Growing up in Buffalo, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer always knew he was the child of Holocaust survivors. His parents, both Polish Jews, told him often about their experiences surviving the concentration camps.
“I knew many children of Holocaust survivors whose parents didn’t speak about it,” Blitzer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But my parents were very open about it. I’m grateful that they were.”
But it wasn’t until Blitzer made his new CNN special about the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that he discovered a video survivor testimony his father, David Blitzer, had recorded in the 1990s.
Filmed at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Hollywood, Florida, David Blitzer discussed growing up in the Polish city of Oświęcim, later “Germanized” into Auschwitz, where his parents were murdered. (The city is known as Oswiecim again today.) He shared intimate details about the mindset of the Germans around him, who he said regretted that Hitler was in power “only when they started to lose the war,” and his belief that the United States’ decision not to bomb the Auschwitz death camp was a moral failure.
David Blitzer’s testimony, along with those like other survivors like Rita Kesselman and Irene Salomonawicz, is featured in the new CNN special “Never Again: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: A Tour With Wolf Blitzer,” which aired on Aug. 26.
The hour-long special, originally intended for the now-defunct streaming service CNN+, follows Blitzer and current museum director Sara Bloomfield as they explore the Washington, D.C., institution and the history lessons it offers. The program aired on the network less than a week after fellow Jewish CNN correspondent Dana Bash’s own special on antisemitism in the United States. It will subsequently be available on CNN’s digital
platforms.
