R.D. Rosen > Quotes

“Prejudice is nothing but ignorance, jealousy, pettiness”—she”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“But how did you convince people to come out of hiding when hiding was all they had known?”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“Let me tell you,” the nun went on, “everyone is equal under God! Prejudice is nothing but ignorance, jealousy, pettiness”—she shook the hose with each word, sending undulating arcs of water into the flower beds—“and intolerance is responsible for all the violence! It’s drilled into children from the beginning.”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“Documentaries     All My Loved Ones, directed by Matej Minac, 1999.     As If It Were Yesterday, directed by Myriam Abramowicz and Esther Hoffenberg, 1980.     The Flat, directed by Arnon Goldfinger, 2012.     Four Seasons Lodge, directed by Andrew Jacobs, 2008.     Generation War (Our Mothers, Our Fathers in the original German), directed by Philipp Kadelbach, 2013.     Hidden Children, directed by John Walker, 1994.     Hitler’s Children, directed by Chanoch Ze’evi, 2011.     Image Before My Eyes, directed by Josh Waletzky, 1981.     Imaginary Witness, directed by Daniel Anker, 2004.     Inheritance, directed by James Moll, 2006.     A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, 1997.     The Nazi Officer’s Wife, directed by Liz Garbus, 2003.     Torn, directed by Ronit Krown Kertsner, 2011.     Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, 1935. Features     Defiance, directed by Edward Zwick, 2008.     In Darkness, directed by Agnieszka Holland, 2011.     Inside Hana’s Suitcase, directed by Larry Weinstein, 2002.     The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski, 2002.     Sarah’s Key, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2010.     Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, 1993.     A Year of the Quiet Sun, directed by Krzysztof Zanussi, 1984.”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“Having God is having someone to rage against,” she said over coffee. “Where else will I go with that? God is strong enough to take it, like a strong parent. My railing is not only against God, but also against man. Where was God? Where was man?”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“When women are educated, the world is a better place.”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“Death was like the thirteenth person in the household, crowding out all other thoughts, making it hard to breathe.”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own experiences. . . . The fact that the plight of other people was worse than one’s own did little to promote personal stoicism.”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“Judgment on Playhouse 90”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“All right. When I was hiding in a small town in Poland with my mother, of course I didn’t have many toys. In fact, I had only two—a doll and a little bear I later named Refugee. He was one of those Steiff bears, but he stayed with me after the war and into adulthood and now he’s in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The copy they made of him to sell in the gift shop is one of their most popular items.”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors

“The most famous child survivor of the Holocaust in the 1950s was not Anne Frank—after all, she didn’t survive—but a young woman named Hannah Bloch Kohner. NBC television’s This Is Your Life was one of television’s first reality shows, in which host Ralph Edwards surprised a guest, often a celebrity, by reuniting him or her with friends and family members the guest hadn’t heard from in years. The program didn’t shy away from either political controversy or questionable sentimentality, as when guest Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who had survived the atomic bombing of Hirsohima in 1945, was introduced to the copilot of the Enola Gay. On May 27, 1953, This Is Your Life ambushed a beautiful young woman in the audience, escorted her to the stage, and proceeded, in a matter of minutes, to package, sanitize, and trivialize the Holocaust for a national television audience. Hannah Bloch Kohner’s claim to fame was that she had survived Auschwitz before emigrating, marrying, and settling in Los Angeles. She was the first Holocaust survivor to appear on a national television entertainment program. “Looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror, and tragedy,” host Edwards said to Kohner in his singsong baritone. “You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” He then reunited a stunned Kohner with Eva, a girl with whom she’d spent eight months in Auschwitz, intoning, “You were each given a cake of soap and a towel, weren’t you, Hannah? You were sent to the so-called showers, and even this was a doubtful procedure, because some of the showers had regular water and some had liquid gas, and you never knew which one you were being sent to. You and Eva were fortunate. Others were not so fortunate, including your father and mother, your husband Carl Benjamin. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz.” It was an extraordinary lapse of sympathy, good taste, and historical accuracy—history that, if not common knowledge, had at least been documented on film. It would be hard to explain how Kohner ever made it on This Is Your Life to be the Holocaust’s beautiful poster girl if you didn’t happen to know that her husband—a childhood sweetheart who had emigrated to the United States in 1938—was host Ralph Edwards’s agent. Hannah Bloch’s appearance was a small, if crass, oasis of public recognition for Holocaust survivors—and child survivors especially—in a vast desert of indifference. It would be decades before the media showed them this much interest again.”
― R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors