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The Current Transcript for September 25, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE: My two sons were in our playhouse outside and I said, get the boys inside. I said I think this is serious. Our placehouse was completely destroyed, so take these warnings serious. These two boys are alive because of that.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Talk about timing. As you heard, Rick Swan credits the tornado cell phone warning system for keeping his children out of certain danger. It was the first major test of that system in an urban area and they are still looking at the data to determine how well it really worked. The tornadoes that roared through neighbourhoods in the Ottawa region a few days ago left a trail of destruction and that prompted multiple acts of kindness. In a moment Kristin Nelson visits those still reeling from it all. Also today, in a polarized world, some people embrace the nonsensical, non-sequitur. Take Bill O'Reilly for example, arguing he doesn't have white privilege.

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VOICE: I'm a really a white guy. When I was in Hawaii last week, I couldn't go in the sun. If I was in the sun for three minutes, my ears would fall off.

AMT: If you're among those looking elsewhere to hone your debating skills, it might be time to consider math. In half an hour, mathematician Eugenia Chang joins me to explain how mathematics can lead you to the art of logic in an illogical world. And then the story of Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov, who for decades kept a secret. He was the tattooist of Auschwitz.

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VOICE: He rationalized it by saying that if they came to him that meant that they would see the sun come up the next day. He knew that everybody who didn't come to get tattooed, they didn't get to see the sun come up the next day.

AMT: It is a story of survival and love, obedience and defiance taking place at a time of unspeakable horror. Heather Morris joins me in an hour to tell the tale of a man she met in his old age, anxious to share the complicated truths of his years in a Nazi death camp. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Ottawa woman saw deck fly off her house as tornado bore down

Guests: Kristin Nelson

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[Alarm]

VOICE: At 4:44 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Friday, Environment Canada has issued a tornado warning.

AMT: That is the warning that went out late Friday afternoon around Ottawa in the national capital region. It was no test. The intense storm flattened houses, ripped off roofs, tore trees from the ground. Environment Canada confirmed yesterday that three tornadoes touched down, causing chaos in eastern Ontario. No one was killed, but there were injuries ranging from fractures to shock. And 150,000 homes were without electricity throughout much of the weekend. Most now have power back, but in the hardest hit neighbourhoods people are still only beginning to come to terms with the huge extent of the damage. The Current's producer, Kristin Nelson, has been out talking to people who are dealing with the aftermath of those storms and she joins me now from Ottawa. Hi Kristin.

KRISTIN NELSON: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: Yet the images we've been seeing in the last few days are so devastating.

KN: Yeah it's quite something. And you know life is slowly getting back to normal here. Most people have their power back and most kids are back in school, but hundreds of people are still dealing with the fact that their homes were damaged or destroyed. And those are some of the people that I've been talking to in the last few days.

AMT: Where did you go?

KN: Well the first place I went was Dunrobin. That's where the first tornado hit. And it was the most powerful one. There were wind speeds of up to 265 kilometers per hour there.

AMT: And some of those pictures again, it seems as if there's just nothing left for some people.

KN: Yeah it's actually amazing that more people weren't injured or even killed. It happened at rush hour, so some people weren't home from work or school yet and many others were at the Carp Fair. It's an annual tradition in the neighboring town. The fair didn't get hit, but the people there were told to take shelter when the warnings came in.

AMT: So what's it like in Dunrobin?

KN: Well the streets were quiet when I went there because there's roadblocks set up to stop the public from driving in still. And for residents whose homes were damaged, they were only allowed in when they were escorted by authorities. So I arrived just as one couple was getting to look at their damaged home for the first time. Laurel Wingrove and Alex Carlson were at a wedding in Toronto when the tornado hit their home.

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VOICE 1: My boyfriend Alex is a volunteer firefighter and he got the page on his phone saying small structure collapse and there was 14 trucks responding. He's never seen that many trucks respond to a call. All of a sudden, his little brother who was on his way to Carp Fair was like Alex your house was destroyed. Like I saw a picture on Instagram, you know, so we just started receiving calls, text messages. We still can't believe it. Like this is unbelievable. Unbelievable.

VOICE 2: This is a 130-year-old building. So you know it looks just absolutely obliterated. These are dumpsters that came from way over there. So they were flying through the air and landed you know ten feet. Some of them went over the house and they're about a thousand pounds each. So it would have been like an asteroid coming in. So I mean the raw power is just I don't think anyone can fathom. This was all trees. You know, hundred year old trees some of them and they were up rooted and thrown like nothing. So, I didn't know this kind of thing was possible you know where we live, so it just happened so fast. So to me just kind of thankful we weren't home and you know there wasn't more people hurt.

VOICE 1: I think I'm kind of still in shock. It's like it feels a little bit hard to breathe, but at the same time I'm like kind of numbed out to everything. I just can't you know, our unit, our building's pretty bad. There's two across the street here on Porcupine that are absolutely destroyed. I just can't believe it.

VOICE 2: But you know the fact that we have anything at this point and the fact that we weren't in there, kind of glass half full I guess, way of looking at it. But you know our bedroom's upstairs and office is upstairs and there's no upstairs anymore, so. Yeah.

AMT: Wow. OK. The second story is gone and a dumpster is in the yard from way over somewhere else.

KN: Yeah it was amazing. It's almost a football field away at the local grocery store and there was all kinds of debris including an overturned boat, insulation, wood, furniture strewn all about.

AMT: Wow. So they obviously can't live there, what do did they do?

KN: Well they're staying with relatives, but they still wanted to try to recover some of their things. So they came back accompanied by the firefighters. And as we talked, the firefighters were going through the rubble in their home and bringing out whatever they could salvage.

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VOICE 1: They're basically going in and getting everything for us, as we describe the location. We're just hoping this is everything that was either like you know had memories attached to it or was a government document. Like I was worried about my birth certificate, but it's in this box. So I know I have it.

VOICE 3: Question for you. Is that a laptop?

VOICE 1: Yes.

VOICE 3: That wasn't on the second floor that was on the first floor.

VOICE 1: Well it's not my laptop. I was trying to help him. That is the laptop.

VOICE 3: So I found that you have a textbook and then you also the.

VOICE 1: More glasses.

VOICE 3: More glasses so.

VOICE 1: Thank you. Oh my.

VOICE 3: I can't believe I found that.

VOICE 1: Oh, does Alex know?

VOICE 3: No not yet.

VOICE 1: No, we need to tell him. That's amazing.

KN: So that laptop was so important because Alex owns a business and all of his invoicing was on it.

AMT: Wow, it's really something huh. A textbook, some glasses, anything and the laptop. Wow. So they stay with relatives. Kristin, what about people who don't have that option, what are they doing?

KN: Well the high school in Dunrobin has become a bit of a makeshift shelter and a gathering place for people who've lost their homes or been affected by the tornado. I went there and the first people I met in the parking lot were Karen and David McKinley. Karen was carrying some bottled water and the whole family wasn't home when the tornado struck their house. They had just come back from seeing it for the first time since the tornado.

