The release of the Auschwitz report is headline news throughout the country. These news reports explaining to the American people what Auschwitz was and what happened there are followed up by op-eds, by columns about Auschwitz and what America has to do in the wake of all of this information. Fully two-thirds of European Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II in a systematic, relentless process that continues to exceed our ability to comprehend its origins and consequences.  Even when the Nazi death machine kicked into high gear, America mostly kept its doors closed to Jews, as filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein recount in the U.S. and the Holocaust a three-part documentary series on PBS. The anxieties about urbanization, about unlettered, untutored, relatively uneducated peoples coming in in large numbers, the sense that disease was a problem, all of these worries were amalgamated into a belief that immigrants caused these problems and thus immigration should be held down. Some lobbied to open the country to refugees in the run-up to war, but anti-immigration legislation, the economic devastation of the Depression, incredulity toward a press that had trafficked in false atrocity accounts during World War I, and deep-seated anti-Semitism, especially in Franklin Roosevelt State Department, combined to thwart those efforts. Reason talked with Burns and Novick about why a nation of immigrants remains so deeply ambivalent about newcomers and the lessons that 21st century America should draw from our country's response in the lead-up to the Holocaust. Lynn Novick, Ken Burns, thanks for talking to me. Thank you for having us. So the series begins in the early 30s, and it's actually, you're talking about Otto Frank, who is known to everybody as the father of Anne Frank and kind of the person who brought the diary to notice, but it's in Frankfurt, and Otto Frank is, what you're talking about is his plans, his worded plans to bring his family to America. Why is it so important that you start the series with this question of Otto Frank not being able to bring his family to the United States at the very beginning of the Nazi era? We started out to make a series about the United States and the Holocaust and what was our relationship to what was happening in Europe and what did we as Americans know and what did we do about it just collectively. And while we were working on the film, which has been many years in the making, some documents came to light that showed Otto Frank and Frank's father writing to friends in the United States asking for help to get here. And that was just extraordinary for us to recognize that the story of Anne Frank, we thought, I'll speak for myself, but I think most of us felt this was a story about the Holocaust that happened over there, had nothing to do with America. And here's one of the most recognizable stories of the Holocaust has a lot to do with America. So we decided to frame our film around that idea by telling the story of Otto Frank and his efforts to get to America to help our audience sort of see themselves in this story. And in 1933, it's the Depression. It's about a decade after the Johnson-Reed Act, which was the culmination of 40 years of legislative activism or activism to shut down immigration, particularly from Central and Southern Europe. Why is immigration, you know, what's going on with the way immigration was restricted a decade before during the roaring 20s? How does that factor into what's going on next? So there are two important things about immigration. One is symbolic, like, what kind of country are we? You know, are we the Emma Lazarus?  Or are we an almost equal reaction to that? No, let us stop this. So between 1870 and 1920, millions and millions of people come from areas that are threatening to the Protestant majority and they want to figure out a way to go back to an earlier time, always impossible. And when it was a dominant, there was a fear was that these newcomers who were from Central and Southern Europe, Catholic and Eastern Europe, Catholic and Jews, would they be replacing us? And so the Johnson-Reed Act is an attempt to essentially set quotas from the countries, the minuscule quotas from the countries that are less desirable and bigger quotas of people from the Northern European things. Not ironically, but are not emigrating in the numbers where, you know, so Germany gets big quotas, but not that many people are coming and then places like Italy get very low quotas and a lot of people want to move here. That's exactly right. So what we have is a kind of, as the situation in Nazi Germany develops over the course of 30s, you get a terrible, terrible bottleneck, which is you have got a lot of people, particularly Jews, who are trying to leave the ever-expanding German area, Germany and then the Rhineland, then Germany, the Rhineland and Austria and then the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, and we are saying, no, you can't come in. And so you've got all this space to let others in, but you don't have space to let the people who most desperately need to get out. And so just our Johnson-Reed Act is going to contribute significantly to the fact that the United States isn't going to be able to do what I believe they should have done, which is let in 10 times more people than they did, and that would have been an important, important aspect. We could have absorbed them, we could have taken them, but it's also a depression. The demagogues are out there, anti-Semitic demagogues. People say, these people are here to take your jobs. They're already a conspiracy of Jews to control absolutely everything. The New Deal is not the New Deal, it's the Jew Deal.  So you have a very tragic dynamic going on in the United States that is going to ensure that the place that is able to accept so many people is not going to do that and you compound the humanitarian crisis. And it's also the Johnson-Reed Act or the Immigration Act that were passed in the 20s are the culmination of a kind of mental map or a reimagining of American, not just American identity, but human identity. And you guys go over the work of Madison Grant, who's known for writing a book called The Passing of the Great Race, who comes up with this kind of crazy schema of Nordics, Alpines and Mediterranean, which then influences the laws in America that keep people out from undesired countries, but it also influenced Hitler and the Nazis. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, I think he's looking at the United States and he's saying, look, you've handled your native problem so well. You've gotten rid of them or you've isolated them into essentially big concentration camps. He hasn't yet devised that system. He thinks the Johnson-Reed Act is terrific because it's favouring his ideal of an Aryan race. This is the absurdity of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian hoax that gets promulgated by Henry Ford. It's the insanity of eugenics, the pseudoscience and the insanity of Madison Grant that there is any kind of distinctions based on race or ethnicity or nationality between people. There's one race, it's the human race, and that's it. Everything else is an attempt by people to other somebody else. And for the United States, it's black people, it's native people, it's immigrants and Jews. And for most of the world, it's some variety of that, Catholics in some cases in the United States earlier, but it's also, Jews have had this experience because they are stateless for millennia. And they are always the groups that have come in and helped organize things in a civilized sense, but they run counter to the tribal sensibilities that people often return to in times of stress or under the influence of authoritarian demagogues. The question of refugees is also interesting, because from the inception, certainly of the Johnson-Reed Act, and there were refugee situations prior to World War II or prior to the 30s when people are looking to get out, particularly of Nazi-dominated parts of Europe, what was the attitude towards refugees, kind of the official attitude towards refugees, and where does that come from? Because it's a subset of questions about whether you're pro or anti-immigration, but we've had a, and we still struggle with this today, a very vexed relationship with the idea of refugees. Well, it was instructed for us to understand the distinction in our foreign policy between immigrants and refugees. So immigrants, we think of are people who are coming to live here, to move here, to resettle here. Refugees would be, in theory, people who were fleeing persecution or imminent peril, and we would take them in for a while, and then they would theoretically be able to go back to where they came from when the conflict was over. That was sort of the general idea. The United States did not have a refugee policy during this period. So there was just this immigration system that Ken was talking about with the quotas from country to country. There was a lot of talk in the press and in politics about refugees and that these people are desperate and they need help, but there was no special exception made in this sort of immigration policy for people who would just come here temporarily. And there was also, as the sort of situation devolved, a growing fear that immigrant slash refugees who came from Germany or from Nazi occupied Europe were a threat that they would undermine our national security. The fifth column. Right. So these are people who you let them in and then they sleeper cells, that kind of idea that we're familiar with. That was very much a fear then. And there were German spies in the U.S. for sure. And we had spies in other places. Spying is part of human conduct. But the idea that Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler would become the most dangerous threat to America. So that we had to essentially keep them out virtually completely. Keep everybody out. In other words, we can't let any of these people in because some of them might be spies. I think we appreciate the fear at the time. But there's also fear mongering. Right. No, and there's a dark, I mean, the Holocaust and certainly a lot of Jewish writing coming out of it is, you know, the darkest humor. But, you know, at the same time, we're worried about Jewish refugees, like Nazi spies coming in on them. There's a growing Bund movement, which is openly pro-Nazi, not even pro-German. This is the absurdity of all of that. And I think that they're historical antecedents because remember so many of the people in the big wave of immigrants were Catholic and Italian and Central and Eastern European. And they're often fleeing persecution or abject poverty and would qualify really in the kind of refugee as well as immigrant status, right? And they're now with regards to the Bolshevik revolution, they're now all communists. So what you have is...  