60 Minutes - 4/5/2020: Critical Condition, Talking To The Past

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

As small businesses and restaurants bear the brunt of the COVID-19's economic impact, some are adapting and helping each other. Scott Pelley shares their stories. Aging Holocaust survivors now have the chance to record their memories in a way that will allow future generations to literally ask them about their experiences, and see and hear their answers. Lesley Stahl reports. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. I also have your address. That's more jobs lost than in the 18 months of the Great Recession. Most layoffs are coming from the largest employer of all, small business. How many people have you laid off? Over 2,000 people. Restaurant jobs are the most vulnerable. Retail is second. Then you start to look at all the concentric circles, the people that do our

flowers, the people that deliver the bread, the people who fish for our fish. We're going to go ahead and get started. Tonight, as the world struggles to contain and recover from the novel coronavirus, we offer a story we completed just before life changed so dramatically. Can you sing me a song from your youth? It's a story of history, hope, survival, and resilience, which has its roots in another time when the world was convulsed by crisis, World War II. Aaron, tell us what your parents did before the war.

They owned and operated a butcher shop. This interview was unlike any we have ever done. Keep your mentality. Keep your soul. Keep your mind. Incredibly, Aaron Elster, a Holocaust survivor, died two years ago. What's the weather like today? I'm actually recording. I cannot answer that question. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Dickerson. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

Ten million Americans filed for unemployment in the last two weeks. That's more jobs lost than in the 18 months of the Great Recession. Those sidelined by coronavirus include business owners at the height of their success, Americans who never imagined asking for help, and those who believed we would never again explore the depths of the 1930s. Coast to coast, the economy is in critical condition, with workers idled at Boeing, General Motors, Ford, GE, Marriott, and Macy's. But the largest job losses will likely come from the biggest employer of all, small business.

When I look around at my dining room of 109 people, we normally see a lot of life. Right now, I see despair. The restaurant's normally jam-packed, and this is what we have right now. It's an empty space. Three weeks ago, you were lucky to get one of these tables at Melba's in Harlem. I started Melba's 16 years ago with money that I saved up under my mattress.

Literally under the mattress? Literally under the mattress. So I grew up watching my mother doing that, and I emulated it. Savings, sacrifice, and Carolina cooking made Melba Wilson a hit. Now she's laid off 24 employees. Melba's is restricted to takeout and delivery, like New York City's other 27,000 restaurants. Overall, one of the city's largest employers. Well, if you're looking at the bigger picture across New York, you're looking at restaurants, you're looking at nightlife, and you're looking at almost a half a million people

that don't have jobs, that cannot feed their families, that cannot pay their bills, that don't know where their next meals are coming from. That's despair. That's devastation. How much devastation is estimated by economists as an eventual unemployment rate between 10 and 30 percent. We found the numbers would be higher if state unemployment offices were not overwhelmed. All specialists are busy with other customers. You must call back this week. I've done that 50 times every day for two weeks. Two weeks ago, Caitlin Reynolds was a vice president of a firm that organizes business conferences.

She filed for unemployment online but discovered her last step in New York is a mandatory phone call. Fifty times a day since March 16th to get through to the contact center for unemployment to continue my claim. I have not yet been able to get through. Guy Hillel found the unemployment office website had crashed. He would go two or three pages in and he would throw you out, would tell you that your session is timed out. Then he would go six pages in again, he would throw you out, your session is timed out. He would go all the way to the end, just press submit. You press submit and he would tell you your session is timed out. Time ran out on the hotel where Hillel was a manager.

A native of Israel, he worked in hospitality for 20 years. When his 500-room Times Square Hotel closed, he went home to his wife, two children, and a new occupation, connecting with the unemployment office. After, I think, 10 days, I was able to submit and go to the next step, which was a phone call. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Want to try again? 6-0-6. No one at the unemployment office is answering his call either. We are experiencing a high volume of calls at this time. And they hung me up.