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VOICE 1: So we just rescued our cat out of the house. We were allowed in today for the first time since Friday. We had two cats and one of our firefighter friends was able to find her on Friday and she's safe. And then we thought the other one was gone, but we found her, so that's all that really matters. We don't have a house, but that's OK. At least we have the cat.

VOICE 2: Yeah the house, the house has had, it's got issues to be honest and worse. You know our boys are safe, the cats are safe. The house can be rebuilt. We'll be OK and I think we're thankful it didn't hit in the nighttime because everybody would have been home. And for the people that were here, they certainly are far more traumatized than us because we didn't hear it. They are still hearing what happened and the glass breaking. We weren't here to experience that so we're seeing the aftermath today. They lived it.

AMT: That's a point. What about those people Kristin, those people who lived it. How are they doing?

KN: Well another woman I spoke to at the school was Ramyza Naji. She was home alone when she saw the tornado coming.

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VOICE 1: I got to downstairs in the basement for two minutes, three minutes. I come up, I go out. Nobody's outside. I go to my neighbour next door. They come out. They scared, very scared.

KN: Was it scary for you?

VOICE 1: Yeah. Yeah I'm scared too, alone. I'm alone.

KN: Did you hurt your wrist in all of this?

VOICE 1: Yeah. I go to downstairs a little bit fast. Yeah I fall down.

KN: You were running downstairs and you fell.

VOICE 2: She saw the deck actually fly off. Yeah the deck flew off and that's when she ran downstairs. Yeah that's traumatizing right. She's a lady, yeah she's tough. She came out and she was running to the neighbourhood to make sure everybody was OK. Yeah a lot of people were really scared like, but that's what neighbours are for right.

KN: Ramyza Naji told me that she didn't sleep for two days after the tornado hit. It was so terrifying. So now she's staying with her daughter in-law Claudine Rashad who you also heard from in that tape.

AMT: And we heard that the deck flew off. What shape is her house in?

KN: Well right after I spoke with them. They were going to see their house for the first time, escorted by the firefighters. And when they got there they found that the roof was very badly damaged. Claudine told me yesterday that volunteers were helping them all day to get it covered up, to prevent any more damage because it's actually raining this morning and it's expected to rain all day here.

AMT: After that tornado hit Dunrobin it hopped the Ottawa River and hit the Quebec side. What happened there, Kristin?

KN: Yeah. Gatineau was also very hard hit by that same tornado that touched down. The city says that nearly 1700 housing units were damaged or destroyed and now hundreds of people have been displaced.

AMT: OK so that was the first tornado and there were three. Where did the second one hit?

KN: Well the second one, it was slightly less powerful than the first one, but it still packed a punch. There were winds up to 220 kilometers per hour. And this one touched down in the southwest part of Ottawa in a suburban area.

AMT: What kind of damage did it do?

KN: Well I went to a neighbourhood called Arlington woods. When I got there I had to step over fallen hydro lines and there were branches littering the streets, police cars were blocking the hardest hit streets there and a lot of hydro trucks were out with workers trying to restore the power. I ran into a couple of residents who showed me around.

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VOICE 1: When the storm started, I looked out the window and my hedges are pretty high. They were bent over like this and then I saw one of these little hydro poles swing into the air. Then I called 9-1-1. This is my neighbour here, but another 20 feet, could have been my house and it wasn't. So it hasn't really sunk in. The mess I would have been in had it been another 20 feet. It's devastating. It's absolutely devastating. And a couple of our friends and this is our friend's house too here. Both cars were crushed, but somebody taped up the roof at least.

VOICE 2: The most beautiful street when you looked in there with all the beautiful pines and beautiful homes. And it's a disaster.

VOICE 3: We walked there yesterday. My husband was there today and they cleaned up all the branches. They're doing an amazing job. They're working day and night. And this fellow came by yesterday, his name was Peter with hydro. He got three hours sleep. He was here till 5:30 in the morning direct, oh my God that's the church. Oh my God, wow I haven't seen that. That's pretty bad.

AMT: What she's seen Kristin? What's so surprising for that reaction?

KN: Well we were looking at the Arlington Woods Free Methodist Church and it was the first time she'd seen that. When the tornado hit on Friday, it ripped off a big section of the roof there.

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Sounds of children moving branches

KN: Teenage girls are moving fallen branches into a big pile here. They're moving them out of the way. There was a lot of activity at the church and a small generator was running so that people without power in the neighbourhood could come and have some warm coffee or plug in their phones to get recharged. In front of the church I found the lead pastor, Mike Hogeboom. He had just wrapped up a service in the parking lot behind the church because it wasn't safe to be inside.

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VOICE 1: One third of our fellowship hall is missing and it actually ended up over 100 yards over into our parking lot. It just picked it up and tossed it over there.

VOICE 2: My name's Ben Spears. I'm the family pastor here at Arlington Woods Church. I have a youth program that usually runs on Friday nights. So I was posting something on the door because I was kind of thinking you know the power is out, it's going to be canceled and sure you know we had a tornado warning, but you know we're in Ottawa right, like this kind of thing doesn't usually happen. So I open the door of the back youth area just to get some light in. And all of a sudden like within ten seconds the wind picked up to an intense degree, the door folded back and it slammed. So I ran to the door, pulled it close. I stayed under like the doorway, you know all those things you're supposed to do. And I just heard the roof like lift off of the building. It was pretty loud. The fire alarm went off cause all the broken glass and everything. And then 10 seconds after that it was done. So I can take you into the area where the roofs.

KN: Oh wow.

VOICE 1: Hard to describe isn't it. Like if you know once you see it for yourself. The two by fours that are missing, most of those landed over in the parking lot. There is some that are lodged in a tree over here. That's you know 30, 40 feet up in the air.

VOICE 2: If it was any later we would have had you know 25 teenagers in the basement you know when it happened. If it happened the day before like we had a seniors program in that room with like 75 seniors. It happened at I guess the best time it could have happened for sure.

[Chainsaw]

VOICE 1: There's a lot of emotion and a lot of you know people dealing with some psychological stuff, you know. A lot of loss, you look around you see trees that are 100 years old that are gone. And you know people's homes have been damaged. There's a lot to process. Yesterday I was here and you just see people walking, almost walking aimlessly. It's a huge loss.

VOICE 2: Definitely like having nights where I wake up and it's just like the adrenaline is pumping still because you're just shocked at how fast something like this could happen.

AMT: What an incredible story and that the speed at which it all happened and over in seconds. And he says he knew something was coming?

KN: He did, but he admits he didn't take it seriously enough because you just didn't expect something like this to happen in Ottawa and that's something we heard from many people. My colleague here at CBC Ottawa, Jennifer Chevalier, she talked to Rick Swant and his son Jordan. They're from Dunrobin and Rick was out shopping when he got the warning on his phone.

