Blue Bag Life won the audience award at the 2022 London International Film Festival. As any artist or writer knows, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” can mean different things. We are all different people. Lisa Selby’s passion is filmmaking. She turned the camera on herself and documented her fractured life. Not everything made the cut, but there’s a raw honesty that’s appealing.
‘Disconnection is the only mothering I’ve ever known.’
‘At Primary School my nicknames were “Disease” and “Witch”. I was sure Helen gave me up because of some disease I had…I thought maybe she didn’t want to be called ‘Mum’ cause I was too dirty.’
Helen is Lisa’s mother. She left her when she was ten. Ran away with her lover and her dad brought Lisa up, a single parent. Usually, that’s the kind of thing men are good at.
Helen had six months to live when Lisa tracked her down to a filthy council house in London, where she stayed with her current—and much younger lover—her mother was unrepentant. In her fake furs, including a natty hat, with a can of Special Brew in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she explained it wasn’t really her fault. After Lisa’s birth, she had been sectioned in a psychiatric ward, which made her incapable of being a proper person, never mind a mother. Her love for drugs was stronger than her maternal instinct. She favoured opiates with a smattering of hallucinogenics.
There was always a fag in her mouth, as there was in Lisa’s. Lisa met Elliot, her boyfriend, after attending an AA meeting. A self-proclaimed alcoholic, Elliot had also been addicted to heroin, like her mum.
‘Heroin was Helen’s favourite. Heroin was Elliot’s favourite.’
We know where this is going. ‘I was drawn to the dark things in life. But this was a different kind of dark,’ admits Lisa.
‘I’ve just found out that my mum is in a hospice. She has cancer. They won’t give her chemotherapy because she’s a heroin addict. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m filming this. It just makes me feel less alone.’
Who are you? What are you? You decide. If life was only that simple, it could be scripted and the chaos of fucked-up lives reigned in?
I’m a fan of Storyville. There have been lots of documentaries on recently to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, 27th January. The date is chosen to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. There are two stories here which wind around three minutes of film, but which takes over sixty minutes to tell.
The first story is quite simple. How a piece of film celluloid was saved by Glen Kurtz (he’s listed as a writer) before it degraded and the images on it were lost. Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were able use the latest technology to recreate frame by frame footage taken by David Kurtz of the Jewish community of Nasielsk, Poland in 1938.
A river separated Nasielsk from Soviet Russia, when Hitler and Stalin made a pact which divided up the Polish territory. 7000 residents,3000 of which were Jewish. Around 100 Jews survived the war when the Nazi came. The people on the film are dead. Identifying them and telling their stories is an act of homage and remembrance.
It also make nonsensical Poland’s nationalist government’s attempts to criminalise those that tell a story of Polish people helping the Nazis to murder, rape, torture and steal from Jewish victims of genocide. Here it was shown to the lie it is. Those in the film had ten minutes to assemble in the cobbled town square. Stripped naked and robbed. Whipped while they were marched to the synagogue where they were locked inside without water or food. Then they were put into cattle trucks and sent to their death. This was all done without Nazi help. The Holocaust was a team effort. The Poles player their part. Rewriting history is what winner do. Three minutes of footage stands as testament to different kinds of lies in different eras.
One Jewish resident of Nasielsk recounted how he’d saved his girlfriend from the Synagogue by borrowing the hat of a sympathetic German officer. Turning up and telling the guards on the door (fellow citizens) that he was here to arrest his girlfriend. She too didn’t recognise him until they were unsafely away. Both made it across the river to the Soviet side and survived the war. Around six million Jews didn’t. Their stories remain untold.
Memory is always being subverted. Tango with Putin begins with the Muscovite fairy-tale princess and her pink car looking for a prince. Natasha and Sasha…and they lived happily ever after in their castle.
James Cameron (reporting on the North Vietnamese):
‘They whispered that I was their dupe, but what they really meant was I was not their dupe.’
The princess wants a toy to play with. And Sasha buys her a television station.
Starvation as a weapon of war. Stalinist policies kill between four and ten million in the Ukraine. War is called peace and stabilisation.
Ashkhabad, a crossroad that became a town when a Russian fort was built in 1881 to help break the Turkmen’s resistance to annexation, disappears in fifteen seconds in 1948. The Turks constitute the largest language group in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. An earthquake wipes out the city. Only the statue of Lenin remained.
Advisors from The Chicago School came to advise the Communist government how to initiate change in post-Gorbachev Russia. Shares. Every Russian citizen should have shares in the former dead-hand of the Russian economy and state enterprises. ‘You pretend to pay us and we’ll pretend to work’ is the Russian way of life. Job done in the free-market Russian economy. With their new-found shared wealth, former Soviets invested in new businesses. They all lived happily ever after.
Maps of the world. American National Geographic Society cut the USSR in half place it in the fold where no child could find it. Moscow’s Institute of Geography prints a different map. Putin’s map shows Russia in a central spot. Former Soviet States in the middle. The United States is an appendage, cut in half and down to size.
Russia has a shrinking and ageing population. From 150 million 1914 to around 140 million. Natural wastage. Around 20 million, a generation lost in The Great Patriotic War. Around 24 million ethnic Russian’s live outside the former Soviet System, but not all is lost. It maintains the criterion of blood purity. Russia for Russians. Muscovites queued for hours to enter Lenin’s mausoleum. Another queue formed to get hamburgers, ketchup, fries and Coke. They came together. Closing McDonalds in Moscow helps maintain imperial isolation. Paradoxically, the second element is land. But the more land the former Soviet States claim, the greater the dilatation of Russian ethic purity. Ukraine provides an ideal fix. Population 44 million. The former breadbasket of Russia (and Germany) is ethnically pure. Many of the battles fought in the Great Patriotic War were fought in and around Ukraine. Many Russian troops that died and continued to die in wars such as Afghanistan were also Ukrainian. You will see old Ukrainian comrades in news reports disparaging Putin’s claims that the Ukrainian people are Neo-Nazis or terrorists.
Stalin’s road to heaven. An ounce of gold is worth an ounce of bread. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Hiroshima, (Kolyma) Magadan. 11th November 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party create a trust to mine for gold, silver and other metals in Siberia. 160 gulags. Three million slaves don’t make it home. Permafrost maintains the expression on their faces when they died.
Russian’s console themselves, ‘Don’t despair, it was worse in Kolyma’.
There are no heroes in the camps, only survivors. Slave labour creates the long corridors underneath the Kremlin, Moscow Underground and Ukrainian Underground. Deep enough to shelter from bomb blasts, but not intrigues. The Georgian Stalin tried to destroy the old Moscow, but succeeded in only creating the new Moscow on the bones of the old.
Perestroika stretches only as far as the Kremlin walls: six comrades protest in Red Square about the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. No one asks a victim of the gulags were they have been for five, ten, twenty or twenty-five years. To ask questions is to leave yourself open to answers. Spies and informers are part of the state apparatus. Only those in power ask questions. The guilty are punished. The innocent fare worse for they have committed no crime. Truth is relative. Hunger ever-present. Minsk to Pinsk. Identification of comrade citizens is no longer easy. Mass deportations, famine, colonisation. Some regard themselves as Georgian, but not Russian. Chechen, but not Russian. Ingush, but not Russian. Uzbek, but not Russian. East German, but German. Ukrainian but not Russian.
The bounty system. The NKVD would inform locals when a prisoner had escaped from the camps. Bring a prisoner’s hand to match their fingerprints. Their reward was a sack of flour. Political prisoners were gullible. He would be taken along with a group of escaping prisoners and eaten. One less political. They lived happily ever after.
T.D. Allman: ‘Genuinely objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meanings of events right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by ‘reliable sources’ but the unfolding of history.’
Notes.
Jim Morrison: ‘Whoever controls the media controls the mind.’
By the end of Vladimir Putin’s second term in 2008, all Russian television was under state control.
Before this story begun, I spent 15 years working on independent television. News and political talkshows were my main passions. After all independent television had been destroyed in my country, I found myself at this house, where I spent many months in discussion of a new enterprise.
Putin 2009. [Cheering] The elections for the President of Russia are over. And our candidate, Dmitry Medvedev, is clearly in the lead.
Back in 2008, Russia still looked like a land of business opportunity. For Natasha Sindeeva, the owner of that white mansion and this pink car, every road was another adventure. And every adventure was her excuse for another party.
The top executive of a Moscow music radio station, Natasha was the dancing queen of the city.
In Putin’s Russia, former music radio producer Natasha Sindeeva dreams of becoming famous and decides to build her own TV station to focus on pop culture.
‘Without any false modesty, I’m going to sing and dance. So be prepared to be sick of me on stage, today. Because today is all about me Natasha Sindeeva.’
Natasha knew how to make things up. She even dreamed up a husband, to be precise—a prince. I remember this moment. I was falling asleep, thinking: ‘I’ve been so good. I deserve a prince. To love me and cherish me. To bring flowers and gifts. A handsome, tall, smart guy with character. I literally painted Sasha’s portrait in my mind.
Their wedding was a literal palace. The Russian Versailles. Natasha spun around the fountains with the world-famous Russian ballet behind her.
And there was a new president too: Dmitry Medvedev. Just like Natasha he saw the world through rose or rather pink coloured glasses, but his partner was more czar than prince.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
Do you remember when he was asked about the most important thing in life?
Suddenly, the Russian President said ‘Love’. If we had a president that talked about love being the most important thing Russia would be a perfect country. But he enjoyed it. Here’s my iPhone, here’s my iPad. Here I am meeting with American entrepreneurs. He enjoyed being the good guy.
Dmitry Medvedev:’ The principle of freedom is better than non-freedom. These words are a distillation of human experience.’
It seems naïve now, but when I watched that clip I wanted to cry. Like: ‘Look Americans, this is what our President is like’.
There was no room for politics in my life. We didn’t vote. We just didn’t.
The economy was booming, as if on steroids. It seemed that anything was possible. It was going to keep growing.
Sasha made money banking, during Russia’s boom years and could finance a crazy idea. So Natasha had one. To build her very own tv empire. And that’s where I came in.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
We started at the most expensive real estate uptown (Moscow). Natasha loved the view.
I remember having talks with Natasha. ‘Why isn’t there tv for normal people, why don’t we make it?’ That’s how it started. It was as simple as that.
What’s the date today? Ah, the 30th. It’s July 30th. The 31st. 2008 and our television station is on its way to being built.
Here it was. The American Dream. The definition of a start-up. ‘Where’s your business plan?’ We’ll finish our business plan later. That’s the reality we lived at the time.
Natasha was a big dreamer. She already had a name and colour palette for her tv station.
DOZHD: Optimistic Channel.
Big, obnoxious.
That was the first time fate intervened.
Radio broadcast: What’s happening on Wall Street… traders say…
Sasha’s bank had not survived the recession of 2008. And from uptown we came down to earth and downtown.
Downtown Moscow. The cheapest building… in ‘Red October’. An old chocolate factory named after the revolution of 1917. Our floor smelled of caramel and rats.
I love that. Those incredible pillars and windows. So the sofas could go here. We thought so too… We’re going to have a TV station. We’re going to do this.
‘All the elements are based on truth, this real life.’
So everything and everybody must be themselves as much as possible. Life must be as authentic as possible.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter. Executive Director.
We came to the office to meet Natasha. And then at one point, this girl walks in and gives Natasha this bundle. Natasha takes this new baby and opens her shirt. And without missing a beat, Natasha starts breastfeeding her. I understood immediately these were great people. I really liked them.
Anna Anya Mongayt. (Journalist)
That was the first time I saw Natasha in person. She made a great impression on me because she was only wearing purple. Purple knee-high boots. Purple leggings. And a purple sweater. And she was wearing this ring with a huge stone.
Right away she made a big impression on me.
They switched on all the lights at once above our main news desk. From afar it looked like an operation table that was incredibly bright. There are people all around the table. The cameras are rolling. The screens are on. Vera is yelling out orders from the control room. So it looks like we’re going to have a tv station after all.
In English, ‘Dozhd’ translates as rain, TV rain.
Only God knows why Natasha picked that name. In truth, the most accurate name for this enterprise… would have been The Adventure Channel.
April 2010 [opens] Dozhd TV goes on air.
The first broadcast looked hideous. Totally DIY.
I was afraid of running into my old colleagues from the real tv stations.
We were the industry’s biggest joke. But Natasha loved it. The parties I hated were great from the start.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
When the project started, Natasha knew nothing about tv news. How it works. What it’s for. And so on… her initial concept was very different. She wanted to have lots of nice conversations. Things like that.
Statement: Regardless of sexual orientation. Regardless of age. Regardless of health conditions. Of hair and eye colour. Of faith and political views. We are always yours.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
When I came to Dozhd, I instantly felt not to lie to myself. To be honest with myself. Because at that point I was still accepting myself as gay.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
I had ten years’ experience reporting from war zones. I wanted…I don’t know, I wanted an adventure.
