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The Current Transcript for January 27, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It would not be unexpected, but there will be more cases imported into Canada in the near time.

MATT GALLOWAY: Canada's chief public health officer confirmed what many expected this weekend with now to presumptive cases of the coronavirus here. There may be more to come. In 30 minutes, we'll hear from public health officials about what they're doing to reassure Canadians and about the long legacy of stars in the minds of this country's health care workers. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

[Crowd chanting Kobe]

VOICE 1: He was basically bigger than basketball. Like he reached at that level. It seems like he was superhuman or something.

VOICE 2: He's LA pretty much.

MG: A Laker through and through. The life of Kobe Bryant was celebrated at NBA games and beyond yesterday. In an hour, we'll explore his astonishing achievements on the court and a more complicated life off of it. But we begin, 75 five years ago, with the liberation of Auschwitz, the horrors of the death camp, and a remarkable story of survival. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

This Toronto woman survived Auschwitz. Now, at 95, she's still speaking up for the people murdered

Guests: Edith Grosman, Heather Dune Macadam

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: From whatever country you come, look at the ruins of the camp. Think and do all you can so that your pilgrimage be not in vain as was not in vain our death. For you and your children, the ashes of Auschwitz are a world link. And so that a terrible fruit of hatred, which traces to here, will never grow a new seed, neither tomorrow nor ever.

MG: A reading by Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent. Today marks the anniversary of the end of one of the darkest periods in human history. 75 ago Soviet soldiers liberated the Auschwitz death camp. Edith Grosman was 17-years-old when she and her sister Lea arrived at Auschwitz from Slovakia, part of the first official transport of Jews to that camp. Edith is now 95 and lives in Toronto and joins me in studio. Her story is part of a new book called, 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz. The author, Heather Dune MacAdam, joins us from New York City. Good morning.

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: Good morning.

EDITH GROSMAN: Good morning. Good day.

MG: Edith, I wonder if you could start by telling me about what life was like in the town that you lived in, in Slovakia when the government, the Nazi-backed government took power.

EDITH GROSMAN: In 15th of March, 1939, Slovak state, an independent state, proud. Our laws against the Jews were in the newspaper. Our laws against the Jews are stricter than German laws, proud of it, you know. And the president was a priest, Dr. Tiso, a catholic priest and signed everything. So it began. The Jews couldn't have all the gold. All the gold they have to give up. They couldn't have domesticated animals. Not a cat, not a dog. They couldn't live on the main street, you know,.

MG: Heather, why and you've written about this, why did the government at the time decide to send those Jewish girls and women into Nazi Germany?

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: Well, it is a big mystery. Why would you pick teenage girls to go know literally demolition buildings? That was the idea that they were going to build the new homes where the Jews are going to be rehomed. That was the euphemism for death that the Slovak Republic used or the Slovaks used, sorry. There's no actual paperwork, no documentation stating why they would use young women. However, Dr. Pavel Meshton and other historians around this history and myself included, you know, there's a couple of reasons that we come up with. One, is if you want to destroy a race of people, you attack young women because they are your next generation. They're going to carry the next generation and women are nurturers of a culture. The other thing is that parents are more likely to give up their daughters than their sons. And so, you know, and they were lied to. So Edith's parents and all of the parents, they were told that the girls were going to work in a factory for three months. And Slovakia was the largest manufacturer of army boots. And so everybody thought, it would be a shoe factory, maybe a munitions factory, they'll go away for three months then they'll come home. They had no idea that they were going to Auschwitz. And it was just a blatant lie in order to get parents to let their daughters go, which, of course, a few months later, they, President Tiso, the Catholic priest said, well, who wants to join your daughters? And everybody said, yeah.

EDITH GROSMAN: So I tell you something. My mother didn't want to let us go, especially not Lea because of me. She looked at me. I was the smallest in the family, you know. Lea was tall and already a human being, educated, and tall and beautiful and. And so my mother said Lea, you'll go to Hungary. And my father said, I don't let my kids away from me. I am the father. I am responsible for the kids and my mother said, but look the law. So he said it's a bad law, but we have to respect it. And you know, my father died, he believed that Lea is dead. He couldn't catch himself dead that he let his daughter die, you know.

MG: Heather, what do we know about how the parents of these girls reacted when they learned that their daughters weren't being sent to work in a shoe factory, but that they were being sent to Germany?

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: Well they didn't find out until they arrived in Auschwitz and part of, you know, and they were on their way to the gas chambers. Part of the story, you know, this is a multiple narrative. So Edith's story forms a narrative spine for the book, but I have loads of research of other families, survivors and non-survivors. And one of the stories is the Hartman family, which is just heartbreaking. And there's postcards that go back and forth between the family and Slovakia and a cousin of the Hartman daughters. And you know, the postcards, they have no idea. They just don't understand. They keep saying, why haven't we heard from them? And of course, the postcards coming back from Birkenau are coded and they're coded so well that the family can't tell that those girls are already dead. And it goes on for two years and it's just heartbreaking. So parents just they didn't find out. Edith's father, Emmanuel Friedman, sent somebody who worked in his store to Auschwitz to try and free the girls. He was a gentile and he went with their paperwork to try and free them, you know, and went up to the gate and said, I'm here to take Edith and Lea Friedman home. And the SS were like, well, what's their number and course, he's like a number? And he looks around. I mean, his life is threatened. He looks around and he sees crazy women who are half naked, wearing Russian men's uniforms, barefoot in a field in mud. This was one of the work details, they were spreading manure with their bare hands. And he thought that Auschwitz was an insane asylum. And he left and he went back to Slovakia and he said to Emmanuel Friedman, your daughters aren't there. I don't know where they are. And of course, they were there.

MG: There were 999 women and girls on that train. Why not a thousand, Heather?

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: Well, that's a really interesting question. And I believe Himmler was very, Heinrich Himmler was very, very into astrology. And I hired a historic astrologer to look into that number, as well as the astrological dates and everything matches. I mean, the date of the announcement is tried with Himmler birthday. Himmler's name, if you do the numerology of it, his Heinrich Leopold Himmler is a 999. His birth year and date equal a 9. And, you know, they believed in some weird stuff. And I truly believe that it was planned as a way of sort of stacking the deck.

MG: What do you remember, Edith, about that transport? Tell me about the train to Auschwitz.

