- They marched them to a local brewery which was surrounded by a big brick wall.

And inside that brewery, they had a Nazi officer who selected people.

Of course, no one knew what he was doing.

So he was selecting people to go left and right and left and right.

And I was with my mother and younger brother.

And they put us over to one side, all three of us.

And for some reason, I had this piece of paper on me and I showed him this piece of paper that I had worked for the Nazi mayor.

And then he grabbed me and pushed me to the other side.

And that was the last time that I saw my mother on that day.

(typewriter tapping) (soft reflective music) - The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education was founded in 1993, by two of our local Holocaust survivors, Jack Mandelbaum and Isak Federman.

They were interested in making sure that Holocaust education remained present in our community.

Jack had been participating in a sport with a friend and that friend asked him, what games he played in the concentration camps.

And it was at that moment that Jack realized that there was a significant gap in public knowledge about the Holocaust.

So Jack and Isak had this goal of ensuring that MCHE would perpetuate not only the history of the Holocaust, but explore the lessons of the Holocaust.

And now, where we're at in Holocaust education, there's a pretty significant amount of knowledge.

And our goal is to make sure that there's more understanding of that knowledge, that people can take a survivor's testimony and understand it in the context of the history but have an empathetic response to what this event meant in that survivor's life, that there's an impact in our world.

And so our work now is ensuring that there is not only knowledge, but understanding and impact as we move forward to try to make the world a better place.

(reflective music) (riveting music) - [Reporter] As still-resisting German forces are rolled back, Allied Army press forward on all fronts toward the heart of Germany.

Gigantic traps are sprung along the Moselle and in the Saar, as the Russians cross the Oder and the American 1st Army smashes beyond the Rhine.

As the American troops approached the Rhine, they freed thousands of Russian and Polish prisoners forced into labor battalions by the Nazis.

Now and into captivity and new allied friends.

(reflective music) (film reeling) - One morning, we woke up and the Nazi flag was gone.

And we didn't know what was happening and all the guards were gone.

We opened up the gates.

My friend and I left and we drove not knowing where we were going but we just followed the road.

And we wound up in the woman's concentration camp where they didn't even know that the war was over.

This was on May 7th, 1945.

So actually, we, my friend and I, became the liberators of this woman's concentration camp.

- As learners, we get to the point of liberation and we assume they've been saved.

They have survived.

Their life is going to return to whatever new normal is and that they're okay.

That's where we stop listening.

But if we take just another moment and listen to their testimonies a bit further, what we hear is that, that moment of liberation was one of the happiest moments of their lives.

- I went in, on a farm, to get away from the buildings because of the shooting.

A day later, the American Army came in, in full blast.

And that was the day of liberation.

April 14, 1945.

I called it my second birthday.

- Everybody was dancing.

Everybody went, the soldiers had liberated.

People went to them, kissed them.

And some were, you think, okay, now it is over.

It was not over.

Really, because there are no connection points anymore for life.

- We were happy and we were sad.

We didn't know where we were going, what our home will be and really, what to do.

We were stripped.

We could stay in the camp, if we wanted to, but we had to have some kind of a plan.

(pensive music) - [Reporter] This is what Europe's like, now that the war is over and the Germans are beaten.

These were a few of the millions of people who were once labor slaves of the Nazis and who are now trying desperately to get home, home to a little farm in Poland, home to a tiny coastal village in Normandy, home to Leningrad, 3000 miles away.

To the Allied Military Government, they are known as displaced persons and not until they reach their various countries, will there, again, be order in Europe.

- For many people, that journey is going to lead to learning that they are sole survivors of their family or potentially, of their entire community.

So the enormous psychological trauma of finding out that you are alone in the world, most survivors, certainly not all, there are absolutely exceptions, but most survivors are in their teens through their early twenties.

That is the demographic range of the majority of people who survived the Holocaust.

(reflective music) - The liberation for me, it was happy and sad.

I should say, sad, 'cause I lost everybody.

And then I saw some people from Greece.

I say, well, is my brothers alive?

No, they took them, the crematoria.

I still don't believe it.

I still now, it seems to me like I'm going to hear my brother's voice, gonna say, Alegre, I'm alive.

I can't believe that my brothers, again, I can't believe even now, that my brothers, they are... Dead.

It's impossible.

There was fighters, young boys.

(sighs) - They have lost generations on both sides of them.

They have lost their grandparents and their parents and they've lost any younger siblings and the generation that are still children.

Many of them did try to go home in that quest for finding any survivor from their family.

Primarily, they had been liberated in the West.

They had been liberated in camps like Buchenwald and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, but they were largely from the East, themselves.

They were Poles or Hungarians.

And so they had to make their way across war-torn Europe.

