60 Minutes - 8/30/2020: Red Flag, Talking to the Past

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Red Flag gun laws allow temporary confiscation of firearms if a gun owner displays dangerous or threatening behavior. The laws have been adopted in 17 states and the District of Columbia, but in Colorado, there's been fierce controversy. Scott Pelley reports. Holocaust survivors will be able to share their stories after death thanks to a new project. Lesley Stahl tells us more. 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

A high school shooting last November renewed the debate over gun legislation. Nineteen states believe one answer is the red flag law. It's a temporary intervention to get the guns out of someone's hands who's in crisis. You may be surprised by those who oppose it. There are portions of the law I just flat out can't and won't do. This is a law that was passed by the legislature. It's signed by the governor. Nobody asked you.

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 Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life.

But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public 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. With pandemic and election news, you may not have noticed that over the summer, there have been about 100 mass shootings in America in which five or more people were shot. To make a dent in this violence, there has been a movement among states towards so-called red flag laws. 19 states and the District of Columbia have

these laws, which allow confiscation of firearms if a gun owner raises a red flag with threatening behavior. Last fall, we told you that Colorado was one of the latest to adopt red flag, but in defiance, nearly half of the state's counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries. Colorado's red flag law took effect last New Year's Day. The story of how it works and why it's fiercely debated begins with a tragedy New Year's Eve 2017. Apartment 24 was a headache for Douglas County Sheriff's deputies in the suburbs of Denver. What's going on tonight? They'd met the resident, Matthew Reel, before. Right! Right!

With each dispatch, deputies were reminded Reel was mentally ill, hostile, and armed. If you keep yelling like that, I will take you to jail for disorderly conduct. He hadn't been violent, but that morning, he live-streamed threats and talked of guns. Yes, I do have some weapons. I own firearms. I have been, you know, I've had some scotch. Deputies believed Real was suffering a mental breakdown. They were stalking. Why are they knocking? They're still knocking. Real hadn't broken the law,

so deputies could only take him into protective custody for a mental evaluation. Instead, Real barricaded himself. Go away! Open the door! I'm warning you, identify! Deputy Zach Parrish hit the door. Sheriff's office! What's your name?

Get him! Get him! Get him! What's your name? He's down. Hey, I'm going. Cover me. In a 96-minute shootout, five officers were hit. Reels' bullets flew through walls and wounded two neighbors. Three are down. We've got three officers hit. One down. Deputy Zach Parrish was killed, leaving a wife, a four-year-old, and an 18-month-old. Matt Reel died with 19 legally owned firearms, including assault rifles, a combat shotgun, and pistols. He had fired 185 rounds. He had 1,067 left. We had been dealing with this individual for almost two months. We had done a lot of things to try to intervene,

but there were no tools available to us to do that. The casualties Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock suffered made him a leading advocate for the red flag law, which allows law enforcement to ask a judge for an extreme risk protection order. The order requires a gun owner to temporarily give up his weapons. If the extreme risk protective order had been available to you then, do you think you would have asked for one? Probably a month before we would have been able to intervene and in my opinion most likely would have saved two lives. We would have saved the suspect's lives and we would have saved Zach's life. The red flag movement began after Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Mental health experts and gun safety advocates wrote a model law which most of the red flag states adopted. Among the authors was Josh Horwitz, who leads the coalition to stop gun violence.

This is a law that is a temporary civil restraining order that allows family members or law enforcement to go to court and remove the most lethal means, a firearm, before a tragedy occurs. And if the judge agrees and issues the order, law enforcement will go and serve the order on the respondent, remove the firearms, and then somewhere between 7 and 21 days, everybody will come back to court. There will be a full hearing. If the person, in fact, is dangerous to self or others, the firearms will be kept by law enforcement, and that person won't have access to them for a year. Do you solemnly swear or affirm the testimony you're about to give?

