[inaudible conversations] c i didnt even have to say anything. You are a welltrained bunch. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon and welcome to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and education center. My name is lillian and im the director public programs. I get the privilege under regular basis. We thank you so much for being here with us today. We hope you overturn on other occasions. Usually i play a game with the audience and i will do it very quickly. Is this your first visit . Please raise your hand. Raise it higher so i can see it they thank you, thank you, thank you. Over here too. Thank you. In the interest so the rest of you can exercise one of your arms if you are a regular and if you attend programs all the time and if you are one of our members please raise your hand. Thank you so much. Thank you. The folks who raised her hands the first time around these dont take my word for it alone. Ask anyone elset around you whoe hand went up a second time why they support this institution and why they come here on a regular basis and why id know many of them by their first names. Those whose first names i havent learned i will do my best to learn them. Alsoil im going to suggest for those of you who are not familiar with the organization to pick up one of our quarterly calendars of events and brochures. Youll find them on the information desk. This will let you know about all of our upcoming programs. I wont steal more of the time to list them all but i will tell you we have a program thats coming thursday evening. Its going to be an exhibition opening for a brandnew t exhibition we just started and that is this thursday the 21st and next sunday we havet another program. We have a film and discussion in a way to judge labor related to the subject matter today. We will be showing the film and israeli made duck imagery that interviewed the survivors and others who were witnesses or who attended the trial and one of those witnesses was eric ross whose photographs are featured in our special exhibition right now memory on earth. Return and i certainly hope you will. At the conclusion todays programmer presenter will be available to sign copies of her new book citizen 865 the hunt for hitlers hidden soldiers in america so as a courtesy i ask you to please allow her to exit the stage and auditorium and continue your conversation with her in the vicinity of our legacy shop. Some of you may some of you may noticed that we have additional apparatus i in the room today and we are very excited that this afternoons program is being preserved and taped for future broadcasts by cspan. Cspan book tv. We are excited to have an author whose work commends such important attention as it should because the subject matter will never go out of style. Let me tell you a little bit about the center. Debbie is associate professor and director of investigative reporting at the [inaudible] western university. She under sees the investigative lab. She is a pulitzer prizewinning investigator reporter and Nonfiction Author who writes for the Washington Post. Tiio she spent three years at Washington University before joining the fact ability. Over the years her investigative stories have exposed wrongdoing, prompted congressional hearings and led to changes in federal and local law. In her classes she and her students focus on social justice in pakistan have reporting. Debbie has one dozens of awards in american print journalism including the Robert F Kennedy report reporting about human rights and the goldsmith prize for i investigative reporting fm harvard university. She received the pulitzer in 2007 at the miami herald or a series of stories about corrupt Affordable Housing developers who were stealing from the poor. A year before that shes appealed surprise finalist for stories about dangerous breakdowns in the nations d hurricane tracking system. Debbie is a frequent speaker at the universities writing conferences and book events andv her first book love wins, who fought case for marriagee equality published in 2016 by William Morrow was named one of the most notable books of the year by the Washington Post. Her second book recently released, hot offos the presses, citizen 865 the hunt for hitlers soldiers hidden in america is the topic today. She works with undergraduate and graduate students on investigative stories and we are delighted to present to you this afternoon debbie. [applause] thank you for that lovely introduction, lillian. I very much appreciate it. Im soo happy to be with you hee today though i am based in washington dc for this First Quarter at northwestern and ive been here in evanston living about evanston and northwestern and chicago and it is been a lot of fun and im so happy to be here to talk about this book project. M let me tell you where this book got started. This book actually started just in the final moments of 2016 when i was at a new Years Eve Party in maryland with my friends and husband and my husband wanted to leave because there was very loud disco musicp playing in the back around anded he had had enough. I ended up having this conversation with the woman were having dinner with who i had never met before. Turned out she was a lawyer from the u. S. Department of justice and over this long unexpected conversation robin gold started telling me about this littleknown unit deep inside the u. S. Justice department that had spent three decades hunting nazi war criminals on u. S. Soil. Though i had spent a decade or so on staff at the Washington Post i o knew very little aboup this unit and i remember thinking to things, asking myself two questions after this two hour conversation. Number one, how was it possible that so many years after the w war, 70 some years after the holocaust, there were still nazi perpetrators and were criminals living here on u. S. Soil. I just cannot understand that and really was fascinated by the idea that that was even happening here and more than that who were the men and women at the u. S. Justice department that had spent the bulk