Apparent suicide bombing in the hall of the Domodedovo Airport. On TV, people are outraged the CNN and Twitter already has images. Apparently 70 dead. While Russian channels, federal channels have nothing.
Suddenly we found ourself in a different reality to other tv stations. Sometimes I felt that we lived in two disparate countries. The news we talked about were ignored by all State controlled media as if it didn’t happen.
In the last year of President Medvedev’s term we launched a weekly sketch show in which, with the help of the classics of Russian poetry, we staged scenes between the President and his Prime Minister Putin.
And True Glory came. Our audience doubled every week. In April, 2011, we lauched a new episode of our viral show in which our father of the nation, Putin, decides not to give his heir Medvedev a second term.
…But the episode never went live.
Natasha:
Because I think there are boundaries of constructive criticism. And occasionally drift towards personal criticism. That crossed the line. So I found it impossible to broadcast.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Everybody on social media shamed us for selling out. Federal media popped champagne. Opposition activists turned of Dozhd. I saw it as self-censorship. Then, in two weeks, I learned that President Medvedev wanted to visit out humble station. At that point, I felt we had run out of independence. Natasha was busy preparing for the visit. But, for me, it was the end of our fairytale. Then I quit.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
When the broadcast finished [after Medvedev’s visit] we all had the feeling of having done well. And I remember for the rest of that week, I would come to work and see people crying at their desks. Our audience thought this was all part of some big pact. Natasha kills our satire show in order to host Medvedev as a guest. Vera quit in protest. And now we’re all playing Judas…For Natasha, it wasn’t a pact.
Q to Natasha. What did you say to Medvedev?
A You’re a really cool dude. You should run for re-election.
CONGRESS
Medvedev : ‘I think it’s right that Congress should support the candidacy of our party leader, Vladimir Putin for the post of president of our country.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
Now, I’m going to scare you a bit. The thaw is over Medvedev represented political moderation. Now the screws will be tightened.
We’re living inside an experiment. An experiment in stopping time. Is it possible to survive 12 more years without change?
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
So I just hoped. Little by little, things would improve. That hope turned out to be completely naïve. It’s a shame, my hopes. All my hopes were wasted on this.
4 December 2011.
Legislative Elections
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
The parliamentary elections are coming up. There are no battles. And the only way out I could think of was to get credentials [Parliamentary] for all our editorial staff. I got them all accredited as members of the electoral commissions at various polling stations.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
‘Hi Misha, I’ve only got a minute, we’ve opened the first electoral ballot box. There are stacks of 9-10 votes for United Russia that are for sure cast together. We’ve just found 3 huge stacks, 20 ballots wrapped in other’s ballots. Wonderful. There’s no way to drop those in together by accident.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
When I went to that protest [against Putin] I expected to see some weird people, to feel a little awkward or even scared. But many of the people I found there were my friends. They’d say, ‘Hi, so, you’re here as well. Look—so and so is here too’.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Ironically, Sasha and I ended up in the same crowd. I was shooting my first documentary at the protest. Sasha was led there by voter fraud.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
The last thing we heard was one of our Dozhd reporter, Ilya Vasyunin was arrested. We’re still trying to reach him now. We can see him in the police van. We should reach him soon.
Anna Anya Mongayt. (Journalist)
You said it was normal to be running from a police van.
Natasha
At first, I thought it would be a cultural, intellectual, lifestyle channel. But when I began to learn more, when I found myself on this wave of information, I realised just how much injustice was around us, which I hadn’t seen before. I honestly didn’t see it. Didn’t know it existed. I couldn’t keep not having an opinion about it.
When the protests started, Mr Gromov, an official from Putin’s administration called me for the first time. He was screaming at me, ‘What do you think you are doing? How dare you! You’re spreading US State Department lies.
I remember I told him, ‘You know, I don’t work for you. I’m not part of the state media. We work in the way we think is right.’
Then he said, ‘We’ll ruin you.’ Something like that. It was a very nasty conversation.
6th May 2012.
Boris Nemtsov, opposition politician.
Today, Putin proved that he was elected illegally. The sheer number of special forces and military. This hasn’t happened in the centre of Moscow since 1993.
[crowd chanting: New elections]
Timur Olvesky, war correspondent.
My first live broadcast was at the elections on May 6th with everything that happened there.
‘It looks like a stampede. Nobody is planning to leave. They are breaking through police cordons. Unfortunately, I can’t see what’s happening.
[Pulled down from his platform by riot police]
Polina Koslovskya Digital Director.
It looks like Boris Nemtsov is getting arrested too. The stream is unavailable. No one expected us to be attacked like that. At the time, it was the job from hell. Because I was negotiating with different platforms. So that people could watch our broadcasts. On other websites if they got hit. So during life broadcasts most of the work we had to do was sending people to the right website on time. The cyber-attacks always came. We were sure they would come and we couldn’t avoid them.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
I clearly remember May 6th, Putins third inauguration. That was the day I switched on Dozsd again.
Our online broadcast has partially stopped. I’ll remind you that today we have been cyber-attacked. The station I’d left just didn’t tell you what’s really happening around you, it also makes you feel less alone.
Q Natasha what are you afraid of?
A I’m afraid that after all the effort and emotions invested into this, something out of control it gets closed down, dies, or gets taken away. I don’t know. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I just don’t want it to happen. Because I’ve put a lot of personal feelings into this. There’s a lot of my heart in this.
3rd Inauguration: Stately event.
Cf
Protest and chants, ‘Russia will be free.’
11th June 2013.
The law criminalising ‘gay propaganda’ passes with just one abstention.
The lives of many Russians will change. The problem with these homosexual propaganda laws is that for the first time in Russian history they are legally introducing the idea of the second-class citizen.
This law touched Dozhd more than other organisations. The newly inscribed second-class citizens made up more than half the team. When the bill was passed, it hurt us all.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief.
When the Afisha issue came with my interview came out, I was very afraid. Back then, I think, I was the first person with some level of recognition. To publicly come out as gay. And among journalists I was probably the first. Really, I should have approved the interview with Natasha Sideeva or Misha Zygar. I was, after all, a face on the station. The station had stuck my face onto buses as part of a promo campaign. Natasha took me into her office. Sasha, her husband, was there. They hugged me, poured me a glass of wine. Sasha brought out a copy of the magazine he had found and asked for my autograph. I signed it. Then they told me I did the right thing. And I burst into tears.
Natasha.
If nothing bad happens with advertising budget, maybe this year we’ll break even.
Sasha, her husband
By the summer of 2013, we had essentially reached out goal. The station was popular. Many advertisers were eager to work with us.
Anna Anya Mongayt. (Journalist)
We were the voice of a new era. People admired us. We felt like the media of the future.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
In interviews with prospective employees would say, ‘what we are offering is not a job. We’re offering you a dream. ‘
Behind me is the ‘Sosny’ Holiday Homes Cooperative. The gates of which just closed on our camera crew. Holiday homes owned by Vyacheslav Volodin, Putin’s First Deputy. Chief of Staff, Sergey Prihodka, Head of the Government Apparatus. And prominent United Russian Party members.
Aleksei Navalny (Opposition Leader)
We’re demanding that all of these people explain where they got their money for such luxurious lifestyles. Where did they get that money?
The level of luxuries they have is not at all compatible with their actual incomes.
KYIV [loud explosion]
Meanwhile, at the independence square, protests continue. They are targeting the Ukrainian government, which refused to sign the deal with the European Union.
[Ukrainian protester] Please tell Russians that we are not against them. We are not against you. Not against Russians. We love them. We just don’t love Putin. That’s all.
Timur Olvesky, war correspondent.
I realised we were witnessing an event that was not only historical but one that was also determining our future. And I begged Misha to send me there.
From Kviv.
We have a breaking story. Both sides are firing live rounds. Some have been detained. It’s an absolute shitstorm over here. It’s a real war.
19th June 2014 was the first fight on Kyiv’s streets. At that point, everything split into Russian reporters on federal TV who’d talk about fascists burning down the SWAT teams, and Dozhd which covered it from a different angle.
6 Days later (25th June)
Natasha:
Good afternoon, It’s 8.37pm, you’re watching amateurs broadcasting live.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
On the day, the show’s theme was the anniversary of the Leningrad siege ending. They mentioned this quote by a great Russian general, Victor Astafyev
‘Maybe Leningrad should have been given to the Nazis, so that thousands of lives could have been saved.’
[cf Moscow given to Napoleon]
Natasha:
Should Leningrad been given to the Nazis to avoid hundreds of thousands of deaths? Should it?
[commentator, people can answer this?]
Yes, I understand there’s already a debate on twitter.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
An avalanche falls.
[announcement on air]
About an hour ago, Dozhd tv was dropped from the NTZ and cable package. Dozhd was replaced onscreen by darkness.
Alexander Sasha Vinokurov (Natasha’s husband and investor)
Nobody thought they would use it as a pretext to shut us down.
[screenshot of other stations] this question was morally and ethically beyond the pale for other people. The station crossed the line of what is acceptable.
Renat Davletgildeev Deputy Editor-in-Chief
The next day, on Tuesday, I think the State Parliament releases a statement chastising Dozhd tv. And on Wednesday, the expulsions begun.
‘Hello, my name is Anna Mongayt. Today I’m hosting the show ‘Online’. Our plan was to devote this hour to the life to Sochi in the lead up to the Olympics. But the situation has changed. Today, for the first time, the show will be devoted only to ourselves.’
It was interactive tv, you’d talk only to people that called in.
‘Can you hear me?’
When I started the show, all the providers were carrying us. But by the time I finished the show, everybody had dropped us.
[cable audience around 8 million drops exponentially to around 60 000 listeners]
A short break while we tell you who else has switched off Dozhd.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
That night for the first time since I left, I called Natasha. Sasha picked up the phone. They were hosting a late-night meeting with the newsroom at home. Natasha was smoking in silence. In one day they had lost most of their 80% of their audience and most of their advertisers. Right away, we began again. We started to brainstorm new plans. It was like we had never split up.
Renat Davletgildeev interview on Dozhd with Natasha.
What is going on? What is happening now?
They were looking for some excuse, and now, it seem, we have given them one. In confidential conversations, meaning off the record, for all these providers told us today that they were ordered to find any excuse—technical, ideological, commercial, legal—to terminate these contracts with us. And everyone who switched us off, confirmed it, just not as a public statement.
[cut to Putin announcement]
‘Dozhd is an interesting station. With a good young team. But, as you said yourself, one that’s made some mistakes. To put it bluntly, not simple mistakes, but an offence to many of our citizens. But you need to own up to it, which you’ve done, and figure out how to proceed.’
Renat Davletgildeev
‘Today we’re holding a press conference for Dozhd TV’s CEO Natalia Sindeeva. And Dozh TV’s investor Aleksandr Sasha Vinokurov.’
Anna Mongayt
I could tell how difficult it was for Natasha. She was a mess. She looked as pale as a ghost. You could see it was hard for her because it was all about to collapse. All of Sasha’s fortune had gone into it. You could see how hard it was on their relationship. She was completely lost. She’d come to work grief-stricken. Looking like a widow.
Q ‘Arkady Orstrovsky, The Economist Magazine: ‘Will you appeal to Vladimir Putin without whose approval this expulsion likely wouldn’t have happened?
A Natasha: I think in that situation I would appeal to Putin, because I will fight to the end for this station, for this business, for this baby, for the right to work in an independent media.
I remember being at their house. Sasha always grilled steaks. Natasha always danced around the pool. We drank champagne with strawberries and imagined our TV future. I recited chapters of the Russian Constitution on citizens’ freedoms and quoted Harvey Milk on the need to fight for your rights. Natasha kept saying: ‘We won’t lose anything.’ We were so fucking stupid.
Sasha.
An opportunity came to sell the house. Without a second thought we invested the money into the station. We sold several properties.
Natasha.
What happened, yes, consequentially led to all doors closing for Sasha. He’s become toxic because he is owner of Dozhd tv.
Sasha
There came a point when we had almost no money left for ourselves. When we trimmed our expenses down, life became more fun.
Natasha.
For Sasha, the bad consequences of the station are elsewhere. For Sasha…he lost me.
[report]
Mr Putin, Anton Zhelnov, Dozhd TV, the key tv players cable and satellite providers are saying there is no command, the situation’s getting worse.
Putin: Maybe they’re fooling you. You think I give commands to cable people and all your advertisers?
Q Well, they’re saying abstractly. There’s no command, so may I ask, who this command has come from?
Putin: I don’t know. I don’t give such commands. I didn’t tell the cable providers to stop working with you and I don’t think I have the right to tell them to start working with you.
Q You work with them you yourself?
[cut to Natasha]
As of now, we have a month left to live. These are not just words. We have to shut down in a month. There’s a little bit of hope in today’s staff meeting, where I will ask the whole team if I can cut their pay and our expenses by quite a lot. If the team agrees we might be able to last another two or three months. So much as I’d like it to be, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
PAYWALL.