EDITH GROSMAN: I don't know. I think we were 50 in one wagon. And when we saw, when we heard toclose the closet from outside, so we knew that it's not good. Then we felt that it's not good. And we young and had older sisters crying. What do you think? Will we live? Will we live? What will they do with us? Who will take us? Where are we going? So it was a panic. It was really a panic, you know. We all stay alive because the later transport, they came from Belgium or from Holland or I don't know. There were a lot of dead people already in the train.

MG: When you arrived at Auschwitz, what do you remember seeing?

EDITH GROSMAN: We arrived to Auschwitz and we didn't see anything only "arbeit macht frei," work is making you free. And we were waiting. We put the packages, we had to take 20 kilos, but what came, we didn't have any idea. It was for us a shock, an unbelievable shock what they did with us after, you know.

MG: What was the first shock? What was the first thing that happened to you?

EDITH GROSMAN: I tell you, I don't like to tell the story, but it make so a big impression on me. We almost all the girls that were standing got monthly and the whole snow was bloody. And this picture I saw the second time when we made excuse me. I feel now everything a lot stronger than when I came from Auschwitz, I tell you the truth, because then we were so happy to be free. It was almost I know it's not a normal situation, now when everything stabilized and I see the truth and I cannot understand the truth. How could it happen? How could happened a tragedy like this, it will never be described. Believe me. How could it be the world looked at this or heard about this? Like nothing, you know. Nothing happened. So what? so what? You know and I think we had to survive and to ask me who says this? Nature. God, I don't know. We had to be messengers. Somebody had to survive.

MG: To tell the story.

EDITH GROSMAN: And tell the story.

MG: You went with your sister. Tell me about your sister, Lea.

EDITH GROSMAN: You know in Auschwitz, when formed the expression, the guilt of the survivors. And I saw her the last day, it is the fourth of December in the evening, I went to visit her. It was very hard to me to go to visit her because theyn't did let it anyone in the block, you know. And I came in and I saw her. She was on the floor on the stone floor in a coma and the rats had dead walked there and back. And I looked at this beautiful girl. How my father and she how they were fighting to take her to school. The Slovaks didn't want to take her and how they were fighting and what a student she was. You know I had a picture maybe because I was too young. She was a woman and I saw her really like something special. And she stayed in my mind like some special person that she could do something important, but they cut off her life. So it was it was hard and it's hard till now, I can tell you that I tried to understand. I cannot understand. I cannot understand anything. Anything of it, you know. Anything of it.

MG: How did you survive after, I mean, and find the strength to survive after your sister died?

EDITH GROSMAN: You know, I came from the camp terminally ill, with tuberculosis in my leg and 80 years ago, tuberculosis was terminal illness. So it was alittle bit concentration of the leg because it was very painful and I was limping. And the doctor, Jewish doctor came to me and said, Edith, you cannot go to work like this limping. You will be the same day in the gas chamber. I can take you in the hospital for a few days till a new transport is organized then I will send you back. And so about two months, she every time took me for three days. After three days, she said go back to work because I heard that they are making a transport. After the transport, she took me again for a few days. A very nice woman. And she I can say, that she saved me with these because when the process became chronical, it didn't hurt anymore.

MG: And had you been ill then you would have been killed. If you hadn't been able to do that work, they would have killed you.

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: That's exactly right. And the other thing, you know, it's that Edith had a dear friend whose name was Elsa Rosenthal, and sisterhood was a big part of survival. And what happened with many girls, if they lost a family member, a sister or close cousin, is that somebody else often stepped into that place. And I write about it in the book, you know, you couldn't survive and Edith says this, you couldn't survive Auschwitz on your own. You had to have somebody with you who had your back and and helped you look after yourself and somebody that you could look after. And Edith talks about how Elsa says to her, elsa says to her, I can't survive without you. And Edith says, so I had to live.

MG: That they needed each other.

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: Yes.

EDITH GROSMAN: Yeah and I was fighting. I don't know if it was God or nature, my will, I don't know. It was something that pushed me to survive. And I want to tell you something. We were young and we were full of life with all this terrible situation. With all this fear. To fear every second in 24 hours. You know, it was terrible. But we were sitting some days on the bed and thinking we wanted to dance, we wanted to sing. We were young, you know. And you cannot stop this energy, even not if you don't have enough food for breathing. We were young and we hoped that somebody will survive. We hope, we fight and we were stronger than Hitler.

MG: It's a real pleasure to meet you. What a story you have. I'm glad that you survived and it's important to hear you. Thank you.

I tell you the truth. I am glad also for them, but not for me. It's a hard life if you are sensitive. I am very sensitive with a lot of things, you know. So it's a hard life. So that's why I go and I speak. It's hard sometimes because with children, you cannot tell them to hold truth with the gas chambers, with gassing people, with a woman, a beautiful like Lea lying on the floor, on the stone, in a coma. She looked, when I see her now, she look like a dead cat, you know. She was there with the hands like this. So you cannot, you know, you cannot tell them everything. So what you can, you tell. For adults I tell, but I cannot tell for myself the truth.

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: But you've done an amazing job, Edith.

MG: You have indeed.

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: You spoken truth.

MG: Thank you very much.

EDITH GROSMAN: You're very welcome.

MG: Heather, thank you.

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM: Thank you.

MG: Heather Dune Macadam is the author of 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz. She was in New York City. Edith Grosman was one of those extraordinary young women. She's 95 and she was with me here in Toronto. Quite a story. The CBC News is next. And then, from the basketball court and beyond, Kobe Bryant was a legend. The Globe and Mail's Cathal Kelly, on the tragic loss and legacy of the NBA star. But coming up next, Canada's first presumed coronavirus cases and what you need to know. That's coming up in about six minutes right after the news. My name's Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One.

[Music]

Health Canada confident it can contain coronavirus

Guests: Allison McGeer, Eileen de Villa, Bruce England

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, Kobe Bryant's death is sending shockwaves through the NBA and beyond. The life and legacy of a basketball superstar. That's coming up in about 30 minutes. But first, the coronavirus in Canada and the fight to stop its spread.

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: As a country, we've learned a lot since the SARS outbreak in 2003, and this has allowed our country and all levels of government to work very closely together to ensure that we are prepared. We're prepared to identify cases and to respond to protect the health of Canadians. All health ministers from across the country have a working extremely closely and very well together.