of their careers hunting for these perpetrators and how were they able to spend day after day, year after year inside some of the darkest moments in recent history and how were they able to do that and then go home at night to their wives and their husbands and how are they able to go home and night to the children and take vacations and live normal lives when during the day they were hearing about and reliving some of the most horrible, horrific moments in the holocaust history. I really wanted to get to know the people behind this reidel Nazi Department injustice. After up around in my husband from this Cocktail Party he was sitting outside hunched over a stone reading the Washington Post waiting for me for quite a long time and i knew i had to begin another book. So about one week later i called up the story who worked in this nazi hunting unit in the west apartment injustice, doctor barry white and i asked barry to talk about what she had been doing here and she recounted a story that prompted me to write this book and in 1990 soon after the collapse of communism barry white and another historian named peter black went and you had already gotten my joke and i have not even told my joke at and you already got the punchline but they went to prague because communism had collapsed and they knew that the nazi had stashed a lot of records in prague, war documents, nazi rosters. They could never get to them because a communist government would not allow them inside their archives. After the collapse of communism in 1990 they could get in and it was a treasure trove of information for these historians and imagine what they might find there. They flew in to germany and they rented this little car that chugged across germany into prague in the middle of the night and they ended up in a little rented apartment and their russian caretaker was very upset that barry white was out there with her husband and was, in fact, they are on the job and was pregnant at the time and their russian caretaker very much wanted to see feed them pork cutlets and beer for breakfast and that was not a good thing for barry who was very early on in her pregnancy. But they ended up inside this massive archive in praguena surrounded by government agents with guns and Everything Else and doctor black, peter black who his translator said im doctor black and this is doctor white. We are here representing the u. S. Department of justice. Well, the government agents started to smoke and they probably were thinking the cia has no imagination. Right . These must be government spies. But often they go into the dusty archives in this Office Building in prague and soon enough barry white pushes back her chair and she is looking at this piece of paper and runs over to peter black and says i found somethi something. Turns out they found a nazi roster from 1945 that listed the name of 700 men who had participated in one of the most lethal operations in occupied poland. And some of those men they knew were here in the United States living on u. S. Soil. They recognize some of the names. That was a turning point in an investigation that spanned about ten years and is at the heart of this book, citizen 865. As soon as i talked to barry white i knew that this was my next book and this was for sure a story that i wanted to tell and so let me give you a little bit of background. I focused heavily in this book on historians. Prosecutors are the hero of this book as well and i focused heavily on historians because of spent about 25 years of my life as an investigator with a reporter so documents intrigue me and i love documents. These historians were able to find documents from all over Eastern Europe, inside what were once communist countries and they went to moscow and went to kiev and went to prague and they went to poland and they found all of this evidence about men who were living here in the United States and i found that absolutely intriguing as an Investigative Reporter that there were men and women who had spent their careers in this obscure outpost of the u. S. Department of justice with dropped ceilings and stained carpeting and a window that faced a mcdonalds and here they were huntingre nancy nazi wee criminals and they were absolutely determined to bring them to justice no matter how much time had passed. I found that really inspiring as a journalist and as a mother and his wife and as a human being. These are the people who, in part, drive this story. Little bit of background. D. As you all no, poland had more jews before the war than any other country in the world, probably accept the United States. It was a thriving hub for jewish life. It was also considered a strategic stronghold for the rights because there was less farmland and a Strong Economy that they wanted to turn over to ethnic german settlers so poland was a very strategic location from a very strategic area for the right but what do you do with the jews . What do you do with the jews . So they had experimented with [inaudible] that idea of bloodless efficient mass murder was very intriguing, was found to bee very interesting and intriguing to the Police Leader of the k lynn district, a man known as [inaudible]. So he was tasked with deciding what to do with the jews of occupied poland. Well, the ss was bitty busy fighting on the soviet front and they needed manpower and he needed help to annihilate the jews of poland and so he ended up recruiting from soviet pow camps, men who were captured soviet soldiers and they were put in soviet pow camps where they likely faced death. He recruited them and essentially taught them how to fight for the enemy. He also recruited lithuanians, latvians, polls and other recruits and he brought them to a little farming village south of warsaw known as [inaudible]. You can see from the map what is interesting about this map is that [inaudible] was an incredible location because it had rail lines that connected this village to other key points in occupied poland. And so he ultimately withdrew 5000 men to this camp and it became, in a sense, a school for mass murder. In this camp these men were trained in nazi ideology and armed and empowered and they were taught military drills, german marching commands andy they were ultimately dispatched from thispa school for mass murr in this little farm village known as [inaudible] to the jewish ghettos of occupied poland where they liquidated the ghettos and they were not to, they participated in shooting operations throughout occupied poland and manned the killing centers in occupied poland. This included tripling the end [inaudible] and they forced you to the gas chambers in occupied poland. The men essentially became the manpower for the ss. They were the men who did the bloodiest jobs in occupied poland and the jews who survived described the men of [inaudible] is more brutal and more vicious and more bloodthirsty than even members of the ss. These were men who essentially became the foot soldiers of the third reich and [inaudible] became their base, base camp. This is where they were armed and this is where they were trained and this is where we were issued deployment orders to go across occupied poland and help the ss annihilate the jews. These were the men who did the bloodiest jobs in occupied poland. Trawniki was essentially a school for mass murder in occupied poland set up by the ss. In fact, one of these historians in the book called the men of trawniki a foot soldiers of the third reich. That is what they did. They weree often known by the jews as the men wearing black coats and black hats. Some jewish survivors called them the ukrainians because some of the men were from the ukraine or that region but there were others, many, many others, lithuanian, latvia. The ss really came up with an incredible system because these men were given wages and were given housing and given food and they were given Service Metals for work that was done well. They were given occasions and they were given all kinds of honors that if they died they would receive proper burials. For these men, especially men who came from soviet pow camp, serving the enemy seemed like a decent option because, in soviet pow camps, they likely faced starvation or death or some other kind of horrible death. This camp was set up in their first appointment was to the city of lou blinn which you can see on the map. Lou blinn was a historical cultural and Religious Center for thousands of poland in do. More than 40000 jews lived in poland in 1939 and they held leadership positions on the town council and they were leading members of the resistanceoo community and there were religious schools, there was just a thriving jewish cultural hub there in 1939. It was here in lublin that two of the main characters in my book met and they were just children and many ways, in every way, at the time. Felix and lucy and you were born in lublin and they were friends and their families were friends and her father was a Court Interpreter before the war and her mother was a dentist. Felixs father was an architect before the war andnd these two teenagers were pushed into the lublin ghetto by the nasis along with their friends, neighborsir and every member of their extended family. 40000 jews were put into this ghetto and there was starvation, typhus, you name it, it was terrible, water shortages, food storages and for whatever or for all kinds of reasons luciana and felix were able to survive mass deportations in this ghetto. Their survival story, like all the survival stories, i have heard and researching this book is absolutely astounding. It took my breath away as a writer. Here they were in this ghetto in lublin and one day men in black coats and black caps surround the perimeters of the ghetto and they put on floodlights and they demand that every family come outside and in this ghetto 1500 jews a day would be deported east for resettlement in the east. And so, over a period of weeks luciana and felix and luciana was in her teens, felix was about 19 or so, everyone they knew deported. Their friends, their neighbors, extended family, everyone they knew they lost but they did not know where they had gone and turns out they were taken to the killing center and gassed upon arrival. But the people who did this were men in black coats and black cap cats. The jews of lublin described them as being more vicious, more violent than the dreaded ss. They went to a Jewish Hospital and murdered the patients and the doctors and the nurses. They went to a jewish orphanage and they murdered the children. This was along with the Staff Members who refused to leave the children behind. They went into the woods and shot jews at the edge of the ravine through mass killing and shooting operations. These men were the trawniki men who were trained at the schoolra for mass murder. This school was so important to the ss that top leadership came to visit, including himmler. The felix and luciana escaped. They escaped the lublin ghetto and under the cover of night took a train to warsaw because they didnt have any place to go and they slipped inside the jewish ghetto of warsaw because luciana had an uncle there. They decided at the last minute theyin needed to get out of the ghetto and so in the weeks before the uprising with the help of the polish underground felix and luciana escaped the warsaw ghetto probably saved their lives because they escaped just before the uprising. What they didnt know at the time was that the trawniki men followed and were sidebyside with the germans to suppress the jewish uprising in the warsaw ghetto. They survived lublin, outran the men of trawniki, they survived warsaw, outran the man of trawniki and luciana and felix ended up at the end of the war in a small farming village neare krakow and they essentially were hiding in plain sight. Felix became a teacher for the local children in this village, never once told anyone obviously he was a jew. At the very end of the war they heard soviet tanks rumbling towards the farm village and down on his stomach and crawled out into the woods on his hands and knees and could see the soviet tanks coming, liberati