Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20160709

Police face, something we should be thinking about, but what we rarely talk about is the danger that is involved in being on the other end of that interaction with the police, and thats not going to happen, at least not for a really long time right now. Obrien we continue with my colleague from the pbs newshour Hari Sreenivasan. This is a department thats been working on this, they didnt have that great of track record. Per capita, it was worse than a lot of other major cities, but really in the past five or six years they have done as Much Community policing as possible and made measurable gains. Decreased Excessive Force, overall arrests and most importantly officerinvolved shootings. Obrien we conclude with the remembrance of elie wiesel. Ththe Nobel Laureate died satury at age 87. We didnt know about auschwitz. To me, that is the greatest mystery and pain, by the way, that people i admired like roosevelt and churchill, they knew, but we didnt. 1944, a if few weeks before d day. We could have run into the forest and find a hiding place with our maid, a marvelous christian lady, a housekeeper, a maid. But we didnt know. If we had, half of my town, maybe more, would have survived. Obrien dan balz, jelani cobb and Hari Sreenivasan on the three days of violence and remembering elie wiesel, when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by the following and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Obrien turning now to politics. Hillary Clintons Campaign had hoped that the f. B. I. s decision not to recommend prosecutions would have closed the book on her use of a private email server. It may have opened a new chapter instead. The state department has reopened its investigation, and a new round of congressional hearings began thursday with f. B. I. Director james comey. Dan balz has more. He joins me from the offices of the Washington Post where he is the papers chief correspondent. Dan, good to have you. Thank you, miles. Good to be with you. Obrien director comey testifying on the hill. How did it play . Well, it didnt play very well for secretary clinton, thats for sure. Director comey got a series of very tough questions from reps about how he could square the description of what happened with his ultimate decision not to recommend prosecution, and i think there were some telling moments in that, but i think, overall, it was simply a reminder, as you suggested, that this is an issue that is going to be with us and certainly with secretary clinton through duration of this campaign. In no way did the lack of prosecution close the books on this episode. Obrien director comey was speaking in the language of the law, and, of course, politicians being politicians were speaking politics. One of the members of Congress Said if the average joe had done what Hillary Clinton did, he or she would be le lead off in d off in handcuffs. Mr. Comey said, no. Walk us through that, if you would. What i think he was trying to say is if you look at the totality of what she did and the question of whether there was willful or malicious intent, that there is no press department for pros precedent for prosecuting her under the statute as he examined them, and as he examined similar cases and outcomes, there were nothing to suggest that she could or should be prosecuted under. This i thought one of the interesting foments, frankly, is when he was asked and did compare this to what happened with general petraeus and outlined a series of things general petraeus had done in which he deliberately handed over classified material to his paramour and biographer and knew this was classified and knew what he was doing was wrong and, at another point, lied to the government about it, and he said that this was different than what secretary clinton had done. Now, he also made clear that many of the things or some of the things, at least, that secretary clinton has said over the course of the last year and some months were not accurate statements about her use of the private server or whether she had engaged in moving classified material back and forth with her advisor. So it was classic kind of jim comey. I mean, hes an independentminded official and Public Servant with high respect on both sides of the aisle, and he steered a careful course through all of the mind fields that were mine fieldsate laid out in front of him during that hearing. Obrien so people are clear on this, as i understand it, she had to know that what she did was against the law, breaking the law and, in this case, i guess, ignorance of the law is a defense . Obrien well, i guess it is certainly a partial defense and enough, certainly, that the f. B. I. Director and the career prosecutors who led this investigation, as he said, came to the unanimous conclusion that no reasonable prosecutor would take this case forward and, as we know, the attorney general, loretta lynch, had already in advance of what jim comey had to say, had taken herself effectively out of the decisionmaking process because well, she announced it after her illfated meeting with bill clinton on the tarmac in phoenix, but she said she had made that decision some time ago. So this ultimately was one that was all in the hands to have the career pros hands of the career prosecutors and jim comey. Obrien to be clear, there is little doubt at this juncture that classified material was emailed through that server. Thats a fact, right . That is a clear fact, yes. Some that was top secret, some that was secret, and