Anya Mongayt
It’s a pressing topic for us here, because we have decided to take some unusual measures. So, why is Dozhd going to sell its content?
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
The audience paying for our content gives us freedom. It provides independence. What we’re putting behind the paywall is the live broadcast: $26 for annual subscription.
That’s something you’re probably going to miss, but it will be reasonably priced.
Anya Mongayt
It’s truly a way for us to be independent. It’s a new way for us to survive. If you are in the same boat, you’ll understand why we are doing this.
[cut to]
What? When are we going on air? Anya get ready.
July 2014.
News feature on the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger plane. Ad lib. Responsibilty give an advanced surface to air missile to terrorist fighting against Ukraine in Ukraine who did not understand the system.
[cut to]
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
Natasha has gone on vacation. Summer.
And suddenly, real combat operations begin in Donbass. And the first information comes in about Russian soldiers participating in real combat operations. I tasked all Dozhd staff with calling all Army recruitment offices to find out whether any Russian soldiers had been killed in Donbass. And to find out their last names.
[in office]
Renat Davletgildeev
We are making a list of people to call urgently. Some of them possibly on air.
[cut to Putin]
So the question is, ‘Is our army present in Ukraine or not?’ I’ll answer you directly. The Russian Army is not present in Ukraine.
[cut to] Timur Olvesky, war correspondent.
Also today, reports of strange disappearances of Russian soldiers. Reports are coming from other cities. On this list: Saratov, Kostroma, Pskov. Our reporters are trying to find out how many soldiers were buried in the town’s cemeteries.
Today, my colleagues and I, and other journalists were repeatedly attacked after trying to talk to the families of the people most likely being buried in Pskov’s cemetaries.
[cut to Army reservist jumps in front of their car]
What do we do?
Wait. What do they want?
[voice outside the car] they will break your camera.
You slashed our tyres.
Guys! We’re leaving.
They’ve slashed our tyres. We’re being attacked. We can’t drive away. I was asked to come here. Wait. Wait. Wait. We’re being attacked by two young unknown men who have threatened us. The said there are many bogs around Pskov and that if we continue asking questions we’ll simply disappear.
[cut to]
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
Natasha has come back from holiday and asks me: ‘Am I imagining things, I was walking here from home and this black car seemed to be following me as if I’m being tailed.
I say, you know, I don’t think you are making it up. Look, this is what we’re up to.
[cut to news]
Today, a Ukrainian press centre posted videos of four Russian soldiers captured by Zarleny village, near Donetsk.
[cut to press conference featuring a roomful of captured Russian soldiers]
[address them] ‘Hello, I’m Timor Olevsky, a reporter from Russia’s Dozhd TV.
Q When did you understand who had detained you?
A When we were captured, we were told we were on Ukraine’s territory and were being held captive.
[fellow captive]
A We didn’t know what was going on here. So we believed what the news showed.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
We saw a jump in subscribers form around 15 000 to 50 000 in four days.
A month later, we got evicted.
Natasha.
Option 1, we get our stuff together and move somewhere, where? Option 1 is to move to some factory.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
The idea of eviction at first seemed incomprehensible. It seemed terrifying for it to come true. If we got evicted we’d completely perish.
[cut to]
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
I never again became part of the team, but I always stayed close. At that point, I realised how much I wanted to help Dozhd survive. In between my filmmaking projects, I try to make up for lost time. Back then, our goal was to keep the news on air, no matter what. But how? We had absolutely nowhere to go.
[cut to newroom]
My name is Mikhail Fishman. It’s 8pm on the 31st October and I’m hosting the last ever broadcast from this great Dozhd studio.
I was thinking about what these years at Dozhd means to me. I can tell you one thing, that it’s clear to me after all these years that Dozhd is a big deal and will be around a long time. Why am I alone? Come along. Join me guys.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
We would drive around looking at places for days on end. Five or six places a day. Someone from our side would start the initial discussions. Everything would be a good fit, then—the size, the price, the condition. Then we’d tell them we were an actual TV station. That was the moment they’d understand who we really were.
Two days later, we’d get a ‘no’.
This was right before Natasha was planning to go to the United States.
[cut to]
I really miss everyone. Life is really hard over here.
[rejoinder]
I’ve heard life overseas is hard. Don’t know why you even bother going. Should have stayed with us.
It’s awful, the way they treat black people. Terrible.
Natasha, let’s talk business because there’s a ton of people here and we need to get moving on schedules.
[cut to]
Natasha
This was the first time I’d given up hope. I said, ‘That’s it. I can’t beat the machine.’
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
So, one night, I called Natasha, I had this idea. I said, I know a place that’s perfect from a legal point of view. We can move in and nobody can stop us.
The view. That’s the Patriarch’s Pond there. Cool. Right?
Yeah.
This was Natasha’s flat in Central Moscow, which was not just unsuitable for a studio, but even for family life, because it was very much a bachelor pad. So, I go to this apartment with our engineers.
[cut to]
The mattress. Let’s lean it a bit.
That’s it.
We go into the bedroom and I say, ‘This will be the control room.’
Dec 2014
Natasha’s Appartment.
Secret Office.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
In the same building, the floor below Dozhd, housed an illegal brothel. Just like that. Two of the world’s oldest professions accidentally collided in the heart of Moscow. In a building owned by the Ministry of Defence.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
Stop, Stop my friends, us posing a legal issue. We’re gonna invite guest here. Roughly, every third guest will rat us out to everyone. But the KGB will find out about this on Tuesday…They already know. That’s all.
Hello, we were stopped the Anti-Corruption Office where we are sitting on a windowsill next to Aleksei Navalny
I wanted to say, I’m very happy to be in your studio again.
But I’m very happy you dropped in and today our studio is a windowsill.
Natasha
I could feel a provocation coming on. People were afraid to leave the office at night. And my intuition came true. I called Forsch in the evening and said, Anna, pack up the studio, ASAP, I feel some shit’s going to happen.
Natasha to workforce.
The locks were covered in some sort of resin. They were shoved full of bolts. Basically, it took professionals, four hours to open the doors. No one has left us yet. Just as they are watching us, they still are. When it comes to work, we don’t have issues. But everything to do with your personal or political stuff…Just keep in mind it might become public.
[cut to]
Toast. A new life.
February 2015.
Flacon
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
Miracles happened to us all the time. Our new office found us by itself. I got a call. ‘Hello, We’ve got a 1000 square meters and we know you’re Dozhd.’
I said. ‘OK, when can I come for a viewing?’
‘How about right now?’
‘Of course.’
We had to move everything ourselves. We didn’t have a moving company. It was just us. Misha was here, carrying boxes.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
We would always say we became very much like a cult. That we all felt this familiar cultish atmosphere. It wasn’t a cult in the name of Natasha. It was in the name of… I don’t know. The name of freedom.
Anya Mongayt
People got lost here. Their whole life is here. Few people here have functional families.
Evgeniya ‘Zhenya’ Voskoboynikovia (Journalist)
At some point you stop distinguishing your work from your life. And you don’t notice the moment of this transition.
Natasha.
Hello, this is Dozhd TV, from our new home and location.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
It wasn’t just for Natasha to keep her dream project. It wasn’t about her dream. It was mainly about saving [Dozhd] as a source of information. It was for the cause. We had to save our cause.
Evgeniya ‘Zhenya’ Voskoboynikovia (Journalist)
I want my country to look like the faces of these people. I think this is important.
[cut to]
Natasha.
Well, to a happy new life for us in Flacon.
Timor Olevsky
After that we were a family. Just a family.
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Zygar Editor in Chief.
We are the chosen ones. Everyone wanted to be us.
Alexei ‘Alien’ Navalny.
Nadya ‘Alien’ Pussyriot.
Natasha ‘Alien’ Sindeeva.
Attention! Foreign Agents.
Putin:
We’re ready to talk to the opposition. We’ll continue to have a partnership with civic society, in the most expansive meaning. We always listen to everyone who constructively criticises any action or inaction of the government. That is on, any level. This kind of dialogue, this partnership, is always healthy. They are absolutely necessary for any country, including our own.
[cut to]
Dozhd is back with an emergency broadcast. My name is Vladimir Romensky. We’re currently on Moscow City centre on Zamoskyvorosky bridge, where Boris Nemtsov has been murdered. He was shot, it’s not yet known by whom, right on this spot
[cut to newsroom]
I’m Pavel Lobkov here with the main news. Boris Nemtsov’s murder.
Natasha
There was a point when I got scared and I thought: This place is wide open and I don’t have security guards. I do everything myself. For a while I lived with this fear. And the fear ate me alive. I kept looking back in case I was being followed, or somebody was waiting for me. I don’t dwell on it because I don’t know how to change my life so that it doesn’t happen. Probably, shut down the station and leave the country. So I don’t think about it. If anything, I’m afraid to think about it, because if I do, it will definitely happen.
Anna ‘Forsh’ Forshtreter
When the battle is over When you’ve carried all the wounded to the rear and fixed them up. It’s over. And now you don’t know what to do next.
All the boys and girls. All the young hipsters have all gone grey. All the ‘light’ news pisses them off. Civilian life pisses them off.
Natasha.
We all started to have conflicts. We all started to hate each other. That was it, when we met at briefings, it was impossible.
[cut to broadcast] Pavel Lobkov
Q to Natasha.
There’s a sense of despair, I’m not going to be positive. I’m not going to say everything is great here. I want to say that we’re sick. We’re sick with narcissism. And all of this dancing. You can’t fake that smile for five years. We had good times, but like we had this pigskin-pink colour. Enough. There’s a dissonance now.
Natasha.
We’re not trying to replace serious journalism, and what we do with dancing. Nothing has changed. You know this.
[cut to outside broadcast, face against a police van window]
‘Russia without Putin! Russia without Putin!’
Excuse me I’m on Dozhd TV, could you please tell me if you’re being released today? [faces camera] Unfortunately, the police aren’t talking to us yet, but we’re still here. Just to remind everybody, there’s eight of us here. It’s unclear what will happen next.
Natasha
In a county of 140 million, only 60 000 are willing to pay for independent news. The paywall keeps Dozhd alive. But you cannot change the world with such a small audience. Over these five years we won small battles, but the war was lost. Our grand adventure failed to change the world for the better. As long as you are invisible behind a paywall and never break even, you are not a threat to the state.
Evgeniya ‘Zhenya’ Voskoboynikovia (Journalist)
We are all really believed in this bright future. It hasn’t come. It’s time to admit it.
Anya Mongayt
I recently watched a film about the great Russian writer Sorokin. It has this very depressing but spot-on phrases. He says: ‘Russia shouldn’t hope for things to get better in the future. Russia’s present is Russia’s future.’
[cut to Putin and dog, barking in front of two Japanese dignitaries. Putin gives the dog a treat. ]
Anya Mongayt
She gathered us all in a room and said, ‘You have to make me happy’. She said, ‘If you don’t make me happy in a year. I’ll shut the whole damn thing down.’
Mikhail ‘Misha’ Kozreyv, Music Programming Producer: TV-Host.
I took it in the most pessimistic light. Maybe the last deadline had already past. And the decision to sell us off was fast approaching.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
It felt like the end. ‘If this is it,’ I said to Natasha, ‘I’m going to film it.’ But, as always with Dozhd, nothing went according to plan.
July 2019.
Moscow Summer Protests.
[cut to] We are unarmed. We are unarmed. ‘Hello to all Dozhd veiwers from this police van to which I was admitted during the process against the barring of opposition candidates from participating in Moscow City Council elections.
[cut to] PROTEST FOR ALLOWING INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES TO RUN FOR OFFICE.
We are unarmed. We are unarmed [chant]
[cut to newsroom and back to protest]
Masha we are going to leave you a second to go to Romensky. Right-now, they are trying to destroy the sit-in. People are being grabbed.
[cut to Natasha in studio]
We decided to hold this emergency broadcast late last night.
[cut to protest]
‘I’m a reporter. I’m a reporter.’
Natasha
We saw this was all completely lawless and unjust. And realised we had to do something. So, we’re taking down the paywall for our broadcasts.
Today you’ll be allowed to watch Fishman’s show for free. Please share and talk about it.
[cut to crowd, Fishman’s show]
‘They were pushing forward very roughly. Still, I’d never seen anything like this.’
Fishman:
We must be very open. We must be accessible. We must report things as we see them. This is our social mission as journalists, if you will.
After opening of paywall figures jumped. 18 000 viewers to 25 million (roughly).
Anya.
Sorry to interrupt [coverage] but Dozhd TV is being raided. You can see it live. Police have entered our offices. Right next to Natasha Sindeeva there are policemen, who are talking to her as we speak.
There’s a cyber-attack happening against all of Dozhd’s internet channels. We have no internet connection. We can’t stream pictures from Trubanya Street or anything else that requires the internet.