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VOICE 1: I got the first alert and like a lot of other people I've talked t,o some of my neighbors, unfortunately we don't take it serious enough. I got the second one and when I got the third one, there's something kicked in, I said maybe this really is for real and I phoned my daughter and my two sons were in our playing outside. And I said get the boys inside, I said I think this is serious.

VOICE 2: All of a sudden my sister comes out she's like guys come inside. I'm like why. And she's like, well dad said. I'm like oh ok, dad said then it's probably serious.

VOICE 1: About ten minutes after that, that's when the tornado goes through.

VOICE 2: I remember just like going inside. My mom came home. Then like started looking, rain comes out of nowhere just starts hammering. Spinning around you could see it starts to spin. We were just like standing there thinking it was just another rainstorm then all of a sudden, boom glass breaks. We don't know how, we all just dropped to the ground. And then next thing we know it, I'm just yelling, get to the basement, get to the basement. We all just go running down to the basement and it was just crazy.

VOICE 1: Our playhouse was completely destroyed. So I just want to send that out to other people. Take these warnings serious. These two boys are alive because of that. So.

VOICE 2: Whenever we get these warnings, we think nothing of them, like at all. Because every time we've gotten one, it's just like a little bit of wind rain. We've sat through rain before and thought nothing of it. So we probably would've been like too late because like if my sister wouldn't have been at home like it's just all these like if this, if that, you know so. You just don't realize how quick it can just all end. Yeah.

AMT: You can hear how shaken he is.

KN: Yeah it was a really close call for them. And things might have turned out differently if he hadn't got that message on his phone.

AMT: So it helped them. But what do we know about how effective this warning system is?

KN: Well cell phone warnings are actually new. Geoff Coulson is a warning preparedness meteorologist at Environment Canada. We reached out to him and he says that this was the first major test in an urban area of the cell phone warning system. They don't have a full picture yet of how well it worked. They're still collecting data from phone companies and the government, but from what he can tell, from social media and regular media, he thinks it went quite well.

AMT: Well Kristin you're in Ottawa. Did you get the alert?

KN: I did. Yeah, but I know some other people with the same cell phone provider, who didn't. I was sitting next to someone and her phone didn't go off and mine did.

AMT: And for those who did get the messages, how much warning did they get?

KN: Well Geoff Coulson says that on average the warning comes about 10 to 15 minutes ahead of the tornado. But some people only got a couple of minutes. Others got up to 30 minutes. So it's something Environment Canada is working on. They're trying to give people more notice, but then that raises other issues. Geoff Coulson says that if people have too much notice, they might try to leave the area and that is not what experts want you to do. If you ever get one of these warnings, take it seriously and find shelter where you are.

AMT: Well the stories around these tornadoes really put that advice into perspective.

KN: Exactly. And before I go, I just want to leave you with one last voice. When I was in Arlington Woods, I talked to another man named Copperfield Jean-Louis. He goes to a different church nearby and so he sort of organized a little group with his pastor and they came there to offer whatever help they could to the Methodist Church that had its roof blown off. Mr. Jean-Louis, he's a long-time resident of Ottawa and he was really moved by the way that the city had pulled together after the storm. And that's something we're hearing from a lot of people. There are a lot of stories of kindness and real feelings of gratitude to all the people who've helped so far bring the city back together. Have a listen to this.

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VOICE: I think the city is fantastic. Actually coming down Green Bank, I saw a Hydro worker just waiting there and he was yawning. I said, I looked, I rolled down my window and said thank you. Give him a thumbs up. He smiled and said thank you because I know they're tired. They're working like crazy, around the clock and the main thing is communities gone together. From the mayor, down to the regular folks, helping, assisting, giving, driving people around and sharing. It's unbelievable. There's been no looting, there's been no theft, no maybe some people have snapped at each other because they're impatient sitting at the lights, but it's just been a community effort to get through this and we'll get through this.

AMT: In the midst of all that devastation, the kindness.

KN: Yeah that's really what you're struck with.

AMT: Well it's an important thing to to hear about and remember. Kristin, thank you.

KN: Thank you.

AMT: The Current's Kristin Nelson is based in Ottawa. The CBC News is next. And then for most Americans, when it comes to Donald Trump, there is no in between. You either love him or you hate him. Finding common ground is becoming more elusive than finding Bigfoot. But Eugenia Cheng says she has found a way to bridge the chasm and it has nothing to do with politics. It's a new way of doing math. Stick around to find out more. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

The power of logic: How math can help you win your next argument

Guests: Eugenia Cheng

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, Lale Sokolov survived Auschwitz, in part because of the job he was given. He was Slovakian-Jewish. He tattooed the infamous I.D. numbers on the arms of his fellow prisoners. I will speak with the author of a new novel, who was inspired by Lale Sokolov's remarkable story. That is coming up in less than 30 minutes. But first, the power of logic.

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[Music]

[Arguing]

VOICE 1: Why is it so easy to buy a gun in this country?

VOICE 2: It's not easy Hiraldo.

VOICE 1: Why don't you have mandatory training? Why dont you have?

VOICE 2: It's not easy.

VOICE 3: Let's just talk about people as Americans. Asian-Americans. That's the term.

VOICE 4: No you're not going to police my language. They are Mandarin. It is written in Mandarin.

VOICE 5: You're not answering my question now. You're not answering my question in the moment.

VOICE 6: I am answering your question John.

VOICE 5: Don't take me back to some before the war crap, I want to hear what you're saying to the coworkers you work with now Jeffrey. Answer the question now. I don't want to hear about stuff from 50 darn damn years ago.

AMT: Well, that's the kind of arguing we see a lot of, hear a lot of on cable news these days, particularly in the United States. We are surrounded by debate and political polarization. People trying to make their case in an increasingly divided world. It can feel hard to bridge the political divide and engage with those who disagree with you, but my next guest argues there's a simple tool to help us do just that, math. Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician and scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the author of "The Art of Logic in an Illogical World." And Eugenia Cheng joins me from Chicago. Hello.

EUGENIA CHENG: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Do you ever get a headache listening to people try to win an argument?

EC: Oh I do. And it can be very depressing and it can feel very futile. And so I cling to the fact that I do think there is a better way.

AMT: Well in a world where we are surrounded by what we just heard and all of that angry debate, how can mathematics or logic help us argue better?

EC: That might seem counter-intuitive I think because mathematics can be thought of as something that's very removed from real life, especially abstract mathematics. The very word abstract makes it sound like it's nothing to do with real life, but the whole point about maths is not that it's about solving specific equations or numbers and things, it's really a discipline for having clear arguments. And mathematicians have been developing the techniques for having clear arguments for thousands of years. So we are actually very well practiced in just that and those techniques can translate into real life very well.

AMT: And let's just get to a definition here, what do you mean by logic?

EC: Logic is a process of justification that we use in mathematics all of our mathematical results are based on logical justification where you show that one thing follows from another and then another thing follows from that just by kind of intrinsic definitions and principles. But then of course you have to assume something at the beginning because you can only use logic to deduce something from something else. And what it means is that we're forced to be very clear about our basic starting points and I think that's something that doesn't happen nearly enough in political arguments.