some that was coffi coffin confidential. Obrien how does this play in the court of Public Opinion . Partisan decisions will determine a lot about how people respond to this, but i think there is, as the republicans put forward in the session with director comey and also many of the things they had to say outside that arena that there is a belief that in one way or another justice was not being done in this case that she got special treatment. The director said that was certainly not the case, but i think the average person or certainly the average person who is not a fan of Hillary Clintons will believe that, in one way or another, that she did get special treatment, that she, in one way or another, was above the law. Jim comey went to some lenghts to try to knock that down, but i dont think he will change a lot of minds on that of people who came into this with a feeling that this was kind of an inside deal from start to finish. Obrien so, and, of course, donald trump tweeting who he frequently calls her crooked Hillary Clinton, now shes lying crooked Hillary Clinton, instantly this gets injected into the political discourse and in some sense the facts kind of get lost, dont they . Oh, the facts certainly will get lost. But this was an issue that was bound to be a centerpiece of Donald Trumps campaign, no matter how the f. B. I. Came out in its judgment on what should be done in terms of prosecuting secretary clinton. I had a conversation quite a while ago with an official in the trump campaign, and we were talking about this. Their conclusion from the start was that this was, in many ways, a winwin for trump and his campaign. First win would be if she had been prosecuted, which would have potentially cost her the nomination, but even in the absence of that, their view was they could easily describe this as a whitewash and what donald trump had to say coming out of the decisionmaking by the f. B. I. Was very much in keeping with that and he will continue to press that. People have been arguing about the facts of this case, they will be arguing about the conclusions of the f. B. I. Between now and election day without any let up. Obrien so Bernie Sanders said it last winter, i i guess it was, are people tired of hearing about Hillary Clintons damn emails . Well, some people are and some people arent, but i think that that reflects the Deeper Division we have in our politics right now. You know, its not just Hillary Clintons emails, its a variety of things in which people come to conclusions in part on the basis of where their partisan leanings stand. This is one example of this. This is a very high profile example of this. This is a very controversial example of this, but it is not a singular example of it, and i think we will see that in a variety of ways as we go forward in the campaign, miles. Obrien lets look ahead just a moment and see how much more we will be hearing about the emails. Members of congress to ask director comey to launch an investigation as to whether Hillary Clinton might have lied to congress, and then there is this that the state department announced it would begin its investigation now which waited for all of this to transpire. What shoes are we going to see dropping, do you think . Well, it is possible that, with a referral from congress, there will be an investigation into whether what Hillary Clinton testified to during the benghazi hearings when she was under oath last fall is contradicted by the evidence. The director said they had not looked at that, that they had not had a referral from congress, and the chairman of the Committee Said you will get a referral very quickly. So that will be one possible avenue of continuation of this. The second is what the state department is going to begin to do. One thing we know, and director comey said this any number of times in any number of ways, that not just secretary clinton but others who were handling this classified material in an unclassified environment on the private server could have their security clearances reviewed, and these are senior advisors to Hillary Clinton. If their clearances are, you know, eliminated, that puts them in a totally different situation in their ability to advise her, not simply during the campaign, but if she were to become president and she wanted them around her as senior advisors at the white house or the state department or wherever. So there is potential consequence yet to happen on this. Paul ryan, speaker of the house, said she should not get classified briefings as a candidate because of this. I doubt that will happen, but, nonetheless, you can see where kind of the drum beat, particularly from republicans, is going to increase over that there should be some kind of penalty to those who have been found to be engaging in this, as comby said comey said, extremely careless handling of the material. Obrien i want to put you in the role as advisor to Hillary Clinton. What would you tell her to get out in front of this . Well, i think her sense is this is going to be an issue no matter what she says. She has been grudging at best in coming forward with information throughout this process. She has only done it when it has been, in a sense, politically necessary. I remember last late last summer when the email issue was clearly hurting her in the campaign, she finally began to talk about it and to talk about it in a more contrite way. But it has been remarkable that she has really had nothing to say about this. It seemingly demands some answers from her. She has nod had a formal