This is a red flag hearing in the state of Washington. I do. All right, thank you. Okay, whenever you're ready, counsel. Officer Coles, can you tell the court why you petitioned for an extremist protection order in this case? Yes. As with most red flag cases, the police have filed a sworn affidavit alleging threatening behavior by a gun owner. The respondent was now making threats that if police showed up to the house,

he would kill them first and then take his own life. We have search warrants and search premises. On the judge's order, weapons are taken into police custody and the gun owner is temporarily banned from buying another gun. They have the right to testify. They have the right to cross-examine witnesses. This is something with court rules, with rules of evidence, with judicial oversight. This is the kind of thing which is a thoughtful, well-developed process to intervene when it matters most. The law requires the gun be returned to the owner in no more than one year. During that year, the owner can appeal. If there is still

a concern at the end of the year, a judge can renew the order based on new evidence. How does this law compare to the kind of temporary restraining orders that we see when a spouse is concerned about being beaten or killed by their loved one. In a domestic violence law, you can not only lose your firearm, but you can be prevented from going into your own home. You can be prevented from seeing your kids. What we're doing with the extremist law is very narrow. Get the firearm out of an explosive situation before it's too late.

If only we could have kept those guns away from him until he could grow up a little bit. Mark Dreher knew about red flag laws, but Colorado didn't have one in 2017 when mental illness overwhelmed his son. There you go, Chris. Chris Dreher's family near Boulder was devoted to his care. Psychologists, psychiatrists, medication. But Chris was tortured by anxiety. He worked at a place and he bought a pistol from one of his co-workers. His long-term psychologist said that he should not have any guns because he had suicidal ideation at that point.

So we took him away, took it away and locked it up. But then he started telling me that he, well, he could just go out and buy another one. And so you were faced with the reality that he could have a gun at any time you wanted. Yes. I made a deal with him. I said, I'll give you the guns back, but you have to let me put trigger locks on the guns and I'll have the keys and he found a way to get him off and one one night you know when he was having some issues he went to a place by his apartments and any committee to the side that night how old was he? 20. 20? 20. 20 years old.

Suicides and memories of massacres, including Columbine and the Aurora Theater, pushed Colorado's red flag law forward against heavy resistance. You don't just take away people's guns. The bill failed in the Republican Senate. We need to save some lives. Then it passed when voters gave both houses to Democrats. Now the law has become Colorado's political great divide. You've got the people who live in the city that has this idea that it is a good thing. But I think more importantly, this is a political issue where it's a vote-getting issue.

Steve Wells' family has been ranching since 1888. He's among those who feel politically powerful cities are trying to corral the countryside. So what's a better idea? Well, I think one of the things you really got to start looking at is individual responsibility. If I have a family member, and I think for any reason that family member is going to be an issue with the firearm, we're going to go take them away from him. We've become so dependent on government making all the answers for everybody. The Second Amendment is what gives us the power to stand here on the steps of this Capitol and push back. Dozens of sheriffs in Colorado have dug in their heels,

including Bill Elder and Steve Reams. There are portions of the law I just flat out can't and won't do. This is a law that was passed by the legislature. It's signed by the governor. Nobody asked you. You're just expected to do your job and enforcing the law is your job. Right. And I also take an oath of office that says I'll support the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution of the state of Colorado, and then I'll enforce the laws of the state of Colorado. When those things are in conflict, you know, you have to decide which one you're going to adhere to. Are you prepared to get locked up in your own jail? That is something that could happen. A judge could order me to my own jail.

You know, I would be the one litigating that issue and we'll determine at that point if this red flag law is constitutional. Opponents say red flag violates the right to bear arms, the right to due process, and the right against unreasonable search and seizure. Some sheriffs say they won't ask for a red flag order, and if they receive one from a judge, they won't enforce it. If you decline to enforce one of these orders and people die, won't the county be liable for the damages? If law enforcement's only objective is to go take someone's firearms and that person still goes out and commits violence,

do you think that we would then be off the hook for any damage that they would inflict? No, people would still look at law enforcement and say, why did you only take their guns? Why didn't you deal with the person? Bill Elder told us the legislature aimed at the wrong target. We need to have funding for meaningful mental health assessments and treatment. There just are no programs. The state hospitals are full. The local hospitals are not equipped for it.