AMT: And that's why you're saying logic is a powerful tool to help us reach some common ground, as opposed to just scream at each other?

EC: We can disagree with somebody else and feel very emotionally upset and insulted by the things that we're saying. But if we take a step back into the logic of what they're saying and trace back their logic, I think it actually helps us empathize with them because we can see where their thought processes are coming from without having to agree with them or emotionally understand why they think that.

AMT: If much of the world doesn't behave logically though, how do we use logic to understand the world? I think that's it tempting to say that everyone who disagrees with us is not behaving logically. And the thing is that they're not behaving according to our logic, but they are behaving according to some logic. There is something that is causing them to do that and I truly believe that it's more helpful to understand why they're thinking those things that seem illogical to us and why they seem logical to those people, rather than simply say those people are not behaving logically. I don't think there are that many people who would just say, oh yes I don't behave logically at all. I think that probably most people think they behave logically, it's just that we have different starting points and different ways of using logic and different ways of weighing up different factors in a situation, so that we come to a very, very different conclusions.

AMT: OK. So I want to talk about a few examples. Let's start with this one. This is ex-Fox News host Bill O'Reilly arguing with a guest about white privilege on his now canceled show.

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VOICE 1: I'm a really white guy. When I was in Hawaii last week, I couldn't go in the sun. If I was in the sun for three minutes, my ears would fall off. Alright, now I'm from Levittown as you might know, out of Long Island and my parents didn't have a lot of money. All right. Do I have white privilege? Am I privileged in any way under this banner?

VOICE 2: Yes, because none of the things that you, none of the things that you indicated, speak to the issue of white privilege. White privilege isn't whether your skin pigmentation is strong or weak, it isn't how much money you have in the bank. It is you are the beneficiary of years of whites having an advantage in this country, based on.

VOICE 1: But I don't experience that when I worked in Carvell painting houses, cutting lawns.

AMT: So what do you make of Bill O'Reilly's argument?

EC: Well first of all, he does lots of shouting over the person he's talking to. That's not the issue. What we have here is a classic example of somebody using what isn't quite the right definition and or perhaps I should be less biased and say that the two people involved are using different definitions of white privilege and that's where the disagreement is coming from. Now I think that what Bill O'Reilly is doing is what's called a straw man argument. At least it used to be called that, but I don't like the gendering of it, so I like to call it a straw person argument, which is where you take something that isn't the real argument that's much easier to knock down and then you knock it down. But what you've done there is you've defeated an argument that nobody was even making in the first place. And so his error is that he thinks that white privilege means that all white people are rich and don't have to struggle, but that's not what it means. White privilege means that if he had all the same characteristics and the same amount of income in his family when he was growing up, but was also black, instead of being white, then he would have been even worse off. It's that disagreement between what white privilege means. Some people think, perhaps willfully, just to aggravate everyone else or maybe they just truly don't understand. They think that white privilege means that all white people are better off than all black people and that's just the wrong definition of white privilege, I think.

AMT: And so what do you make of the argument of the guest. That was Reverend Jacques Degraff by the way.

EC: I think he made a valiant attempt at refuting the argument and he started pointing out that that, the things that Bill O'Reilly was saying was not actually anything to do with the issue of white privilege. But I don't think he very clearly explained why those aren't to do with white privilege. He started saying that white people are the beneficiary of years and years of white people having an advantage, but he didn't really explain what that consisted of. And why, in what sense that gives them the privilege. And I think with all of these arguments it's important for us to say in what sense people are privileged and what sense they are not. And it's true that there are white people who are poor and who struggle and who don't feel like they have any of the benefits of the supposed white privilege. And so in that sense, they are not privileged. But then there's another sense in which they are privileged, which is that if they were also black, then they would be even worse off.

AMT: What kinds of mistakes and logic do you hear the most when you listen to current political debates?

EC: I do hear a lot of straw person arguments, where people simply take a different definition of the same thing and then defeat it. So for example, in the Black Lives Matter argument, people argue against it by saying all lives matter. But that's a straw person argument because the people who say black lives matter aren't claiming that other lives don't matter. All they're claiming is that black lives matter, but they are currently treated as if they don't matter as much as other lives. And so if you claim that they're saying that other lives don't matter, you're replacing their argument with one that they're not making and then you're defeating an argument that nobody is making. So you haven't actually achieved anything.

AMT: So what does a logical argument look like?

EC: I think that a logical argument involves a careful unpacking of what people were saying, back down to their fundamental basic principles. So instead of just yelling at each other that we disagree about the conclusions and the other person is wrong, we should be trying to understand how the other person came to that conclusion and this is what we do in mathematics. If two people think they've proved things that contradict each other in mathematics, we have to unpack their proof very carefully and try and find the exact place where we differ. And I think that we could very much stand to do this more in social and political arguments, as well. Instead of focusing on trying to show that the other person is wrong, it would be very productive if we could try and focus on understanding how the other person got to that point, so that we can understand the sense in which they have a point and the sense in which we have a point and then the exact place where we disagree.

AMT: I'd like to get your feedback on another example. There's been much debate around universities providing a forum for controversial speakers and not long ago, The New Yorker dropped ex-Trump staffer Steve Bannon from its Festival of Ideas. He was still scheduled to speak at the Munk Debates in Toronto. So we asked for a little help from some people who spent a lot of their time arguing or debating. The Ryerson University Debate Association agreed to help us out by presenting both sides and I want you to listen to the first argument.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: My name is Jamie Fotak. I'm vice president of the Ryerson Debate Association and I'm studying philosophy. Let it be resolved that Canadian universities should not only refuse to ban controversial speakers from their campuses, but also provide the necessary support for them to be able to present their ideas. Freedom of Speech illuminates all ideas, inconsequentially bad will be exposed and the good ones further are appreciated. In providing an isolated space free from mentioned, let alone criticism, schools are allowing bad ideas to permeate. It is far more harmful to a speaker who is spewing falsehoods for their ideas to be disproven in public and to be presented with the clout they are currently given when their talks are being shut down before the zipper on the costume can be exposed. Freedom of speech is the capitalism of ideas, only the strongest survive.

EC: Eugenia Cheng, before I go to the other side, what do you think of that argument?

EC: So first of all, there's the issue of whether we're talking about banning speakers or just not providing them with a forum in the first place. So it's true that banning them can create publicity, which then gives them even more of a platform in a way, but if we just simply didn't invite them in the first place that would be different. So perhaps we should have started by being clearer about which of those we're talking about. And so the next thing is something that comes up a lot in political and social discussions at the moment, which is this question of freedom of speech. And the thing is that I think freedom of speech really means that the government can't prosecute you for saying something because of freedom of speech. It's not about whether every institution should allow you to say everything you want. And so I think that a university not providing you with a platform doesn't actually violate freedom of speech, unless the government then arrests you for having said the thing that you're saying.