So it's a fraught journey to move from Western Europe in the American or the British occupation zone to go back to your hometown, in Poland or Hungry, to try to find a surviving relative.

There, they are often met with local anti-Semitism, people who had been their neighbors, non-Jews, who were not pleased to see them returning.

- There were a lot of anti-Semitic and antisemitism existed in Poland, even after the war.

You know, it didn't diminish.

I mean, you know, it's just, some of them got more power after the war because they blamed the Jewish people for everything, for the war, for their problems, for everything.

So a lot of Jewish people were blamed for all that, regardless.

- At that point, they attempted to come back West where the Western allies, the British and the Americans, had set up displaced persons camps.

- [Reporter] Here, a GI, attached to AMG, interviews men who've lost their homes and their families and arranges to send them and as many others as possible back to one of the hundreds of displaced persons camps, which already have been set up throughout Europe.

In peace as in war, English, Russians, French, Belgians and Americans are working together operating this displaced persons camp.

The cooperation and unity that brought about victory is helping to bring order out of the suffering and chaos created by Hitler.

- Those earliest renditions of the camp were operating under military operations, military law.

So the survivors were co-mingled with other displaced, non-Jewish displaced persons from Europe.

They were locked into the camps.

They could only access food at certain times during the day.

And for people who had been through this very unique trauma of the Holocaust, where they had not had autonomy, where they had not had access to food, where they had not been able to make decisions that resulted in an outcome that they chose, this was unacceptable.

They lobbied the authorities at the displaced persons camps and it got the attention of men like Dwight Eisenhower who was the head of the military in Europe.

He is sending information back through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to Truman and it reaches Truman and he has some understanding that something's got to be done.

They don't know what, but he commissions Earl Harrison to go and run a study of the displaced persons camps in Europe and to provide a written report back to Truman.

What Harrison finds is that the Jews suffered something unique and singular, and that they need to be recognized as a very specific subset among the displaced persons.

(tense music) So his recommendations include the establishment of Jewish displaced persons camps, a removal of the military authority from those camps where there will be a more civilian administration of those processes.

- So we had weddings.

We had dances after the war in displaced persons camp.

Someone even opened up a sidewalk cafe where they had, in the summertime, they had music and dances and someone served tea or coffee.

And they started businesses immediately after the war.

- While they were looking for surviving family members, they were making new friends among the survivors.

They were finding partners.

And we hear all sorts of stories of survivors who met their partner on one day and potentially within a week, they were married.

- Went back to the English zone, to Bergen-Belsen, and there I met my future husband.

After the camp in Bergen-Belsen, you know, from the DP camp, I moved to, because my husband and his family, they went to Bad Nauheim to the American zone, which was a better zone to go on looking on the future, if you wanted to get out of Germany.

- You hear stories of survivors who would share wedding gowns.

They would gather the silk from paratrooper parachutes and one or another of the ladies would put together a gown.

And then multiple ladies would share that same gown through the course of a day or several days, while several marriages were happening.

We have a wonderful story of, among our local survivors, three brothers who survived and found each other.

- So the three brothers had one, we had the one wedding under a canopy with a rabbi.

This was already on the American zone.

And all, a lot of American-Jewish and I'm Jewish, came to look at the wedding from three brothers in the one canopy.

One was the first one that was oldest and then another one and then it was the third one.

- What follows, of course, is a very significant baby boom.

The displaced persons camps in Europe had the highest percentage birth rate in the world at that time.

(upbeat music) - I met Isak in Bergen-Belsen through my brother.

And that's why we made our way from there to Bad Nauheim because we knew that in Bergen-Belsen, we didn't have a future.

We weren't going to live there.

- This was the best thing that came out of Bergen-Belsen.

But I told her right away that, we going to America.

We got to get out of here.

(tense music) - [Jessica] The post-war years, leaving Europe was a difficult process.

The Jewish survivors did not have any identity paperwork.

They had been stripped of all belongings when they went into the camp system.

And so to immigrate, you have to prove who you are.

You have to say where you're coming from.

You have to establish that you are on your country's quota list to gain an entry visa.

- It was in April of '48.

And I never forgot the day, when the ship pulled in into the harbor.

I saw the Statue of Liberty.

It was...

I never thought, I would ever see that or make it and come back.

And it was just freedom.

I wouldn't have to worry.

And... Be scared.

Beaten up, humiliated.

I could look up and be proud that I'm a Jew.

- When we think about survivors, one of the things that we talk about is the fact that they, in a very short time period, have to navigate multiple complex systems and several different languages.

If you take the example of say, a Polish survivor who had been in a death camp, they may have spoken Polish at home or they may have Yiddish at home.

When they arrive at the camps, they have to understand and make decisions based on instructions given to them in German.

When they are liberated, they would be liberated either by a Russian speaker or an English speaker.