Jails tend to be the warehousing for people in crisis. Jails are the new asylums. I have 1,700 inmates. Anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of those inmates suffer from some form of mental health issue. In protest of the law, nearly half of Colorado's 64 counties have declared themselves symbolically Second Amendment sanctuaries. County commissioners passed a Second Amendment resolution even in the county that lost Zach Parrish, Tony Spurlock's deputy. They do not agree with you. No, they don't, but I asked them, and they have yet to answer me this question. What does a Second Amendment sanctuary county mean?

Does that mean everybody gets to carry a gun, those who already have restraining orders, the sex offender that's registered down the street here from my office? It's a clever term, but it literally means nothing. The laws of the state of Colorado and the United States are laws that be followed by all elected officials. There have been court challenges in other states based on the Second and Fifth Amendments, but so far, red flag laws have been ruled constitutional. You are required to relinquish the firearm. Yeah, I understand.

A study in Indiana published last year by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law estimates that for every 10 red flag orders, one life is saved. Springfield, that's it. Perfect. All right. We've got an active shooter at Sargent High School. Red Flag did not stop a California high school shooting in November, nor many shootings over the summer.

But a study from the University of California, Davis, credits Red Flag with stopping 21 potential mass murders in California over the last three years. In Colorado, a lawsuit failed to prevent the red flag law from taking effect last January. The name of the law is the Zachary Parrish Violence Prevention Act in memory of Tony Spurlock's fallen deputy. Would you describe yourself as pro-gun rights? I am pro-gun rights. I'm a Second Amendment guy. Then how can you support this? This is not about taking guns away.

This is about giving a respite time, a time for someone who is in danger and may not be making rational decisions at this point, an opportunity to stay alive, the opportunity not to kill their family members, an opportunity not to hurt some unknown citizen. Let's eliminate as much danger as we can so we can get that individual some care and treatment. Since Colorado's red flag law took effect eight months ago, more than 70 red flag petitions have been submitted to judges. In more than 60% of those, the confiscation order was granted.

Sometimes, historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of concentration camps across Europe. Most of the survivors who remain are now in their 80s and 90s.

So 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 we first reported earlier this year, a new and dramatic effort is underway to change that by harnessing the technologies of the present and the future to keep 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. Come on ahead and sit on down. To film and collect testimonies from as many survivors as possible. You're rolling. 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 that's the point well maybe people thought

you're turning the holocaust into something maybe hokey yeah they said that you're gonna disney by yeah disney by 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 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 3-D 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 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 9 to 5. A week? We were there with breaks for lunch, but I was there from 9 to 5 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 of 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. 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's 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. Yeah. 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. 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, you 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 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. Podcasts are great because they help us make the most out of our routine. We learn about the fall of the Ottoman Empire while we drive, keep up with news while we take the dog for a walk, or turn folding laundry into a comedy show. Make the most out of your time with the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, a credit card that can get you unlimited free grocery delivery and the most PC optimum points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited.

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Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The whole point of the Shoah Foundation's project is to allow meaningful conversations with Holocaust survivors to continue even after the survivors themselves are gone. And of the more than 20 men and women who've participated so far, four have passed away already. Tonight, we wanted to share conversations with two of them, conversations that at times felt so normal we could almost forget we were talking to the digital image of someone who was no longer living. First, a spunky four-foot-nine woman named Eva Kaur, an identical twin who together with her sister survived Auschwitz and the notorious experiments of Dr. Joseph Mengele.

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 Kor.

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 Menger'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. Because if the train came in that direction... It was on one of those visits that Eva made a stunning announcement... I, Eva Moses-Kor... ...that she had decided to forgive her Nazi captors. Hereby give amnesty to all Nazis who participated... 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 forget. 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 ran along the marketplace, the street, and kept crawling till 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. 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, for 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. I was an astronaut for NASA. Recording interviews with other historical figures like astronauts and eventually with anyone at all. What unit were you in? So do you think that this is just going to be a tool that people use? Everybody will be recording their histories. Interactivity. 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 a 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 clichés 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 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 Pinka Scooter 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. Jadą dzieci, jadą drogą

Szoszczyczka i brat Inawidzić się nie mogą Jaki piękny świat 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. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.