AMT: OK well that's, it's good to hear what you have to say on that. Let's hear what Jamie Fotak's debating opponent said in response, arguing against the resolution.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: My name is Mclain Weaver. I am a fourth-year economics student at Ryerson University and I am president of the Ryerson debate association. This whole idea of a crisis of freedom of speech on university campuses is a fallacy, it's not happening. What the real situation is that there's a couple individuals who want to come to campus and there's been large protests and the costs of security has made it prohibitive for these coming to campus. I think they're a huge waste of student resources, student time, student energy to invest in this when we could invest this money in other places that would be more productive, such as their education.

AMT: OK. What do you think of that counter-argument?

EC: Well he did try to refute the first argument, but I definitely honed in on the phrase, it's not happening. He said there's a crisis of freedom of speech, but it's not happening and that doesn't really constitute an argument. That's just a statement that hasn't had any justification. So that was an issue in the first place. I think the main point is that he missed the more nuanced parts of this argument, to do with whether having somebody speak at a university is more about giving them a platform or more about giving the university an opportunity to rationally refute their ideas. And I think that's a much more interesting and nuanced argument and it's almost like a question then between the rhetoric that those controversial speakers are wanting to put out against the idea that rational arguments can defeat that rhetoric.

AMT: OK. It's really fascinating to hear how you take us through this. I want to go a little further now. Let's break down some of the steps to arguing better. You talk about the first step being to move from the real world to the abstract world. Tell us more about that.

EC: Mathematics lives in the abstract world because that's the place where logic really works. And in order to move there, you have to forget some of the details that get in the way. And this might seem like it takes you away from the real world, but what it does it really is it takes you to the heart of an argument, the essence of an argument that's making it true. And if you try to justify something, using a general, what sounds like a general argument, you can use abstraction to show that someone's argument isn't right. For example, they might say that they don't believe that you should pay for something that only benefits other people. So some people say that every university, people should pay for their own university education because they're the ones who are benefiting from it and therefore they should pay. But then you can try transferring that to another situation and see whether it's still true. So for example, elementary school education. Are they the ones benefiting from the elementary education? Do we make them pay? No we typically don't. And so that shows by taking it to an abstract level and finding another example, we can then say that their argument wasn't really, that wasn't really their argument. And then we have to get to the basis of is there something different between university education and elementary education. And maybe that's a question of people choose to go to university, if they want to, but everybody has to go to elementary school education. And then there's the question of do people really choose to go to university though. There's so much pressure on people to go to university, if they want to go into certain jobs that they don't really have a choice to get certain jobs, you simply have to have a university degree. So we get to see that the argument is much more complicated than the one liner that we tend to get these days because we have tiny attention spans. We need mic drops, we have tweets that only have 280 characters and so on.

AMT: What's another key step to arguing better?

EC: Another key step is to develop the capacity for following long chains of arguments. So small children can only really follow one step of an argument, so they think that they are hungry and they need food or they want ice cream and they want it now and they can't see something more long term, such as if all they eat is ice cream every day then in 20 years time they won't be very healthy, for example. And as we grow up, supposedly one of the things we develop is the ability to put together chains of argument so that we can get a bit further than that. And most of the arguments that we're trying to have in politics and things at the moment, are quite complex and I think that if we try and simplify them to one simple justification, then it's always going to be an oversimplification where we end up disagreeing with each other. But we need to be able to say, under these circumstances this is true, but under these other circumstances this is true. Now let's weigh up these two circumstances and so on and it goes on for a while and a short argument or a meme or a tweet, simply isn't long enough to do that.

AMT: You need a starting point, do you not, to be in an argument, people have to be arguing in good faith.

EC: Yes that is a big problem these days and I think that when people are not arguing in good faith, it's very difficult and perhaps what you have to start with is to try and persuade them to argue in good faith. And one way to do that is to be very sure that you are already arguing in good faith yourself and this is hard. And I catch myself doing it often and I've been really concentrating on stopping myself, especially in the last two years where I discovered that I'm simply trying to show that someone is wrong and then I pause and think wait, I should try and understand why they think that. And it's a discipline that I impose on myself every day. I always read articles I disagree with to make sure I understand why people think things I disagree with and when I read an article I agree with, I always read the comments to make sure I can see what hateful things people are saying in opposition, so that I can understand what the opposition thinks.

AMT: When people are passionate about something or upset, they seem less rational, less logical. How do emotions and logic intersect?

EC: I think it's important to remember the emotions and logic are not in dichotomy with each other. They are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes people and I must say it's often men, accuse women of just being emotional and not being logical. And I think that women sometimes feel emotions so strongly that they worry that they're not being logical, but I think that emotions and logic work together. I know that I am extremely logical. I'm a professional research mathematician. I also know that I'm extremely emotional and I have emotional responses to things very quickly and very strongly. And that doesn't mean I'm not also being logical and the thing is that I can use logic to unpack where my emotions are coming from. So for example, if I'm completely terrified of something, then I can work through that to see where that terror is coming from and if someone has really upset me, then I'll be very upset, but that I can gradually work back through it to see why I'm so upset about it. At the same time, I can use emotions to help understand other people's logic because I can try and understand where they are coming from, rather than imposing my own logic on them all the time. And so empathy kind of helps me access their logic, which then helps me empathize with them even more.

AMT: What are the limits of logic? Where does it fall down as a tool to make sense of the world?

EC: Logic alone will never persuade people. People are emotional beings and unless we get to the heart of their emotions, we won't be able to persuade them. And I think that is why in the arguments between scientists and science deniers, the more the scientists argue about logic rationality and evidence, the more the anti-science people dig their heels in because they're not going to be persuaded by any of those things. And so instead of simply going on and on about evidence and calling the other people irrational, we need to understand that they are probably afraid of something and that that fear is overcoming their ability to understand rational logic and evidence.

AMT: The truth seems a casualty of a lot of public discourse. What happens when facts do not matter to the person with whom you're arguing?

EC: I think we need to be careful about saying that because I think that everybody thinks facts matter. It's just that they have a different idea of what facts are and actually if we're completely honest with ourselves, how do we define a fact? How do we define a truth? I don't actually think there's any such thing as truth. What there is is different ways of justifying what we think is true and different disciplines in academia have different ways of accessing truth. So mathematics uses logic, science uses evidence and so on. I don't think that we should overstate the matter. I don't think that there is something that is absolutely true. If you think about something that's true in the news. How do we actually know it's true? We think it's true because it's been reported by some source we consider to be reputable, but that depends on their reputation. So these things are still somewhat contextual and I think that if we overstate how true they are, then we're opening ourselves up to being defeated in arguments. Instead we should say, here's a framework for how we believe in accessing truth and then we can ask the other people, what is your framework for accessing truth? What methods are you using for determining that this thing is true? And importantly, what would persuade you that it wasn't true? Because a good framework for accessing truth, also has a framework for saying when something isn't true.

AMT: Before I let you go, I think it's worth just mentioning as you discuss this in your book, you make the point that you know people have a certain view of mathematics and you make the point this is not about the memorization of numbers and tables. Mathematics is about learning to think.