MG: Don't panic. The risk is low and we've got this under control. That's essentially the message coming from Canada's minister of health, Patty Hajdu. Canada's first two presumptive cases of Corona virus have been announced. A man in his 50s who had recently travelled to Wuhan, China, is isolated now at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. And this morning, Ontario health officials confirmed that his wife had also tested positive and she is currently in self isolation. Thus far, there have been around 2700 cases in China, with at least 80 confirmed deaths, according to Chinese state media. Dr. Allison McGeer is an infectious disease doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Eileen de Villa is Medical Officer of Health for the City of Toronto and both are with me in our Toronto studio. Good morning to you both.

EILEEN DE VILLA: Good morning.

ALLISON MCGEER: Good morning.

MG: Dr. de Villa, we'll start with you. What were your first thoughts when you heard that we in this country had a presumptive coronavirus case in the city of Toronto?

EILEEN DE VILLA: Well, as I've indicated through many media appearances, we were not surprised to learn of that first presumptive case of coronavirus. We have a very mobile population with lots of travel back and forth between Canada and the affected part of China. So we weren't particularly surprised to hear of that.

MG: Were you surprised to learn that that patient's wife had now and we just learned this this morning had tested positive with coronavirus.

EILEEN DE VILLA: Not especially. Again, similar travel history, same exposures, not a surprising development at this stage of the game.

MG: What can you tell us about her condition and the latest on that?

EILEEN DE VILLA: So as you've heard through the news release, she is in self isolation and the last word I have in respect of her conditions is that she's currently asymptomatic. So we're certainly pleased to hear that she's doing well.

MG: Why self isolation? What does that mean?

EILEEN DE VILLA: It means actually that she's staying at home, so as not to to spread the disease to others, which is, in fact, the appropriate course of action for somebody who is ill with a respiratory illness or disease.

MG: Why would that be appropriate rather than her husband, who is in isolation at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre?

EILEEN DE VILLA: So it's all a question of what's required in order to deal with your symptoms, right. If you don't need to be managed in a hospital because of your given medical condition, if you're not sick enough to require hospitalization, then the best thing to do to recover from a respiratory virus is to in fact, stay home and let your body do its work. Rest, fluids and let your body recover from a respiratory virus. This is standard care.

MG: Can I just ask quickly just about the language that we're using, we're calling these cases presumptive. What does that mean?

EILEEN DE VILLA: Well, actually, that has to do more with the lab testing. And, you know, Dr. McGeer here would perhaps be better to speak to that, given that she is a lab expert, but it is more around the testing. New virus, you want to make sure that you have two tests that confirm that the virus in question is what you believed it to be.

MG: Allison?

ALLISON MCGEER: Yes, this is really just standard good laboratory practice. This is a new virus. People are developing tests as we go. It's amazing that the Ontario Public Health Lab has this test up and running, but whenever it's new, it's really hard to validate the test and to be absolutely sure about. And this is a circumstance in which we want to be absolutely sure and so there's always this issue of a second reference lab confirms it before you call it confirmed. That doesn't mean this isn't a case. This is a case. It just means that we want to dot the Is, cross the Ts.

MG: We know that the first patient had symptoms on the plane. How concerned should people who were also on that plane be?

EILEEN DE VILLA: Well, at this stage, right, as far as what we're doing is as Toronto Public Health is our follow up, as we do with every case of infectious disease. This is our standard practice when we identify diseases that are communicable. We investigate the case, the ill individual, understand the circumstances of their illness and then identify those who are close contacts and therefore have been exposed to the disease in question. And why do we do that? We do that in order to inform those individuals of their exposure, to tell them what signs and symptoms they should be watching for, and then to offer them advice and guidance should they develop signs and symptoms of the disease in question. We then help guide them through appropriate health care and making sure that they get the right level of treatment.

MG: Would everybody on the plane be at risk of contracting this or is it just people who would be sitting next to this individual or in the rows in front and behind? How does that work?

EILEEN DE VILLA: So those who are at greatest exposure risk are those who are close contacts, those who are within a certain radius of where the ill individual is. You know that's how it works with these particular kinds of viruses, so we're following up with those who have been identified as close contacts. Those people have been identified and our staff at Toronto Public Health have been working flat out since we received confirmation and notification of that presumptive case, we have been working on it non-stop.

MG: Dr. McGeer, there is a lot of misinformation that seems to be spreading online around this. How concerned are you about that?

ALLISON MCGEER: You know, there's a limit to what anybody can do to control that, but I think it's a real challenge for people because it's so hard to know what's trustworthy and what's not trustworthy. One of the things that I don't think people are saying a lot, certainly on social media, is that it's really important to remember we're up at 80 cases exported from China. There has not yet been a single transmission on an aircraft. And everybody like Toronto Public Health is following up really carefully to people who are at highest risk on those aircraft. So it's easy I think to escalate. It's perishingly easy to start rumours about what's going on and really hard to listen. So it's about listening to public health. That's what they're there for.

MG: One of the reasons why people perhaps escalate is they'll connect dots back to the SARS crisis in 2003 and they will talk about what this city, but also the rest of the world went through. You know this as as a doctor, but also as somebody who contracted SARS during the SARS epidemic. What was that experience like for you?

ALLISON MCGEER: Well, you know, I think the SARS outbreak for all of us who lived in it was truly awful and for many different reasons. And there is many experiences as there are people who lived through the SARS outbreak in Toronto, but none of it was good. Well, that's not true. A lot of it actually was very good and the health care community and public health pulling together to get through it was awesome. But yes, I don't think there's any question that the, particularly in Toronto, where we have lived through it, you know, you see the pictures of Wuhan, you listen to the people begging for medical supplies and for assistance in Wuhan and there is an element of yeah we were there. We feel for you.

MG: Well, and one of the things we hear and I've heard it from health care workers, people who were there on the frontlines in the SARS crisis, is that this is one of those moments that kind of reminds them of what they went through. How concerned are you about the frontline workers with this coronavirus?

ALLISON MCGEER: I think, you know, I'm worried about the frontline health care workers who lived through SARS dealing with it because there are so many reminders. On the other hand, I'm not worried at all about our healthcare system, our health care providers being able to cope with it. If truthfully, if we could get through SARS in Toronto, we can do anything.

MG: There are questions as to how the patient even got onto this plane with symptoms. We heard that the patient was experiencing symptoms on the plane and then managed to get off the plane and come through the airport here in Toronto. How effective are the safeguards that are in place if those steps actually happen? If somebody got on the plane with the symptoms, but also was on the plane, then they managed to get off the plane without saying anything.