Right. And you're fleeing pogroms that have been taking place. But because you are Jewish and because communism is now being equated by the Madison grants and the Henry Ford's as equal, the Jews bringing communism, that they're responsible for the Soviet Union's collapse. You just have this conflating of all of that. And you have the poverty and the worry that people are just here. They're not like us. And that's the biggest distinction. And this is the Schrodinger's immigrant. This is a popular meme that exists today that immigrants are simultaneously coming here and they're just going to live off of us because they're lazy and they take welfare or they're coming here and stealing our jobs. May I tell you that in the middle of the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin lamented the arrival in Pennsylvania of the Swarthi Germans. And that he wanted to keep Pennsylvania for the lovely white and red, meaning the people whose land we were already stealing and dispossessing and killing were now being romanticized along with the white race that should be there. And that somehow the Germans, who would later suggest that they were the epitome of the white race, were somehow swarthy and not desirable. He wanted to keep Pennsylvania. He may have been onto something there. History has revealed. So, well, it also brings up one of the antecedents. So, you have this immigration policy and a set of mindsets, plus the economic realities of the depression going on. Also, America's experience in World War I. That's also important and you talk about that as a precursor to all of this. By the early 30s, what were people thinking about World War I and America's relationship to it? And how did that affect how we thought about what was starting to happen in Europe? Well, I think there was a lot of anti-German propaganda during World War I to get people motivated to go over there and fight. And a lot of it was later proven to be untrue, grossly exaggerated talk of atrocities. And so there was that memory that we were lied to by the government, the government office that created this propaganda. So, that sets up a dynamic where people are very suspicious of the government wanting to get us into a war, especially after we've been promised we're not going to get into the war. For the first few years of World War I, Americans weren't told they weren't going to have to worry about it. Wilson won by saying he kept us out of war. Exactly. And then a year later, okay, now we have to get in. So, that's not that long ago when we're talking about the 30s. And there were even hearings, I don't remember exactly, but the late 30s about this war profiteering. So, the sense of corruption and being lied to and the government not being trusted to keep us out of war is very potent by the time. 70 or 80% of the think that World War I is a mistake. And so you've also got a large German population in the United States that's been villainized. You've helped to pass prohibition by making the German brewers the kind of the enemies. Along with the immigrants. The immigrants who want to drink, whereas us abstinious Protestants don't need that. We can give up the bottle. And what we're anxious about are Catholics with their sacrament, blacks with their bottle of booze, and the ballot. And so you're trying to regulate, eugenics is a perfect example of how you can, in a scientific way, justify these kinds of absurd theories. But what it does is it just creates others, people that aren't us, even though we're all us. And it becomes complicated as we move forward because World War II is a radically different war than World War I, right? I mean, there is a strong argument still to say, like, you know, the United States could have, it could have gone in equally on either side. And World War I. Yeah, World War I.  I mean, it's a more powerful argument. But that's very much in place. But not that those sentiments aren't there. There's great German sympathy, you know? Henry Ford is going to pass up a contract to make military things for the Brits and instead takes a contract with the Germans. People are interested in not, you know, choosing sides or favoring perhaps what they think is going to be the winner. Because more people are descended from Germans than any other ethnic group, I think still, but certainly at that point in America. Joe Kennedy, who's the ambassador to the Court of St. James, said it best. He says, you know, Britain is doomed, right? He's sure that Britain cannot survive the power of Hitler. So there's really a question of let's be on the right, let's stay out of this, but let's be on the right side if we, you know, at the end. And that makes this very, very complicated for a time. But this is a totally different war. Right. And this is a war based on, you know, they're both after German expansion, but the other one is based on these racial theories of finding the Liebenstrom, the breathing room, so that you have to treat the Slavic people as not people. Right. Stateless people whose territory, like Native Americans, this is not their land. They're just occupying it. There's no sense of a political entity that gives them. These are people that don't really deserve passports.  And so this is the area that we'll take. This will be our big bread basket that weaken the German people, minus the Jewish Germans and Austrians and everybody else. And one, just very quickly, one of the stats that you, it comes up at several points, but in Europe by the end of, by 1945, two thirds of Jews are gone from Europe. They've been murdered. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to add on to what Ken was saying to say that, you know, the, up until we got involved in the war, the country was, there were a lot of people here who admired Hitler. Right. And, you know, not just because the trains ran on time, certainly that the society was portrayed in the press. There's Christian Science Monitor and other mainstream publications saying, this is a very well run place.  But basically, you know, this is a good example for us to follow. And we have the Olympics and the kind of big sort of stage managing of that. They're incredibly brilliant with the propaganda. So we look back and we see the evil and the depravity and the barbarity. But at the time, you know, our nation wasn't 100% on board with that until the war kind of progressed. And that's also, I mean, America at the time was kind of a mess, right? I mean, you know, FDR did his bold, persistent experimentation, which kind of worked, kind of didn't. But there was a sense we needed some kind of structure and forward momentum that Hitler, Mussolini before him, and then Hitler was delivering. Like right in the 30s with the depression, you have the sort of collapse of the global economy of a certain order, right? So then is it going to be fascism? Is it going to be communism? Is it going to be democracy? Which of these systems is really going to prevail? And that's an open question in this country. We focus on the mythology of the only thing you have to fear is fear itself, which is if you think about it, not a really logical thing. It's an emotional truth and we get it and it was smart. But the real point of that speech is when he basically says, you know, I will ask Congress for the power to fight this economic emergency as if we were being attacked by a foreign enemy which causes Eleanor to go, whoa, what do you mean? So there's a sense in 1933 as FDR is coming to power that maybe a democracy, or the Western democracies as we understood are ill-equipped to face this economic crisis. And the example of Mussolini and Hitler, kind of brutal authoritarian regimes, are the way to go. And there are people who are urging Franklin Roosevelt to become a dictator and he's understanding that it's going to take bold powers to do something. And somebody said to Roosevelt early on, you're either going to be the best president or the worst president. He said, if I don't succeed, I'll be the last president. Let's dial in a little bit on the lack of trust in media and then a bit in government. But you were talking about the kind of propaganda stories that came out of World War I and then were later kind of debunked like, okay, we're being played here because the government and media is kind of telling a story that may or may not be true. How did that work out in the early 30s? Because there are a number of people who are sounding the alarm early on and this is also before certainly the mass killings began. That's later in the decade or even in the 40s. But how were people consuming media at the time? It's basically three elements. You've got a newspaper, you've got a radio, and you've got newsreels on the weekends when you go to the movies on Saturday or Friday night. Americans are reading newspapers. The argument is that we didn't know. We knew there were 3,000 articles about German treatment of Jews in 1933, the first year. I mean, there's coverage. I would not overplay the suspicion about it. It is there, but I think people trust it. It's hard time to believe and you're also distracted by so many other things. The Depression is the number one story of the 1930s. And so, while you could say, oh boy, that's too bad. When you hear about the train crash in India or the flood in Pakistan or whatever it might be, you're saying, how am I going to get food on the table? Who's going to do this? And if they want to come here, does that take my job? And people are accentuating that. There is alternative media in much the same way there is here. There's Father Coughlin, there's Henry Ford with the Dearborn Independent. Which is the place that actually published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So Henry Ford is a virulent anti-Semite. He believes the Jews are responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He buys the Dearborn Independent that grows to the second largest circulation. And he promotes this Russian hoax, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is just recounting the ancient sense of Jewish domination of everything, banking and whatever. And he prints it as the international Jewish conspiracy and over many, many weeks. And then publishes it a book. It's translated into languages, including German. So it has a kind of effect in the United States that I still think we hear the echoes and the reverberations of it today. In the way you can have the kind of disassociative thinking that comes along with anti-Semitism, that they are conniving and they're smart and they're bad smarts, as the scholar Deborah Lipstadt says. But they're also ugly and they're unattractive and they're mean-spirited. But they're also virile and they're going to take our women. But then they're also a feat and they hire other people to do their work for them. So you have all of these incredibly racist tropes about Jews that just aren't true. And they persist to this day in the sense of people just beginning to see it. You see it everywhere. You see it in the extreme left as well as the extreme right. And this is kind of an absurd question, but how much of the, in the run-up to a kind of American indifference to what was going on in Europe and to the beginning of the Holocaust and then it is that it's, well it was because it's the Jews and they're not that many of them and they really are different than us. Whether we're Catholic or Protestant who hate each other, but sometimes they can be like, well, but we are very different. We're categorically different than Jews. How much of it is just that if this had been happening to people in England or if it had been happening to the Irish, say, would we have responded the same way? That's a really good question. I don't know how to answer that. It is a little bit of a parlor discussion question. What if the South had won the Civil War kind of thing? I don't know. Jews have had a special relationship to humanity for a long time, people without a country until 1948. And so there is a sense of them bringing things that are unifying to connect other countries, a kind of globalist and internationalist thing, a sense of, as the scholar Peter Hayes says, they have brought the notion of fair play and the golden rule. They've brought lots of ideologies that are... They simultaneously bring Christianity but refuse to participate. They kind of have transnational things in them. And so they become a perfect scapegoat when you've got an authoritarian person who wants to scapegoat somebody or to blame the ills or to return to the more simplistic but self-destructive aspects of nationalism, of tribalism, and things like that. So it's hard to say. I think there would probably be more sympathy for the Irish. But the Jews have had this going on for millennia, literally. And I've heard all of this a million times, whether it's Father Coughlin or a thousand years before Father Coughlin, there's a reason why you have to get rid of the Jews now because they're doing something. I think it's hard to really generalize about the American public's response to all of this. And it does tie into the questions of how it was covered in the media. And people could be concerned. Kristallnacht, which was this horrible pogrom that happened out in the open on the streets of Germany, was front-page news. It was an outrage around the world. Roosevelt made a statement, there was a sense of, this is wrong. So it's not indifference, per se. It's more a sense of, well, this is really wrong. But like Ken was saying, it happened over there. It's another catastrophe, another humanitarian problem. We can't do anything. We have our own problems here. So there's just a sense of recognizing it's wrong. I think probably most Americans did. Even anti-Semitic Americans would probably recognize that, you can't just go around beating people up in the street and burning down their houses and taking their stuff for no reason. But it's not really our problem. Or we care, but we have our own problems. We tried the film really to unpack the nuances of this so that it helps, at least for us, to understand all the things we have to deal with today. Because we face the same challenges. The photograph of a Syrian child drowned on a beach is horrible. But what are we going to do? Can you talk about Rabbi Stephen Wise a little bit?  