EC: That's right. So there is a traditional view that mathematics is about numbers and equations and solving problems and that it's very useful for things like building bridges and flying planes and developing computers. And that's all true. But if we think that mathematics is limited to that, then it gives some people the opportunity to say that they don't need to do mathematics. That they are grateful that someone else does it, but I don't need to do it because I don't use it in my daily life. And the thing is that mathematics is more math. It is about a discipline for thinking clearly and if we think of it like that, then I hope everybody wants to think more clearly. I certainly wish that certain people in the world at the moment would think more clearly and I think if we show that mathematics is about thinking clearly then that shows that it is relevant to everyone who thinks.

AMT: Thank you for your time and for your thoughts and your ideas. Thank you.

EC: Thank you very much.

AMT: Eugenia Cheng, mathematician and scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her book is "The Art of Logic in an Illogical World" and she joins us from Chicago. A big thank you as well to the Ryerson debate association for being such good sports and letting us pick apart their arguments. Let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. In our next half hour, it was a secret he carried for decades, afraid of judgment for the role the Nazis forced him to play. I'm going to speak with Heather Morris about Lale Sokolov, the real life inspiration for her new novel, "The Tattooist of Auschwitz." I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

[Music: Theme]

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and the love that helped him survive

Guests: Heather Morris

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[violin plays]

VOICE 1: Could you tell me your name please?

VOICE 2: My name is Lu Sokolov. I was born ne Eisenberg.

VOICE 1: What name are you known as?

VOICE 2: Lale. They called me Lale.

VOICE 1: What was the name of your wife?

VOICE 2: Gita Sokolov.

VOICE 1: Where did you and Gita meet?

VOICE 2: In Auschwitz-Birkenau.

VOICE 1: And how did you meet?

VOICE 2: I was the tattooist in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I tattooed her number on her left hand and she tattooed her number in my heart.

AMT: You just heard Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov speaking to author Heather Morris, 60 years after his escape from the concentration camp, where he saw so many of his fellow Jews die. For many years he was assigned the job of tattooist of Auschwitz, inscribing numbers on the arms of prisoners as they entered the camp. It was a story he kept mostly to himself for decades, afraid of being seen as a collaborator because of the privileges that position gave him. After the death of his wife Gita, whom he met in Auschwitz, Lale Sokolov shared his memories with Heather Morris. They spoke several times a month, over many years, at his home in Melbourne, Australia. Lale Sokolov died in 2006. Heather Morris has turned the story into a novel. It's called, "The Tattooist of Auschwitz" and she joins us from Melbourne, Australia. Hello.

HEATHER MORRIS: Hello.

AMT: It's so interesting to hear his voice and so much to ask you about. First of all, how did he come to be the tattooist at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps?

HM: He was destined to die within weeks of being transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He got typhoid and he was thrown on the death cart. One of the prisoners that he shared a block with was taking him off because he knew he wasn't dead and a stranger came along and helped him. And for seven or eight days the men in the block and that stranger, another prisoner, cared for him. And when he was well enough, that stranger took him outside and introduced himself. He said I am Pépan I am the tatowierer, I would like you to come and work with me. And so he got the role being the assistant. He was only the assistant for a few weeks and one day he went to work and Pepan wasn't there and he was told by the camp commandant you are now the tatowierer.

AMT: And it was really by their whims. The original man was likely taken away and killed.

HM: Yes. We could not find him. We've had researchers searching for him, but we didn't have his surname cause Lale couldn't remember it. So we can only presume he was killed immediately.

AMT: Now he came from Slovakia. How what happened to him to get him to Auschwitz?

HM: Well Slovakia was the first country really that started handing over young Jewish boys and girls, men and women, to go and work for the Germans. And he volunteered when the Germans issued an edict. Every Jewish family had to surrender one child over the age of 16 to go and work for them. Now Lale had an older brother who was married with two small children and he had a sister and there was no question that he would go.

AMT: He was tattooing the people who were coming in a very infamous of course, numbers on their four arms. How did he describe the process of tattooing?

HM: He rationalized it to himself and he needed to do that, by saying that if they came to him, that meant that they would see the sun come up the next day and maybe the next day after that and the week after that. He knew that everybody who didn't come to get tattooed, they didn't get to see the sun come up the next day.

AMT: He couldn't have refused at that point, could he have?

HM: Oh no not at all. He wouldn't have seen the sun come up the next day.

AMT: Lotte Weiss was one of the people whose arm he tattooed and she now lives in Sydney, Australia. Let's listen to what she remembers about Lale.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: He did my tatoo. I can't forget it. C2063. He was a very good chap you know. I knew that he did on all the girls, so there was no sense in being angry with him or anything. Nothing. He was a good friend and then he married Gita and Gita was a good friend of mine, before and in Auschwitz. Very often I think God looked after me because my sister Celilia and Erica, they died two days within each other and they had similar number to me. But I tell you something, it was so horrible for us when we were there, the suffering. I was so bloody lucky. My luck was Lale and gita and if you needed each other, you know we were there, one for the other and it was just sheer luck.

AMT: Heather Morris, we get a little sense from that and you know over time, we have learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, but she speaks there about the bond amongst those people who would do, would help each other. And you spend a lot of this novel kind of looking at that. Yes that friendship, that bond, you know in a funny kind of way, Birkenau was a community. People had jobs, some had privileged jobs like Lale. People looked out for each other. And it was the humanity that Lale saw time and time again of one person doing something small, sharing their bread, helping in any small way they could. That's what kept them all going.

AMT: Lotte also remembers that Lale marries Gita and we heard Lale say earlier that she tattooed her number on his heart after he had tattooed a number on her arm. So he knew the number. How did he find out her name? It was a big place. He actually, like he was looking for after wasn't he?

HM: Absolutely. He had a minder, an SS minder, who he described to me as being an uneducated oaf, somebody that he learned when to walk in front of, when to walk beside and when to walk behind him. He learned how to manipulate this man and he got from him, Gita's name. He gave Baretzki the number and he said would you find out who she is and where she is? And Baretzki did it for him. They have a relationship, which yes can be called into question, but please, understand at all times, Lale was just using and manipulating this person.

AMT: And we'll talk a little bit more about that after, but in terms of Lale and Gita they fall in love. How do they fall in love in such a terrible place?

HM: Well Lale fell in love first. He was the one who was totally smitten. When he held the arm of her, an 18-year-old girl dressed in rags and her head shaven, he knew that in that second that he could never love another. And you have to understand that this man had been something of a playboy before he went in to Birkenau. Now Gita, she wasn't the same. She saw no reason to get to know him initially. To her, they were never going to leave that place other than through the chimney. He just had to have the faith for the two of them.

AMT: She wouldn't give him her last name. Why not?