ALLISON MCGEER: Can I just weigh in. You know, I saw a lot of people with SARS and it's easy to think he had symptoms and he didn't talk about it. My guess about what actually happened was he wasn't feeling perfect when he got off the plane, but nobody feels perfect when they get off a 16 hour flight. And then he went home and developed symptoms, you know you kind of think of you're sick and you're not sick. It's actually not like that. The beginning of these coronaviruses you just don't feel that well. And so I think the answer is probably that he got off the plane. He maybe wasn't feeling perfect, but he didn't realize he was ill. Got home, he was ill, he called then public health goes back to talk to him and the end of the long discussion with him, you look at it and you think, you know maybe I can't tell whether he was feeling bad on the plane or not, but I'm going to air on the side of caution. And erring on the side of caution means he was symptomatic on the plane. The penalty for that is that everybody is saying the system failed, he didn't report his symptoms. My guess is that's not true.

MG: Dr. de Villa, that's what some people are saying, is that he didn't report his symptoms and that we're relying too much in some ways on the person to disclose.

EILEEN DE VILLA: Well, you know, this is how we manage through communicable diseases and we have to deal with the information that we have in front of us. I agree with Dr. McGeer. It's easy to look backwards and to try to manage these things, you know, through the rear view mirror, but I don't think that's a way to be successful. I think what we do is we look at the information that we have. We and in this particular case, I think it's important to emphasize that for this presumptive first case, all the information was communicated when it was clear that there was the need for health care. And, you know, symptoms or illness had gotten to the point that it was worth going to hospital because medical attention was needed. The information was absolutely given. So the individual provided notification of the symptoms and provided notification to paramedics who would be the first response of the travel history. So as such, they were able to adopt appropriate protective measures and so were the individuals who received the patient at the hospital. And those measures have been in place throughout the entire medical journey.

MG: So when you hear people say that Canada should stop flights between China and Canada, particularly during a lunar new year celebration, what do you say to that suggestion?

EILEEN DE VILLA: Well, you know, I understand, right? I think we have to, as a public health community, appreciate that when we're in a circumstance like this, we have a new virus that's been recently identified, you know, not even a month now when you think about it and one has to emphasize, we can't overemphasize how remarkable it is. Right, that we have laboratory tests that allow for this very quick identification and there for a very quick communication. So we understand that there are anxieties and that gives rise to fear, but it's important that we guide our public health interventions, our public health actions and the management of this situation with the best available evidence.

MG: Dr. McGeer, how worried in that Eileen de Villa is talking about fear, are you worried about stigma? When SARS happened in 2003, we saw in the city of Toronto some people avoiding, for example, Chinatown, worried about and we saw a community being stigmatized because of the fear that was swirling around. Are you worried that that could repeat itself?

ALLISON MCGEER: Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, the hardest thing in this circumstance to manage at the moment for everybody, I think is this issue of travel, because there's tremendous drive to say, if we can just stop people travelling, it'll be okay. When what the scientific evidence tells you is it doesn't work. It causes very significant harm and it does not work. You know, it's not people who are the problem here, it's the virus that's the problem. And all of the evidence we have says that stopping people from travelling is not going to prevent a spread. It's not an absolute that it's not going to spread. It's just that stopping travelling isn't going to help and when you stop travel and issued travel bans, there's enormous economic consequences. There is, as you say, stigma for people in China. And all of us should be sitting in Canada now saying thank you to the people in China. What people are going, the fear, the isolation, the economic consequences of what's happening in China are huge for them and they're doing it to protect us.

MG: And yet you go around and the conversations that you will have with people will indicate a real fear that people have in this country about what's going on right now. And they would say, of course, public health is downplaying the risk. That's the role of Public Health. In that moment what do you say to people who are having those conversations this morning, who are worried about what's going on?

EILEEN DE VILLA: Right. I would say that the role of Public Health is absolutely to protect the population and that this is something that we do each and every day. We manage infectious diseases absolutely every single day of the year. We do case management. We do contact tracing. This is what we do. And as I said, every single day of the year. I do think it's important and you talked about credible information and relying on sources that are credible, as did Dr. Mcgeer. I think the best thing that we can tell our public is to focus on those credible sources of information. There will be much misinformation and yes, there will be fear. We absolutely understand and appreciate that. But please focus on credible sources of information. We appreciate that people want to get updates, but Toronto Public Health is a credible source. The Ministry of Health, Public Health Ontario, Public Health Agency of Canada, all credible sources of information and actively working to update the information to make sure people have what they need to make the best decisions for themselves.

MG: Just before I let you go, are you expecting further cases?

EILEEN DE VILLA: I won't be surprised.

MG: We'll leave it there and perhaps chat again. Thank you both for being here.

ALLISON MCGEER: Pleasure.

EILEEN DE VILLA: Thank you.

MG: Dr. Allison McGeer is an infectious disease doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Eileen de Villa is the Medical Officer of Health for the City of Toronto. We mentioned survivors. SARS killed 44 people in Canada. Bruce England was one of the lucky ones. Retired paramedic supervisor contracted SARS 17 years ago. Bruce England, good morning to you.

BRUCE ENGLAND: Good morning.

MG: What went through your mind when you heard of these first presumptive cases of the coronavirus in Toronto?

BRUCE ENGLAND: SARS. I went back 17 years ago and went back to the night sweats. Remebering all the flashbacks of 17 years ago.

MG: Tell me about those flashbacks. What was happening?

BRUCE ENGLAND: It was the I guess, the isolation, being cut off from society. You know, just dealing with your loss of your health. You know, just like lying in a hospital bed, not having the strength to you know sit up. You know, this stigmatization of, you know, being sick and having diseases like that and listening to the news and hearing all the people dying from SARS.

MG: And this moment, what you're hearing now with these two presumptive cases, that takes you right back to that moment.

BRUCE ENGLAND: Oh, yes.

MG: You were a road supervisor with Toronto EMS in 2003. How did you first get SARS?

BRUCE ENGLAND: My crew notified me, there was a field pronouncement of one of the first patients, and I think the next day they'd gone back for a family member who was quite ill and they transported to the hospital. That's when they called me and the patient wasn't responding well to the treatment, you know to the medication, what they were doing in and it just didn't sit well with him. They thought, they knew something was wrong, they just couldn't put their finger on it and they called me in. I came in to review it and talk to him. I didn't really talk to the patient. I just went over it with the crew. I think I was maybe 10, 12 feet away from the patient you know in an open area of the hospital. Talked to the crew, I went back to the office and did a report and then just carried on with my day.