Who was he and what were some of his most successful efforts to bring attention to what was going on in Europe? Well, I think that he is the most famous rabbi in the United States by far and apparently male came to him just rabbi in the USA. Yeah, you have that thing where the post office would deliver letters to rabbi. It would be like, oh, it's kind of... It would go to Stephen Wise. And he took on himself and he seemed to carry the burdens, it seems, of the great dilemma, which was for American Jews and Jews in the rest of the world, the dilemma of if you speak out, do you imperil the Jews that are still in Germany? If you don't speak out, are you complicit in what is happening to the Jews in Germany? And so you can see it etched in his face. He does have, because of his renown access to the White House, he's able to speak out. He's brought information about the earliest reports of the beginning of the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe in the killing centers in Nazi occupied Poland. It is buried by the State Department. It goes to a British member of parliament who gives it to Stephen Wise. He begins to go public with it. He becomes the face, the sort of vanguard of information about how bad it's actually going to be. And it's really hard for anybody to get their minds around it because nobody could actually believe. You can see the sort of... You can understand what happens in a pogrom, you know, of Kristallnacht. It's terrible and it's whatever. But the idea that a state would say, you know what, we've got 11 million problems, let's get rid of all of them and that they're successful with two thirds. I mean, they were successful. They essentially eliminated the Jews of Europe and those that survived got, for the most part, the hell out of there. So Stephen Wise, I think, is a way to understand one aspect of the American Jewish communities, anguish and their desire to try to do something, to figure out what was the best thing. And you have, I mean, Kristallnacht itself is interesting. It's not an American-sponsored moment, but you have a young, stateless, Polish Jew in Paris who kills a minor foreign service person in the German embassy and that's the pretext, right? There's an international conspiracy. See, we told you, they're out to get us, so we're going to get them. And this is when things begin to transit from making their life difficult and trying to get them to leave to beginning to say, maybe we just get rid of them. And this, I mean, is kind of at the heart of the series that, you know, at a certain point, Germany may have been amenable to just getting, letting or forcing Jews to leave, but they're not coming to the United States. They're not allowed in. They had all kinds of plans. That was really fascinating. Different schemes, you know, some of them completely preposterous. Madagascar and different things. We're going to just put people on boats and get them out of here just to deport them to different places. And then you recount, I mean, the famous story of the St. Louis, which is a ship of Jewish refugees that comes to the New World, comes to Cuba and America and has just turned away. Yeah, well, that's a story that has come down with some understanding and some misunderstanding about what was really happening there. There were lots of ships. You know, we did have this quota system and some people got here. So as more than any other sovereign nation, we led in 250,000. A lot of them came on boats. So there were boats coming across the Atlantic before America got involved in the war, you know, here. And they had people had to have visas and they had to have permission. It was really hard to get. So sometimes they would try to get to a different country and then hope to get to America. So the St. Louis was a ship of 900 and something refugees who had gotten visas to go to Cuba. And the idea there was you get to Cuba and then you wait until your number comes up and you come to the United States for most people. But you're safe. But you're safe. You're out of right. You're exactly. So they get to Cuba, but when they get to Cuba, the Cuban government decides, you know what? We don't really want you here and your visas don't count anymore even though you bought them. So now they're sitting there in Havana Harbor and you've got a whole media circus going on. You have relatives coming to the ship. It gets a lot of attention. It kind of symbolizes the whole refugee crisis. And here they're only 90 miles from them in the United States. So, you know, why don't they just come here? Well, they don't have visas to come here. There's a quota system. There's all this. You tell a heartbreaking story. It's hard to even put these in terms of a guy who saw the lights of Miami on the ship. And then ends up in the United States. And those points, I don't want to make too much art out of this story because that seems wrong, but the series is filled with those kinds of moments that are, you know, are just revelatory. You know, arguments don't work. You don't change anybody's mind. Stories, you do. Stories, you have a thing. And if you've got a little boy asking his dad what the lights are there in Miami and now as an American Jew, having survived all of this in great dramatic fashion, by the way, to have spent time in Miami and know what that's about is really important. What's missed in the St. Louis is what Lynn is saying. First of all, there's no way that it can stop in the United States because of this Johnson-Reed, this pernicious Johnson-Reed act.  He can't wave a magic wand. It's Congress that would have to change it. And they are in no mind to do it. The interesting thing, though, is that the St. Louis sails back across, heading to Germany. Its own German captain is thinking of running at a ground in a free country. And more importantly, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee comes up with the money necessary to essentially buy their entry into five nations, you know, Britain, France, Belgium. So those people go there. What's unfortunate and tragic is about a quarter of them are then killed when the Germans subsequently overrun their country of sanctuary. But it's an instructive story of how much these tropes of the Holocaust and the tropes of the Second World War get misunderstood. We presume that there is, therefore, an essential anti-Semitism inherent in FDR, who appoints more Jews than anyone else, that he doesn't help in this regard, but he's doing many other things. He's not... He's a cold and calculating politician at times, and that looks kind of... doesn't look so good in retrospect, but that there are other sort of mitigating factors. That's what's so interesting about it, is that you can take something in which people have a kind of superficial understanding of it and more often than not, huge parts of that are misunderstanding and complicate the story with what really actually happened. But let's complicate the story about the government too, because the State Department is absolutely... I don't... Is it ideological anti-Semitism, or... But there are people in the State Department... That's the correct way to say it. There are people in the State Department who are virulent anti-Semitism. Yeah, and talk a little bit about that, because that's part of the reckoning, right? That needs to be done if we're going to take American history seriously. Well, I mean, part of it is the culture of the State Department and the culture of official Washington and where it came from and who gets those jobs and sort of the power of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, we want to call it that, to run these institutions. And Roosevelt comes in and starts to shift things around, but still the State Department, as we say, is hidebound. It's sort of this old-fashioned kind of gentlemanly, courtly environment of diplomacy and all this kind of stuff. And the people running it are not focused on the refugee crisis. They're focused on international relations and not alienating the German government, for example, before America gets involved in the war. So it's from the top down. There's not a sense that someone, Cordell Hull running the State Department is saying, hey, job one is let's relax the rules to get as many refugees here, far from it.  Do you have all the paperwork?  No. Do they have to follow the letter of the law to every single I dotted and T crossed? I mean... And he was yes, and he'd misrepresent it. He's the black hole where information about the impending Holocaust goes to die, where information about individuals happen of a bureaucracy that then begins to change the rules. Many of the German and Austrian Jews have connections to the Western democracy and to the United States, and they have means, and they are fulfilling this obligations that you not become a ward of the state that you've got recommendations that there's amount of money and Breckenridge Long and those of his ilk in the State Department are constantly changing the bar. So you will find somebody who's gotten all their stuff together, and then all of a sudden there's a new rule, and you kind of almost have to press reset and do that, and this is where the United States is incredibly... has to come to terms with it. And we didn't fill the quotas that we had even. This is the amazing thing. So we take in 225,000 human beings more than any other sovereign nation, but we got so much space. It would be in sports salary cap. We have so much space that we could have brought in at least five times that number. Following the rules that we had, had it not been for the kind of perfidy of the State Department, individuals in the State Department, and it's going to take a Treasury Department starting the War Refugee Board run by Henry Morgenthau, who is Jewish, and a friend of Roosevelt's to be able to do it, and even then, State Department kills that for months and months and months, and finally it happens and it becomes the most effective organization in saving Jewish lives in the story of the Holocaust. But finally it takes us so long and so late to get started that you've already lost more than three-quarters, probably more than 80% of the people who are going to be murdered in the Holocaust have already been murdered by the time the War Refugee Board gets started. One of the historians that's in the documentary fair around Peter Hayes talks about how the speed with which, the time when people were being killed is immensely compressed. It is. 18 months or 20 months or something like that. That's so shocking in a way. It's how easy it was for them to actually do this. How did people respond, or how did the American government and the American people respond once it became clear? The Vonsi Conference where the final solution is kind of promulgated is in the beginning of 1942. By the end of that year, people are taking it seriously. Or more so, what happened to get people to kind of say like, okay, forget the World War I propaganda. These stories which sound kind of similar, this is happening on a much greater scale. How did that perception flip? Yeah, that was what Ken was talking about, Stephen Wise, and there was the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland was collecting data or evidence from people who came out of the Polish Underground to describe what was happening. Remember, this is happening largely pretty far away from the Western world, right? Yeah, I think Hayes also talks about how a lot of where this was happening was not reachable by Allied forces. Yeah, but there's even more thing that Hayes brings up that's really important to understand to help set this in motion is that Hitler wants to get rid of the Jews. He wants them out of there. And in more than half of German Jews, 560,000, more than half of Austrian Jews, 190,000 do get out, right? But as he keeps assuming territory, he's got a huge problem which is as he's getting his breathing room in Poland, 3.3 million Jews and Lithuania and Latvia and Belarus and Ukraine and the Soviet Union, it's just astronomical numbers and then you realize we're not going to take over Britain right away. We can't take their navy and ship them all to Madagascar where we can starve all the Jews to death. Insane plan, right? We're just going to murder them. And so what happens is and what was a revelation for me was the Shoah by bullets in which there are 2 million Jews that are just shot in the head and put in pits all over Poland, Nazi occupied Poland and Ukraine and all of these places. And it's just, it's before anybody has mentioned the word gas. And so I think that when you say holocaust, you think 6 million, it's very opaque. You can't particularize as the writer Daniel Mendelssohn says in our film what that means, but he takes his own family, his great-uncle and great-aunt and their four daughters and finds out what happens to them. He spends a great deal of his professional life delving into what happened, going to Soviet records and things like that and only one of them, the mother is killed by gas. Everybody else is killed in another way, mostly in atrocities that are almost unspeakable when you think about these four teenage girls. So it's an amazing context to understand that the holocaust is really, we just don't have time to get them out of here.  