HM: No. Because there was no point in it. She couldn't see them ever leaving there and so she played it really tight in terms of how much information she would share about herself and he accepted that. He knew sooner or later they were going to leave there. He just wouldn't have it any other way. Yes, he also described the fact that he survived as being just lucky, lucky, lucky, but also he helped manufacture that luck by being an opportunist and looking out for others.

AMT: So they looked at their circumstances differently. She thought they weren't going to get out and he had this hope and it's almost as if by by falling in love with her, he had a reason to hope for a life after that.

HM: Absolutely. There were many occasions, he walked alone between the two camps. There's four kilometers between Auschwitz and Birkenau. When Baretzki was either too hung over or couldn't be bothered making the journey, he let him walk alone, unescorted, because he knew he would not run away. There was no way Lale would be leaving that camp without Gita.

AMT: What privileges did he get from his job as the tattooist?

HM: Well the most significant privilege was freedom of movement. Because he could be in any part of the camp, it also meant that he could get access to the girls who were going through the belongings of the prisoners and get from them, money and jewels that they smuggled out. And with that, run his black market, where he could help as many people as he could.

AMT: He would get diamonds and rubies and gold, what would he do with it?

HM: Well he befriended some of the villagers. You know that was one of the things that struck me the most. I did not comprehend that people who worked and lived nearby, came into Auschwitz-Birkenau every day and carried out a 9 to 5 job and then went home again. I talked about that with Lale because I just couldn't comprehend that knowing what they were doing there and he was quite sort of matter of fact about and he said, oh they had families to feed. But it was those villages that he was able to give them money, the jewels, the diamonds, and they in return brought him food in particular.

AMT: And what would he do with the food?

HM: Distribute it as far and wide as he could. Break it into small pieces.

AMT: Those local workers were coming in to build more areas for the new prisoners to sleep and of course more gas chambers and more crematoria.

HM: Exactly.

AMT: So he was doing this, this is very dangerous, as you mentioned, he has an SS guard assigned to him named Stefan Baretzki. And you make the point that he's able to manipulate him. Tell us more about that relationship.

HM: He wasn't that much younger than Lale, but he was an uneducated man, who was spellbound by Lale in some ways. That's how I worked out their relationship. He saw in Lale somebody that he probably would like to be and so he thought he could learn from Lale. Now Lale was happy to tell him anything he wanted to hear.

AMT: But he always ran the risk that Baretzki could have just shot him in the head.

HM: Yes he could have. Now, yes and no in some ways because the reality was that Lale was doing a good job. And if Baretzki had decided to take out the camp tatowierer, he might have had to answer to one or two other people.

AMT: He says many times through the character Lale in the novel, that he would do what he needed to do to survive.

HM: Pretty much, yeah. I suspect that there would be a line in the sand he would have drawn, if he had to, but I don't think he got tested to the limit of doing anything that morally, he could not live with himself.

AMT: And he often encountered the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, when he was tattooing new arrivals. What did he tell you about Mengele?

HM: Nobody in Auschwitz-Birkenau put the fear of God in him, quite like Mengele did. He gave him the shudders. He couldn't look at him. Mengele threatened him whenever he could. He was, he said, pure evil.

AMT: And Mengele was essentially, sort of he would show up around the people coming in to be tattooed because he just, he was literally choosing who to experiment on.

HM: The selection. That's what the process was called. And they would either be selecting them to just either live or die or if he decided to turn up, he would be selecting them to be his guinea pigs.

AMT: He does tell you the stories of people that, in fact, his own assistant is at one point chosen by Mengele.

HM: Leon, yes. And he thought that that was in some kind of retaliation for Lale. Having a bit of bravado around him once, yeah he couldn't take Lale. The commandant of the selections wouldn't let him. So he took his assistant, Leon, instead.

AMT: Can you tell us what he did to him?

HM: He castrated him. He didn't kill him and he came back, but he castrated him.

AMT: So horrific. Lale gets out of Auschwitz and ends up back in Slovakia. What time frame are we talking here?

HM: He in fact left Auschwitz on a train for another camp on the 27th of January, 1945. We mentioned only a few hours before the Russians arrived and liberated the camp. He was given the choice to stay or to guard and he feared that it would just be open slaughter for all those that remained and so he did get on that train and go to another camp and from there he got transferred to another camp, as well. That was just outside of Vienna. It was from there he escaped. He just decided one day, enough was enough. And it was the camp that was run by mostly elderly German soldiers and they didn't care. Things were not going well for them. They knew that. And he just stuck his way out underneath the fence and found himself opposite the Danube River. He knew that the Germans were on one side and the Russians were on the other and he needed to get to the side the Russians were on and then after trying to swim to get to the other side and he couldn't against the current. He said he just had to float like a log and play dead.

AMT: He makes it back to Slovakia, but he ends up on the Russian side and is put to work for them.

HM: Yeah with the Russian hierarchy, in a castle full of fine art and tapestries and the Russian hierarchy made it their headquarters and yes they worked out that he spoke both German and Russian because he did. He spoke five languages and they put him to work. He said I was a pimp. I have to hang my head in shame. I was a pimp. He would go each day to the village and he would arrange for young girls there to come in the evening to be the, yeah the female companions to the Soviet or the Russian hierarchy that were there. He said it was mostly the men, they would get drunk, girls would eat and drink and then they'd get driven back home again. They were happy to come. They got a meal, they got good food, they got good wine. He paid them in jewels because he was given jewels to buy them with.

AMT: That the Russians had confiscated, obviously.

HM: Absolutely.

AMT: From some of the places they took right. And how did Gita escape?

HM: Gita was taken on a death march and he watched her go. She marched for about two days, through the snow, through the forest. This is January. They got to a point where she and three other young girls from Poland made the decision, we can keep marching and as we fall, we'll be shot or we can run. And yes, they saw a house through a forest and it took her six weeks of hiding in the forests and in villages, being hidden before she managed to make her way back to Slovakia and got back to Bratislava.

AMT: And he has a last name, that's about all he's got. How did they find each other again?

HM: Lale went looking for Gita at the train station. Every day trains were coming in from Europe with displaced people and prisoners returning and every female he saw, he would ask them, were you in Birkenau? Were you in Auschwitz? Did you know Gita? Of course he didn't find her initially and he was told, get back into town. There's a Red Cross has set up a building there and register your name. Now he had a horse and a little cart, just big enough for one person to stand on the back. And he was driving or riding down the main street of Bratislava, heading for the Red Cross building. She was walking towards him with two of her girlfriends. She saw him and she found him and she stepped out in front of the horse and I know it's a Hollywood ending and I have to feel like I should apologize for that, but it's how it happened. And he literally did just drop to his knees and say marry me.

AMT: So they end up in Australia, which is where you meet him. How do you come to be the one who hears his story? Who he chooses to tell this to.

HM: Like Lale I was lucky, lucky, lucky. I was having a cup of coffee with a friend and she casually said to me, oh I have a friend whose mother's just died and his father has asked him to find someone he can tell a story to and that person can't be Jewish. Now she was Jewish, she knew I wasn't. And she said would you like to meet him? And I said yes. And a week later I knocked on the door to his apartment and I meet him.

