‘The little Holocaust video that could’ is being released worldwide. Courtesy/Jim Terr
Holocaust News:
Twenty four years after it was produced in the year 2000 with a small budget from several foundation and private grants, a one-hour video of interviews of New Mexico survivors of the Holocaust is being released worldwide, with a new introduction and with the benefit of internet viewing and download.
View the video here.
“We Were There: Seven Survivors of the Holocaust” was produced by Las Vegas, N.M. producer Jim Terr, then living in Santa Fe. Under a grant from World Voices Media of Santa Monica, Calif., the re-released video is available for virtually unlimited download and viewing, on a non-profit, non-commercial basis.
In a note to contributors to the original video Terr said, “it was grueling to complete and update this, apart from technical difficulties. I had forgotten how disturbing the video is. But I suppose that’s the point.”
Indeed, several news outlets both local and national described the original video as “harrowing”, “touching and horrific”, etc.
In a short introduction to the new release, Terr emphasizes that the term “Holocaust” can be applied to many such state-sponsored mass slaughters, not just the Nazi/Jewish experience of the 1930s and 40s. He mentions events in Africa, Armenia, Cambodia, Ukraine, India, China, Rwanda, Srebrinica and the United States as possible examples of “holocausts” and describes the mechanism of such events as demagoguery, which he said, “has been my life’s study and concern”.
In the YouTube video information, Terr lists several past projects, which he says were done on “a shoestring budget, with occasional foundation and private grants, supplemented by Patreon.com contributions” — as well as future projects.
Regina Turner, director of the New Mexico Foundation for Human Rights, who introduced Terr to the project’s interviewees (now all believed deceased) in 1999, calls the re-release, “A beautiful job. Bringing this before the public eye again is more crucial than ever in the frightening world we currently live in. The rise of nationalism … is seemingly analogous to 1933”.
The late Hilde Caserio of Albuquerque, who was 72 at the time of the interviews, said in the video, “I defy anyone to look at me and tell me it didn’t happen. It can happen here; it can happen anywhere. And it has happened here; no town or city is immune to it. Those maniacs are everywhere.”
She continues, “Here I am, almost 73 years old; if one ever crossed my path with the wrong look or word, I don’t know what I would do. I’d probably spend the rest of my life in prison but I’d feel good enough that I’d done away with one. You can’t kill six million people and think it never happened. That’s almost as big as New York City!”
Other interviewees, including a GI who helped liberate the death camps, make similarly vehement comments on the subject of Holocaust denial.