His credit card company is giving him a break for 90 days. No such luck with his car payment. What is it like, after so many years in your industry, bringing home a paycheck every week, what is it like that you're not doing that now? It hurts your pride, in a way, you know? Sleepless night, you wake up in the middle of the night thinking, worrying, what will be next?

How can we get to the next step? Have you ever applied for unemployment before? Never. How do you feel about it? At first I was embarrassed. I've worked since I was embarrassed. Um, I've worked since I was 15. I've always put work above anything else. I've never, I never thought I would be in a position like this where I would need to ask for help.

Are you a month away from being broke? Two months away? I'd say about a month. Yeah. It may take a month or more for the largest government bailout in history to show much effect. Federally backed emergency small business loans will become available through banks, but demand is likely to cause delay, like those calls to the unemployment office. Melba Wilson applied for a loan.

Her employees are waiting. It was devastating. I was heartbroken. I was scared, scared for me and scared for my daughter. Alicia Navarro was laid off at Melba's after two years. She's single with a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter and a list of questions. Can I feed my family? How can I pay bills? You wonder if this last three or four months,

am I going to become homeless? Wave at the camera. Hi, camera. Unemployment benefits have been temporarily increased for the emergency, about double in many states. But even that leaves Navarro about $2,000 a month short. Sing rain, rain, go away. Come on, come on, come on.

This month I won't be able to pay my cable, and I won't be able to pay my phone bill. You got the rent covered? Definitely have the rent covered for this month, but I have it covered for the next two months. But after that, what do I do? New York ordered a 90-day stop on evictions. Nationwide, foreclosures on federally backed mortgages are delayed 60 days. Like most Americans, Alicia Navarro is expecting a one-time check of $1,200 from the bailout fund and $500 for her daughter, Aaliyah. But those checks are likely six or eight weeks away.

As Caitlin Reynolds found, the safety net wasn't meant to catch so many millions at once. You know, I'm curious. Would you try the unemployment office again? Yeah, absolutely. Let me pull up the number. You know, I'm curious, would you try the unemployment office again? Yeah, absolutely. Let me pull up the number. We're sorry. We are experiencing an extremely high volume of calls at this time. Thank you for calling New York City Contact Center.

My name is Mariah Mohamed. I assist you. The high volume of calls is 1.3 million a day, the state office told us. It's completing 61,000 applications a day. May I have your first and last name? May I also have your address? Answer the questions truthfully. And the reason you're no longer working is that lack of work, discharged, or quit. Like other states, New York is attempting to spread calls across different days of the week based on the applicant's last name.

How would you inspire them? The state is training another 200 reinforcements. Some will take calls from home. We're doing everything we can to get people paid as soon as possible. This virus has, for me, been almost like a hurricane with no wind or a forest fire with no flame. Danny Meyer is among New York's most successful restaurateurs.

He started the Shake Shack chain and runs 20 other restaurants. How many people have you laid off? We've laid off over 2,000 people by now. Restaurant jobs are the most vulnerable in the crisis. Retail is second. There's about 660,000 restaurants in America. You can do the math on how many human beings are actively working,

producing something of real value by bringing people together, and they're out of work right now. The math is 12 million jobs in restaurants, which Meyer explained is only the start. Then you start to look at all the concentric circles, the people that do our flowers, the people that deliver the bread, the people who fish for our fish. We know from the farmers in the green market that if people are not gathering and restaurants are not open, how do you know what to plant? You don't go to the trouble of planting a crop only to have it go fallow. Factories are

fallow too. Manufacturing output is dropping at the fastest rate since the Great Recession. We employed about 120 full-time employees at Bednarc Studio. Michael Bednarc owns a Brooklyn design and fabrication company that makes displays for retailers. We laid off about 25% of our staff, about 30 people. We made basically a pay cut across the board for everyone so wage reduction his factory builds in wood glass metal and plastic he has enough contracts at the moment to last about a month and a half we sort of just were trying to stay positive find a way to get through six weeks, and hopefully on the other side there would be something to do.