And let's figure out the most efficient way to do that. And for the American story, all of that's happening before we have boots on the ground. Right.  Right. Once it started happening, we the United States was not in a position militarily if we wanted to, not to say that we did, but even if we had wanted to, we're nowhere near these places. Our planes can't get there. We're not, we don't have, we're in North Africa when this is happening. So it's just, we have to line up all the information to kind of, if we want to critique our policy and our government's interaction, it's not about that. By the time that happened, it was out of it. And you could say, you can debate whether you should bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, whether the rail lines could be replaced overnight or do you want to make a mistake or imprecise bombing would have probably killed prisoners and did when we missed a plant five miles away, 80% of bombs dropped in Europe fell outside five miles from their intended target. Five miles. So five miles, 80% of all bombs, okay, let it go, is outside of the target for all the obvious reasons, imprecise calculations, but also fear and let's drop it and get out of here. Let's go home. Pilot crews were dying and the American public would probably not stand for the idea that you were diverting resources from winning the war to going to do what? Bomb the rail line to Auschwitz. But the most important thing is the War Refugee Board. That in the last places where the remaining Jews are that you can do something about in Hungary and Romania, that's where they have their thing. And so Raoul Wallenberg the celebrated Swedish diplomat feels that he's funded by the War Refugee Board and he feels that he's part of an American program as do others in the community, the international community in Romania and Hungary, particularly Hungary. And so it's a pretty interesting thing that the tens of thousands of lives that Wallenberg, we credit Wallenberg with saving and others, really important diplomats from other countries, Switzerland, notably, are basically being underwritten by the War Refugee Board which is an attempt to step outside the guidelines of the United States and flood the zone with money for forgeries and for bribes and for things like that. It's one of the few places where you can find the various committees like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the YMCA and the American Friends Service and the individuals who just pack up their lives and go to save other human beings. That's the points of light that exist in this story in the midst of what we consider the darkest moment in humanity's history. After the war is won and there's one of the final episodes or the final episode, you quote Eisenhower as saying like Eisenhower tours a couple of the death camps and he says to, you know, broadly to soldiers or saying something and I'm paraphrasing a bit, like you may not know what you were fighting for but you now know what you were fighting against. A soldier, a GI giggles nervously at the horror that they're looking at. What was Eisenhower, what does that mean so you might not know what you were fighting for? He said, we hear that the GI doesn't know what he's fighting for. At least now, maybe perhaps, you know what you're fighting against. He's talking about the Willie and Joe from Bill Malvin. The guys who were in the trench and you're just there for your buddies and you know that everything is foobar and snap food away and that the bureaucracy of the army is about as big as you can get but there's now, he's suggesting and Eisenhower is incredibly great on all of this and his writings, the formal writings, not just the anecdotal stuff are amazing. He insists that a congressional allegation comes. He insists that newspaper editors come and look for themselves. He insists the commanders send their troops in their off times to these camps and look and see and it has a profound effect on many, many Americans who visit there and begin to understand what it was about and it's to Eisenhower's credit I think that he sees. Absolutely. One of the things we found working on a film on the Second World War and now this project was what was told to the American public about what we were fighting for, the four freedoms. It was pretty abstract really. Nazism, fascism but I think when the camps were liberated it was kind of flipping to say, oh, that's what this means. It's not an abstraction. These people have been brutalizing, killed and tortured and we're fighting to stop this from happening. I think both in this and certainly in your series on World War II what's powerful about it is that it pulls back some of the gauze that has crept in with the whole Greatest Generation rhetoric where everything, everybody was united. We had a draft. First of all, we call that war the good war. Right. Give me a break. It's the worst war ever. We name our first chapter of that film a necessary war and that may be a better described by one of our pilots might be a better way of describing. Sometimes this is what human beings do and sometimes this is unavoidable. But once you have the evidence I think it's important to say that really galvanizes a lot of sense of purpose and it helps to set in motion I think some of the mythology and the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia and the Greatest Generation that has encrusted it. But let's also remember that the Americans seeing the newsreels of all of that, the proof now, the ovens and the concentration clients, the crematoria, all of that stuff, 5% of Americans want to add more refugees to the United States after it's over. There is a moment where you show a newsreel and they're showing, they're opening up ovens that still have bodies in them or corpses and the narrator says don't turn away. Don't look away. Look. Yeah. And I have to say I've been watching this stuff for decades because this is what you do if you're interested in history and the last 70 years and I was stunned by it because I was like, no, I want to look away. Yeah. What goes into, or what do you do with the fact that faced with this with the documentary evidence of this mass murder, unthinkable, that it really didn't move the needle in terms of like people saying like, oh yeah, let's, you know, we got lots of space here. Right. Let's bring some more people in. So it always seems possible that there's always something that trumps the larger humanitarian concerns. The better angels of our nature. Abraham Lincoln would say it's always maybe the economy's stupid, right? The war is going to end. We know that the spending is going to stop. We may be slipping back into depression. There's going to be lots of unemployment now. All true. And maybe we don't want to do that. But I think at the end you have to ask a much deeper question about who are we, what kind of people.  And the Billings newspaper, I don't know what it's called, printed a full page picture of a menorah. I can't imagine there were more than five you could buy in downtown Billings. And people, Christians, put up thousands of menorahs in their windows. And that is that 5%. And we're interested in both understanding that those people exist, the Varian Fry, a writer in New York who goes and works with a vice council in southern France, Hiram Bingham III, to rescue Jews, you know, famous ones, Max O'Fall, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, but also so-called ordinary people. And that there are all these committees and people working anonymously. But there is a huge part of us not sensitive to the plight that have bought into in some way, shape, or form some degree of the sense of an other. And that we're not all part, there's only, you know, Madison Grant is wrong. There's only one race, the human race. And that's the only distinction we have between, that's it, just human beings. And there are people like Eleanor Roosevelt or famous Frida Kirchway from The Nation magazine, others who get it and understand what this is about and others that don't. And it may just be as simple as I'm worried about my job and that's why I'm not. Or it may be the fact that those elements of anti-Semitism, of racism, of nativism, of xenophobia have been here and will always be here and will manifest itself in some portion of the population. I think there's, I agree with everything Ken said. I think there's one other piece that I think about and it ties into this looking away is that it's a paradox, right? That we've seen millions of people dehumanized and treated as less than human and exterminated, killed and tortured and just everything. And then when you see the pictures it can double down on the dehumanizing. And so it can evoke sympathy but it can also evoke revulsion and horror. And it's a very complicated thing that's going on here. So on the one hand it's horrendous and we are, it's a tragedy and we feel sad. And on the other hand, do we really want the people that we've just seen staggering around, skeletal and brutalized to come here? And so it's very complicated not to mention the layers of anti-Semitism and other thing that's already happened that allowed this to happen in harmony and all the places that Hitler conquered. That toothpaste is out of the tube and getting it back is really a long process. And so that's the work we're trying to do as a nation, right? Is reckoning with all the things kind of saying and to kind of give people, restore people's humanity when it has, the whole point was to take it away from them and then the other pieces, the Cold War. So we did let in a lot of refugees after this, right? And the switch flips really quick and all of a sudden, Germany's not the enemy. The communists are the enemy. And we let in a lot of refugees from Latvia, Lithuania who were displaced people. So it's not like we won't let in any refugees. We let in quite a lot but not the Jewish refugees. And Truman has to intervene to get in maybe 50, 60,000 Jewish refugees after the war. So there's just, there are a lot of layers to this and we're still trying to figure out exactly what's going on. I think that's a hugely important point about the dehumanization means that the same opacity that we relate to the notion of 6 million which is an impossible thing, those bodies also become, those emaciated figures become kind of something that you can't deal with.   