June 1940 issued visas and passports to an undetermined number of Jews and other refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.
For this, Sousa Mendes was punished by the Salazar regime.
For his work to save jews, Sousa Mendes received the honour Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Va’Shem.
In this episode I am talking to Marlene who tells me how her family escaped from the Nazis from Poland to Uzbeskistan and Siberia.
In this episode I am talking to Eve Kugler who tells me about her childhood during the war and how when she was 6 years old, a uniformed Nazi solider grabbed her from her mother and started swinging her around. After a few minutes he congratulated her mother for "having the perfect Aryan child".
Tune in to her story.
In this episode I am talking to Ruth Hubner Cohen who tells me about her survival. Her mother and her were starving and without much choice, her mother used to sneak in food after dark, and put herself in danger.
One time dogs chased her and she was so scared that she not only stopped trying to bring in food but she feared dogs for the rest of her life.
In this episode I am talking to Frank who went into hiding and had to take care of himself since he was 14 years old, after his parents were taken away.
How did he survive?
Tune in to listen to the clever idea that he had .
In this episode I am taking to Julius Maslovat who tells me how his family went to hide in a bunker when his mother was pregnant because she was scares that the Nazis will shoot her.
His story during the Holocaust can be found in the film: Why Am I Here? A Child's Journey Through the Holocaust.
In this episode I am talking to Sally Singer (99 years old), Anne Novak (98 years old) and Ruth Zimmer (94 years old), who together with with their brother Sol Fink (96 years old), all live in Winnipeg, Canada, and are likely the oldest living set of Holocaust survivor siblings anywhere in the world.
The four siblings spent their youth in Sanok, Poland, near the Carpathian Mountains.
What happened when the war started? Tune in.
Tune in to their amazing stories.
In this episode I am talking to Rachel who was born in Siberia. Her mother received no prenatal care and she weighted less than 2 pounds (=900 grams).
Later, when she was still very young, about 100 children, herself included, were put on open freight carts and shipped to the next prison. Because of the cold weather and exposure, only 10 children survived.
Tune in to listen to her story.
In this episode I am talking to Max Eisen who lived through a 13-day death march from Auschwitz to Loslau and there he was loaded onto metal boxcars made for transporting coal and sent to Mauthausen and then from Melk he participated in a three-day march in the mountains to Ebensee until he was liberated on May 6, 1945.
Max Eisen is the author of the book "By Chance Alone", a story of courage, determination, and resiliency. He received the Order of Canada award on December 29th, 2021 for his contributions to Holocaust education, and for his promotion of transformational dialogue on human rights, tolerance and respect.
The Order of Canada is one of the highest civilian honours.
In this episode I am talking to Gina Roitman who was born close to a displaced persons camp after the second world war.
Her entire life, her mother kept telling her chilling stories about a woman she calls the Nazi Midwife. A few years ago, after her mother died, Gina decided to go and investigate and found out the horrifying truth.
Join me.
In this episode I am talking to Tana who was was born in Berlin and a few years later, when she was about 4 years old, she spent a year in Theresienstadt concentration camp and was one of the 100 children to survive that camp out of 15000 children.
Tune in.
In this episode I am talking to Maxwell Smart who was just nine when the war began. Born in the Ukrainian town of Buczacz - then part of Poland - had his life turned upside down in 1939.
When Maxwell went into hiding, among others, he and a friend helped save a baby. His friend died a few days later and Maxwell carried the guilt for decades over his friend's death.
His amazing story was written into a book that was released on May 2, 2022 by Harper Collins "The Boy in the Woods".
Maxwell is also a very talented artist who paints a lot about freedom and escape as ongoing themes in his explosions of color.
https://www.artbymaxwell.com/about-us/
In this episode I am talking to Muguette who tells me how she and her mother and brother escaped the war by hiding in different places, including cutting off their yellow stars and riding the metro in Paris with German soldiers.
This is the one year anniversary to The Effect of Us podcast.
In this episode I am talking to Martiza who tells me how she and her family jumped off a bridge to escape the Nazis.
I also had the honor and privilege to interview Maritza to The Museum of Jewish Heritage(New York) Yom Ha'Shoa 2022 ceremony.
Tune in to the fascinating story.
In this episode I am talking to Rose who tells me how she escaped the war with her mother from Rzeszow ghetto, where everyone around including most of her family were put on trains to Belzec to be gassed in the extermination camp.