Natasha.
[cut to] Hello Dad, sorry, did I wake you?
No worries.
I just thought I’d call. You must have read the news. I wanted to call, so that you didn’t worry. You were called in for questioning? You got a subpoena? I’m on my way to the Investigative Committee. Don’t worry, it’s about the protests.
OK. Thanks for calling. Good luck and good bye.
To say I was nervous was an understatement. This was my first time. This was my baptism of fire. This was my first subpoena, even with all of Dozhd’s difficult years and situations.
In the morning at the Investigative Committee my hands were sweating. This had never happened before.
[cut to Natash outside and her report]
I can tell you first they asked about how we covered the protests on July 27th. How we worked and who funded Dozhd TV. That’s it. There weren’t any other questions.
Q You came as a witness on the case? A witness?
[cut to Anya in studio]
The Moscow case isn’t over for our television station. Today, Natasha Sindeeva was called in for another interrogation
Sasha.
I was worried. Of course. And the kids were even more worried. Because they didn’t understand what was going on. The night before, we had a long conversation about it. What to watch out for. What her strengths and weaknesses are. What to be wary of, what not to worry about, what to expect.
Natasha.
I was nervous. I didn’t sleep all night. I’d never been that scared before.
Sasha
It’s very difficult to decide what’s important to do in life—go to war and die heroically? Or live a long live and die from some common sickness? Both scenarios are possible for a person, or a TV station.
December 2019.
Natasha.
Right now people are unsubscribing for two reasons. First, they’re dissatisfied with the content etc, but that’s only a small part of it.
Second, people don’t have time of Dozhd. They don’t watch it, because they can’t find time.
?
Honestly, for the last few years I’ve had this feeling not only of stagnation, but of death This slow, horrible death, of this station, we all love.
?
If the most optimal way to reach our goal is to kill Dozhd, we need to kill it.
[cut to Natasha at home]
I’m awake at 4am yet again. I can’t sleep. It’s either old age or nerves. Dozhd is the thing that never lets you rest. You’re constantly thinking of where to find the money for all this.
At the beginning of 2019, I set myself a goal. By April 2020. Dozhd’d 10th birthday, I have to answer for myself. Only for myself. This question: What do I want to do with all this? I don’t know how I will answer this question in April.
Sasha believes closing the company is one of the best options. So that it just doesn’t die quietly, you know. But things can’t continue the way they are now.
Sasha
Selling the station to a media group is out of the question. We haven’t lived through our last ten years to end with a shitty thing like that.
Natasha
Sasha asked me, ‘Imagine you don’t have a TV station. It’s all good. Everything is calm. What do you do now?’
And I said, ‘I want to do the tango’.
[cut to Natasha doing the tango in a studio with a young male dancer]
Sasha.
Of course, I want to be the top priority for my wife and kids. But that’s extremely egotistical. It’s stupid and impossible. This is about our relationship. Not Dozhd. Even if not Dozhd, ‘Dancing with Stars’, or something else would have taken her, if not Dozhd. I just wish she could be next to me more often.
Natasha.
It’s unexpectedly hard to clap for yourself and to record. What I’m to say, I feel I must record it. Against the background of discussions and next moves etc. While all this was going on, last night I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Sometimes I think everything happens for a reason. Maybe it’s time for me to stop and think about what’s really important. Are you prepared to sacrifice yourself for some mission or goal?
Where do your priorities lie?
Or, at the very least, this is a chance for me to stop and think.
Anya.
Dozhd means so much—socially, emotionally, historically—that if Natasha decides to shut it down, people won’t forgive her. If, at a certain point, she decided to pull the plug, she will be always be remembered as the person that killed Dozhd. And not even Putin wants that honour.
February 2020.
Freiburg, Germany.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Natasha had never been away from Russia this long. She decided to take a break from the news.
Natasha.
I don’t miss it at all. You know I was guided by illusions. For quite a long time, I hoped things would change. But my optimism has run out. I’m not saying that I’m depressed all the time, but…yeah, I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that Putin is here to stay. He’ll be in power as long as he lives. I can’t say I know what to do with the rest of my life. But it’s definitely something I’m thinking about a lot.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
On our way to radiotherapy we found out that Vladimir Putin announced new constitutional amendments that let him stay in power until 2036, when Natasha will be 65.
[cut to Putin]
Our duty is to protect the Constitution. To respect it, as we respect our country, our history and our accomplishments.
2003.
[cut to Putin speech]
I oppose anyone—however good their intentions—violating the Constitution of our country.
I repeat myself, we should protect the Constituion. I oppose any changes to it.
2007
[cut to Putin speech]
Amending the Constitution to serve a specific person is, I think, wrong.
2018
[cut to Putin speech]
I have never altered the Constitution. I wouldn’t do it for myself, and I don’t plan to, even today.
2020
[cut to Putin speech]
I repeat once again, these amendments have been necessary for a long time, and I’m sure they’ll be useful to this country and its citizens.
Natasha [radiotherapy for her breast cancer]
You understand that nothing’s happening, things are getting worse. You just have to figure out how to live and exist in this. I think we live in a world that is so inverted, unfortunately, where our people get bullied, locked up, arrested, punished, killed, and persecuted and so on. There are very few of them. These people, us who fall prey to this machine. There are few of them. And, in that case, yes, you have to stick with each other. It’s very important. And not to betray your people. Is this journalistic? Probably not. Human. Yes.
I have remained human for ten years, and have never betrayed myself and my values. That’s more important to me. I don’t care whether I remain in history as an unprofessional media manager. But I remained a human with compassion, conscience and responsibility.
Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
When we shot the interview, she took breaks every twenty minutes to wash off the sweat. Still, the first thing she did when she got to Germany was finding a local tango teacher.
[cut to Natasha dancing a tango with her teacher]
The worse she felt the more she thought about dancing. Her goal was to ‘master the tango with tricks’ before she returned to Moscow.
April 2020.
Moscow.
What is really going on in the hospitals and in the regions?
Natasha.
Right now, journalists are like doctors. They’ve ended up in the frontlines. Just like doctors have, although neither of them wanted to be. For journalists, this moment calls for an act of bravery.
I completely stopped thinking about what I’ve been thinking about for the past year. About where I should go, leave, stay, or shut this down. I’ve gained a better understanding of why we need Dozhd and why we need to work. Our task to explain that to people, to be a guide in this complex situation. You know, when they cut out this sickness, it felt like they cut out something unnecessary. Something bad has left and I feel lighter inside. And I think, or need even think, I know that Dozhd needs to exist.
[cut to Moscow office]
Natasha.
[champagne] have you looked inside the fridge.
What’s in there?
It’s very beautiful in there. Though there’s less already.
[with friends]
Natasha.
I’ve lost weight. Got in shape. I feel great, I’m ready to fight. I really want to work and think we’re entering another good phase. So, I invite everyone to have a drink. Please make sure everyone has a drink.
[toast]
So to us. We haven’t been together in a while.
Natasha.
Today is 17th June, 2020. And there’s less than 2 weeks until the referendum. I just got a call from the editor-in-chief, who said the police were at Dozhd. To question one of our reporters, who’s been investigating online voter fraud.
Sasha
They can shut the station down at any time. They can put all sorts of pressure on us, literally. Even something directed at the owners of the station. I don’t think anyone doubts that for a second.
Moscow. Eve of the Constitution Referendum, June 2020.
Why won’t they tell people honestly that you want to rule over Russia for 36 years—7 years longer than Stalin? And two years longer than Catherine the Great? [broadcaster]
Natasha.
We want to release this at 3pm, alongside Putin’s address.
Today?
Yes, today.
We’ve grown up. Who are we to know who to love? No. [broadcaster]
Natasha
Hello. Hello, take this [camera phone] I’m here to vote on the constitutional amendments. Let me take this selfie[shot]? That’s it. Ballot paper and vote (camera shot) Not sure if it’s visible?
[cut to outside polling station]
Of course, this is all for show. The amendments have already been approved. I don’t really know why I bothered, but since this is the first time in a long time I’ve got the opportunity to say, ‘NO’ to tick that box. I decided to go.
Sasha.
I decided not to vote. The main reason is that I don’t think the state can be changed by some kind of flashmob. I don’t think it will be changed by elections. It will be changed in some other way.
Results are as follows: YES 77.92%. NO 21.27%.
Natasha.
Dozhd. So for the first time in ten years we’re celebrating in this zoom format.
The station changed us in many ways. The station and the changing times. Being in the middle of all these events and movements really changed us and the way we viewed life. What is or isn’t important.
So, here’s the station, right. I think it had quite an effect on, among others, how we evolved as a family, as individuals, as Sasha, and I.
I think Sasha doesn’t regret it either. And believes all of it was done right.
Q) Vera Krichevskaya (tv producer)
Is Dozhd the right kind of investment or the right kind of loss?
A The right kind of loss.
Sasha
She regards this as her life’s work. Not a responsibility, not a burden, but her life’s work. And if it’s your life’s work, you have to do it well. You need to somehow see it through to the end.
Natasha.
This is my life, Vera. I now understand this is my life, you know. I’m now at a place where I can say, this is my life. And this is how I’m living it.
After the summer of 2020, Dozhd intensified its news coverage and started publishing on YouTube for free. There, broadcasts quickly reached tens of millions and quickly allowed Dozhd to pay off its debts.
In May 2021, Dozhd was banned from the Kremlin’s press corps, ‘for covering the protests in support of Alexey Navalny’.
In August 2021, a month before the Parliamentary elections, the Russian Ministry of Justice labelled Dozhd as ‘a foreign agent’.
In February 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine.
In March 2022, after six days of live coverage of the war in Ukraine, the Russian government shut Dozhd down again. Its new is available in Russia again as long as YouTube is available in Russia.
Natasha and Sasha have separated.
Tango with Putin charts Natasha’s journey, from building the station, Dozhd, to recruiting an open-minded team of outcasts who find themselves reporting on some of the biggest and most controversial stories of the day while trying to protect independent journalism in their country.
The simplest path is that of force. The crooked path is that of rhetoric and ideology. I ask myself a question here: Could I have done this. Could I have massacred men, women and children? My sympathy is not with the Nazis, but the victims of Neo-Nazism. My answer is Yes. Like 99% of other Germans I’d have looked the other way. I’d have lied and minimised my role. I’m aware of Miligram’s experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) that sought to teach us something about how we responded to authority. The Jesuit ideology of give me the child and I’ll give you the man.
But if you read and attempt to write you know the world is full of words and sand. Our thinking habits protect us from ourselves and others by not thinking. Gulliver bound by 10 000 threads asks to be released. Antoine Augustin Cournot’s idea that we do not resolve difficulties we only displace them. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, dissenter and critic of the Soviet Union asked ‘how did we get into this quagmire’ (of Communism)? The principle of the cult became state religion. We see that with the moron’s moron in America. Not naivety or pragmatism: xenophobia, sectionalism and crude belligerence. Reagan’s Making America Great Again clarion calls, sound very much like Making Nazi Germany Great or Saving Mother Russia. For the Nazi state it was a built-in given. Ubermensch and the tendency to view the world of others as inferior. The moron’s moron’s celebration of ignorance as a force for good. Blind optimism makes you blind. Collateral damage is what happens to those not in the cult. A term much used by George W Bush (junior) and his Yes man, Tony Blair. The idea if you say something enough people will no longer recognise what it means—deaths: 55 000 in Iraq, 500 000 children under-five due to United Nations sanctions, in particular, chlorine used in treating water plants. Samizdat art and writing was a recognised way of getting around what couldn’t be said in the Eastern bloc. When it is hot in the desert, one does not take clothes off, but put more on. We are back to those cloaked references and signs from Mother Russia. Since we cannot save our world, we save the memory of that world and burn as we go.
Notes:
Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor.
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, ready to believe and act without question.
Arnold Wieber former Nazi.
Buchenwald. To each what he deserves (cf Auschwitz, work makes you free).
In 2008, filmmaker Luke Holland embarked on a journey to find and interview witnesses to the crimes (atrocities) of the Third Reich.
Karl Hollander, SS Liebstandarte, Adolf Hitler, Oberstumfuhrer.
[trained at Dachau, ‘did quite well,’ promoted to Sergeant).
Daughter: What is a Blood Order?
Father: It was a political decoration for participating in the 1923 Munich Uprising.
Did you take part?
No
You must have been only about nine.
Sworn in?
1935.
Otto Duscheleit, Waffen-SS, Insterburg Germany
The [church] bells rang over all Germany when Hitler seized power. My mother voted for Hitler in 1932. My father also voted for Hitler in 1932.
Unemployment and inflation.
My older brother was already a convicted Nazi in 1932. In 1932, he was 11 years old. I remember he showed me his brass knuckles with spikes.
He said, ‘Today we are going to smash the Communist HQ.’
Germans don’t buy from Jews
He photographed Insterburg citizens that frequented Jewish shops.