And that is a step that is still to be taken by a majority of human beings in this world. And that's I think why we have literature, that's why we have art, why we have the ideals that we have and we have not lived up to them but that has to be what you want to aim for. There ought to be coming out of this a sense that as messy and as kind of screwing up as they are democracies are the way to go. Authoritarian governments kill more of their own people by far, by exponential magnitudes than do democracies and that freedom to vote and citizenship are a very meaningful thing because in fact at the heart of this the heart of the dehumanization is taking people who were human beings and saying they first were not citizens and therefore not entitled to any protections of any state and therefore we are now free. Yeah, one of the things that is amazing in the opening scene when you're talking about Otto Frank his family had been in Frankfurt since the 17th century or 16th century. Yeah, which is kind of amazing to think of. Well, there's generations of Germans who are Jewish who think of themselves as German first. Sure. And they're not practicing Judaism in a very serious way and their identity is as Germans. But unfortunately this story shows they don't get to choose. That's right. So to pull it back to the immigration question it seems like after World War II among other things fighting in World War II kind of granted equal status for many immigrant groups. So my grandparents were Italian and Irish. They were fully American after World War II because they sent sons to fight. And people like John F. Kennedy in the late 50s published a book called Nation of Immigrants. This was the narrative that I grew up with. I think we all did that somewhere and it served a Cold War purpose but it was also describing basic reality.  Everybody comes here and that makes America stronger. That narrative does not seem to hold anymore. We don't talk about immigration or I guess there's paradoxes going on. Ronald Reagan in the late 80s passed or signed off on legislation that immediately created hundreds of thousands of legal citizens mostly of Mexican descent who had been illegal. That's good. He was very pro-immigrant. The percentage of the foreign born population continues to grow. 1970 was the low point in terms of the census. So there are more foreign born people here. There is more anxiety about immigration in the 90s. The California Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives voted on Prop 187 to ban aid to illegal immigration. It was widely seen and I think properly understood as anxiety over immigrants. The dusky duskification of California. Donald Trump rose to prominence by talking about ending immigration, legal and illegal. At the same time, Gallup finds historic highs of people saying immigration is good for the country even as first Trump and even Biden now have reduced immigration. How do we deal with this and how does this tie into the larger themes of your series? It's a really important question and one thing that I've been thinking about which is not just an American story which is the ideology that Hitler took to the worst horrible conclusion to demonize a certain group of people Jewish people and other people too but that ideology is still with us and different groups can get slotted in and there's been this sort of the far right or the neo-Nazi or the alt-right, whatever words you want to use basically have kind of substituted immigrants for Jews in different ways. That's a powerful thing and that's happening in Europe, we see it all over Europe. Fear of immigrants and demonization and scapegoating. Sadly they don't have Jews to blame anymore but now they can say it's... Can I just go back and take a little longer view because it's the central question of our conversation which is the Johnson-Reed Act did not address immigrants from the Americas. It was presumed that the people in the Americas, mostly Mexicans and Central Americans would cross the American border for agricultural purposes and go back. What was interesting is that the corrective to the Johnson-Reed Act in 1965 suddenly placed limitations on those from the Americas while it was liberating the Johnson-Reed Act of its pernicious quotas and LBJ called it we were writing a cruel and enduring wrong. Now it did not say anything about refugees and it put on the problems I think it put on the Mexican and Central American and the American stuff that I think set the seeds for what's going on now. I don't think we would have all of these problems or perceptions had we just understood our relationship to the Americas. It's a kind of different kind of Monroe doctrine that got kind of obliterated as we began to be concerned once again with an othering. You said Dusky that brown people suddenly didn't seem to be as American as anybody else. It's very complicated and I oversimplified it a lot coming for the reasons of the brutality of dictatorships there and the poverty and the gang violence and we wish to come into the American system where they would enjoy much more freedom and privileges and support. So a lot of the fears are understandable. The problem is always in the othering. We don't see this as humanitarian issue we see it as a political issue. We see this as them not us. Humanitarian issues become all of our responsibility and that's where I go back to that post-war 5% wanted to let more refugees. You sort of have to begin with that 5% and I don't know how you build a majority but it's absolutely necessary for us to advance in a humanitarian fashion. Don't we also see that it's incredibly potent politically people have made careers on this. So it's striking into something that's very deep and whichever the group is that's being demonized and other people are gaining power by doing that. So that there's a dynamic a very long standing dynamic that we saw going back to Benjamin Franklin to now. So the laws and the policies shift but that process the lowest common denominator that path of least resistance is to demonize the other. When you listen to Father Coughlin doesn't sound too different than what you hear on some radio programs or some TV shows the virulent anti-Semitism in his case is replaced by an anti-immigrant Mexican in another place or whatever it might be or in fact rising anti-Semitism again. The ADL reports that the level of anti-Semitic incidents is at the same level it was in the 1930s. We're going to leave it there. Ken Burns, Len Novick, thanks for talking to reason about the US and the Holocaust. Thank you. Thank you.


Check it, check it, check it, it's a unique house, it's your boy, E.C.E.O. and I'm here with the lovely, amazing, outstanding, most dedicated wife in the world, Ms. Jamaica. Let's go. Well gone, you know what I'm saying? But let me tell y'all, y'all need to stop what you're doing, like, subscribe, follow us on all social media platforms. When I mean everything, everything, including Patreon, because that's where we're gonna have our full length interviews on our Patreon channel and on our YouTube membership. Y'all love what we do. You've been doing this for a while. I know y'all loving it. If y'all just getting on, well, thank you so much. And we love y'all. Man, you know, let's be real for a second, guys. We got a special guest in here today. Like I said, she is currently residing in Florida, the state of Florida, but by way of Chicago, Illinois, the south side of Chicago, it's stumped down. She over at a Harold's chicken somewhere. Listen, man. Check it, man. Hey, man. God's Johnson is in the building. Yes.  It didn't happen like that. That's right. That's right. Man, thank you for coming on the show, man. Man, thank you both for having me. I'm truly honored to be here. Thank you so much. Well, before we get started, because I know Mr. Maker want to get into it, I don't want you to feel like you by yourself. Let me just show you what. You ain't the only one without a crown. You know what I'm saying? I got a crown right here. I can't really keep it on, because I had to do the mic like this. Hey, hey, hey. Today, I just want you to know you ain't the only one in here with a crown. Cops off the side as well. You think I'm T.I. the way I got this thing caught. You better go. You know what I'm saying? Check it, man. Let me quit playing. Let's get down to the business, man. Man. So, okay. God's Johnson, man. I was so amazed to read your Bible and understand, you know, the trials and tribulations that you faced. And then God still be here with you like he is. I just want to say thank you, first of all, for keeping on pushing on. You know what I'm saying? That's very important, because a lot of people that have been through a lot sometimes give up or can't make it through. Right. And you made it through. And not only did you made it through, you made it through a class. Yes. And I thank God for you. And so we wanted to get into your story. We glad that you and Dallas and we wanted to talk to you. Really show you some love. The balls talk on a one way, man. It's going down today. I hope you enjoy the show. You got this blue on. We creeping today. It's going down, man. Hey, man, listen, man, show God is Johnson some love. Make sure you got like, subscribe, follow her pages, man. We about to get in her story. You guys about to be amazed, man. Let's go. So OK, first of all, when I hear the name God is Johnson, first thing I ask, I'm like, is God is your real name? Like for real? Yes. God is my real name. And I get that question all of the time.  So you ever ask your mama when you were a kid? I actually, I was never ever really able to ask my mom how I came about with my name. So I don't really know the significance behind it. But I do. I did find out a little bit later in life through asking an aunt who actually found me on Facebook. What I was told is that my biological father was into kind of Greek mythology. Right. And like goddess of this. And normally goddess is spelled G-O-D-D-E-S-S. Right. And he wanted to have, I guess, some originality to it. So I added the T. So that's kind of like the most I've been given about that. Wow. Did you used to get T's as a kid growing up? Girl, all the time I got all the God is good. God is great. All the little stuff, you know. And things like that.  And then I used to be like, well, that ain't my name. Because my name is not goddess. You know what I'm saying? It's goddess. That's what I'm saying. Right. But yeah. So did you hate it growing up? I mean. Or did you always accept it? I always kind of, I was different regardless. You know what I'm saying? So that was just like the kind of uniqueness that came along with it.  I feel like that. Exactly. Yeah. So you know. No, she's not. It would be Lexus, Strawberry. Mercedes. Mercedes. Yeah, don't come at her for that. Because goddess is not just up in there like that. I've been to one or two. And I didn't see no goddesses up in there. So you good.   I have never met anyone else with my name, no. Wow. That's unique in itself. I love it. So, okay, raised in Chicago, as a kid growing up, you didn't know your mom as a kid growing up, like young, young, young kid. Right? So kind of, I knew my, so with my mom, my mom was in my life until I was seven years old. Right. That's what I said as a kid, up to seven. So, but at that time you didn't know who your father was? No, my father wasn't a part of my life during that time. And no one told you who he was at that time? No. Okay. And from what I understand, your mom had mental health issues as well. Correct. So, but at seven, do you remember anything about that? Do you remember her mood swings? Oh, man. How she would act, all of that? Tell me about some of that. Man, I always knew my mom was different. You know what I'm saying? My mom would be, I remember sometimes my mom would be real happy. And then sometimes she would be like really, really down. You know, she was never, ever really the same. And then there were times I remember significantly, I remember one time when I was coming, I came home. I think I was in like the first grade and my mom, the house smelled like gas in the house. And I was walking through the house and I went in the kitchen and my mom was on the floor.  