AMT: Why did you have to not be Jewish?

HM: That was very, very important to him. He wanted to talk to somebody who had no history, no baggage, no family connection to the Holocaust that could in any colour how I would interpret and write what he wanted to tell. He actually quizzed me at length about what did I know about the Holocaust and I was ashamed to have to admit that my small town, New Zealand education, really hadn't given me much. And so to him that made me perfect.

AMT: And why was that. What was he afraid of?

HM: That a lot of people, who I've met who are survivors that all got different stories. They all have a different interpretation on what was right and what was wrong. I guess to him having somebody who clearly would have none of that baggage made for the perfect person.

AMT: Was he afraid of being judged as a collaborator?

HM: Not by his community here, but he did fear that if his story became widely known that somewhere out there, somebody may point their finger. And he was also, the fact that Gita never spoke about her time there. Not to their son, only ever to Lale himself. So he could not talk about it, while she was alive because she didn't want him to and he respected that and that fear that somebody might consider him to be a collaborator. And I've spoken to many, many people now in many countries. Spoken at synagogues from London to Sydney and beyond and nobody's even hinted he should have thought that way.

AMT: And yet we do know that in your book you talk about how he was an assistant to the capo for a short time. Tell us what a capo is.

HM: A capo or blockleiter was a person who got to have that single room at the front of every block and their role was just to make sure the rest of the persons on the block went to work. They didn't have to work. Look there were good ones and bad ones and I've read many testimonies of people who had some pretty harsh things to say about capos.

AMT: That's why I brought it up because there are those people who use that as a shorthand to attack others you know in terms of like making a Nazi reference and he would have been sensitive to all of that, right.

HM: Oh absolutely.

AMT: I mean it's so complicated, but it offers a glimpse into people in great trauma and misery and captivity and what some do to try to just breathe the next day. It takes another look at it right, it's not superficial to look at how people end up doing what for their captors.

HM: No. And I guess sometimes the lines were crossed and they were the ones who would yell and scream and make out in front of the SS, that they were the tough capo that was going to keep their block in line, but there were also some that took delight, what seemed, took delight in actually hurting, injuring making prisoners suffer.

AMT: You told Lale's story, but you chose to tell it as a novel, as opposed to a straight up account chronicling what he went through. Why is that?

HM: Strictly, if I was to write it as a memoir or biography, I could not have Gita and the other players in there. I could not write dialogue. I could not weave this beautiful love story into all those facts that we know were going on in that camp at the time. And I had admit, there were two occasions I put Lale and Gita together, that they weren't, for dramatic effect. And so as soon as I did that, as soon as I wanted to have a presence with Gita, have her story of what was going on in the block with her and the girls. It was no longer a memoir. I'm really proud of the fact that I chose that format because it enabled me to write a story, which is just not about facts and figures, it is about two people.

AMT: It's emblematic of the hardship and the sort of the humanity buried in so much trauma.

HM: Yeah, absolutely. And it was that humanity that kept him going time after time.

AMT: What can we learn from hearing Lale Sokolova's story today?

HM: You know he used to say to me, humans, people are going to be the only ones that can save the day. Don't trust your governments he would say. Don't you trust politicians. They will not save you. It will be the man in the next street. You just try and do one thing he would say to me, just do one thing good every day if you can. And when I would see him, I'd often say ok Lale, what did you do today? And he'd say oh nothing much. I didn't go out today. He said, until later in the day and I realized I hadn't done anything. He said I'll take the doggies for a walk. Then I find a stranger and I smile at them and then I feel better.

AMT: How did hearing his story over time and then writing his story in a novel change you?

HM: Well I went through a period when it actually affected me quite severely. Thankfully that was short lived. And I need to tell you that in that book, you get about 10 per cent of what I know and what I've heard because no good can come from you hearing it all this well. And yes, I then had to come to that realization well, tell myself this is not your pain. This is not your trauma. You don't get to own it. So just back off and help where you can. Tell Lale's story. But what it did do was I learned about this time in history that I keep seeing continuing. All I can do now is talk to as many people as will want to hear Lale's story and feel so damn good about the fact that I get thousands of letters from people, who say that just hearing his story makes them want to lead their life differently.

AMT: And you know you have events in there. At one point, I think it's about a year before the the Russians started advancing. An allied plane flies over and you describe through the novel, people yelling bomb it. Bomb it. Like they want the allies to bomb the gas chambers or anything just to stop this right because they obviously, no one is coming to their aid and they're living through this hell. And of course, after the war, this remains a real controversy that neither the railways, nor the gas chambers were ever bombed. And clearly the planes were flying over and taking a look.

HM: Oh they were taking a look and they're also photographing. I've seen aerial photographs that are now available that showed what was going on there. The allies they knew, but from what I understand from the heads of Washington and London, to do anything to help them, would be diverting from the war effort. And they had a plan and that wasn't in their plan. So yes they did nothing.

AMT: It's a reminder of the of the personal suffering that goes on when so many people were so helpless.

HM: Yes, utterly. Utterly. And all they had was each other.

AMT: Well you introduced us to one man with an incredible story about many people. Thank you very much.

HM: You are very, very welcome.

AMT: That's Heather Morris, the author of the nove,l "The Tattooist of Auschwitz," based on the real life of Lale Sokolov, who tattooed numbers on the arms of fellow prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. If you go to our website, we have pictures of Lale Sokolov and his wife, Gita, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Heather Morris spoke to me from Melbourne, Australia. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Tom Power is going to be speaking to the musician, Tanya Tagaq, about her new novel. Her debut novel, "Split Tooth." We're going to give the last word this morning to Anne Pitman from Ottawa. She was not affected by the tornadoes this past weekend, but news of their touchdown still put her heart in her throat because a tornado landed on her cottage near Plevna, Ontario in June of 2003. And we're going to leave you with Ann Pitman recounting that moment to Duncan McCue on Cross Country Checkup on Sunday. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: All of the sudden I was coming down the stairs and I thought I was having some kind of seizure because everything was moving, like the stairs were moving and so many trees came down. We lost the cottage completely.

VOICE 2: You lost the whole cottage?

VOICE 1: Yeah the cottage was destroyed by the tornado. Our van was a pancake and all the trees came down on our lot and they were massive trees and you know I'm just trying to figure out where my children are. And so they were outside and I couldn't imagine that they could have survived outside.

VOICE 2: The kids were outside when this was happening?

VOICE 1: Yeah, they were and I didn't know where they were outside and I thought.

VOICE 2: Oh my god.

VOICE 1: I was certain that they had died or that they were pinned under a tree. And so I you know let out a deep wail and became pretty hysterical and they all opened the door and came in, in a matter of seconds. All fine and in fact, they were in the only place that they could have survived I think. They were underneath part of the porch and I believe the whole cottage lifted up and turned on the access of that porch and it's just no way they should have survived that. It's a miracle really.

Sept. 25, 2018 episode transcript

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