Rose and her mother escaped the ghetto the morning before they were supposed to appear in the square to be sent to Belzec and hid in the cemetery before escaping to Warsaw.
Tune in to her story.
In this special episode I collaborated with Mayor Brownstein and we interviewed togther Mrs. Gyrogyi Nemes who was 16 years old when the Nazis invaded Hungary.
This episode is also available with a video at this link:
https://youtu.be/5Y8fLImS2DY
In this Episode I am talking to Jack Adler who was 10 years old when the Nazis occupied his home town in Poland and has vivid memories of what happened from their occupation until he was liberated by American soldiers while on the Dachau Death March.
In this special mini series that will have 4 episodes, I am talking to Ben Lesser who survived 2 death trains, several Ghettos, 2 death marches, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, until he was liberated in Dachaua 5 years later.
Ben has funded the Zachor foundation and has dedicated his time to Holocaust education.
For more information about Zachor, check out the link:
https://www.zachorfoundation.org/zachor-foundation/about-the-founder/
Tune in to part 3 of 4 of his story.
In this special mini series that will have 4 episodes, I am talking to Ben Lesser who survived 2 death trains, several Ghettos, 2 death marches, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, until he was liberated in Dachaua 5 years later.
Ben has funded the Zachor foundation and has dedicated his time to Holocaust education.
For more information about Zachor, check out the link:
https://www.zachorfoundation.org/zachor-foundation/about-the-founder/
Tune in to part 2 of 4 of his story.
In this special mini series that will have 4 episodes, I am talking to Ben Lesser who survived 2 death trains, several Ghettos, 2 death marches, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, until he was liberated in Dachaua 5 years later.
Ben has funded the Zachor foundation and has dedicated his time to Holocaust education.
For more information about Zachor, check out the link:
https://www.zachorfoundation.org/zachor-foundation/about-the-founder/
Tune in to the fourth and final part of his outstanding story.
In this special mini series that will have 4 episodes, I am talking to Ben Lesser who survived 2 death trains, several Ghettos, 2 death marches, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, until he was liberated in Dachaua 5 years later.
Ben has funded the Zachor foundation and has dedicated his time to Holocaust education.
For more information about Zachor, check out the link:
https://www.zachorfoundation.org/zachor-foundation/about-the-founder/
Tune in to part 1 of 4 of his story.
In this episode, I am talking to Rena who tells me how when she was about 7 years old, her mother and her two older brothers were deported and murdered. She had to pretend to be a 10 years old boy in order to survive with her father in the camp.
When Rena's father was murdered, she was left alone.
In the various camps she was interned she was adopted by different women, but they all died.
Tune in to her story.
Join me as I interview Steen who lived in Denmark during the war, where Jews made up only 0.2 percent of the country’s population and were well-integrated into Danish society at the time.
Steen and his family were arrested and deported to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, where he was separated from his parents.
Tune in to hear his story.
In this episode I am talking to Sami who was subjected to Nazi medical experimentation in his early years.
Sami was also recently interviewed by Fox News about the statement that Whoopi Goldberg said that "Holocaust is not about race" for which ABC News suspended her for 2 weeks for her “wrong and hurtful comments about Jews and the Holocaust".
Link to the interview: https://www.foxnews.com/media/holocaust-survivors-whoopi-goldberg-race
Tune in.
Join me for this special episode in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, where I collaborated with the Mayor of my town, Mitchell Brownstein and interviewed Mr. Leslie Veretes.
This interview was recorded on January 26, 2022 on Zoom (with video), was released on January 27, 2022 and is available to watch on YoutTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rgCDld5Pr0&list=PLIPWrqchWq1jhLi4MTV-7uhl6So31LXeK&index=9
In this episode I am talking to Paul who was born in Austria.
When the war started his family escaped to Belgium where he was hid in a Catholic boarding school in Jamoigne, Belgium where only 2 people knew he was Jewish.
In this episode I am taking to Sanne Kalter DeWitt who tells me about her experiences in Germany during the Nazi regime before the war, during the the war as well as the anti-Semitism she experiences in the USA after the war.
Tune in to her fascinating story.
In this episode I am talking to Eva Perlman who tells me about her story in Germany and France during the war and how a "series of miracles", as she calls it, saved her.
Tune in.
In this episode I am talking to Aviva Cohen who tells me about all of her names, her time during the war and the 4 women who raised her and who she considered to be her mothers.
Tune in to her fascinating story.