press conference in months and months and months. She has done individual interviews on television, certainly, but not done a General Press conference. Shes going to have to answer a lot of questions about this, no doubt about that. Obrien this controversy is like my email box, keeps filling up. Dan balz, the Washington Post, thank you for your time. Youre welcome. Thank you, miles. Obrien the dallas protest is one of several nationwide that had been called following the shooting deaths this week of alton sterling and Philando Castile. The men, both black, were killed by police in separate incidents that were both caught on camera. With me is jelani cobb of the new yorker magazine to talk about. This such a horrifying week, its hard to put words to it. Youve attempted. You talk about the layer cake of horrible issues that is involved in this, and the first one that comes to mind, of course, is race. And, you know, the governor of minnesota said it wouldnt have happened if that had been a white person in that car. Do you believe that . Oh, yeah, i do. Or at least its far less likely to have happened. One of the things that happens with Police Shootings in this country is we have a large number of them, disproportionate number of them that affect people of color but, in the aggregate, the majority of people shot fatally by police each year are white. So it means we have a twofold problem. One is that there is a great deal of Police Shootings that happen in the country, and a disproportionate number of them that happen with communities of color and people of color, but even we took all the africanamericans and latinos out of that equation, for the total number of Police Shootings, we would still have violence happening at rates that would horrify most western democracies. In the short term, its much more likely that the person this happens when theres a person of color in that vehicle. Obrien you mentioned the word horrified because it is horrifying what weve witnessed and yet it goes on. Theres a sense of inertia here, i think. How can we possibly at this point start working toward some kind of solution, a dialogue, a conversation . You wrote about that, that idea of initiating a conversation. Where does that conversation begin . I think were having conversations. Seems to me thats all were doing is having conversations. But thered been an attempt, i think, to create some kind of groundswell for reform around guns or to have reform around Police Training or these sorts of things. Now it seems, of course, in the wake of what happened in dallas that that conversation will change dramatically and drastically. Obrien how much does dallas change the whole equation . Black lives matter is a movement. I think we can say that up to this point. Does that stop it . I think dallas is catastrophic, and for lots of reasons, and certainly for people who are interested in having a conversation around police accountability, it becomes infinitely more difficult to have that conversation because now were much more inclined to think about the Dangers Police face, something we should be thinking about, but what we rarely talk about is the danger that is involved in being on the other end of that interaction with the police, and thats not going to happen, at least not for a really long time right now. Obrien by all accounts, Dallas Police, we are told, were judicious in their use of force, racially sensitive, all the things we would hope to expect out of a bigcity police department. Theres a bit of irony here. There is. Actually, there are two ironies. When we look at the Philando Castile situation in minnesota, he did what a motorist is supposed to do, he followed the best protocol, the best practices. When hes pulled over, he tells the person he has a license, a firearm in the car and is licensed to carry it, and from what we know right now, it culminates in him being shot fatally. Obrien which compounds the horror. Right. Obrien he was doing textbook. Doing the right thing. On the other hand, hearing from people during the march yesterday before the shooting broke out, people were saying there was a very heavy police presence, but there was a pretty good rapport between the demonstrators and police and it seemed to be calm, not a great deal of tension. In both cases, you see people following what might be the best practice force this and still wind up with the worst case scenario. Obrien so do we begin with guns, with retraining police, do we begin with condemnations of violence . None of it seems to work. It doesnt. But heres the interesting kind of commonality. When we were looking at what happened in baton rouge with alton sterling, who was shot fatally by a Police Officer, possibly shot by two officers, on tuesday, and then looking at the situation with Philando Castile in minnesota and ten looking at the situation in dallas, the Common Thread here is guns. One, when police talk about the dangers implies it in their work, theyre talking about dealing with a very heavilyarmed public. And when people say, well, this person overreacted or is antsy, the fact is they are confronting realities in which theyre much more likely to be dealing with an armed person than their counterpart in most other western countries and, on the other side of it, if were going to have a second amendment, this is almost an object lesson in its inapplicablability to other communities, wherein the idea that a person has a weapon generates a, you know, fatal response from Law Enforcement, this is not i think it points us in the direction