And then these pictures were exhibited (shown) at the Insterburg Town Hall.
We had the task of standing guard in front of a Jewish department store. And we little boys—I was just 9—had to line up in front of the Jewish shop. And had to link arms and not let anybody through.
My friend said, ‘Let’s go in there.’ there must be something in there. we can recognise the jew by. The Jew smells. You can smell the Jew.
I was in a communication unit where we trained as wireless operators at the age of only 15 or 16. And my leader was drafted into the military. And then suddenly, I was a Hitler Youth Leader. They found me a bit girlish. I wasn’t the right kind of leader for Hitler Youth. Boxing in the afternoon. We weren’t allowed to stop until blood flowed. At the end of the week, the leader spoke to me. You don’t have what it takes to be a Hitler Youth Leader. You’re too soft. From 10 to 14 you joined Jungvolk. At 14 you joined the Hitler Youth.
Is that the Jewish grandmother?
‘yes.’
That’s the Jewish generation. That’s her. And that’s her mother?
Yes.
My older brother was a convinced Nazi. And later he realised that our Father was also Jewish, according to Jewish tradition.
His mother was Jewish.
[Therefore he was Jewish]
But he didn’t make that public. He kept that a secret. And when my brother realised he was a Jew, He wanted to be racially pure. When he realised that according to both Jewish and Nazi rules, our father was actually Jewish, a process of rethinking began.
For girls it was the Jungmaedel… and the BDM. The Association of German Girls.
Hans Werk, Berlin, Waffen-SS.
At aged 6, in 1933 I attended the local primary school. The teacher was a local party operative. He raised us according to the Nazi doctrine.
In the morning we had to stand up: Heil Hitler.
He practically raised me to be a Nazi. Against my parents’ wishes I trusted him more than them. Our teacher asserted strong control over us. This is my Hitler Youth membership card. I joined the Jungvolk at aged 10 and received this. 1st May 1937.
Even before I was 10 years old. I couldn’t wait.
We learned to read with the normal alphabet book. But we also had a Jew themed alphabet book. It was published by Streicher, who also published the Nuremberg Race Laws. And had a caricature of a Jew for each letter. I remember one in particular, a butcher’s shop that was really greasy and filthy. A disgusting Jew with long hair and a hat behind the counter. Next to him, was a blond German girl, with a white apron. He had his hand where it shouldn’t be. The Jews were to blame for everything. We were a village of 175 people. No electricity. The Mobile Nazi Film Unit come to show films. ‘Suess the Jews’. They showed Nazi films in the smallest villages. You can’t imagine today, what kind of presence they had.
There were no Jews in my village.
My parents had contact with a Jew who came from Freideberg-Ostbanhof. He bought the skins that was sold him on slaughtering days. I always went with Woldenberg with him, to get my hair cut. His name was Piefke. One day he didn’t turn up.
I asked, where is Piefke?
They told me he emigrated.
Marianne Chantelau, Wilhemshaven, Germany. Bund Deutscher Madel.
When you’re 10 or 12, you want to in a group. You want to get out of the house. We were allowed to play sports. We could play tennis on the main sports field. We were allowed to use the pool. We were allowed to play on the lawn in the park. Everything was forbidden before.
Klaus Kleinau, Bernburg, Germany, Waffen-SS.
My mother was active in the Frauenschaft. That was a women’s organisation. We went for walks on a Sunday, when I was little. My father always put on his uniform. And then we went for a walk. My mother didn’t like that at all. Women didn’t have a uniform, but he made sure that she wore a Frauenscaft badge on her coat. So that everybody could see they supported the Nazi ideology.
Karl-Heinz Lipok. Brandenburg, Germany, SS Death’s Head Unit.
I would like to have got involved, but father said no. And in the summer of 1933, they finally said yes. And I got a brown shirt and black blazer for my birthday. And that was in Stendal, when we visited my grandparents. And they bought the uniform from a Jewish store.
We did things that we enjoyed. But that faded. Then we moved to the Hitler Youth aged 14. Participation was mandatory.
Hugo Gotz, Slawentzizt, Germany, Wehrmacht.
Between Slawentzizt and Ujest, there was a Jewish cemetery. There was at least 100 graves or more. So there must have been a Jewish community. At some point. We were in the Jungvolk and Hitler Youth. And that’s when the Jew-baiting started. As we repeatedly went to the Jewish cemetery. We went at midnight for the witching hour. It was a test of courage.
Blue skirt, white blouse and the knot made out of leather. It was a triangular necklace held together with the knot. There were these social events were we would meet
There were evenings when we spoke about Nazism and the Fuhrer.
Sometimes Hitler’s Mein Kampf, bits of that.
We didn’t support the party, but we liked the uniform. We went along with it, because we enjoyed it. Putting on the uniform and going on marches. Or singing and so on.
Oh, that was lovely. There were hiking songs that you could sing today. It was lovely.
[Sings: Raise the flag…
Comrades shot by the red front and reactionaries.
Henrich Schulze, Celle, Germany, Wehrmacht.
The Jews weren’t popular, where they? And this had consequences.
[reporter question: Why weren’t the Jew’s popular?
Apparently, they were into deal-making. They had hooked noses.
Heinz Hennig, Bernburg, Germany. Wehrmacht.
Originally, it was a perfectly normal hospital for psychiatric patients. And it remained one. But the Fascists turned part of it into their Extermination Centre. It was all kept very secret. But word got round. That buses were arriving in Bernburg with blackened windows. In the direction of the Sanatorium as Bernburgers called it. Every few days, black smoke rose, and it smelled sweet. For this, many people concluded that people were being burned there. People arrived and were murdered. The furnaces are still there today. It was talked about a little. Very quietly. It was dangerous to talk about it. It was only whispered about in private.
Bernburg was one of six euthanasia centres in Germany and Austria. Approximately, 14 000 people regarded by the Nazis as ‘Not worthy of life’, were murdered here.
Herbert Fuchs Waffen SS, Obersturmfuhrer Bergenz, Austria, 1919.
It was the 9th November 1938. The SS was sworn in on that date every year. The SS from all over Germany concentrated on the Feldherrenhalle. It was night. And we marched there in ranks. And then came Hitler, Himmler and some others. To the left, under the Residenz, next to the Feldherrenhalle, there was a glow of fire. It didn’t mean anything. Just a fire somewhere. We returned to the barracks. The next day we found out: Kristlnacht. I had no idea. The fire was the synagogue.
Marianne Chantelau, Wilhemshaven, Germany. Bund Deutscher Madel?
The Party ordered the schools to take the children there. The children should see it.
Q What was their motive.
A They did not belong to our ethnic group. Apparently, I don’t know the motives.
Q Can you remember your reactions?
A Firstly, I was too young then.
Q 14?
A But look, it wasn’t in our neighbourhood. And, honestly, we didn’t really leave our neighbourhood.
Karl-Heinz Lipok. Brandenburg, Germany, SS Death’s Head Unit.
From 1829 [plaque on wall] until its destruction on 10th November 1938, this was the centre of the Jewish community in Weener. Synagogue from 1829 to 1938. A school from 1853. Rabbi and Teacher’s house from 1887. I can’t read the Jewish.
Q So there was a Jewish community here?
A Yes, in Weneer?
Q Who burned it all down?
A People from the SA.
? I didn’t really care if the synagogue was burned down. I wasn’t sorry about that. I didn’t feel any pity for the Jews.
Q So for you, it wasn’t a crime?
A No, not for me. Well, hold on. Crime…One would always have to say, Yes. However, I don’t consider it one. It was all the same to me. But if you look at it from a legal perspective, one would have to consider it a crime, because it is the destruction of other people’s property. And the one who destroyed it was the criminal. But I didn’t feel that way.
Karl-Heinz Rinne, Wehermacht, Berlin 1922.
We were on Fasenenstrasse and saw the synagogues ablaze. And the fire brigade stood in front of it. And they did nothing. They did nothing at all. We were astonished that they didn’t intervene. They just let it burn down. I only understood it all later. They only made sure the neighbouring houses wouldn’t catch fire. But that was only the beginning of the hounding of the Jews.
Kristallnacht 9-10 December 1938.
Some 1400 synagogues and places of worship were destroyed.
Over 7000 properties and cemeteries were damaged.
Many Jews were murdered. 30 000 were imprisoned.
The event caused a major Jewish exodus.
Karl Hollander, SS Liebstandarte, Adolf Hitler, Oberstumfuhrer.?
We didn’t have any civilian clothes. We were always in uniform from morning until evening. And when you are in uniform the whole year round that leaves a mark. You have no time to orientate yourself as a civilian.
NAPOLA Nazi Political Academy.
In the Nazi Political Academy is was important that graduates should enter into all the professions. There should be people everywhere who played an elite role in Nazism.
Everyone hoped to be drafted as soon as possible. To become a soldier and go to war. Many of us volunteered for the Waffen SS.
So just as there was an elite. We wanted to be part of the elite (elite).
SS Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Lubbener Hollander. Believer [passport/book]
With the swastika. See?
Q This shows you are Aryan?
A Yes, of good stock.
Q You couldn’t become an officer in the SS otherwise?
A No. That was a prerequisite.
Q What was your rank?
A SS Obersturmfuhrer, First Lieutenant, at the end.
Karl-Heinz Lipok. Brandenburg, Germany, SS Death’s Head Unit?
I went to the SS because I heard they trained you hard. I was an athlete. Athletics, boxing, skiing, football, hiking. I liked sports. It got you tough.
Hans Werk, Berlin, Waffen-SS.
Fleurs Werk.
On 15th March I signed up for the SS. The SS was the elite corps. They had the best tanks. And we got excited. Well, I did anyway. My father wasn’t so excited about it. I did it without his knowledge.
I had written farewell letters to my parents.
‘When I fall, you should be proud. You should not wear black.’
Nonsense like that. You wonder how that could happen.
Karl Hollander, SS Liebstandarte, Adolf Hitler, Oberstumfuhrer?
My parents took me to a career counsellor. The man said: First he must complete his Labour and Military Service. That’s two and a half years. Or you could send him to Oranienburg. To the Death’s Head Unit. They’ll take him at 16. And then he won’t have to do any Labour Service.
Arbeit Macht Frie (Work sets you free)
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Oranienburgh, established by the SS, 1936.
Once I saw a man there. He once brought stamps from me for charity. And I wanted to go over. He hadn’t done anything! My comrade held me back and said, ‘You idiot! Haven’t you noticed what’s going on?’
That was a Mr Warschauer.
Q But why did they send him to Sachsenhausen?
A I can’t tell you that. Being a Jew was probably enough. Yes. Locking this man up was a disgrace. We did not agree with that. You can imagine. But when you’re caught up in it. [shake of the head] You keep your mouth shut. At 16! I’m sorry. But that’s the truth.
And then I heard screams outside. I put the table under the window. And then stood on top. So I could look through the window. And then I saw it. How people were beaten. With bull whips. And others hanging. Their arms behind their backs. The stool was pulled from under their feet. And they screamed until they were unconscious.
Q If an officer asked you to do it?
A If an officer had asked me to pull the stool away? The stool would have gone flying. No doubt about that.
200 000 prisoners were held in Sachsenhausen. Tens of thousands were murdered by shooting, gassing and medical experiments.
Karl Hollander, SS Liebstandarte, Adolf Hitler, Oberstumfuhrer.?
[trained at Dachau, ‘did quite well,’ promoted to Sergeant).
On 10th January 1940, I was ordered to attend the Officer Training school in Dachau. I passed the exams with fairly good results.
The school was next to the concentration camp.
Q My question would be why Jews were interred in Dachau?
A No. We didn’t know that.
Q You didn’t know that?
A No, for us they were political prisoners.
Kurt Sametreiter Gastein Valley, Austria, 1922, Waffen SS, Oberscharfuhrer
If somebody says they don’t know about the concentration camps, this is just not true. The concentration camp inmates went to work in their prison uniforms. With 2 or 3 guards depending on how many prisoners. Everybody saw this.
I was stationed at Dachau, 1st April 1938. There was also Jews there. I know this, because our local police commander was there. He was also a Jew. And he was taken there. I even saw him.
Q in the camp, in Dachau?
A Well, yes, on his way to work.
Dachau Concentration Camp 1933-1945.
The first of a network of concentration camps under SS control, where millions, mostly Jews were murdered.
Karl Hollander, SS Liebstandarte, Adolf Hitler, Oberstumfuhrer?
What Adolf Hitler came to power all those who opposed him were arrested overnight. Put into concentration camps, killed…The intellectual leadership of the resistance was gone. And anyone who still protested was promptly killed. Killed. So people were scared. I can’t explain it any other way. These heroes you expect to find—and there aren’t many of them.
Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Austria. Established by the SS, 1938.
I was 14 years old. I was nanny for an SS family for six years. I looked after their children. Because their mother worked in the concentration camp. We took the children sometimes when they wanted to see their mother. She never came home. She normally slept over there. She worked nights in the canteen. I also went to the cinema in the camp. The prisoners filled my teeth. They sorted out my teeth.