MG: When did it when did you realize that something was wrong?

BRUCE ENGLAND: I think the next day we were getting reports from public health that there was a new emerging virus coming out of China and you know, we thought you know, maybe, you know, this was something to do with it, but we weren't sure. We weren't getting the information. You know, we were really in the dark about it.

MG: And when did you start to feel ill?

BRUCE ENGLAND: About 12, 14 days later. I was working on the road, I'd gone home, I was working the night shift. I think I'd gone home and tried to go to sleep and I woke up with the aches and chills. I just didn't feel good. And I called into work to book off sick and I was talking to one of the people at work, and I remember sitting there and I could hear sirens coming on in the background and next minute a couple of paramedics were coming through my front door in encapsulated suits. And they took me out to the hospital.

MG: What a moment.

BRUCE ENGLAND: Yeah.

MG: How's your health today? That was 17 years ago. How are you today?

BRUCE ENGLAND: I feel it every day. Neuropathy, I've lost a lot of feeling in my hands and feet. I get tired very easily. I'm one of the lucky ones. You know, I recovered a lot better than most of the other. SARS patients. You know, I think I put it down to the fact that my employer, you know, the ambulance servic, my chief at the time and my senior manager made room for me at work. They helped me recover where I think the nurses were thrown under the bus.

MG: There was a lot of criticism in terms of how frontline health care workers during SARS, to your point, were treated. In what way do you think that things are different now? People talk a lot about what we as a society have learned from SARSS. What do you think is different now as you're watching this story unfold?

BRUCE ENGLAND: Right now, there's it appears to me that they're more transparent. There's more information coming. There's a lot more information coming out of China. Public health is trying to get out front of this story right now. The hospitals are trying to talk, get information out, where before I got the impression they're in denial. They were hiding information and they were moving patients around and not talking about it, trying to keep their numbers down. And I don't see that happening right now. So that's a positive thing.

MG: We were talking with Allison McGeer about the stigma that existed as well. For people who were working in health care and were impacted by SARS, that stigma was very real for them back then as well, wasn't it?

BRUCE ENGLAND: Oh, I mean, what do you say to somebody who knowingly goes into harm's way to treat patients yet, you know, after their shift, a twelve hour shift or a 13 hour shift, and on their way home to their families, they stop at a like a coffee shop to get a coffee and they come and ask you not to come in because it makes the customers feel uncomfortable because you're in your uniform.

MG: And that was the kind of thing that was happening back then.

BRUCE ENGLAND: Oh, yeah. You know, the paramedics were asked not to go into like the fast food restaurants because people were uncomfortable about seeing them. They didn't want you in grocery stores or anywhere else. Yet, you know, you were out there looking after the public.

MG: Just before I let you go, what advice would you give to health care workers who are out there now dealing with on the front lines of this virus?

BRUCE ENGLAND: Well, if you're doing it, you have to wear your personal protective equipment and they're doing it. The first crew, they were wearing this stuff and that's one thing that's going to save your life. And that's what it's all about.

MG: Be prepared when you go out.

BRUCE ENGLAND: You got to go home at the end of your day.

MG: Bruce, it's great to talk to you about this. I'm glad you're feeling better and hope that that continues over time. Your perspective on this though is really interesting. Thank you.

BRUCE ENGLAND: OK. Take care.

MG: And you. Bruce England is a retired paramedic supervisor and a SARS survivor. He is in Toronto. Well, coming up in the next half hour, Auschwitz 75 years later. There are, as you're hearing, sombre ceremonies at the site of the concentration camp today to mark its liberation. Gathered there are some of the remaining survivors. The CBC's Susan Bonner spoke with some of them. She'll join us from Auschwitz with their stories in about 90 seconds. And we'll talk as well, not just about that concentration camp, but concentration camps in the years to follow. What do we need to know about those camps, how they operated and how in many people's eyes they continue to operate? More on that to come. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music]

Kobe’s legacy reaches beyond basketball

Guests: Cathal Kelly

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The Toronto Raptors are going to dribble it up. There's a 24 second shot clock and of course, Kobe Bryant wore number 24. And I wonder if that is what is happening in honour of him. 24 second shot clock expires.

[Fans applause and then chant Kobe]

MG: Remarkable scene yesterday at the beginning of the Toronto Raptors game. The aptors and the San Antonio Spurs paid tribute to NBA great Kobe Bryant, running down the 24 second shot clock in honour of the number that he wore, 24. Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash in California yesterday. Eight other people, including his daughter, were also killed. The Globe and Mail's Cathal Kelly has written about Kobe Bryant extensively over the years, and he's with me in studio now. Good morning.

CATHAL KELLY: Morning.

MG: How would you describe Kobe Bryant as a basketball player?

CATHAL KELLY: I would say a brilliant, an incredibly brilliant, but complicated figure. Transformative. I think the modern NBA and I'm not talking about the tactics or the way they play, but the way the NBA carries itself, its dominance throughout the world is, you know, perhaps the world's most fascinating league. A lot of that is down to him.

MG: Why? What did he do? There were other superstars before him, but what did he do that was transformative?

CATHAL KELLY: I would suggest that the thing that Bryant did that, you know, it's hard not to call him Kobe. The thing that Kobe did that other players couldn't do is that he brought this mercurial persona, this need to attract attention on and off the court, and a sort of arrogance that translated with fans in a way that mere play couldn't. I think the way I put it today is he was social media before there was social media. He was a person that used the press, who berated his teammates, who castigated his opponents, who was against everyone tilted at every windmill and people found that fascinating. And the important thing, of course, is that he could back it up. He was probably the most brilliant player of his generation.

MG: Fascinating backstory. Grew up in a basketball family and grew up in Europe before he moved back to North America. Who was Kobe Bryant in that context?

CATHAL KELLY: In that context, like Kobe Bryant was a child that was bred for greatness. His parents had decided in his youth that he would be special in some way. That wasn't necessarily basketball, but it turned out that way. His father played professionally overseas. He was home schooled. And so when he arrived, he arrived with this incredible cockiness and self-assuredness that people really hadn't seen before.

MG: That he was able to display in a bunch of different language.