In this episode I am talking to Charles Heller.
Charles was a child of a mixed marriage. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was unaware of his Jewish roots, even after his father escaped to join the British army and fifteen members of his family disappeared. Before his Christian mother was taken away to a slave labor camp, she hid him on a farm to protect him from deportation to a death camp.
Did he shoot a Nazi soldier? Tune in to find out.
Join me in this episode as Leo Roos tells me about his survival story in the Netherlands and how one day 2 young and drunk German soldiers, open the locked cellar they were hiding in and let him and his parents escape.
Tune in to listen to his story.
In this episode I am talking to Esther Adler who survived the war in Germany and witnessed Kristallnacht, that is the Night of Broken Glass. Kristallnacht was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party in Germany on 9–10 November 1938.
Esther does not want to use the word Holocaust and she prefers using the word Shoah, find out her explanation as to why.
In this episode, joining me from Tokyo Japan is Janos Cegledy who is a Holocaust survivor from Hungary and a world renowned pianist. He has been living in Japan for the past 30 years.
He tells me about his story and war experience in Hungary. The over overcrowded conditions in the ghetto, the terrible sanitation conditions, the incredible stench...and how he survived.
Join me as I interview George Berci, who is 101.5 years old , an award winning surgeon who is retired but still an active part time researcher on liver disease at his clinic in Los Angels.
He talks to me about his childhood in the war in Hungary. Because he was Jewish, he was not able to get in to any high school or later to get accepted to the faculty of medicine in University.
In this episode I am taking to John and Amy, the co-funders of KAVOD.
From their website:
KAVOD is an American non-profit organization whose mission is to provide emergency aid to Holocaust Survivors in need so that they can live the remainder of their lives comfortably and with dignity.
It has been estimated that there are 80,000 Survivors living in the United States and that over 1/3rd are living at or near poverty levels. It is unconscionable and unacceptable that these courageous people, who’ve endured so much already, are living their remaining years struggling with day to day essential needs.
100% of all donations received by KAVOD goes to the Survivors. They have raised 7 million dollars since its start.
https://kavodensuringdignity.com/
See English version of this same episode number 23b (English) in a separate release.
Un premier: The Effect on Us en français!!!
Pour cet épisode, j'ai voyagé de Montréal à Paris afin de rencontrer Rachel Krolik, la veuve de Joël Krolik.
Joël était le cousin germain de ma grand-mère paternelle, un enfant caché pendant la 2e guerre mondiale.
Rachel est la dernière rescapée de la Shoah de ma famille qui est toujours en vie.
Join me in this episode as I speak to Thomas Hecht about his and his family's fleeing story to escape from Europe during World War 2, and survive. His country had become a very scary place with a lot of anti-Semitic attacks.
Join me in this episode as I speak to the psychologist Judith Nemes Black, who was a toddler survivor herself.
Together we explore if the effects the Holocaust had on next generations can be considered to be a trauma?
Join me in this episode as I first speak to Dida Berku about the story of her father Jack Yanku Berku and how his best friend denounced him to the Nazis who caught him.
Then I spoke to Dida's mother Nora Berku who is 98 years old and she tells me more of her story.
In this episode I am talking to Ted who tells me about the few concentration camps he was taken to, the death march, and how the Germans treated Jews worse than they treated their dogs: "I wished that the Germans will treat me as well as they treated their dogs, but they never did".
In this episode I am talking to Eva Kuper who was a hidden child survivor of the Holocaust and tells us how 90% of the Jewish population in Poland were murdered during World War 2.
Eva’s mother was deported to Treblinka where she was murdered alongside countless others, a fate that the infant Eva avoided because of the fortitude of her mother.
How did she escape? Who saved her and how she connected with her savior 60 years later?
Tune in and listen to her story.
In this episode I am talking to Ilona Toth, who is 100 years old.
Ilona tried to shield her 2 children their whole life from her story.
While I met her, she was having a hard time hearing me, and her daughter Judith Toth helped translate the questions to Hungarian for her.
But she was also having a hard time telling me her story, near her daughter, Judith, even though her daughter is 60+.
In this episode I am talking to Henry and his daughter Shoshana Ruttner about his survival story when he was 14 years old, that includes the rising of antisemitism in Czechoslovakia before World War 2, his time at the camp and how he managed to escape from Auschwitz after a couple of years.