Q, So, you had dentists there?
A Yes, prisoners were the dentists.
A Yes, he filled my teeth. They were very nice prisoners. The Kapos and so on. They were nice. Only the poor Jews were killed straight away. When they arrived, they were immediately taken to the gas chambers. They burned them immediately. They killed so many people.
Franz Splek, Muhlverteregion, Austria, 1925. Apprentice Stonemason.
In Mauthausen they had the ‘Death Stairs’. In order to avoid a detour… because the camp was at the top of a hill, and the quarry was at the bottom. To make it quicker, they built the ‘Death Stairs’. The steps were different heights. And when it rained there was those who slipped and fell. Or dropped the stone. And injured someone else’s foot. Many lost their life. There were many accidents.
Q Did you see that too, back then?
A yes.
Franz Splek, Muhlverteregion, Austria, 1925. Apprentice Stonemason.
And then there was another steep wall. And some were pushed down, either by Kapos, or by the SS, over the steep slope. Twenty metres in free-fall onto stones. Nobody survived that.
Mauthausen was at the centre of camps providing labour to German and Austrian industry. Of the nearly 190 000 prisoners, nearly half were murdered.
U-Boat Bunker, Valerin, Bremen, Germany.
Bookkeeper.
These are tomatoes. I don’t have anything green. But I don’t think that matters. Smell this.
Q is it local.
A Homemade, yesterday.
This [photo] was taken for my ID card for the bunker site. I was a wage’s clerk. I did the payroll for the German workers. For the foreign workers, I only submitted their hours. Because the concentration camp prisoners did not get paid. There were groups of labourers in Kap Horn. And here at Valentin Bunker, where they built submarines.
Kap Horn was surrounded by water on three sides. On one side were pontoon, boats that the concentration camp inmates were herded into. And then taken to the steel works. We Germans were not supposed to go there. But I went once. And I saw how people stood. Packed in tightly like matches on a boat.
I am ashamed to this day that humans could do that to other humans.
The Kapo came from a sub-camp, Nuengang concentration camp. And he had a group of 15-20 men . And these group of 15-20 men had to be brought back to the concentration camp- dead or alive. They dragged them along. Just so he could hand over the same number of men.
Q You mean at the end of the shift?
A Yes, when they could barely walk.
Q How did you know that?
A I saw it. Our hut was just 20 metres from the bunker. But as a bookkeeper I had nothing to do with it.
Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, established by the SS in 1943, Germany.
They were unloaded from the trains. And then had to walk five or six kilometres to the camp. When they walked past in their wooden clogs it sounded like a threshing machine. Here they come again, we’d say to each other.
Most people benefited from it. They could work here and earn money. And those who earned money were okay with it.
Q They made a profit out of it, you mean?
A You could find advantages in it, yeh.
Q They benefited?
A Yes. Yes.
In some way the concentration camp had an effect on all of us. Local shops benefited too, of course. The butchers shops. The bakeries. And all the grocers.
Q Your grandfather was a delivery man?
A yes. He was a delivery driver. With a cart and horses. He collected goods from the train station in Bergen and took them to the camp.
Q The prisoners were hiding here somewhere (farm buildings?)
A Yes, they hid in the hayloft, or the pigsty. Or on top of the pigsty. I mean, they are big buildings. Either we discovered them in the morning or they came to us. Well, they were hungry.
Q And then what happened to them?
A Well, they were picked up. Here in the barracks, there was a bit, what do I know…Or to the concentration camp. They took them to the camp.
Q And who picked them up?
A Yes, Guards, you know.
Q But how did guards know that people were hiding here?
A Well, we discovered them and reported. At least that’s what I remember.
Q Did you make a telephone call or …?
A yes, yes, yes.
Q Did you know what happened to those prisoners?
A No. Nobody knows that.
Slawentzitz,44 kilometres from Auschwitz.
My father was a railway man. My father was also head of the cargo department. That was why our flat was right in the train station. It was interesting, because when the trains came we could see clearly what was happening.
Q What were his duties?
A Well, to register these trains. Let’s say, a freight train loaded with people. And headed for Auschwitz. It had to be registered on the paperwork at the freight yard. Where all the trains went.
Slawentzitz was one of many sites, that included concentration camps and factories, that formed part of the Auschwitz industrial complex.
The Nazi policy of Extermination Through Labour claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
They cut down all the trees for about ten kilometres. And they put up factories in no time. Massive camps of prisoners and Jews and so on. They were unloaded at the freight yard. And were marched to their respective camps. Every day, I saw guards escorting Jews from work back to camp. Sometimes they had to carry one of their fellows. Because they could not walk any more. They put them on some kind of stretcher. I saw that often.
My father knew where people were going. No-one came back. Sometimes my father came home and said: ‘They dispatched Jews again today’. To Auschwitz. People said quietly: ‘They are driven up the chimney there.’
I still have the smell of the crematorium in my nose. When you saw the smoke going up, like when you burn car tyres, then we said, ‘They’ve put some more in’. At least three people were put on there at a time on a metal grille. As the skin burned it produced a lot of smoke. You could smell it two kilometres away.
Grunewald station includes a memorial to 50 000 Jews deported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Their departure was witnessed by Berlin’s residents.
Ebensee, Austria, the site of a concentration camp, established in 1943, where 30 000 individuals were imprisoned. Almost 9000 were worked to death.
Q [residents in Home] are you all from Ebensee?
A yes, we were all born in Ebensee.
Q All of you? What did you know of the concentration camp during the war? How much did you know?
A [resident] we know nothing. At least I didn’t. I can’t speak for the others. I knew nothing. Everything about the camps was covered up. You understand? It was all hushed up. Suppressed. People would talk quietly. But not out loud!
B [resident] well, it was awful. It was awful. My old neighbour- he moved to Poland. He told me so much. Because he was in the concentration camp and survived. He survived. They were hungry. So many of them starved to death.
Q The camp inmates worked in the tunnels?
A –[c resident] Those who still could. Others had to carry them back in the stretchers when they couldn’t take any more. No food. They were finished.
[b resident] yes, but so many.
Q What happened to those that could no longer work?
A [c resident] they were burned. Yes, exactly, every time. The ovens were fired up. You could see the smoke from the ovens. You knew what was going on.
[b resident] these were horrific times.
[a resident] and they beat them to the end. In the labour camps, they beat them to the end.
Then it was over.
Q So you think the people here knew what was going on?
[b resident] Quietly, no one would admit it, for fear of going there themselves. People said, ‘Don’t say anything or you’ll end up in the camp too.’
They noticed.
Everyone knew, but nobody said anything. The day before the Americans came, there was lots of smoke and it smelled awful. They burned them all. The ones who were worn out. They burned them all. I remember that.
[c resident] I always sat by the window, so I saw a lot. The Jeep drove up, the Americans opened the gate. Imagine the rejoicing when they came. How they screamed! How they screamed! But for joy. They were cries of joy! They were so glad.
The townspeople got scared they’d break into the houses or something. But this didn’t happen.
[resident a] And suddenly, all the SS guards were gone. None to be seen, from one moment to the next.
[c resident] they would ring your doorbell, late at night. And your whole flat was searched.
But someone was there?
My friend. Yes, my boyfriend. Well, he was with the SS. They would have caught him.
But he was not from Ebensee. No, he was not from Ebensee.
I see.
Your husband. Was he a Nazi?
No.
Your husband was an SS camp guard?
C resident: If I hadn’t hid him for nine months, they would have arrested him. But they didn’t get him.
Herman Knoth, Hamburg, German, 1927, Waffen-SS.
For the German people, the Waffen-SS were at the peak of the nation. Not just physically, spiritually too. Yes, an elite.
Yes, it’s still here (tattoo mark on his arm)
Whenever I have surgery I tell them about it. I’ve had quite a few operations. It’s somewhere. Here, look.
[another member] Hans Werk
Now you should be able to see it. [showing tattoo]
Q what was your blood group.
A ‘O’. It was interesting you’d expect it to be done for all soldiers. To help everyone. But there was an awareness of an elite. Only the Waffen-SS.
[another SS member]
They come and said, ‘Show your arm.’ It was supposed to be your blood group. In case you were wounded. But many said they also did it to mark us forever.
[another SS]
The Waffen-SS had nothing to do with the terrible and brutal treatment of Jews and dissidents. And the concentration camps. The Waffen-SS had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Nothing in the slightest. We were always frontline soldiers. We were never involved in actions behind the front. Always at the front, eye to eye with the enemy. Nothing else. I have no regrets. And I’ll never regret being with that unit. Truly not. A camaraderie like that…You could rely on every man, one hundred percent. There was nothing that could go wrong. That was the beauty of it.
Friedrich Elder, Salzburg, Austria 1925, Wehrmacht.
There were SS units that fought on the front line and they were merciless. They shot whole villages. Nothing remained standing. The people lay around like dead flies. That too, was SS units. The Russians were already driven out, but with civilians…they did what they liked. There were more dead than alive. The living received us begging ‘Please, Please…’ Generally, the Russians were taken prisoner. With some exceptions. I don’t know the percentage, but generally where the ordinary soldiers, not the elite troops, they drove away in their tanks, were shot. And buried in a mass grave. They had to dig their own graves which we put them in. Well, I wasn’t there. When they were forced to dig, they knew they’d be shot.
Q Did they talk to one another?
A No, there was a deathly silence
We were in the Pripvat swamps. A doctor and three medical orderlies. And we were attached to the Hungarian SS unit. And allegedly, they found ammunition in a village. We witnessed as they started to set the houses on fire. The people flooded out of their homes. There was thick black smoke everywhere. It was like a film. It was a dark night. And these troops on their rather small horses and they’re riding back and forth shooting like savages. It was like a cowboy film. In the middle, was a house that was bigger than the rest. It may have belonged to a mayor. And when they people ran into this house, it too was set on fire. When the people inside could no longer stand the heat and smoke. They ran out of the house. Machine guns had been set up outside. And as they ran out they were just picked off. The whole village was wiped out. Women and children and men who were just… they would have burned alive if they didn’t come out. And if they came out they were shot.
Q What was the role of the medical personnel?
A We had no role. We never had a chance. If a grenade had been thrown, and had injured a few Hungarian SS then perhaps…
Q If the SS men had been hurt?
A Yes.
Q Why did your officer not write a report?
A I don’t know. I can’t say. Perhaps they didn’t want one.
Q What do you mean?
A What is not in the archives does not exist.
And then we withdrew further with the tank. And drove through a village, which was engulfed in flames. And I didn’t know this… I didn’t know about this ‘scorched earth’ order. Hitler instigated a ‘scorched earth’ policy. At the Fuhrer’s command no house should fall into the hands of the Russians. He hoped the Russian advance could be slowed down that way. Yes, it was cruel. But I did not care who burned.
On the 20th January 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, senior Nazi officials met to discuss the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ the mass murder of all European Jews.
On the 9th May 2011, former SS man Hans Werk met a group of young students at the site of the Wannsee Conference.
Q You said you are ashamed to be German, is that correct?
A No, I didn’t say that. I am ashamed today that I joined that organisation. That I was proud to serve in the Liebenstart. And I was proud to bear this tattoo. And our leader, this hero, hid in a bunker, like a coward. And shot himself and escaped responsibility. And Adolf and his cliché brought to disgrace. They cause us to lose our homeland. And I lost my honour.
Q And what?
A My honour!
Q But you were full of honour and pride, back then?
A What was I? If you’d kept your honour? You’re ashamed now that you had the honour of standing for your fatherland? No I don’t understand?
He’s ashamed of that?
A I’m ashamed of the crimes committed. To stand up for the fatherland is something completely different.
Q Everybody goes soft on camera.
A Think about it…The majority cheered when they bombed London and Coventy to ash. Knowing that woman and children were killed. These are the consequences of letting ourselves be seduced? No, that’s the result. The concentration camps in Germany. The destruction of Warsaw. Wherever you go today you have to be ashamed.
Q Anybody in this room with a weakness of character? Will think, ‘Shit, now I’m a German. What am I going to do now?’ That’s what you’re doing now. You’re judging people. Even though you said, it’s not our fault. Somebody with a weakness of character will think, ‘On, No, I’m a German, I must be ashamed my whole life.’
A why don’t you show your face? Why are you such cowards [screen faces blanked out.] Look at the camera and say what you think.
Q-A Then I’ll get a criminal conviction and get persecuted by the state.
Hans: I say, you’re one of them. Why are you hiding?
Q-A because I’ll be made out to be a criminal.
Hans: Why won’t you be?
Q-A of course I will.
Hans. That’s rubbish.
Q-A in your eyes, I’m a criminal, like your old comrades?
Hans: Then I would have to be afraid the Nazis would set my house on fire.
Q-A what nonsense.
Hans, shouldn’t I?