And you found a way. We did. Overnight, working with a partner, Bednark is now manufacturing gear for hospitals. The minimum pay here is $18 an hour. They're making 27,000 face shields a day. The New York Department of Health wants to buy half a million. So you were forced to lay off about 30 people, and now you've hired how many? We've probably hired close to 100 ourselves.

There's probably about 300 to 400 people working on this project. We have truck drivers, and then we have auxiliary people working on it. Every day we get a new lunch served by a local restaurant. They deliver 160-box lunches. A restaurant that was closed except for takeout is now delivering 150 lunches to your face mask factory. Yeah, our goal is basically to keep the funds in Brooklyn, keep the funds in New York, help people help others. So by giving them a lunch, we can employ 10, 15 people at a restaurant each day. It's great.

We actually heard a lot of stories of empathy. Alicia Navarro from Melba's cooked up one way to help. I study how to do homemade hand sanitizers, Lysols, homemade masks, to help people who are less, who are unfortunate and who can't afford those things, and you can make them with everyday home supplies. Danny Meyer started a nonprofit charity making grants to his most needy former employees, and Michael Bednart's people are sacrificing for each other. We had some employees offering to split their weeks, so they'd do 20 hours and then have their counterpart do 20 hours that week just to sort of keep people working and keep people busy and keep people getting paid.

You had employees volunteer to split their weeks with somebody who was less fortunate. Correct. The best of these stories happen before our eyes. A chicken dish, a grilled salmon, and a vegetarian dish, correct? Yeah. Okay. Melba Wilson took an order for takeout from someone who wanted to remain anonymous. 100 dinners to be delivered to nearby Mount Sinai Hospital.

One voice on the phone joining a chorus of Americans longing for better days ahead. I am so uplifted, first of all, by the fact that you're doing this for the medical staff and also that you're helping my employees. So it means the world to me. And your name is Melva? I'm assuming you're the owner. Yeah, my name is Melva. Yeah, I just happen to be the owner. And thank you so much.

And stay safe. May God continue to bless you. Thank you. Yeah, bye-bye. Okay, bye-bye. My grandmother always told us, this too shall pass. And it's times of trials and tribulation that I lean on my faith and I lean on my spirit.

I don't know how, I don't know when, but believe me, this too shall pass. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. shall pass. Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. more flights more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card and then some get your ticket to more with the new bmo vi porter mastercard and get up to 2400 in value in your first 13 months terms and apply. Visit bmo.com slash theiporter to learn more. Tonight, as the world struggles to contain and recover from the novel coronavirus, we offer a story we completed just before life changed so dramatically. It is a story of history,

hope, survival, and resilience, which has its roots in another time when the world was convulsed by crisis, World War II. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of that war and the liberation of concentration camps across Europe. Most of the survivors who remain are now in their 80s and 90s. Soon, there will be no one left who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, no one to answer questions or bear witness to future generations. But as Leslie Stahl reports, a new and dramatic effort is underway to change that. Harnessing the technologies of the present and the future, it keeps alive the ability to talk to and get answers from the past. Hi, Aaron.

Hello. Can I ask you some questions? You can ask me anything you want, within reason. Our interview with Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster, who spent two years of his childhood hidden in a neighbor's attic, was unlike any interview we have ever done. Aaron, tell us what your parents did before the war. They owned and operated a butcher shop. It wasn't the content of the interview that was so unusual.

Where did you live? I was born in a small town in Poland called Sokow Podlaskie. It's the fact that this interview was with a man who was no longer alive. Aaron Elster died two years ago. What's the weather like today? I'm actually recording. I cannot answer that question. The survivors were getting very old.