CATHAL KELLY: Absolutely. He was multilingual. You know, it was pointed out that he could have got a scholarship in the U.S. based on his academics, not his athletics. So he was someone, someone who was bred for greatness and carried that through like never seen to lose that self belief, even when he you know, we now forget it, wobbled at the beginning. He wasn't quite the player, he was initially advertised, as he had to grow into that role.

MG: And came in straight from high school?

CATHAL KELLY: That's exactly, right. He was one of the last to do it.

MG: His career, there are people in Canada who will remember a high or low point in which he scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors. What did that tell you about what he was capable of?

CATHAL KELLY: That he could, you know, it was two things that happened there. First, to score 81 points is insane. In that game, he took 46 shots. The Raptors total, so about 10 players, took 76. So he didn't lack for self belief. That was the thing is that most players will never score that amount because most players will not take that many shots. They will try passing off at some point. But he just felt he was in a rhythm and kept going. Later he called that, he didn't talk about the physical need of doing it, he's talked it is a feat of the imagination. That only he could imagine so big to score 81 points.

MG: In the imagination of basketball fans and you saw this yesterday, not just social media, but if you talked to basketball fans of a generation of his generation, he was the greatest player. What did he mean to basketball players and fans of the current generation? Because there's Michael Jordan and there's Larry Bird and there's a long list of extraordinary players, but in that generation, he seemed special.

CATHAL KELLY: Well, the thing is, I think Kobe Bryant had a Shakespearean arc to his career. There's three Kobes. There's the initial Kobe that wins the first championships and becomes, you know, the rising star in the NBA, the new Michael Jordan, probably the second best shooting guard in history after Jordan. Then there is the sex assault accusation, at which point his reputation is brought low, understandably. Then there is kind of a dark Kobe period after that when he becomes quite embittered and retreats into himself. And then there is that necessary third arc when he becomes the elder statesman. That went on for quite a while. That's the player, I think, players of this generation remember, when he became a kinder, gentler Kobe. He was still, he was still could, you know, kick against the pricks when he had to, but he was the sort of person that took people under his wing and was more open to new players.

MG: As you mentioned, at the height of his success, he's accused of sexual assault. He's arrested, never tried, settled a civil suit related to this out of court. The story was that this would have destroyed his career now. If this had had happened now in the era of MeToo, in an era of heightened awareness around sexual assault, that he would have never come back. He did come back. How did he rebuild his career and his image after that?

CATHAL KELLY: I think the thing that athletes, the advantage, if that's the word we want to use that athletes have in this, is that, you know, whereas other careers when something like this happened necessarily stopped, an athlete, there's a huge investment in them. Their career continues because they're under contract in most cases. And so you have your way to play your way out of it, fairly or unfairly. And people have very strong opinions on that. But because he was continued to be great and because he continued to win championships later on, people simply, I don't know if forgave is the right word, they simply moved past it.

MG: How does that call it the legacy that you see him leaving?

CATHAL KELLY: It certainly complicates his legacy. You know, I think that's for people to say to themselves. This comes down to, I would think, an art versus the artist question. I think you can appreciate the art without necessarily endorsing every single thing about the artist.

MG: There is a view that is shared that the statistics don't define his legacy in some ways. That he had all the numbers, but that isn't the full picture.

CATHAL KELLY: No, I think that's absolutely true, because it is what we, I think people will remember about Kobe Bryant a generation from now is not that he was the fourth leading scorer of all time or the five championships or the remarkable 18 straight All-Star Games. What it is, is the person. Kobe encouraged players in the NBA and I think writ large to be more themselves, to be more honest in the media about what they thought was going on, to be crueler, which people are always attracted to. I mean, nobody was crueller to his teammates than Kobe Bryant and people loved it. And also to see themselves as something more than basketball. You know, by sport standards, he was a renaissance man. This guy spoke Italian. He played the piano. He appreciated art. He was probably the first North American athlete that gave people permission to like soccer because he was such a big fan of it. So this was someone that was a lot more than what he did on the court beyond the numbers.

MG: There's a heartbreaking video that's been circulating of Kobe Bryant on the Jimmy Kimmel show, speaking about his daughter, who was also killed in the helicopter crash yesterday, talking about how she was a basketball player and when people came up on the street and talked to him, he looked at her in some ways as furthering his legacy. What does that tell you just about who he was as a person? People say that, not just as a father, but as somebody who, you know, became an advocate for women in sports.

CATHAL KELLY: Yeah. And a massive advocate. He had recently said that he thought women should be playing in the NBA, not at some future point, but right now. This is someone who saw himself like he was raised as a legacy. That was the entire point of his child rearing and obviously wanted to carry that on. He didn't see his greatness, I think is imbued entirely in himself, which a lot of great people do. He saw that as a generational patrimony that he was going to pass on.

MG: Cathal Kelly, it's good to have you here. Thank you.

CATHAL KELLY: Good to be here, Matt.

MG: Cathal Kelly is a columnist with The Globe and Mail.

On anniversary of Auschwitz liberation, writer calls attention to modern-day concentration camps

Guests: Susan Bonner, Andrea Pitzer

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. Today in Poland, some of the remaining survivors of the German death camp at Auschwitz are gathered to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet forces. They are accompanied by dignitaries from around the world. CBC's World at Six host, host Susan Bonner is covering today's events and she joins me now from Auschwitz. Susan, good morning.

SUSAN BONNER: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What is it like at Auschwitz today?

SUSAN BONNER: You know, there were many powerful moments over the last few days as survivors gathered here in Poland, but nothing like the moment when they came here to Auschwitz-Birkena. The intensity of this place is just so hard to put into words. It's not just a death camp, it was a death factory. The epicentre of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. And the survivors lived through that. So to watch them just walk through the gates again, to relive their trauma and to see them as old people, many in wheelchairs, using walkers, leaning on family members. The mere fact that they came back, it was extraordinary.

MG: You went to some of the sites at that camp with the survivors. Tell me about that.

