With an estimated 196,000 Holocaust survivors still alive, it's never been more important to share and preserve their stories. The Los Angeles-based nonprofit "If You Heard What I Heard" does just that, and those telling the stories of resilience are the grandchildren of survivors.
"These stories are being forgotten. They're not being told. It was also really hard for my grandparents to tell the story because it's reliving it. And it was something that was so atrocious and so bad that I can imagine why people don't wanna talk about it. My grandfather didn't wanna to talk about it. He had numbers on his arm, and we would always look at him as kids. 'What's this? What's this? And he just didn't want to talk about it. It was too hard," said Amy Chapman, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who participated in "If You Heard What I Heard."
"The stories of the Holocaust are so horrifying that it's almost hard to believe. So the more time that goes by, people actually think that they're fiction," said Ellie Heisler, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.
"If You Heard What I Heard" was founded six years ago by Carolyn Siegel. An act of anti-Semitism in her hometown of Los Angeles motivated Siegel to share what her grandparents overcame.
"As grandkids of Holocaust survivors, we're the last generation to ever hear survivor stories firsthand. We're the least generation to say, 'This is what it was like to sit in a room with this person and hold their hand and hear the story at 8 years old, at 12 years old, at 20 years old,'" said Siegel.
"A 9-year-old escaping the Warsaw Ghetto, escaping Germany, breaking her leg, being alone in the world, and thinking, 'Oh, if she could do that at 9 years old. I can do this now,'" said Chapman.
Siegel conducts the interviews herself with the third-generation of Holocaust survivors. The interviews last three hours, but then are edited down to 30-minute videos which live forever on ifyouheardwhatiheard.com.
"This organization does such a beautiful job between bridging the gap between the aisle of the left and the right, because it shouldn't even be about that. And it's not about that, it's about preserving stories, finding a way to share them and having a human connection so that history, in this tragic, tragic way, does not repeat itself," said Heisler.
For more information, you can visit ifyouheardwhatiheard.com.