Heather Mayo came up with the idea for this project. She had worked on exhibits featuring Holocaust survivors for years and wanted future generations to have the same opportunity to interact with them as she'd had. I wanted to talk to a Holocaust survivor like I would today with that person sitting right in front of me and we were having a conversation. She knew that back in the 90s. After making the film Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg created a foundation named for the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, Shoah, to film and collect testimonies from as many survivors as possible. They have interviewed nearly 55,000 of them so far and have stored them at the University of Southern

California. But Mayo dreamed of something more dynamic, being able to actively converse with survivors after they're gone. And she figured in the age of artificial intelligence tools like Siri and Alexa, the technology had to be creatable. I've been involved in interviewing Holocaust survivors for over 20 years. She brought the idea to Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, and now her husband. He loved it, but some of his colleagues weren't so sure. One of them looked at me.

She was like, you want to talk to dead people? And you said yes, because that's the point. That's the point. Well, maybe people thought you're turning the Holocaust into something maybe hokey. Yeah. They said that you're going to Disney-fy the Holocaust. We had a lot of pushback on this project. Is it the right thing to do?

What about the well-being of the survivors? Are we trying to keep them alive beyond their death? Everyone had questions except for one group of people, the survivors themselves, who said, where do I sign up? I would like to participate in this project. No barriers to entry. The first survivor they signed up to do a trial run was a man named Pincus Guter, who was born in Poland and deported to the Majdanek concentration camp with his parents and twin sister Sabina at the age of 11. He's the only one who survived. They flew Pincus from his home in Toronto to Los Angeles and asked him to sit inside this.

So you're in this dome? Yeah, I call it a sphere, they call it a dome, and then eventually it was called a bubble. A bubble surrounding him with lights and more than 20 cameras. What's our f-stop? The goal was to future-proof the interviews, so that as technology advances and 3D hologram-like projection becomes the norm, they'll have all the necessary angles. So the very first day we went to film Pinchas, we had these ultra-high-speed cameras that were all linked together and synced together

to make this video of him. So we sit down and they press record, nothing happens. So Pinchas is sitting there with 6,000 LED lights on him and cameras that don't work. Can I go back to sleep now? Sunglasses shielded his eyes. When are we going to start? I was bored sitting in that chair, so I started singing to myself.

So suddenly Stephen had this idea. Oh, he's singing. We're going to record some songs of his. He was such a good sport. He was a really good sport. Eventually, the cameras rolled and Pincus was asked to come back to the bubble for the real thing. How long were you in that chair? A whole week from nine to five. A week? We were there with breaks for lunch, but I was there from nine to five answering questions. Oh my gosh. It took so long because they asked him nearly 2,000

questions. The idea was to cover every conceivable question anyone might ever want to ask him. Did you have to look exactly the same? I had to wear the same clothes, and I had three pairs of the same

jackets, the same shirts, the same trousers, the same shoes. Every morning. Pincus can now be seen in those shirts, trousers, and shoes at Holocaust museums in Dallas, Indiana, and here at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, outside Chicago, where visitors can ask him their own questions. What kept you going or what gave you hope while you were experiencing hardship in the camps? We did hope that the Nazis would lose the war. Pincus' image is projected onto an 11-foot high screen. What we see here...

Smith joined us to explain how the technology works. So what's happening is all of the answers to the questions that Pincus gave go into a database. Then when you ask a question, the algorithm is looking through all the database. Do I have an answer to that? And then it'll bring back what it thinks is the closest answer to your question. I'm going to try talking to Pincus. Yes. All right. Did you have a happy childhood? I had a very happy childhood. My parents were winemakers. My father started teaching me to become a winemaker when I was three and a half years old. By the age of five, I could already read and I could already write.

Wow. You're very smart. Thank you. I've noticed there's a little jiggle right before Pincus starts to talk. What is that? What you're seeing here isn't a human being. It's video clips that are being butted up to each other and played. And as it searches and brings the clip in, you're seeing a little bit of a jump cut. The jump cuts stop being distracting once we started talking about the fate of Pincus' family. Tell us what happened when you got to the camp. As soon as we arrived there, we were being separated into different groups. And my sister was somehow pushed towards the

children. And I saw her. She must have spotted my mother. So she ran towards my mother. I saw my mother. And she hugged her. And since that time, all I can remember whenever I think of my sister is her long, big, long, blonde braid. That was the last time he saw his twin sister, Sabina.