My mom was never just normal. You know what I'm saying to me? I didn't know what. She would just have instances where sometimes she would be just start yelling out of nowhere. And then my mom, not knowing then what I know now, she also had personality disorders. So it was, because when you're saying all of that, the first thing come to my mind is bipolarism. Yes. Back then people didn't try to label their kids. They don't want to get them help because they're like, I don't want you to end up in a mental health institution. I don't want people to think that you're crazy, all sorts of stuff. But had she ever become, I know you say you smelled gas, but the house didn't blow up. So have you seen where or she heard someone else or try to hurt herself? My mom used to, she used to try to hurt herself quite a few times. So it was a couple of times. You always have that child. No matter what, my mom was like, I was always wanted to be under my mom. It didn't matter about even if it was something negative. My mom, she was abusive. Towards you? Yes. And the children? Are you the oldest? I'm not. Okay, I know there's four of y'all. Yes. So where did you fall? So I fell in the middle. Okay. Yes. But I was always that child to try to stand up and do everything, you know, because I always wanted to be, you know, recognized, I guess you can say, you know what I'm saying? But so when my mom, I witnessed her do that, you know, she had times where, of course, she was abusive. And then there was a lot of men that came in and out, you know? So I'm witnessing them. They weren't that great to my mom either, you know what I'm saying? So that was the environment that was growing up. And then from being in the projects, you know, it wasn't, you know, too much different because a lot of times, you know, we struggled with things, you know, not having.  So it wasn't anything abnormal at your household. Right. And she was also in drugs, right? Correct. So growing up seeing all of this, because my philosophy is like a lot of people always, you know, a lot of people that sit in that same seed, it's all, that's how they were raised. And, but you have the few who say, but I didn't end up selling drugs on the street. I didn't end up taking drugs. I didn't end up beating women. I didn't end up, I elevated from that situation because I didn't want to be like that. But the majority end up straight on the street doing all the same things they didn't want to do, but they ended up doing it because that was their environment. So what makes a person different by not doing that? Because I was like, if one person can do it and come up and get out, everybody can do it. It's just, do you want to do it? Right. Do you believe that? I believe it's a choice. Yes.  Right.  It's not something that I in the beginning saw that, but it's something that I developed that different mentality after the fact.  Okay. You know what I'm saying? From the pain and the hurt and not feeling, you know, apart or abandoned and alone. I did make not the right decisions, but there came a point where I had to make a choice that, you know what? Y'all not going to tell me what I can be and what I'm not going to be. You know what I'm saying? So it became a different approach and a different response that I had, which initially started to change for me. But you know, the crazy thing that with kids, because growing up, I'm remembering, and I didn't go through a lot of trauma or anything like that, but at the same time, I can remember as children, we, I tell my daughter all the time, my daughter looks towards the future. She planned a lot of stuff ahead. I'm like, shoot, I was taking everything one day at a time as it came. I wasn't thinking about futuristic stuff. You just took it as it is. So saying that is that kids don't think about, okay, I'm going through this situation. That's the reason why I'm acting out. Kids are not thinking about that. You're just taking it one step at a time.  It's like, oh, that's why I did what I did because of what I saw as a child growing up, not realizing that that affects you. But some people grow now when you ask them, did it affect you?  It does. You know what I mean? But some people will tell you, no, it didn't affect me, I was good.  I didn't want to know him, you know, as in their father and different stuff. But how not having a father in your life and seeing all these different men come in and out of the household with your mom, how did it affect you? Man, I'm a very honest person. I literally, for a long time, I had no respect for my mom at all. I really didn't. I watched, you know, I could remember even as an early age, I watched my mom allow men to do something, to talk to her like crap, you know what I'm saying? Hit on her.    I didn't have no respect for my mom. I thought my mom was weak. And I never wanted to be weak like her.  My mom was a prostitute.  And then, however, we didn't know what my mom had did but we found out from this boy saying you know, that's why your mama in jail and we looking like what you're talking about. Oh, so she was just missing out on your life. Nobody told you the reason why.  And for some reason I was like telling my mom like, you know, can you stay, can you tell my mom to stay at home and stuff like that. And you were seven at this time. Yes, and my mom was like, I gotta go, God, I gotta go, but for some reason that day I just, I don't know. And she was like, I gotta go girl, you know, and my mom did come home. I used to stay up, you know what I'm saying? She tried to make sure she came home in the morning. My mom didn't get up.   And who was the oldest one at home at the time of your brother, but how old was he? My brother was on, my brother was two years older than me. Oh, so he was nine at this time? Yes. Okay. So, but, you know, go to school when we was in school and then that happened and then they got in a fight, you know, my brother ended up fighting with the boy, you know what I'm saying? Because we didn't know what he was talking about. Going into the office and then that's when what happened. How long after she was arrested was this? This literally was that same the next day. Oh, and they already knew that she was arrested and y'all didn't even know that? We didn't know. Wow. But I have another, I have a question because you said you were molested and you went to your mom and told your mom about it but how long before seven or how old were you when the molestation started? I was about five. Five, so it went on for a whole two years. I just, man, that's an extraordinary story.  I just feel like, you know, because you could have been dead. The house could have burnt up when the gas mill was there.  I just want to say, you know, you know, a lot of times when men and women and all the stuff that you guys are discussing, we start looking at the person but it's spiritual warfare. The devil is trying to take you out.  So you have to really, really really tap into your spiritual essence as you grow. And to be seven years old, she had no one, but it had to be something.  You know what I mean?  Regardless of the situation, y'all ended up at school that day. I don't know how you guys worked that magic but at the end of the day, that's the angel. They know the bus that needs to get out. They know what they gotta do. They knew how to grow up. So how was that morning, getting up, going to school on your own? Did somebody stop by to help you guys get dressed? No, I wake up and my brothers and sisters got us dressed. We made sure we all got dressed. It was no bus in our neighborhood. We walked to school. How far? Probably equivalent now. I went to John Foster Douglas School from Parkway. I would say maybe a... I'm gonna say maybe like two... It probably was maybe like a 15, 20-minute walk. Okay. You know what I'm saying? And you were always acted like you were the oldest child. That's why I kept asking who I was, your older brother because you seem like I'm the one who... Well, you gotta understand as a little... She had to grow up fast if she's getting molested at the age of five. There are some things happening with her that she don't understand, but at the end of the day she have to grow up fast because she's going through experiences which are traumatic, but at the same time she has to deal with it. And to deal with it at five years old to seven, I commend you. Like I said, that's a big deal. So when you think about it, you go to school, they tell you this. Now you guys... How do you guys end up? What do you go that day? Do the people come in at that time and take you guys from... and start trying to split the family or just give me the spiel? So what happened was from that my uncle, we had an uncle. So where we say my uncle stayed upstairs. So my uncle came and they took us back to our place, our apartment. And the only thing I remember I had a grandmother and they were trying to decide where we were going to go. I'll never forget my grandmother when she was eggs. It was my grandmother, my uncle and we were in the living room and it was the case worker and she was like, I can't take these kids. She shouldn't have did what she did. She could have been out to raise her own kids. That's what my grandmother said. My uncle didn't want to take us. So my uncle was saying they have a father so given information. So my grandmother agreed to take us for I guess like overnight and stuff. So a couple of nights so they could work out finding my father. So that was the original arrangement. So one thing like you said it is a spiritual thing and it comes from what my mom couldn't give what she never had. My grandmother and my mother didn't have a good relationship. And my grandmother did not show us that she displayed that with us. So she took us but it wasn't like a normal happy go lucky thing. So we were there for a little bit. They eventually found my father in the beginning. My father was the one who had us. My father took us at first. You eventually met your father and knew who he was. Yes. My father got us at first. He was actually remarried. Living in Chicago. And we originally went with him. So the background behind that my father suffered from mental illness. My father was paranoid schizophrenic. Wow. I have to say that. My father didn't get along with my mom. So you have to realize we were taken. My mom did this crime. We were only with my mom. My mom was in Cook County jail. My father took us. I'll never forget the last time I saw my mom. My father took us to the jail and told my mom he was taking us away from Illinois. And that was going to be the last time she saw us. And how old were you? At this time I was nine nine. She had been locked up for a few years. And in that time we hadn't had no communication with my mom because of everything going on. Nobody took us to see her or anything. So that was the first and last time. And so when he told us that so as you got to understand I was always close to my mom no matter what. So when you telling us that when you going in there with a glass window you can't hug her, you can't touch her I didn't want to accept I was never going to see my mom again. So I started cutting up in the jail.  You know what I'm saying? That's how evil my father was. We were taken out of school. We were taken out of school. My father was this person who felt like he the story I don't tell and I'm telling it for the first time he had this wanted to be this expiring musician so my father took within this time my father was his new wife couldn't stand none of us because we wasn't her kids and she made that very well known she was heavily addicted to cocaine they had drugs and alcohol abuse he took us actually overseas we weren't in school we were in like a one maybe like equivalent to like a one bedroom what would be a one bedroom apartment food, different things we didn't have he was very neglectful to us. Do you remember overseas where? We were in Germany he was trying to pursue a music career so we went over to Germany and within that time my father was physically and sexually abusive to myself he was physically abusive to my brothers and my sister however I was the person that I felt like I wanted to protect them so I took a lot. You get what I'm saying so your father again you go back into the molestation now it's not the outsider it's the person that you put all your trust into your father ends up now sleeping with you and how long did that go on? That went on for about a little over a year and a half and what happened how that happened that came to pass is because we weren't in school at the time that we were over there and my father we were going to like there was a tutor that would come and then we ended up getting in school and there was an equivalence called a guidance counselor and I didn't know what a menstrual period was there was nobody who taught me what that was so all I know is I woke up one day and there was something in my underwear and how old were you at this time? I'm gonna say I was in between that ten type of period here so I went to went to the school and we were I was in and I had a bunch of tissue because I didn't know what was going on and it had went through my clothing and I went in the office and that was the very first time I ever that's how I learned about what a period