SUSAN BONNER: Yeah. We walked through some barracks where the walls are lined with faces of the dead and the suffering images of starving women and children, names of the dead clothing. We went into one building that with a woman to see an image of her 9 year old self enlarged, filling half a wall. Her name is Miriam Ziegler and she stands among a group of children as the camp was liberated. And she's showing the soldiers her prisoners tattoo because they asked her for her name and prisoners didn't use their name. They were identified by their numbers. And she told us about the fear she felt as she stood there thinking, what's going to happen to me next? Where will I go? Eventually, Mariam made it to Canada and another woman told us about how she could not stop thinking of all the children who did not make it out of Auschwitz. Listen to Tova Friedman.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Every child was sort of murdered the minute they arrived. Maybe I was lucky the right time and I wasn't murdered when I arrived at the cattle car. But I feel that I represent those that aren't here, all those children. And I remember many of them. And I remember when they were taken to the ovens and to the gas chambers because they took us each barrack at a time. And just by pure luck I'm here. And I represent the children that aren't here and all the possibilities it could have been for our generation. All the artists, the doctors and the scientists that all went up in smoke.

MG: It's incredibly powerful. I can't imagine what it's like for them to be back in that site that caused them so much suffering and so much pain.

SUSAN BONNER: Yeah, there is a lot of pain and you see it and you feel it. One man from Montreal, Johnny J, told us it was his revenge to come back here, Matt. He survived. And really what's been striking meeting these survivors is how urgently they feel the need to tell their stories. Every year there are fewer survivors and most of them told us they won't come back here again. So they want to give their own eyewitness account here while the world is paying attention, while they can.

MG: This is part of the 75th commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz. There are dignitaries from around the world who are gathered at Auschwitz today. Tell me about who is speaking.

SUSAN BONNER: As you mentioned, they come from around the world, heads of state, some royalty. Canada's Governor General, Julie Payette is here. But the focus is is not really on them. It's on the survivors and their stories. Last week, political leaders gathered in Israel and they spoke out about the whole 75th anniversary. Today, it's the survivors. Their fears about rising anti-Semitism echo here. They talk about unchecked hate in the world right now and where that can lead. Matt, that's what this is all about today at Auschwitz.

MG: And being there in that moment, just what is that like? I mean, in hearing from the survivors themselves in that space, for you, I mean, it's history that is right in front of you in many ways and is still living.

SUSAN BONNER: You feel the weight of the history. It's actually a physical sensation that that all of us working together here are describing. Every once in a while, you know, you're busy working and then you look up and you see where you are and you know what happened here and you feel it physically. It's emotional, it's powerful and you feel the trauma emanating from these people, but you also feel their will to just get this story told and to tell the world their message, which is pay attention to hate. They've lived the worst of what it can do. They've seen it.

MG: Susan, thank you.

SUSAN BONNER: You're welcome.

MG: The CBC's Susan Bonner, Susan and the World at Six will have a special edition of that program from Auschwitz tonight on CBC Radio One and the CBC listen app. Auschwitz and the Nazi death camps were at the height of a system of cruelty that began before Hitler took power and continued after the destruction of the Third Reich. In her book One Long Night, Andrea Pitzer looks at the origins and the worldwide use of concentration camps from the 19th century to the present. Andrea, good morning to you.

ANDREA PITZER: Good morning.

MG: You spent years researching concentration camps, and I'm just wondering first what it's, what's going through your mind on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, I think there are two main things. One is just that, that there is more than a hundred years of this concentration camp history, but Auschwitz represents this really singular moment, along with all the death camps, that this industrialized power was turned to the just wholesale destruction of a people. And I think it's really critical while people are alive that we focus on that and gather their memories together because it's unlikely we would return to that place, but it's not an automatic given. And the other thing I think of is just how we're setting the stage for and seeding the ground with some of the very same things today that led to Auschwitz back then.

MG: I want to get to that in a moment. Tell me more about that singular moment though. How was a camp like Auschwitz unique in the history of concentration camps?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, these camps had existed. Things called concentration camps had existed for 40 years before Auschwitz came into being. And from my book, I call it the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of ethnicity or religion or political affiliation. So people rounded up on the basis of who they are rather than something that they've done. Those were around in the world, all over the world for quite a long time. But in the Nazi era, for the first time, we see a camp system that begins that way. The basic concentration camp system that then expands with this extermination camp system that's added in the middle of World War 2. And that specifically targets how to gather people together from across Europe, targeted groups, particularly Jews, and what were then called gypsies, what we would call Roma or Sinti and how to literally erase them from the face of the earth and that's singular in camp history. There were many lethal camps, but ones that were designed specifically for the mass extermination of people is really a singular thing.

MG: In your book, you trace the origins of the modern concentration camp back to Cuba in the 1890s. What was happening there?

ANDREA PITZER: So under Spanish rule, the Cubans had been resisting for decades and the governor there said that really the only way to end that rebellion would be to shoot a lot more prisoners and also sweep the countryside bare of peasants, the civilians that lived there, and then shoot the rest as rebels. So they literally cleared the civilian population out of whole sections of Cuba and put them behind barbed wire. And they called it reconcentracion. And so concentration camps became the name for how this was done around the world after that.

MG: Before the Nazis set up their concentration camps, the Soviets were running gulags in Siberia. What was happening in those camps?

ANDREA PITZER: So that all sort of began with World War One internment, which was a global thing. And many places, including the one at that point, was Bolshevik Russia before it became the Soviet Union, after World War 1, or when countries left word one, they simply started rounding up other groups of civilians. And with the Soviet camps, the singular thing there, the thing that was new, the innovation was instead of taking enemy aliens, foreigners who happened to be on your soil when the war began, they took their own citizens. They took their own population and identified target groups, whether they were religious groups or political groups and they began locking up their own citizens with the idea of reeducating them.

MG: In Canada and the United States, we know the people of Japanese heritage were interned during the war. Were the, would you call knowing what you know, would you call the facilities that they were interned in concentration camps?

ANDREA PITZER: Yes, because again, you know, it's important to remember in the U.S., that population that was rounded up, the Japanese-American population during World War 2, most of them were American citizens. And even those who weren't were arrested against the wishes of military intelligence at the time. It was really a political decision that was made to do this. And I also think in Canada during World War One, the Ukrainians that were here were treated really terribly with some pretty bad forced labour that they were put to. I think we have to include those, certainly not on the scale or the kind of Auschwitz camp. You know, they were not death camps. They were not extermination camps. But even Auschwitz rose out of exactly these other kinds of camps that we're discussing.

MG: And to your point, the language matters that in some ways, if we call them internment camps, that can diminish what was happening in those facilities.

ANDREA PITZER: I think it's fine to call it internment, it's one of the things that were there, but if we use that term as a way to minimize what happened, that's where I think the dangerous is. They are concentration camps.