He learned later that day that she and both his parents had been killed in the gas chambers. Pincus was alone at age 11, put to work as a slave laborer. Did you ever see anybody killed? Unfortunately, I saw many people die in front of my eyes. I wasn't sure how a recording would handle what I wanted to ask Pincus next. How can you still have faith in God? How can you possibly not believe in God? Well, how did he let this happen? God gave

human beings the knowledge of right and wrong, and he allowed them to do what they wished on this earth, to find their own way. To my mind, when God sees what human beings are up to especially things like genocide he weeps wow Stephen I could ask him questions for 10 hours and on the screen wow

since Pincus Guder was filmed the Shoah Foundation has recorded interviews with 21 more Holocaust survivors, each for a full week. And they've shrunk the setup required so they can take a mobile rig on the road to record survivors close to where they live. They've deliberately chosen interview subjects with all different wartime experiences. Survivors of Auschwitz, hidden children, and as we saw last fall in New Jersey, 93-year-old Alan Moskin, who isn't a Holocaust survivor. He was a liberator. Entering that camp was the most horrific sight I've ever seen or ever hoped to see the rest of my life.

MARGARET WARNER, Moskin was an 18-year-old private when his Army unit liberated a little-known concentration camp called Gunskirchen. There was a pile of skeleton-like bodies on the left. There was another pile of skeleton-like bodies on the right. Those poor souls, that's the term my lieutenant kept screaming, oh, my God, look at these poor souls. Each of Alan Moskin's answers is then isolated by a team of researchers at the Shoah Foundation office. I remember the expression and the attitude of all of us, what in the freak, what is this God Almighty?

Who add into the system a variety of questions people might ask to trigger that response. For every question that we asked, there are 15 different ways of asking the same question. And that's fed in. And that's all manual. Editors rotate the image, turn the green screen background into black, and then a long process of testing begins, some of it in schools. So Mr. Pincus on your screen. Students are asked to try it out, ask whatever questions they want, and see if the system calls up the correct answer.

How did you find out that your city was getting invaded by Germany? Would you ever want to seek revenge? How did you find out that your city was getting invaded by Germany? Would you ever want to seek revenge? How did you feel about your family? Can you rephrase that, please? Every question and response is then reviewed. We log every single question that's asked of the system and see if there is a better response that addresses that question more directly. As we discovered, it's still a work in progress. Tell us about your family when you were a little boy. How about you ask me about life after the war? So a couple of things about artificial intelligence. It is mainly artificial and not so intelligent. Just yet, for now. But the beauty of artificial intelligence is it develops over time.

So we aren't changing the content. All the answers remain the same. But over time, the range of questions that you can ask will be enhanced considerably. And you had to stay silent? Questions to draw out what it was like for Aaron Elster hiding in that attic 75 years ago. I used to pray to God to let me live till I was 25. I wanted to taste what adulthood would be like. The rest of that conversation with Aaron Elster, as well as one with a survivor of Joseph Mengele's infamous twin experiments at Auschwitz,

when we come back. So, am I a lucky guy? Yes, I am. This weekend, while we care for our families, we are aware many families grieve for loved ones lost to the pandemic, perhaps telling their stories and finding some solace in shared memories. The power of shared memory lies at the heart of the Shoah Foundation's project to allow meaningful conversations with Holocaust survivors,

even after those survivors themselves are gone. Of more than 20 men and women who have participated so far, three have already passed away. Tonight, we are sharing Leslie Stahl's conversations with two of them. Conversations that at times felt so normal, Leslie says she could almost forget she was talking with the digital image of someone no longer living. First, a spunky four-foot, nine-inch woman named Eva Kaur, an identical twin who, together with her sister, survived Auschwitz and the notorious experiments of Dr. Joseph Mingala. Eva Kaur spent her life after the war in Terre Haute, Indiana. She died last summer at the age of 85. Hi, Eva. How are you today?