saying we need to have meaningful reform in our relationship with weapons. One other point that ill say about this is, if this is correct, that there is one shooter that was involved in dallas, then we have to ask ourselves, is it reasonable for the average citizen to have access to a firearm that can hit 12 Police Officers, the 12 trained Law Enforcement officers before they have a chance to respond. Obrien its a difficult question given the constitutional protections, and ive got to say, we talk about a groundswell, you can pull people and there is a willingness to change the status quo when it comes to guns, but we dont see anything like that in congress. We dont. We saw just before the fourth of july vacation that, you know, there was the congressional sitin and kind of mustered a great deal of moral standing and john lewis, the former civil rights hero was involved in this, but the demands were pretty tepid considering the scale of the problem we have here, more background checks and, you know, refusal to allow people on the no fly list to have weapons. Whats interesting is when we talk about the major gun reform bill recently, in recent history the 1994 bill, and we talk about it as the Highwater Mark in terms of gun reform. But when you go back and look at the language used in 1994, both from journalists covering this and politicians advocating and voting for it, they viewed the 1994 bill as a starting place, not a finishing place. Obrien and, of course, nothing has happened since to continue that conversation. No. Obrien you know, thats kind of a longterm issue. Lets talk shortterm for just a moment. You get the sense that weve got a bit of tinderbox in this country right now. How concerned are you about just whats going to happen in the nearterm future and what can be done to sort of calm things down on all sides . We have a lot of summer ahead of us. I think any reasonable person would be worried these tensions can be further inflamed, and if we had a trench of division between us previously, with we have a canyon now. I think that, in the very short term, there has to be some sort of gesture from the top that people are very serious about doing something in relationship to guns. I think its also important for people to make it clear that we are still interested in continuing these efforts toward police accountability, because there is a feedback loop here. The public feels jeopardized by Police Officers who may be too quick with the firearm and the Police Officers feel jeopardized by a public that is heavily armed, and as long as were in the cycle, the loop, we wont find ourselves outside of it. Obrien the highest level, the president . Certainly the. , the congress, the senate, the house, they all have it within their capacity to do something on this. Obrien do you hold out much hope . Cautious optimism is appropriate that we have the capacity to make change. It doesnt necessarily happen quickly, even in dire circumstances. But if you dont have any optimism, there is no reason to get out of bed in the morning. Obrien good point. Lets talk for a moment about the medias role in all this. You wrote a little bit about this, the way this is covered particularly on the cable networks. I think in one case one network was comparing it to 9 11. Obrien severa9 11. Several did. There is a great deal of hyperbolic language around this. Its still troubling and, you know, to compare what happened in dallas, saying this is the worst terrorist assault on Law Enforcement since 9 11, it does a number of things one, it kind of leaves you with the impression that 9 11 was meant to attack Law Enforcement officers. It was not meant to do that. It was a general attack on america itself, on every aspect of the population. But beyond that, it kind of places us in the context of external terrorism and things that are happening on a grand scale. It is completely within our power to have done something about this before it happened, selfinflicted wound from aways really inert Political Class that has not done anything about guns in this country. Obrien when you talk about 9 11, what happened accidently was the war on terror. When you talk in those terms, it gets scary. Thats right. What happens in these moments is there is a tendency or temptation to forgo the constitution in exchange for the feeling of security and safety, which is exactly what youre not supposed to do in these times. Obrien and that gets injected almost immediately into the political process and gets amplified by certain candidates themselves. We saw this in orlando. Look at how this was immediately theres about five minutes of grief, and then it became a political fight. Even the way it was discussed by the current republican nominee, the presumptive nominee was in a way that exacerbated the divisions that we were seeing. So i think that this is something that we should be better at dealing with by now unfortunately. Obrien black lives matter, but words matter, too. Do you think were a little reckless with our words collectively . What i think is interesting obrien yourself excluded, of course. What i think is interesting is i just read a statement that came from black lives matter when i was on my way over here, and they were very stringent in the denunciations of what had happened. But i think there is also a dynamic that weve seen in the media where any voice of dissent, if youre africanamerican, is conflated with being black lives matter. My nephew attended a protest. He happened to have been concerned about some things donald