As they're trying to make their way to America, they're having to navigate a system completely in English.

And certainly when they get to Kansas City, they're being met by English speakers and have to start to acclimate to a new country, a new culture, a new language.

- Coming into the harbor of New York, I was looking down from the ship and I saw a mass of people, several thousand people who came to the harbor to greet returning soldiers from the war.

And they had had made big signs.

Welcome Joe, welcome Bill.

And you know, we love you, something like that.

And I was on this huge ship and I looked down, and all of a sudden, I realized... That there was no one waiting for me.

- What they often found is that they would go to a major port, a place like New York, they would be met by an aid organization that would say... - You cannot stay in New York.

I said, show us the map.

- So a big, it was a big map, bigger than this wall, maybe 30 feet wide by 10 feet high.

And I see Kansas City.

- I never heard the name, you know, 'cause in Europe, people don't, they know New York, Los Angeles, and maybe Boston or Chicago.

- Chicago was well-known in Europe as a gansta town, at this time.

So I said, Im not going to Chicago.

I'm a small town boy and I don't like big cities, anyway.

- Kansas, Missouri was all a farm town.

And I, as a butcher, they shipped me here to Kansas City.

- And we should look at the map and we say, President Truman is from Missouri.

Kansas City is the heart of America.

Let's go to Kansas City and Kansas City, here I come.

(upbeat music) - What we see is an acclimation to the broader Kansas City community, an acclimation to the Jewish community in Kansas City, the American-Jewish community.

But then within that, there are survivors that are reconstituting bonds together because they have the shared history and they must rely on each other as family.

There aren't grandparents.

There aren't aunts and uncles.

There aren't cousins.

- Some of the friends that I made in kindergarten and first grade and second grade, they all had grandparents and they had aunts and uncles.

And I did ask, where are they?

And they just responded, they were killed in the camps.

And I, you know, until I got older, I didn't say, what was the camps?

I do remember when my parents wanted to send me to summer camp, that the Jewish community centers ran, I was afraid to go because all I heard was camps.

The one thing that I saw from the survivor community was any time they would get together to celebrate, it was joyous.

And the idea that what they went through, the awful things they went through, they still could enjoy and celebrate the wonders of life.

- As that immediate need started to dissipate, as they became more stable and able to support themselves and felt like their children were thriving and doing well in America, they started to reflect more on what had happened to them.

The survivors went to the executive director of the Jewish Community Center and spoke to him about meaningful ways to commemorate the Holocaust experience in Kansas City.

From that meeting, they established what they called the New Americans Club.

And this was a group of survivors who was interested in perpetuating Holocaust memory.

They were responsible for not only founding our original Yom HaShoah Commemoration, every spring, there is a community commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

They also commissioned one of the earliest Holocaust memorials in the United States.

This was in June, 1963.

President Truman was there to dedicate the memorial himself, which I can only speculate how meaningful that was to the survivors, that he came himself and participated because he was so dear to them.

But six men, who had been former camp prisoners, made replica uniforms of their striped prisoner uniforms and they stood at that monument during the dedication in their prisoner replica uniforms.

(dramatic reflective music) - The very first memorials happen almost immediately after liberation and they're put up oftentimes by survivors, sometimes within months or years of liberation.

So that's in the 1940s, but it takes really until the 1960s before we see more widespread formal memorialization happening.

It's really much later that this memorialization starts to happen in the US, so for us to have one in 1963, is really special.

There are a few in the country that predate this one, but it is among the very first in the United States.

It was very important to the survivors who commissioned this memorial that it includes something about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

And so, what we see on the back here is a very detailed map of the Warsaw Ghetto.

And this is really interesting because I mean, you can see street names right down to Mila Street, which is where the headquarters of the resistance was in the Warsaw Ghetto.

If you look down here, what you can see is a forced exodus.

People are being taken from the ghetto and this fiery door represents what would have been most likely Treblinka because most of the people from the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to Treblinka.

So the names that you see on the flames, those were names of family members who had died in the Holocaust.

For many people in the community, this acts as a place that they come to remember those that they lost because they don't have, there is no grave for the people up here that are listed.

Here in Kansas City, they were able to commission a really interesting piece that was very special, very unique, and very overtly Jewish in its symbolism.

- Those two projects, Yama Shoah, and the Memorial to Six Million, were the earliest projects of the new Americans.

And it really represented their interest in ensuring that our community was active in Holocaust remembrance and education.

And that is a culture, that as a survivor community, they have perpetuated.

It was survivors who founded the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and established our mission that is primarily educational but also commemorative and forward-looking.

And it is their testimonies that they gave so freely that formed the basis of all of our work that they wanted to ensure that this legacy was left in our community.

(reflective music)