I'm fine. And how are you? I'm good. It felt natural to answer her question before posing my own. So how old were you when you went to Auschwitz? When I arrived in Auschwitz, I was 10 years old, and I stayed in Auschwitz until liberation, which was about nine months later than we were liberated. So we made a little announcement about the fact we were starting this project.

I get a call the next day from a lady called Eva Kaur. I didn't know her at that point in time, and she says, I want to be one of those 3D interviews. I want to be a hologram. Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, and his wife and colleague, Heather Mayo Smith, were running the project. I said, well, I'm traveling.

I'm very sorry. Where are you going? Well, I've got to go to New York. I'm going to D.C. When are you going to go to D.C.? I'm going to D.C. Turns out we were going to the same event in D.C. I arrive at my hotel. She's sitting in the lobby waiting for me. When Eva, on the right, and her twin sister Miriam arrived at Auschwitz,

they were pulled away from their parents and older sisters and taken to a barrack full of twins. They never saw their family again. Fifty years ago at a railroad site... Sixty minutes reported on Mengele's twin experiments in a story back in 1992. And we actually interviewed the living Eva Kor at her home in Terre Haute. Eva told us then about becoming extremely sick after an injection. Mengele came in every morning and every evening with four other doctors. And he declared, very sarcastically laughing,

too bad, she's so young, She has only two weeks to live. When I heard that, I knew he was right. And I immediately made a silent pledge that I will prove you, Dr. Mengele, wrong. Imagine picking up a conversation almost 30 years later and after Eva's death. Eva, tell us about Dr. Mengele. What was he like? He had a gorgeous face, a movie star face, and very pleasant, actually. Dark hair, dark eyes. When I looked into his eyes, I could see nothing but evil. People say that the eyes

are the center of the soul, and in Mengele's case, that was correct. Eva and Miriam are visible in footage taken by the Soviet forces that liberated Auschwitz 75 years ago. They went back to the camp many times, Eva continuing to go even after Miriam's death in 1993. It was on one of those visits that Eva made a stunning announcement that she had decided to forgive her Nazi captors. She came under blistering attack from other survivors. How can you forgive? How is that possible?

My forgiveness does not mean that I forget what happened, which is impossible. My forgiveness is an act of self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment. Are you able to forgive, Aaron? I cannot forgive. Aaron Elster disagrees. For them to get forgiveness, they have to ask my little sister, Sarah, whom they brutally murdered. I have no right to forgive, and I will not forgive. What's important for me in this project is that we have Holocaust survivors who have different points of view about God and religion and faith and forgiveness, and that's what this project will allow us to do. Aaron Elster, unlike many Holocaust survivors,

never spent time in a concentration camp. As Jews were being rounded up in his town's marketplace and sent to Treblinka, his father told him to run. He was nine years old. And I managed to crawl into the sewer that went along the marketplace, the street, and kept crawling until I felt I was out of sight, stood up and started running. He made it to the building of an older Polish couple named the Gurskis,

who'd been customers at his family's butcher shop. He shows up, and she didn't want to take him. He started crying, and then she led him upstairs. Aaron, how long did you stay in the attic? I lived in that attic for close to two years. Two years with just one visit a day to bring food and water. What was it like in the attic? Oh, there's so many things that I remember. The hunger, the fear, the absolute, total loneliness.