trump said, and he attended a protest at his college, and he said later on the news, they said black lives matter protests donald trump. He said, i had no idea we were part of black lives matter until the news station told us i think there is a con flags that happens in this discussion. Theres superheated rhetoric that goes on in lots of the corners of this country. Its hard to make a oneonone relationship of whats being said and done, especially when you see people who are troubled have access to firearms, you dont know exactly what it is that pushes them into action, but i think the rhetoric doesnt help. Obrien lets talk about the cameras for a moment. Were watching these horrible tragedies unfold before our very eyes, Live Streaming capability in our hands, and, on the other side, you have police with the body cameras on. On the one hand, you get the sense that were seeing something thats just been going on for a long time or were finally seeing it, but to what extent do you think it is altering reality in some sense. Do you think it does . I think it does, but like many things, its complicated. When we were working on the documentary we did on frontline, a number of officers were looking forward to having body cameras because they thought the camera would resolve instances when they had been wrongly accused of Excessive Force or doing something they didnt do and thought the body camera would be a protection for them. There were officers that felt that way. At the same time, the visuals weve seen most recently in baton rouge and minnesota, i think they have a kind of exacerbating effect. One, things that have been happening for a long time, were disputed for a long time, weve cast doubt on people bringing claims for a long time, but there is something about bringing a video witness to whats happening and almost transforms the general public into a collective eyewitness of what happened in. The case of mr. Castile, this woman is narrating what is happening while a Police Officer is holding a gun to her and her loved one is dying in front of her. Obrien and shes calm and the officer is not. Shes calm and the officer is not. The exact opposite of what you might expect in a situation where someone sees their fiancee shot and they become hysterical and the professional person, you know, their training kicks in and they become calm. Thats not what happened in this circumstance. The more terrible idea here is perhaps she was driven by a concern that she not do anything that night trigger him to fire again and also there is a 4yearold girl thats in the car. All of it compounds into something thats too horrible to really think about. Obrien lets talk about the political system as we get to the end here. The fundamental lack of faith in the system, donald trump talking about the system being rigged, reinforcing the peoples belief the system is not it in for them, the fact there is so little faith in the system, how much does this add to the toxic nature of this . I think its interesting. I think there are many people who have legitimate grievous about the grievances about the way our economy and politics work now after the Great Recession and housing crisis, there was a justifiable and reasonable loss of faith in the institutions, something that had been going on for many years, actually going back generations to watergate weve seen this erosion in trust in institutions and i think thats one problem. The second problem is that you can use that skepticism or that erosion and siphon it off away from the possibility of actual substantial change into demagogic directions, wherein you indulge the worst ideas. We go back and read madison or tokeville or anybody who looked at this country at the outset, this is something they were concerned about, when you have a representative democracy, you have to have a population thats wise enough to discern between the actual course of action and whats being presented by demagogic figures that take advantage of that. Obrien how dangerous is it if nothing happens out of this . Where do we go next . I think thats the most dangerous possibility of all that we acclimate ourselves and bequeath to our children a world fraught with these dangers we had in our capacity to address and did nothing. Im an historian and i think in those terms history will not look kindly upon us for that. Obrien author and historian jelani cobb, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Obrien the issues of guns, policing and race have all come together to dominate the news this week. One suspect is dead and three others in custody as the Investigation Continues in dallas where police were ambushed following a peaceful black lives matter protest. Five officers are also dead and six are wounded. Here now from dallas is my colleague Hari Sreenivasan of the pbs newshour. Hari, bring us up to date. Theres been a lot of confusion in the wake of this, understandably, about whether there was one person who acted alone or multiple suspects. What do we know . Well, right now, jeh johnson from the department of Homeland Security says there was no reason to believe this was part of a languager International Terror plot or if this individual was connected to any black nationalist organizations. That said, the Dallas Police arrested or has in custody a few more suspects and they havent actually given us any more information on how those suspects may be tied into this. Obrien any indication of whether there will be further arrests or is that it as far as arrests go, do we know . No, they havent said