Q-A I don’t believe it, really.
Hans, when I speak so openly.
Q-A you shouldn’t be afraid that some Albanian stabs you on public transport? You should be afraid of that. Not your own kind.
Hans I’m getting agitated, but one should stay really calm.
Q-A But you’re doing it
Hans. Enough now. I belonged to a murderous organisation. What else was it? But innocent women… One can think one’s actions are wrong. Even very wrong. But innocent women, or because they were Jewish or Gypsies, or because they were weak, physically, or were sickly. They were killed by injections. Euthanasia…I remember a man called Frank Lemke. We used to tease him as a kid. One day he was gone. It turned out they had injected him in Landsberg. Gone. We were told that those ‘unworthy of life’ had to be destroyed. ‘Unworthy of life’. We carried it out to perfection. Planned at the Wannsee Conference, in this house. Around a table like this one. In comfort, with coffee. They decided how the Jews, women and children were to be killed. By this horrid method. I cannot be proud of that. I am ashamed of that. It can’t be taken for granted that a Jew would wish to talk to a SS man like me, who was convinced that what Adolf did was right. Think about what that means. I met 23-year-old German Jews. Their fathers were in the war. An old Jewish lady of over 80 years told me: ‘My father was in the First World War, he received medals. He did not want to believe that the Nazis would kill him. He refused to flee Germany. ’ You can imagine what happened. For me, this is too much. But I believe it is important to talk to young people like you. I ask only this of you. Do not let yourself be blinded!
[another former SS soldier]
Q are you still proud today? That you were a member of the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler?
A Of course. Not just anyone could join.
Q you mean it was…?
A An elite. You could say that.
Q Are you willing to accept that the Liebstandarte was involved in the murder of Jews among others? How can you say this is an elite in the modern sense?
A They weren’t involved in those murders.
Q But the SS?
A Maybe, I don’t know. I never witnessed it.
Q Will you admit the SS was a criminal organisation?
A No
Q You won’t accept that?
A I won’t accept that. I would dirty myself if I admitted to that. And I won’t do that. The whole SS organisation was recognised as a criminal organisation at the Nuremberg Trials. But not by a German court. So, I won’t accept that.
[new/old former SS soldier]
Q So, you are saying that the reports that came out later about the murder of Jews in the extermination camps, it’s said to be 6 million.
A That’s a joke.
Q One million, maybe a little more in Auschwitz.
A yes [shrugs, means no]. I don’t believe it. I will not believe it. It can’t be. Today they say… Excuse me, but it’s the Jew who puts it that way. The scale that is claimed today. I deny that too. It didn’t happen. I can’t imagine that back home. So many horrible things happened. I don’t know.
[new/old former SS]
The majority of those under Nazism said after the war again and again, firstly, ‘I didn’t know,’ secondly, ‘I didn’t take part’, and thirdly, ‘If I’d have known I’d have acted differently’. Everyone tried to distance themselves from the massacres committed under Nazism, especially those of the final years. And that’s why so many said: ‘I wasn’t a Nazi’.
[new/old SS]
An SS officer was lying next to me And an American officer came to his bed and said: ‘Are you a Nazi?’ to this SS officer. And he said, ‘Yes, I am.’ The American officer shook hands with him and said, ‘The first German to admit he was a Nazi. A pleasure to meet you.’ Later, I asked myself what I would have said to this American officer if he’d said to me. ‘Are you a Nazi?’ Probably the same as everybody else. I was forced to. I joined the Hitler youth. And so on…I wouldn’t have said I was a Nazi.
[new/old SS]
We are, at least, complicit in other people’s crimes. We can’t be accused of being active perpetrators. We didn’t do that. We didn’t beat, or imprison anyone, or do anything like that. But we went along with it.
Q How can you say that you didn’t imprison anyone when you were a camp guard? A member of the Death’s Head SS.
A A valid question. A very valid question. That’s when complicity begins to turn to guilt. That’s why I got out.
Q At what point does complicity make you a perpetrator?
A Complicity begins by going there in the first place. Not to have turned around straight away. We didn’t dare. Nobody walked away.
[old/new Nazi}
Let’s say there was an order to exterminate the Jews. If, as a policeman, or a soldier, I am forced to help round up Jews and take them to a concentration camp. What does that make me? If I go voluntarily. Then I’m definitely a perpetrator. If I’m ordered to do it… Has perpetration begun if I say, ‘Move along Jews…’ I don’t know. I can’t answer that question. What else could I have done? If I refused I could have been put against the wall and shot.
Q Did you ever yourself hear of this happening?
A No, never.
Q there is no record of it happening, in the literature, either?
A I never heard of it.
Q If you received such an order what would you have done?
A Yes, that is a good question. If ninety-nine men had said yes before me, I might have participated as well.
[woman, former Nazi]
Q The main responsibility of the murder of the Jews in the second world war
A in the second world war the responsibility is German. It is the stigma they will bear for the rest of their lives. But I don’t feel part of the collective guilt of the Germans.
Q So who is to blame for these atrocities?
A God will be judge of that.
Q Put the good Lord aside.
A No.
Q I would like to have your opinion.
A Yes, but… the good Lord doesn’t sit opposite me. But I feel… I’m ashamed as a German. Because something so cruel happened in the German name. With this meticulousness. With this bookkeeping accuracy.
Hans:
What it comes to judging between those who did it and…Actually, they were all perpetrators. They were all perpetrators.
Q The concentration camp guard… do you consider him a perpetrator?
A Well, yes…I was one of them. I feel like a perpetrator.
[Nazi woman]
I’ve always said we didn’t know. But in the end, we are perpetrators too. We let it happen. We should have got to the bottom of it. So, in the end, we’re perpetrators too.
[Former SS]
Do I consider myself a perpetrator? [laughs] That’s such a broad question. I wouldn’t have been a perpetrator if I’d the courage to say ‘no’ at any point. So, if you say that I didn’t say that, then I’m a perpetrator. That’s an easy answer of course. But I can’t be convicted as a perpetrator. Because really I was an ideological perpetrator. And not a…But let’s finish now, shall we? [laughs]
[unrepentant SS former officer]
Q So you are not willing to blame Hitler?
A No.
Q For you? Hitler is not responsible?
A I will not blame him.
Q You will not blame him?
Q Do you still honour him?
A I certainly do. The idea was correct.
Q And the murder of the Jews, was that also correct? That’s what Hitler…
A No, I don’t share that opinion.
Q Sorry?
A I don’t share that opinion that they should be murdered. They should have been driven out to another country, where they could rule themselves. That would have saved a great deal of grief.
Angela Merkel [former] Chancellor of Germany.
The mass murder of six million Jews, carried out in the name of Germany has caused indiscriminate suffering to the Jewish people, Europe and the entire world.
The Shoah fills us Germans with shame. I bow before the victims. I bow before the survivors and those that helped them survive.
Luke Holland. In memory of my murdered grandparents and millions of others.
I’m unfamiliar with the American college application process. It’s a big country, but modelled, in theory, so school-test scores determine which colleges will accept students. The American dream is a quite simple belief that if you work hard you’ll get your just rewards. Student, Tina Zheng, for example, plans to be a brain surgeon.
The adolescents featured in this documentary stay mostly tight-lipped. Their collective goal is to get into an Ivy League College. Harvard is mentioned. Stanford College features as a possibility, but with less than five percent chance of gaining entry. And UCLA. They are all A+ students. Rachel Schmidt’s test-scores, for example, put her in the top 1% in America. Alvan Cai’s mum and dad come from Taiwan. They do everything for their son. Test scores in Taiwan determine a boy’s future. They have left nothing to chance. But Alvan worries that his parents are out of step. Offering vouchers for food or the pictures or even a red envelope with God knows in it might be regarded as bribery by college administrators. UCLA, for example, receive over 102 000 applicants to study at their college every year. That number is growing and increasingly most applicants will have A+ grade to have a realistic chance to be considered.
Granada’s documentary series 7UP, a World in Action special in 1964 had much the same premise. The Jesuit dictum: ‘Give me the boy and I’ll give you the man’. Director Michael Apted is dead now, but I think we are up to 64UP. It was classified a snapshot of social class. Looking at it a life-time later, it went pretty much as expected. Those Eton-educated kids with marbles in their mouths did prosper and did go to Oxbridge Universities.
Debbie Lum has her viewfinder not so much on class but race and ethnicity. San Francisco’s Lowell High School is a hothouse of the super-smart. The majority of whom are one of the fastest growing proportion of the American immigrant population—Asian Americans. Ivy League colleges their teachers warn them view high-test scores from Lowell students as a given, but question whether such students can think for themselves. Viewing them as robotic. In other words, such institutions are inherently racist, but without acknowledging, for example, college quota’s for Jewish students that were in place until the 1950s. Black students, of course, had their own colleges.
Class bias is often race in disguise. In 21UP, for example, the Yorkshire son of a farmer told how his cohort in university assumed he’d be stupid because of the way he spoke and the accent he used. Similarly, Rachel Schmidt who has a black mother may be smarter than most, even at Lowell, but her successful application to Stanford College was due to her being black. Asian Americans adopting the arguments of the far-right white groups that would send them back to wherever, because it didn’t really matter. The only thing that did matter for Neo-Nazis was they weren’t white and therefore couldn’t be right. In fact, were stupid. In the land of the free, Richard Powers, Overstory, characterisation: ‘The immigrant’s son yields to the disease of improvement before there is an effective cure’.
Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel takes lessons from screenwriters.. The Hero’s journey. The ‘shard of glass’. ‘A psychological wound that has been festering beneath the surface of your hero for a long time.’
The moron’s moron, for example, a narcissistic psychopath with a troubled childhood that lies, lies and lies again. He hooks up a band of far-right fundamentalist Christians and other far-right hate groups until he begins to believe everything he says must be true because they’re saying it too. Find support from the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, and Kremlin backed ability to produce propaganda and hatebomb through Facebook, predominantly. And he gets elected the 45th American President.
Misha Defonseca stood up in her local synagogue in the early 1990s and told an extraordinary story about Holocaust survival and triumph. The shard of glass was shown, and people wept. Jane Daniel owned a small publishing company in Millis. She urged Misha to write her story down. For around two years Misha refused, but then the true hero finds his/her truth, and she writes her extraordinary story.
Jane Daniel’s recognised its potential for commercial value. Because not only was it Holocaust literature, which generally sold well, but it had a Save-the- Cat-type twist. Misha, the seven-year-old heroine, trudged from her Belgian home in search of her parents. She was befriended by a she-wolf in the forest and became part of the wolf pack living off scraps of meat, and distrustful of humans.
Misha and the Wolves published April 1997, Mt. Ivy Press, Boston. It sells reasonably well internationally and at home. Oprah Winfrey comes calling. A spot on Oprah’s Book Club, Jane Daniel’s explains guarantees over a million sales. Disney talk about making a film of the book. A virtuous circle of sales and publicity. Win-win.
Lose-lose. Misha balks at going on Oprah. She sues Jane Daniels for return of her book rights.
Middlesex Superior Court, Massachusetts, August 2001. Jane Daniels is shown to have deposited money in the tax haven of Turks Cacao (beloved of crooks and internet giants) which she never paid royalties, and which she disputes. After a ten-day trial, the jury found for Misha on all counts and awarded her $22.5 million damages.
The Hero may not be as simple as you think, Save the Cat advises writers.
ACT 2. The Hero decides to accept the call to action. The Hero ‘shard of glass’ is the court judgement against her. Jane Daniel takes on the world of Misha and the Wolves. She assembles a team and cast of characters to help her.
ACT 3. Setbacks and false defeats. The HERO triumphs. But there is a sting in the tale. Trump gets elected President, fails to win re-election and commits treason. His supporters attempt to stage a right-wing coup.
Misha does not go to live with the wolves, but is fed to the wolves.
Deborah Dwork (The Holocaust Historian) I think we would like to believe that [the moron’s moron Donald Trump] Misha Defonseca believed. That [he]she was a survivor of the Holocaust [electoral fraud]. I think we would like to believe that we were not so naïve. That we believed it, because she believed it. And we would even like to believe that this narrative has a redemptive purpose. Because it made right the wrong of her childhood. I think it’s nonsense. There is no redemptive purpose. We were so naïve. It was all a fabrication.
Evelyne Haendel: ‘It’s human to believe. Creditability is something else. It’s your need to question things or not that will help you discern what’s true and what’s not.’
NOTES:
There’s a saying in Millis, small-town big family. We became friends with Maurice and Misha. Belgian refugees. Eccentric personality. I never saw anybody that had such a relationship with animals and had so many cats. She told me about her life, during the war.
Misha was waiting for her father to pick her up from school. And he never came. A woman tapped her on the shoulder and said ‘Come with me’. She was taken into a family that she didn’t know. She was given a new name and different clothes.
When she was only seven years old she walked alone through Nazi occupied countries. Across thousands of miles in search of her deported parents.