What do you do all day? You're sitting there. I used to catch flies out of desperation and tear their wings off so they wouldn't fly away. So I hid them there. How did you survive? How did you survive in that attic? I had the ability to daydream. I used to write novels in my head. I was the hero all the time. And we have that ability to either give in to our misery and our pain and die,

or absorb the physical pain, but keep your mentality, keep your soul, keep your mind. So was I bored? Was I scared? Was I in need of somebody to accept me or to tell me that I'm okay, that I'm a nice kid? Sure. But that was not part of my life. We got a phone call to say that Aaron Elster had suddenly passed away. I was at a conference at that time. The next morning I went into the

little room that we had, and I turned on Aaron Elster's testimony. And I realized I was going to be the first person ever to click that little button and ask a question of somebody who was no longer alive. And for the next six hours, people came in and out of that room. His funeral had not yet taken place, and yet the legacy was already continuing, and it was a very powerful and touching moment. You're good. You're doing great. A touching moment that may soon be available to others beyond the community of Holocaust survivors. They're going to come in and they're going to have you look. Heather Mayo-Smith says in the process of developing and testing this technology,

she was barraged with inquiries. There wasn't one person, literally not one, that didn't ask me if they could do a similar interview with either a loved one or themselves. Unrelated to the Holocaust? Unrelated, completely unrelated. Can I do this with someone that I know? What's the answer? Yes. She has started an independent company that's trying to expand the use of this technology,

recording interviews with other historical figures like astronauts, and eventually with anyone at all. What unit were you in during World War II? So do you think that this is just going to be a tool that people use? Everybody will be recording their histories. Interactively. Other people can interview them. Mm-hmm.

It'll just be life. Yeah. We're going to go ahead and get started. For now, though, the race is on to capture interviews with as many Holocaust survivors as possible while there's still time so the conversations can continue always with people like Aaron Elster. Do you want revenge? When I was a youngster, I wanted revenge very, very, very much. And I hate it.

I hate it. But most of the perpetrators, most of the killers are dead. So who am I going to hate? The grandchildren that had nothing to do with? It's not right. Revenge is not part of my life, not part of my thinking. You know, here you have these people who were basically destined to be annihilated, that they survived as the miracle, but they were supposed to be murdered, killed, and now they have immortality. They were not supposed to have a name. They were supposed to be destroyed for all time.

And now, through this program, they will be able to continue to answer questions hundreds of years after the Nazis have gone. It's that never forget. We've had a lot of cliches around the Holocaust, you know, never again, never forget, we must remember, all this sort of thing. What this does, it makes sure that there isn't closure, because it's not about a statement. It's not about a particular thing that's being instructed of thing. What this does, it makes sure that there isn't closure because it's not about a statement. It's not about a particular thing that's being instructed of you. The onus is on you to ask the questions. The onus is on you to be curious and to want to know. And so in a sense, it turns

the learning on its head and says, I'm not going to tell you what the lessons of the Holocaust are. I'm not going to tell you what the Holocaust means. but if you want to find out, then you can ask. It's so terribly important. So there we were at a special moment in time when the living Pincus Guter could talk to the one who will live forever. Would you ask you a question for us? I will ask the one which is my favorite. Okay. Can you sing me a song from your youth?

You want me to sing it for you? Yes, please. What does that mean? What is the song? Is it a happy song? Yeah, it's a happy song. It's like a brother and a sister, which of course my twin sister, are traveling in the woods or on the road and they can't get over how beautiful the world is.

Oh my God. This week, the number of coronavirus deaths worldwide reached 60,000. A wife became a widow. A son never got to say goodbye to his father. At CBS, we lost the light of our beloved colleague Maria Mercator. This suffering is different. We are all a part of it, but we also must keep moving. We are scared, distracted, trying to make it through the day. As we rush, though, we risk trampling on the grieving, especially when the deaths they mourn are totaled up for political fights. For thousands, everything will be defined as either before or after this hinge point in their life. So we should spare a moment for sorrow.

This is what pledges to be in this together actually mean. We tell those who have lost their world that the rest of the world is not indifferent to their suffering. We acknowledge that getting back to normal will be impossible for many. We should spare a moment to say we see you. We feel your sorrow. You are not alone even in this moment of deep loneliness. The human spirit endures as Leslie Stull showed us tonight. This virus will either drive us closer together or

farther apart. Let it be the former. I'm John Dickerson. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.