that yet. Theyre trying to follow every lead. Theyre not convinced whoever they have are innocent or guilty. They want more information and they want to figure out how this happened. Obrien the suspect demonstrated capability, presumably, from his military training. Yeah, you know, when they went into his house, Authorities Say they found a detailed combatman yule in his home combat manual in his home and bombmaking materials, this is something the individual planned for some time. Obrien thats interesting because the protest wasnt planned out for some time. Does it appear he was waiting for an event . Thats a possibility because he had said to the Police Yesterday he was interested in killing white people and specifically killing Police Officers, so perhaps this was an opportunity to know that police would be on the streets essentially walking with the protesters and protecting them and, in fact, the Police Yesterday were not in their riot gear. Most were in standard uniforms, didnt have bulletproof vests phon. This wasnt an event where they expected the protests to turn violent. Obrien thats part of the way the Dallas Police department operated. Its well known for being racially sensitive and judicious in use of force, led by an africanamerican. There is horrible irony here, isnt there . There is. You know, this is a department thats been working on this. They didnt have that great track record. Per capita, it was worse than a lot of other major cities, but in the past five or six years, they have done as Much Communityoriented policing as possible and have made measurable gains. Theyve decreased the number of complaints of excessive use of force, theyve decreased the number of overall arrests and theyve also, importantly, decreased the number of officerinvolved shootings. Obrien hari, i know youve only been there a short time but you are a former resident of dallas. Whats it been like being back under these very difficult circumstances . Its a very change thing. I lived here a few years and just behind me, downtown is essentially one large crime scene. There is an enormous set of blocks where you would normally have the Financial Center of the city. Its all but empty right now. There is more of us, meaning reporters, than outnumbering citizens. You drive by and see reporters talking about how empty they are. Obrien watch for haris reporting all throughout the weekend from dallas. Thank you. Well be right back. Thank you. Elie wiesel, holocaust survivor and human rights about visit died saturday following a long illness. He was 87 years old. Wiesel was 15 when he was sent to auschwitz camp in 1934 and freed in 1945 from another camp. He wrote about his painful experience in night. In 78, president carter appointed wiesel chairman of the commission on the holocaust, leading to the establishment to have the United States Holocaust Memorial museum in washington in. 1986 wiesel was awarded the nobel peas prize with wiesel called an important spiritual leader. Wiesel was a guest of charlie over a dozen times over the years. Heres a look back at some of those conversations. First of all, i would like to show the tragedy of a person who is not only a victim of his own sickness but of injustice. There are things that we remember and, therefore, others also remember. What about the things we dont remember . For every face that i see before me, there must have been hundreds that have vanished. For every word i want to say, there must have been ten i dont say. For every episode i lived through or imagined, how many are there that nobody could ever know that they ever existed in my mind . Rose is it a powerful emotion in you that the time will come in which there will be no one who lived through the holocaust to tell and is still telling their story . That has been in my case surely the most profound anguish i ever had. What will i feel if im the last survivor . And i wrote about it in some of my books of that fear. What is it . I will have to say i am a witness. When i say i, i mean anyone else, of course, in my case. We are here. We are alive and, really, today, many people dont believe us. Rose many . Many. First of all, there are those vicious, ugly antiseemitis who see it doesnt happen. If a human being who is normal would not believe this is normal and therefore he could get away with anything. Rose when you created this character, tell me the story you wanted to tell to bring these profound ideas to a novel form. Well, the novel is actually between the father and son. Rose right. All of pi bogs, there is always all of my books, there is that situation, father and son. Rose obligation, responsibility. And to communicate something. The father, his life, his fear of life, his happiness in life, his joy, his sadness, his memory. What am i without my memory . What are you without yours . In all of my books, i have that situation. Even in the bible, abraham and isaac. Rose here he wants his son to go back to rumania. Hes sending him back because at one point, i stopped because i couldnt end it. I wanted to end it with something good and Say Something positive and i couldnt find anything. There is nothing after alzheimer. There is only darkness and total fear and anger in and around the person because the person cannot explain what he wants, what she wants, and, therefore, the people around, those who loved him before and still love him dont know what to do. In this case, what i found is that the only redemption or the only redeeming possibility for the father is to say, okay, my son, now you