In this episode I am talking to Dana about her survival story. Among other horrors, she was taken away by a refugee family who starved and humiliated her. She was restrained, abused and held against her will. She eventually broke free and managed to escape. She was placed in a Russian Orthodox orphanage and was reunited with her parents one year later.
In this episode I am talking to Johnny, who during the Holocaust was a prisoner in several forced labour and concentration camps. He survived Auschwitz, where his family died in the gas chambers. He was chosen to go to the crematorium by Doctor Mengele, but was saved once by a Polish director of school and later on by the Polish underground in Auschwitz.
After Auschwitz, he survived 5 months on death marches and 4 different camps.
In this episode, I am talking to Lisl who was always very proud to be Jewish and survived a few concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, she is 95 years old and asked that I not refer to her as a Holocaust survivor but rather call her a witness to history - such an interesting approach!
In this episode, I am talking to Tommy who was an only child and survived the war alone. In the ghetto he worked on different tasks like carrying bodies and burying them. He also was able to act as a courier and get in and out of the ghetto to feed other hungry orphans, thanks to the Swiss consulate.
When the war was over, he had to lie about his age, and make himself 4 years younger, so he can apply to enter Canada who was accepting orphans until the age of 18.
In this episode I am talking to Dori, who as a child in the Netherlands, hid alone (without her family) in a system called "the underground", in different places, with people she did not know.
How did she do it? What are the underground? Tune in to find out.
In this episode I am talking to Ellen De Jonge Tissenbaum about her survival story from the Netherlands hiding on the farm of her father's best friend, a non-Jewish mayor of a small town with 8 children. During and after the war Ellen lost her Jewish identity....tune in to find out if and how she re-discovered it.
In this episode I am talking to Bill whose mother was forced to leave him during a selectia (a selection in the ghetto) and he was raised by his aunt first inside a double wall, then on a farm and in the forest for 2 years.
Join my conversation with Linda to hear about her father and paternal grandparents' escape story from Lithuania, by benefiting from the Chiune Sugihara's visa.
Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who was stationed in Lithuania during WW2. Sugihara helped thousands of Jews flee Europe by ignoring his orders and issuing thousands of transit visas to Japan, all while risking his job and the lives of his family.
In this espisode I am talking to Sheryl Silver Ochayon from Yad Vashem about Righteous Among the Nations (in Hebrew: חֲסִידֵי אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם, ḥasidei ummot ha`olam ).
Righteous Among the Nations is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis for altruistic reasons.
When Yad Vashem, the Shoah Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, was established in 1953 by the Knesset (the Israeli Parliment), one of its tasks was to commemorate the "Righteous Among the Nations".
How many Righteous Among the Nations are there? Join me to find out.
In this episode I am talking to Marcel and Miriam Zielinski, a married couple who met after the war. Each of their stories is intruging.
Marcel was liberated at the age of 10 and walked with an orphanage about 100 kms from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Krakow to look for his parents after the war.
Miriam was very young (3 years) and hid with her parents during the War in the attic of one of her father's patients.
Join us to hear their stories.
In this episode I am talking to Fishel Philip Goldig who has one regret in his life, that the Nazis stole his childhood. Fishel was saved from murder by laying down diagonally under a mattress in a barn, while the Nazis shot dead his aunt and cousin who were hiding not far from him in the same barn. Was it luck or divine intervention?Tune in to find out. Fishel co-launched a book in May 2021 about his story and often talks to children and adults about his survival.
In this episode I am talking to Mila Sanberg-Mesner who was 16 years old when she jumped off a death train with her sister and cousin and was saved by a German man who was in love with one of her sisters.
How did she, her two sisters and cousin survive? Join us to hear Mila.
In this episode I am talking to Sidney Zoltak who survived the war and still keeps in touch with the family who saved his family by letting them hide for 14 months in an underground bunker on their farm. Sidney has dedicated his life to educating people about the Holocaust, he wrote 2 books and is a regular leader-survivor on the Montreal delegation of the March of the Living.
Join us to listen to his fascinating story.
In this first episode, I am interviewing Jordana (Schoenfox) Hapner, who was 12.5 years old, (just a little bit younger than me) when she got locked out of the ghetto and could not return to see her family.
Jordana takes us on her incredulous solo survival journey.
Her courage and story will amaze you.
In this episode I am talking to George Reinitz who was 12 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz. He lied about his age so he can stay with his father and that ended up saving his life.
When the war ended George, still 12 years old, was the only member of his immediate family who survived.
How did he survive? Join us.