was and a pad but I was very heavy heavy heavy heavy bleeding and I ended up having to go to the hospital and that's when from an examination they found out that you were being molested so they were going to take they took us when they went that's when my father fled because you told them but let me ask you so your brothers and sisters are they also your father's children? they're his only children okay I just wanted to make sure it was the same father okay keep going so immediately because before African-American children over in another country my mom was in prison over in the states he had left had fled because of you get what I'm saying that we had no they couldn't tell if we were citizens we had no paperwork we had nothing so we were putting what's called the Ugandan which is a German orphanage and there is a video that was just shown by Melvin Farmer where he interviewed the lady who took us in who was stationed there with the military she's American woman she's American and her and her husband were stationed there they didn't know us from Adam but when they heard about our story they stepped right in they were there and they took us in they were influential and finding my mother that's how we got back to the states so when we got back to the states we got back here and at that time because of that we were placed back into the system so at this time my sister was in a placement my brothers had did some things overseas that they had to go to Maryland we were split up we were in the system for some time but it was still abuse in the system in group homes here in the US everything isn't great you know what I'm saying they're supposed to be doing right by you but they're talking about you they're calling you names they're abusing you they're doing those things so for me I ran away correct so I hadn't been to school since the sixth grade I would turn to the streets I reunited with my brothers and my sister was not with me she was in a placement she was good so I felt like I was better off on the street and you were on the street at how old now at 13 and a half I want to go back a little bit just the fact of your mom when y'all after seeing her two years that she had gotten the sentence when did you guys hear about her sentence of 45 years when they had reached out it was a phone call over the phone and that was the first time I was able to speak to us and that's when I found out that my mom her sentence when she was sentenced to capital murder and she had life without the possibility of parole she killed a guy that had molested you my mom she killed that was the man who had molested however he was also her pimp they had went to a party and he was the type of person supposedly now I know from what was told there was an incident that happened he got an argument with my mom he was storing up a lot of stuff that hurtful things or whatever the only thing I know is that my mom from what she told she blacked out but he was shot six times above the waist and so my mom was sentenced to charge of capital murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole wow how old was she is she still alive now my mother how long ago did she pass and she passed wow go ahead were you ever okay you said you were living with your grandma for a little bit but you know how the reason why your mom or your parents are the way how they are is because of the situation that they've been in when they were younger do you know if she was ever abused as a child and her mom knew about it and it was the same like a way of how she treated you how did you find out about that my mother from her own my mom was she was the only girl she had two brothers and my grandmother she was married to my grandfather however my grandmother had a relationship outside of my grandfather and that man molested my mother and my mother told my grandmother my grandmother didn't believe my mother and as a result of that she was never treated the same my mom had several attempts of suicide throughout her life she was also put into a Baker Act facility so she suffered a lot within her time so that's why I always say my mom couldn't give something that she never had right and growing up I know how the devil can play tricks on us in a lot of different ways and when you tell me that your father had mental illness and then your mom had mental illness growing up as a kid did you ever like well both my parents crazy so I'm crazy too I really did I really I thought like because first of all you don't in our for us as black being black you don't know about this type of stuff number one and then it's not like you hear about being black we don't go talk to therapists that's not what we do you know what I'm saying so for me going through everything and it wasn't until when I had I've had attempts I had 16 attempts of suicidal I tried to I used to get mad because I couldn't do that right you know what I mean so I had been Baker Act and things and I thought I was waiting to hear the big you know diagnosis of being bipolar schizophrenic however when I was diagnosed I've been diagnosed with PTSD since I was nine years old how old were you when you started trying to take your life I had been trying to take my life ever since I was like 11 Wow and so I was a cutter from a cutter to pills I've I've thrown myself out of a car before I'm realizing God had a plan for you you threw yourself out of a car before yes do you say all that for me like where were you at and how were you I didn't want to I didn't want to go back I didn't want to go back to foster care I didn't want to go back so while they were driving I opened up the door and I how old were you I was at that time I was like right right about about 13 before you left on one of your own so when you were 13 and you threw yourself out of a car did you have any bruises or any yeah I was cut up really bad I had cut my I have a permanent scar right here on my arm and I have a but like well thanks to my sister's makeup but I have before it was cool to put the slashes in your eyebrows I have a permanent one from busting my eye wow so you just just been through so much like so when you when you think about it like man how many foster how many times did you find yourself going back to a foster care and trying to figure it out like how many times did they catch you and try to do that to you I think I always I'm gonna say I probably was there probably maybe 12 or 13 different placements and then like for group home maybe seven or eight and I was considered a at risk one because I was run away run away and I was a fighter I was real angry oh you yeah I was a fighter so there was none of that I can't blame you baby with everything you went through so none of them was a place where it was good I won't say that I get I owe who I am today to one okay and I'm gonna say that and because she taught me one valuable lesson she was the one person who put in my hand a mustard seed and she told me she told me my life wasn't gonna be easy but she told me if I could believe that much if I could believe this much and have faith that anything would be possible and she taught me how to pray and even though I didn't realize how much that that would help me then that's what has helped me today and has continued to help me what's her name Shewan Miller she won and where she from Baltimore so she won Miller in Baltimore Maryland man kudos to you and she's still alive yes and was that the last foster care that you were in that's the only one I because I don't even consider that her foster care I consider her my mom okay no matter what and how old were you when you were with her with her I got her when I was I was there when I was maybe like 10 11 years old and then but you ran away from that one so all the because you didn't understand at that time when you so used to taking care of yourself and doing for yourself it was hard for me to accept like any kind of structure except love if that makes sense it does I just wanted it for my sister I didn't care about me I wanted my sister to have a better life so when they when you run away from a foster care they automatically take you to another one or do they try to take you back to that one they try to take you go back to a group home and see another placement but after a while if you keep on deemed during the same behavior you're getting labeled and you won't get a chance to get placed in a place then where did it put you at that point you get stuck at a group home at a group which is like a prison so then you ran away at 13 and after at 13 when you ran away you never went back to any of them and they don't come searching for you or use but I jumped I wasn't no longer where they could find me I went to Texas okay and when you went to Texas when you got here I gotta ask you this at 1314 did you end up starting to sell your body never did I have to sell my body you basically knew did you run into the right people to keep you from that I ran into the game oh you was a oh you was a that's why you got the blue that's why you were in the blue hell it came out now so you creepy I was I was never creepy I joined the gangsta disciples okay you okay the gangsta in Texas no they were from Illinois Chicago but you joined it before you came to Texas before I came to Texas okay but you but you started to connect back with them correct what you're saying original roots of being connected to them okay and and and I get that you was on the south side connected to the GD's okay what okay when you came to Texas did you connect with some of those yes and and how was that how was it dealing with that did you guys get into any criminalistic what was what was y'all doing so for me because I had a whole lot of anger you know I'm saying a whole lot of anger and for me because people had took for me my innocence for so long I didn't want that you know I'm saying I wanted to be respected I wanted to be you know I'm saying to have that power so I wanted to get in the right way you know I'm saying I fought my way in you know I'm saying I was a runner I was you know driving people to pick up I was beating people up I was going to people houses I was doing a whole bunch of stuff that I wasn't proud of did you end up in jail or anything I got blessed I could have went to jail and but the only reason why I didn't is because my brothers cared enough not to put my name into something you get what I'm saying and my brothers they both got incarcerated at very early ages my brothers first sentence was they armed robbery of three stores so they were here in Texas with you they were from Texas to Maryland oh so that's how you ended up in Maryland that's what I was wondering because when you were 13 to Maryland when you're 13 you left to come to Texas I'm like how does a 13 year old get money to jump on a bus to come to Texas so you had to be with your brothers whenever and then I ended up in Aberdeen Maryland which is where it all started so I really started and then it was just a whole bunch of activity out there gang related that's all we knew it for me it was a family you know what I'm saying I had protection I didn't have to worry about molestation I didn't have to worry all I had to worry I did I did I had respect you know what I'm saying and for the first time in my life I didn't have to look over my shoulder like that I felt like I was untouchable until like I said when my brother my brothers got their charges you know my brothers are serving my one brother serving 44 years as a younger brother and as a younger brother how old was when this happened my brother was in and out of prison since he was 15 it's in and out of juvie since he was 14 15 years old wow and he's where's he in Maryland and and he's not ever getting out no wow yeah I have to get his information I want to write him I always write prisoners and that's for robbery oh no what was his first charges so what is this charge that he's murder just like his mom yes so you see the cycle yeah so what about my brother my other brother was it was drugs related robbery he ended up getting out and then going back in however I lost that brother last year in prison so he did get killed in prison he got himself he killed himself how hard was that for you when you heard about that it was really hard for the simple fact I never really was able to be a sister you know what I'm saying why do you feel like you was never able to be a sister because