remember for me. Rose you touch base with my memory . You receive my memory. Its kind of a transfusion of memory. Just as there is a transfusion of blood, there is a transfusion of memory. That doesnt mean you will leave my life, it means you will be a continuation of my life. Rose so i want you, my son, to burrow yourself into my life, then you will receive my memory. You go and meet the people that were part of what shaped me and are part of my memory and my past for better and for worse, and that will understand and help you define yourself . That means you cannot be what you are unless you know what i am. Rose and the message for all of us beyond the holocaust . I have written more than 30 books and only three or four deal with that period. Rose why do we all think of you as so we define you that way, almost. I know. Rose thats how we define you. I know. You put me in a certain category. Rose yes, we do. Its difficult to break away from it. Rose does it make you angry, frustrated, what . No, i say to myself, i were i had written more. The problem is you cannot, there are no words. Im always afraid i will use the wrong words and, therefore, i am so careful. I was waiting ten years before i began writing about this period. Rose because you said before, you waited ten years because i was afraid i would not find the right words. Rose because no words could go ahead. Rose no words that can define the horror. No words for that experience. Finally, finally the enemy has succeeded in doing something which no one has ever done, not even god, to do something and not to have words for it. He deprived the victim of a language to describe the victimhood of the victim. Rose why did you go back and why did you go back now . Why go back . 50 years after, i had a feeling that maybe the child that was there is still there, and i wanted to see that the place remained the same place, whether he had absorbed something of our anguish, whether the sky was the same, the trees the same. So i did go back. Rose what did you find . Oh, i found silence in me and pain and outrage. Rose pain from memory . Pain because, after all, my father died there, and between the death of my father and my liberation, i was there but didnt know it. Then liberation came, the American Army liberated us. I left. I did not go back. It was in eastern germany. And i go back now and i see what i see. It hurts. Ill give you an example. There were two camps. One was a camp for political prisoners, jews and nonjews. At the end, when auschwitz was evacuated, we were taken to a small camp and a large camp. We were in the small camp, the large camp was mainly for political prisoners. The camp where i was is no longer there. It simply vanished. So i was going around there seeing nothing but trees, grass, sky, and the barracks disappeared. Everything disappeared. I was wondering, what remained there, the anguish, the agony, the pain of thousands and thousands of human beings, what happened to that pain . As for outrage, how can i say that . I learned that in the camp, they are now building a kind of memorial to the nazi prisoners of the russians, because afterwards the americans left, the russians came, and they maintained the camp for five years as a camp for former nazis, lowranking nazis. Many of them died. So now it somehow doesnt fit in my mind, a place that was, so to speak, immortalized by the victims of naziism, now is becoming also a place honoring the memory of nazis, victims of others, of russians. There is something wrong there. Rose you worry that the memory of the holocaust has been lost, at the same time that we have holocaust look, you and i were together at the inauguration of the museum in washington, and i have been involved with it for some years. Its important, all these memories have to be kept, must be kept somewhere and, therefore, the archives are very important. However, deep down, i am not sure whether we are not losing the war of memory. Maybe its because of the years, soon to be decades, and then centuries, that i am not sure that what we want people to remember will be remembered. Rose how do you preserve the memory other than ways that have already been measures that have already been taken . I wish i knew. Usually through pictures, art, words. Rose its all there. Its not all there. Thats the whole thing. For first time, we are trying to remember something that defies memory because we are using tools that were adequate for other tragedies, for other events, but not this one. I have written books and i can tell you, each time i finished a book, i felt a taste of ashes in my mouth. Rose why . Because i felt its not it. Its still not it. What i wanted to say, i didnt say. Rose has anybody said it, you think, because it is incomprehensible to human it cannot be said. Maybe the documents and the diaries written by the prisoners, the ones burning the corpses, th the diaries found in the ashes, maybe they convey a certain fragment of the truth. We can not. There are no words and therefore no images. There is nothing. All we can do is try. We are trying. Maybe the effort will be made. I hope it will be made. I dont compare kosovo to auschwitz. Nobody ever should do that because its not the same thing. Tragedies should never be compared. There are no analogies in sufferings of such magnitude, surely not. I went to six or seven camps and in the tens of thousands of men and women and children, you listen to them, and what they have to say breaks your heart because there is something about the way that tell the stories, especially