ANDREA PITZER: If we step into the present, last year, the spectre of and that phrase concentration camps was raised again in connection with what's happening along the U.S. Mexican border. The detention centres there were designed to hold South American refugees who are trying to cross into the United States. Have a listen to what the Democratic Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border. That is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing.

MG: Andrea Pitzer, she, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, faced heavy criticism for calling those detention centres along the U.S. Mexican border concentration camps. What was your reaction to that criticism?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, I had been calling what was happening on the border with putting detention at the heart of this immigration policy, a concentration camp approach for months before she did. So I would not disagree with what she said. I think some of the flack came from the fact that people don't know this other history, this 40 years of history prior to Auschwitz, camps that happened after Auschwitz. And so I think if you hear what she said and you think she is saying that these camps are like Auschwitz, then it's reasonable to be upset and concerned and think that that's an inappropriate comparison. But I think that response is because people that don't actually know the larger history, they don't know that Auschwitz and these other camps were extermination camps, but that concentration camps are a much larger, much more ongoing project, which is quite dangerous.

MG: And the pushback in part to your point came because people said that she was drawing a false equivalency. That she was putting those detention camps in the same category, in the same box as the Nazi concentration camps.

ANDREA PITZER: Right. And I can't speak to what's in her heart. I've never met the representative, but what I will say is I was one of the people she cited. And so if she was, in fact, reading the things I was saying about these border detention sites, then I think she was probably using the term correctly. But again, I see how the misunderstanding arises because there are people out there looking to deny or to minimize the Holocaust. I just had someone write me about my book yesterday saying I really spent too much time on Jewish suffering during World War 2. So I mean, that perspective is out in the world. We have to be aware of it and be sensitive to it. But my sense is that that's not what she was doing in that moment.

MG: If you even move beyond that into the more present time we're in right now. There was a leak of thousands of documents recently detailing what the Chinese government is doing in terms of rounding up and returning members of its mother's Muslim Uyghur community in what it calls reeducation camps in Xinjiang. Some people have called those concentration camps as well. How do you see what's happening in China?

ANDREA PITZER: I think what's happening in China also fits in this tradition. It's very much inside the history of Chinese forced labour detention and concentration camps. In this case, now it's targeting, targeting a minority in a border region. And that targeting of minorities in border regions, we see that in India today. We see it in Myanmar with the Rohingya. We see it in China with the Uyghurs. And it's not that different. It's a level of degree of cruelty higher, but it is not that different than what we're doing on the U.S. border camp. So we have a border camp, concentration camp detention crisis rising in the world right now that we really need to be paying attention to. Climate change is only going to make this much, much worse.

MG: Do you think that more people would pay attention to the situation happening in China if the phrase concentration camp was used to describe what's happening in Xinjiang?

ANDREA PITZER: I think you see it used more and more, and I think it is raising the profile of those camps, which you know, with more than a million people detained in them, I hope that we will be able to raise it further. But then, you know, China keeps a lot of that information guarded and a lot of things are found through people who get out, through satellite photos. We have a really incomplete picture. So I think we, yes, we should use that term. We should press for more information.

MG: One of the things that becomes clear in reading your book is that concentration camps, in one form or another over the span of history were embraced by communists, they were embraced by capitalists, they were embraced by fascists as well. What is it that is so attractive to this system across ideological lines?

ANDREA PITZER: It really has to be manipulated by a government. So it doesn't just rise organically. There has to be somebody sort of pushing for it and propagandizing for it. But labelling one group as outsiders and dangerous to public health or criminals or destroying your society can be a really great way to motivate people who are frightened and angry, maybe for other reasons. And so you find it used again and again. What I will say is that the more checks and balances a system has, typically in democracies, you can undo some of that more quickly. You don't tend to see the camps that last 30, 40, 50 years in societies that have some mechanisms by which the people can vote people out or undo things. But yes, every system is capable of generating a concentration camp system.

MG: Early in the program, I spoke with Edith Grosman, who was on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, and he talked about what it was like to be there at that time and talked about how in some ways people felt and she felt that this was happening in broad daylight. That people knew about this and didn't do anything, and that she finds difficulty in reconciling, not just that she survived, but that she survived in the face in some ways of people around the world turning their backs. We hear this phrase again and again, "never again." When you look at the world since then, through your research of concentration camps, what does that phrase mean? Never again.

ANDREA PITZER: Well, I think it has to mean two things. I think that what happened to it is in people like her that were sent to Auschwitz and either came out or didn't. It is a horrifying sign of how we can take technology and cruelty and and just commit unbelievable, unimaginable atrocities. And so never again should on one hand be absolutely specific to that moment. But if the "again" in "never again" means we don't want this to happen again, then it can't just be "never again will Jews in Europe be rounded up and killed under Hitler in the 1930s." It has to mean a broader thing as well. And I think that broader thing is let us not take steps like these camps that are open in so many countries right now around the world. Let us not take even these steps closer to Auschwitz. Let us not imagine what other unimaginable horrors we can't yet picture that could develop out of these situations that are happening in broad daylight right now. You know, refusing to let that go further, I think is really important part of never again.

MG: And do you see the bricks for that foundation? Just finally, do you see the bricks for that foundation being laid now in terms of how people are acting around the world?

ANDREA PITZER: I do. And I think that people say again and again, this is not what's happening in my country with these people is not the same as those other camps. But looking through a century of camp history, what I can tell you is, that is always what is said when a camp system rises is "No, our camps are for people who deserve it. They are not like those other camps." And never is that true.

MG: That's a bracing message on a morning like today and in a moment like the one we're in right now.

ANDREA PITZER: Well, I think it's an important one. I think that this is a really good moment to make sure that the never again, you know, vow is something that we actually carry out.

MG: Andrea Pitzer, it's great to speak with you this morning. I appreciate it. Thank you.

ANDREA PITZER: Thanks for having me on.

MG: Andrew Pitcher is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. She was in Washington, D.C. That is The Current for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio on for Q. More on the death of Kobe Bryant, including an interview with Canadian author Wesley King. He teamed up with Kobe Bryant for a series of children's books about basketball and magic and you will hear that conversation coming up in just a few moments on the program. If you missed anything and you want to listen to the program again, you can do that through the CBC Listen app. Of course, there's our new podcast as well, the Current Weekly. New one comes out every Friday morning, and that's all available through the CBC Listen app. Get that wherever you find your apps. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.

[Music: Theme]

Jan. 27, 2020 episode transcript

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