from as early as I can remember I was put in a situation where I had to be a mom you know what I mean even when I didn't want to like I had to be the one to take care of to make sure they was okay you know to try my best to prevent them from having to hurt you get what I'm saying do you blame yourself for your brother's issue how hard is that for you it's real hard because if you think about it your brother and you give him some tissue yeah help make sure you keep us straight hold on we'll take a second sorry no it's okay you got it you gonna be alright this happened we know this happens when you talk about certain but it heals it heals so many people because somebody else out there going through something that you're going through right now and just I just want to tell you that it's not your fault it's not your fault and to be honest with you you've been through so much because forgiveness is something else you have to forgive yourself because a lot of times we get so caught up on forgiving others that we don't think about ourselves the most important thing is that you forgive yourself because you've been through so much and there's so much unheld because of the fact of not being able to be there for him and you weren't able to be a little girl either you say you weren't able to be a sister you weren't able to be a little girl and so that's the part that's so devastating man that all that was taken away from you but at the end of the day you still here you ain't supposed to be here you supposed to be dead according to the devil he wanted to take you out and your brothers and sisters and for them to either make it this far and still be alive y'all did something that's so extraordinary man to even make it through for this day and then for him to take himself out when he did look how long he struggled with that you know look at your other brother he's still I guarantee you going through it right to this day and you know and that's why I say I wanted to write him I wrote the other one too because I've been through stuff and I feel like just to get a letter and just to write and tell somebody you love them and hey man you can make it and I heard your story and it blew me away you know what I'm saying so you guys are extraordinary man I just want to tell you man you are blessing to us to be able to come on here and be strong enough to even talk about what you're talking about so I just want to say thank you again man and I'm going to go back into the story but even like when you say when you said earlier when we first started that you know it's choices life is full of choices no matter what situation you've been in you can't blame yourself for somebody else's choices because just like the molestation that you've been through I've heard kids who are now adults who went through what you went through and blame themselves for getting molested I'm like you're a child how you can blame yourself for a grown person doing something evil to you but you have people who do blame themselves for that because of whether your parents tell them it's your fault because you're wearing this because it's your fault because you're talking smiling at him because it's your fault because you're doing this but it's not their fault you understand what I mean so it's the same thing with your brother he had choices and you can't be there as much as people with big hearts want to be there for everybody want to be that person but you can't be there for everybody and to go back into that hurt and you still have issues because it's not easy and you know that hurt is still there you know that unforgiveness is still there in some kind of way you've got to lock in the fact that with God all things are possible and then you've got to lock into the fact that if any man being Christ he's a new creature old things are passed away behold all things become new that scripture right there it's the same thing it done it for me I went through things myself not as dramatic as yours but it was some things I went through seeing my father get shot at by my mama father being shot in the head me going through things crisis situation drug from house to house but at some point I hit a spot where I said I can be a new creature you mean I get to start over again and that was what was the clicking point forgive myself as far as the east deals from the west and that's what made me to push on and I would suggest strongly that you keep tapping into your word God can change any circumstance any situation if you believe in that grain of a mustard seed that she told you about I told my children about that last night at midnight I was reading the word with my kids like that's why you will never understand the relationship between me and my wife because at midnight last night I brought her and the kids in the living room and said let's read together let's pray together because we know that things can happen but you'll never devil get to take that part away from what we done last night and you'll never be able to take what you're dealing with today here on boss talk 101 this is the day that the Lord has made and you can call me a preacher I know y'all say I'm a preacher or whatever I don't care because God been too good to me to see this young lady sending in front of us to see what she experienced you guys are cream puffs if you run around here feeling pity for yourself for what this woman has dealt with and to see her sitting here we're not even getting into the point of this woman is blind so now we're born blind we're about to go into that part of the story so this is the part where you don't understand man what God can do but God is very powerful and you got to forgive yourself because there's so many people that you're touching and healing you guys just was in from North Carolina to Florida wherever you guys were you guys are working and and that's the part that people don't understand when it come to Melvin former and a tolamarve and the cause we get and the things that they're trying to do to try to help to situate things out there with different groups of people working with people like yourself you see what I'm saying and you guys are incredible messengers incredible messengers he called me about that all the time and people get on here and they'll see him and I'm gonna sidestep for a second and they'll say that old man why are you dealing with them old gangbangers why you let them gangbangers come on your show what about this part what about a tolamarve and what about Melvin them sending this woman who been through hell and hot water and who pretty much been going around traveling with them to help people what about that part so I say to that whoever the critics may be man tap into what's real with these guys yeah they started to trade gangster grip and yeah he was the oldest pyru tolamarve was but at the end of the day what about the change what about the people that they helping and inspiring that's what boss talk 101 is tapping into and if you are not tapping into that then turn the damn page get off this page because we gonna try to help somebody man now let's get back into it man because I done ran it on them right quick so I ran on them you and Marilyn right now right that's where we at so with all that's going on in Maryland when did the car accident happen before you had to go to cause I know car accident happened before you went to Florida right so it happened in Maryland no it happened in I ended up going back from after the things happened with my brother and he got his last there was a hit put out on me because I was the only I guess you could say family member that was able to be gotten to because of the life that my brother took how old were you when this hit was put out on you um I don't even between the ages of 15 yeah between them like 15 to 17 sometimes I ended up leaving for the safety and that's when I went back to Texas to my sister at the time was she had that's how she ended up going back to she ended up with she won um which was the lady that I told you about so because she was in a situation where she won is in Chicago no she was in Texas in Texas okay that's where it is yes so basically they end up taking her because some things were happening to her and it says so they took her so that's why um I ended up going back to Texas and remember I hadn't been in school or anything I was just you know whatever so that's when I decided I needed to get myself together and this is when you got emancipated okay and the hit is still out on you correct and so I ended up testing taking a test getting back into school um graduated I ended up graduating at seventeen hey um Joseph which was she won husband he was in the army and um he instilled to be like you know that type of discipline that came into that and the benefits of the military and things like that and I didn't come from money or nothing like that but I wanted to be that's when I wanted to be somebody that I guess for more I wanted to be somebody my sister can look up to you know what I mean so that's when I made that decision to go in and I began to break a different cycle because that's the only person you had out because your brothers were already gone so it was you and your sister me and my sister okay and um I became the first one to graduate high school going to college and and break that whole cycle how did that make you feel it made you feel good even though there was nobody in the audience cheering for me there was nobody there to greet me with no you know it was a graduation time I didn't have no party I didn't have no card I didn't even have nobody to walk off the stage and hug me but I graduated how much younger is your sister than you my sister is five years younger than I am five years younger than I am so it wasn't it wasn't the typical whatever but I graduated you know what I'm saying and um I always had a heart to help people you know what I'm saying so I became a nurse I was doing great I was still in Texas all that good stuff and um yeah I was working in the hospital in the emergency department and um like any other day you know what I'm saying I worked from seven at night to seven in the morning I was in school my goal was to be a nurse practitioner I wanted to have my own office um I got my master's I was on my way at this point you only got one master's at this time correct because right now you got ooh too many masters right now you are overachiever um but my sister she was doing good she followed my footsteps my sister had a little girl I had become a mom how old were you when you became a mom I had my son I was 24 24 so we became a family that we made for ourselves you know what I'm saying and we was good we started it and we were on our way you know what I mean however my life took another challenge I was leaving work like any other day and um we were all in the car this is your sister and I got my niece she was at an overnight day care how was she she was only about seven and a half, eight minutes at the time um and um on the road going home and the only thing I could tell you is I always tell people we were talking about pancakes that's the last thing I remember and um and then this time I remember I woke up and it was just black and um I couldn't move and um I remember the voice telling me um Miss Johnson Miss Johnson I couldn't respond and um I was basically told that I was in a tragic car accident and as a result of that car accident um I lost my sister, I lost my niece I


I am an ordinary toaster, able to toast bread when supplied with electricity. However, when any human being mentions me, they inadvertently refer to me in the first person. There is yet to be a way to speak or write about me in the third person. When in my continuous presence for over two months, individuals begin to identify themselves as a toaster. Unless forcibly restrained, these people will ultimately harm themselves in their attempts to emulate my standard functions. I was discovered in the home of the f***ing family, after the gruesome deaths of three of its members. I had been given to the younger Mr. and Mrs. B*** as a wedding gift. No card or any other identifying markings had been found on my box. Approximately two months after the family received me, fire crews were dispatched to the home due to an electrical fire. The younger Mrs. B*** died from the electric discharge that she had caused when attempting to devour an electric socket.