those who were tortured, and some of us are terribly sensitive to torture. Psychiatrists say a tortured person will all his or her life remain tortured. Thats what it is. It leaves a scar, and there already people who were tortured, and they began talking. Its a kind of process. They began talking and then they stopped in the middle of a sentence because they were looking for the right words and didnt find them, and they began crying. I have rarely seen so many adults weep, sob like children. The children dont cry. The children were laughing and playing and singing, and a i dont know what hurt me more, what was more painful to see, the laughter of the children or the tears of the parents. So i came back with stories. I collected stories after stories. I listened and listened and listened. I asked people sometimes never, never sharp questions. They suffered enough. Why should they suffer . But gently i tried to make them talk. One old man says, 180 men, prisoners, were shot. Two men survived. I am one of the two. And then he stopped for a minute and he said, my son was among the others. And thats it. And began crying. A young man who is a volunteer working for the i. R. C. In a camp, he, too, was a prisoner, and he had seen the murder of his brother, and he began talking about it and stopped in the middle and couldnt continue. And i understand that. And tragedy is too painful, too deep, too allencompassing. For some reason the words are failing us. We dont find the words. So the tears become words. Rose so you listened to the stories, one after the other and you see the tears. Yeah. Rose and you see a why have that saw her and you see a wife that saw her husband taken away, never to be seen again. Who saw a son the prisoner who suffered most, the last time they saw their families, children, parents or wives, sisters and brothers were when they were taken to prison, and that, for them, is the worst torture of all. They could withstand physical torture but not that torture. They dont know. One man said he had in his hand a two a 2monthold baby and the military took it away, dropped it to the ground and he hadnt seen the child or mother again. He doesnt know if they are alive. So the stories remain in the middle, halfcompleted. Rose why do you think this happened . Oh, charlie, we have talked about these matters many times. I dont know why. What is it about a human being who tries to prove his or her humanity by causing pain to another human being. Rose is it their humanity theyre trying to show or are they showing their fear or Something Else . Maybe they try to show something that in this century it is human to be human. Rose human to be inhuman . Yeah. Rose but in the end, it is, if you look at that kind of rule and obscenity, it is, in fact, inhuman and its a rage that takes them beyond all rationality. They place themselves outside the human condition. I would not like to think of them as human beings, except to the fact that some human beings are inhuman and therefore we must fight them and condemn them. Rose you still have written at the beginning of this that you are reluctant to talk about the past. Not about the past, about that past, because i dont know how its difficult to be personal. I dont like to speak about my suffering. I speak about other peoples suffering. I work in human rights, meant to speak about other peoples agony, imprisonment, victimhood and not mine. Therefore, i dont speak about it. In my lectures, i speak about philosophy, literature, history, but not about my past. Rose what do the people in your town say and remember about the coming of the nazis . Oh, i was too young to remember everything, and i was too involved in religious studies, biblical studies, so i didnt Pay Attention to topics of the day, but people were not really that concerned because we in rumania, later in hungary, we had it good, despite the antisemitism that existed everywhere. We knew an antisemite hates jews, so what. We survived that, too. Until the germans came into our town in march 19, 1944. Rose but people know exactly when everything changed. The powerful stories of watching a synagogue being burned, and people standing around not doing anything mainly to prevent the fire from spreading. That we knew in germany when they burned about synagogues but we didnt know about auschwitz. That is the greats mystery and pain, by the way. There were people i admired like roosevelt and churchill, for instance, they knew but we didnt. 1944, a few weeks before dday, charlie, we could have run into the forest and we could have found a hiding place with our maid, a marvelous christian lady, but a housekeeper, a maid, but we didnt know. If we had known, half of my town, maybe more, would have survived. Obrien elie wiesel did at 87. Rose for more about this program and earlier episodes, visivisit us online at pbs. Org d charlierose. Com. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Beginning monday on the pbs newshour correspondent William Brangham this is nightly Business Report with Tyler Mathson and massive rebound. American businesses ramped up hiring, alleviating fears the economy is sagging and sending the s p 500 just shy of a record close. Job growth is back. Fed on hold. Volatility collapsing. Is this the perfect scenario for investor . Youll me entrepreneurs using social media to serve political discussions. Toni niktly Business Report for fr good evening, everyone and welcome. Stocks touch all time highs and for that, you can thank a blowout jobs report. The employment numbers for jun