Misha: ‘I never discovered my parents or where they went to. To this day, I do not know’
I was asked to speak about my story. Temple Beth Torah. My husband convinced me to do it. Saying it would free me. When I went up to the Beema. I realised I was going to speak for the first time. I burst into tears. And slowly, snatches. I began to tell.
The dramatic tale of a woman whose Holocaust memoir took the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher – who turned detective – revealed an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
Karen Schulman (The Friend) I was mesmerised. I had tears in my eyes. She was hungry. She was thirsty. She was cold. She wanted her parents. How did this person (this little girl) survive?
‘If they think I’m alive, I can’t let them down. I have to keep going.’
You could hear a pin drop. Everyone was entranced with her story. I never expected to hear what I heard. When Misha was seven her parents were arrested by the Nazis. And she was told they’d been deported. She was place in the care of a Catholic family. Called De Wael. It was a safe place. They gave her a new identity. Monique De Wael. The deception saved her, but she felt very alienated there.
‘I ended up in a family that didn’t love me. That’s the least you could say. They hated me there. They would call me ‘worthless’ ’.
There was a grandfather in the family that was kindly. ‘He told me, my parents were in Germany.’
‘He showed me with a compass, that Germany was in the East. So Germany didn’t seem that far.’
At that point Misha made a tremendous decision. It turned her life upside down.
She decided at the age of seven to walk to Germany, to find her parents.
So she took her compass and some supplies and started walking. Heading East.
‘I know exactly what to do. I need the basic. I need food. Something to drink. To have a light for protection. ‘
‘The first night I slept under a bridge. It was not far from home.’
‘Each time I approach a village, I see the station.’
She had to hide from the Nazis. Being alone in the forest. Having to steal food. Freezing temperatures. She had been traumatised by this.
‘Killing. I saw killing. The dead people. It was really desperate. I dreamed of seeing my parents. So I stayed deep in the woods. Away from the war.’
When she was away from the woods, she was away from people being sent to concentration camps. She was away from the horror that was happening in the cities. She was with birds and flowers. She said that was what saved her.
‘I completely gave into the wild life. I saw animals living normally. Eating just what they need. Not more than they need.’
‘With animals I didn’t need any words. We were near each other, in silence. And understood, without words.’
Jane Daniel. (The publisher). I was thinking this would make a fascinating book. I had a small publishing company. And I mean tiny. And I was looking around for new project. I was the one that said, can we take this public? Take it to another level?
I could make something big out of this. There’s a market for this story. Because it had an amazing twist.
‘I remember, I’d just been called by a farmer who saw me stealing food from his farm. I run away, full of fear. When you run away, you run very hard. Suddenly, I had the impression somebody was watching me. I turn around and see this magnificent animal. To me it was like a huge dog. The wolf seemed alone. And I needed a companion. It was a beautiful grey she-wolf. I look in my bag for something to eat. And I give a piece to the wolf, which it doesn’t take.
It takes a long time. But after a while, we would walk in parallel. I was able to see its generosity. To see the strength it had. I was able to live with it. She was like a mother to me.
Much later, it was a whole pack of wolves. I don’t know how long I was with them. They accepted and protected me.’
Jonni Soffron. The Wolf Expert. Wow, this is quite a story. Misha was very different from most people I met. She should have been an animal. Or her spirit is an animal. We talked about being accepted by the pack, but treated as a low-ranking member. And she had to exhibit low-ranking behaviour, in order to be with them.
Misha said, typically, the alpha male would eat first. The others would lay around the carcase waiting for their turn. They would leave little scraps, in close proximity to where she was, when they were finished.
‘Wolves eat 10kg, in one meal. The leftovers were more than enough for me.’
We became very good friends. She visited multiple times. She would hand-feed them the pieces of meat. I think they sensed in Misha, she was a friend, as opposed to a foe. She had such a sense of being with them. It was as if she belonged in there.
‘I had no reason to stop walking. It’s what I done every day. Day after day. Month after month. I hoped to find my parents. Figuring, if I’d survived as a child. My parents must have survived. This belief helps me continue.’
Jane Daniel, Publisher. This is a moral narrative The battle between good and evil. The innocent child and the evil Nazis. And the child survived. It had mythic qualities. It could take my little publishing company to a world-wide happening. So I asked Misha if she would be interested in publishing her stories.
‘With everything I went through, I learned to mistrust people.’
I don’t think she was very impressed with me. There was no reason she should be. The only book I’d published before was a legal-financial book. Not exactly her thing.
‘For more than 2 years I refused. But my friends and community said to me “Misha, do it” for future generations.’
‘I found myself in hell, again.’
It was a painful process, but it was as if she was compelled to tell her story. As if it was some kind of catharsis. Everyone was stepping up. All over the world we were selling the translation rights. My agent came back from California and said “Disney wants this. Period”. This was the case of a hot property.
When the book was published April 1997, Mt. Ivy Press, Boston. I said, let’s see if we can get Oprah to do this. Oprah had her book club. If you were one of her books, you had a guaranteed sale of one million books. They said they were interested. So that’s a big, big deal. And we’re beginning to say, we’re heading into a monster bestseller here. (Misha, The Memoir of the Holocaust Years)
Jonni Soffron. The Wolf Expert. Jane Daniels said they (Oprah) wanted to send a crew and film Misha in the wolves. So I said , yeh. (Wolf Hollow in Ipswich). I told Misha before we went into the enclosue, “This is an adult wolf. He’s a very big boy. His name is Pedro.’
Jane Daniel, Publisher. Nobody went in but Misha. The sound man had his boom over the fence. Misha squatted down and she’s feed the wolf. Everything is going fine. The wolf is very friendly. And then the wolf decided to put its paws up on her shoulders.
Jonni Soffron. Pedro was much taller than she.
Jane Daniel. Then all of a sudden, very quickly opened his mouth and put her whole head in his mouth. Very gently. Fangs on both temples.
‘I had no fear. Nobody talk about the big bad wolf to me.’
Jane Daniel: The wolf held her head for a minute. We stopped breathing. Then just as fast as it happened, it was over. At that point, Misha appears and lets out a big howl. At this point I get goosebumps. Way back in the pen, we hear an owww coming back.
Jonni Soffron. When she howled, they immediately howled back.
Jane Daniel: There it was, you could immediately see the connection between the human and wolf. I saw it. It was amazing. A shocking moment. So they got a really lot of interesting footage. I thought this is going to make a great Oprah show. The next step was she was to go to Chicago for the studio portion.
Jonni Soffron. Things were going swimmingly well. Then I began to see some tension between Misha and Jane.
Karen Schulman (The Friend) It wasn’t very pleasant as time went on. The book wasn’t selling very well. She kept saying “I have no money. I have nothing. Jane Daniels is no good.” I felt saddened. But Misha was sitting at my table one night and said to me: “She didn’t want to go on Oprah Winfrey”. I said, gee Misha. I don’t understand that.
Pat Cunnigham. (The Neighbour). Well Misha and Maurice were having financial difficulties. Then she started selling things from her house. I felt bad, they were losing everything.
Jane Daniel: All of a sudden Misha is not co-operative. Had one objection after another. Doesn’t return phone calls. She doesn’t want to go. It’s inconvenient. She needs somebody to take care of her animals at home.
‘Jane made me so mad. So insecure. My husband said many times. “We’re a survivor. You don’t use that kind of attitude”.
Jane Daniel. Come on, it’s Oprah. You find a dog sitter or pet sitter, or whatever. You make yourself available. “No!”
‘The bad memory came back. I had a nightmare. I was very anxious.’
I tried everything. I wrote her notes: This is a million sales. “No, No, No”. I thought this is crazy. Any other author would be falling over themselves to do this. It never happened.
A year after the book came out, there’s a knock on the door. And I’m handed a big package. It’s Misha filing a lawsuit against me. Everything stopped. No other country wanted to do business with us. We had a lawsuit attached to this project.
Romana Hamblin (The Attorney) The first time I met Misha, I felt very compelled by the circumstances of the case. It was clear to me that several things had been done that were improper, illegal, fraudulent.
Misha was asking for return of the copyright. And for all of the royalties which she was due for book sales.
‘Jane Daniels saw in my life a goldmine. And she took advantage of it.’
Romana Hamblin (The Attorney) There was so much anger and bitterness by the time I got involved. There was not much room for negotiation.
Jane Daniels It was clear we were going to trial. It wasn’t going to settle out of court.
Middlesex Superior Court, Massachusetts, August 2001.
Jonni Soffron :The sense in the courtroom was a lot of drama. The atmosphere was pretty tense. Then, of course, the money comes up.
Romana Hamblin (The Attorney) We found that Jane Daniels had set up a company in Turks Cacao so that contracts that came from overseas came directly into her account and she never paid royalties.
Jane Daniels, We had documents to show that she’d been paid. We had cancelled cheques to show that she’d been paid. So everything she was saying, we had documentation to refute.
Jonni Soffron but she could speak no falsehood. Where’s the money? Jury was very sympathetic.
Romana Hamblin, The jury was riveted. Here was a person in front of you that had survived the Holocaust. They were engaged and absolutely enthralled by this story.
Misha was a good witness.
‘Oh what I live is…because it’s my life.’
Jane Daniels: It just made me look like a monster. And I thought. This is not going well.
‘Jane was always fighting. She fought for what she wanted.’
There was a 10 day trial and it was gruelling.
JD: The Judge asks the jury, how do you find on count one?
Romana Hamblin: The jury found unanimously for Misha on all counts.
JD: I mean, ultimately they came in for a massive judgement against me.
Jonni Soffron. It was kind of mind-boggling to hear the number. I was blown away. I said, ‘are you kidding me?’
Romana Hamblin, $22.5m. It was a very large verdict.
JD: I’m an optimistic person. But that hit me like a ton of bricks.
RH: The money damages against JD was largely based on JD’s testimony. This was going to be on Oprah. There was some contract with Disney. There were thing JD testified to that really elevated the level of damages. Well beyond what would seem supportable to a book like this. So everybody paid attention. People love a big verdict.
JD. Disney had fallen through. Oprah had fallen through. There was no millions of dollars. It’s an untenable position to be in. A cruel exploited of an innocent Holocaust survivor. Your world falls apart at that point.
After the trial. This was the lowest point in my life. I ended up going into therapy and being diagnosed with PTSD. I had horrible insomnia. I was hanging on by my fingernails. My publishing company was gone. My copyright was taken away. I mean, I was destroyed at that point.
I ended up doing a post-mortem on what had happened. Looking at it piece by piece by piece. I was in my lawyer’s office going through old records and documents. I had no idea what I was going to find. I opened a bank account. And it’s in Misha’s writing. And it’s her signature card. And on there it says, date and place of birth, 5/12/37, ETERBEEK. And mother’s maiden name: DONVILLE.
All of a sudden I get a flash. She knows who she is. She knows where she was born. She knows who her mother was. This was stuff she supposedly didn’t know She lost her identity in the war. This doesn’t add up. Clearly, she know a lot more about who she was than what she had told me. What else might not be true? I had be owned by courts and lawyers. My life had been turned upside down. I wanted my life back. If I can prove she’s not who she said she is, I can overturn this judgement.
It was the dead of winter. The days were short. I was standing in my kitchen. And I thought, I have to do something.
I started recalling all the things that had happened. How I’d met her. What had happened there. What happened and how did the law suit come about? And then I thought, I’ll write a book about the case. I’ll do it as a blog. I was writing my memoir of her memoir. And maybe somebody will read it. Talk about a long shot.
The next day, I get up. I turn on my computer and there’s an email. The email says,
Sharon Sergeant. (The Genealogist)I think I may be able to help find out what’s the real story. I did a timeline of Misha from a variety of photographs. First from the book. Then from other images on the internet. So I could get a sense of her life.
JD: I wanted to know who she was. Who is this person who has just ruined my life.
Sharon Sergeant: Each photograph I tried to analyse to find out what kind of information I could squeeze out of it. The first clue was Misha claimed she was 7 years old, when she was taken in by this foster family. In the American book there was what are called polyphonic images. And the poly photos were taken at that time. And I looked at the photos and thought, No, this doesn’t look like a 7 year old. This looks like a toddler. 3-4 years old. Big bow in her hair, chubby, chubby cheeks, frilly clothes. Something’s wrong.
ERNEST and MARTHEW.
The next picture I looked at was who Misha said was her forster grandfather and grandmother. According to the narrative, he’s a rustic, farm man. I did a close-up of the hands of grandfather, which were manicured (nails). Did not look like a farm person’s hands. And he had a ring on one of his fingers. Not the kind of thing a farmer would wear.
And the little dog on grandmother’s lap, that looks like a little house dog. Not a farm dog. I thought, jeez, that’s strange.
And that’s when I started comparing the French and American books. I was looking at names and places and dates. [De Wael, grandmother and grandmother]. That was the big red flag.
JD. She called me and said, did you notice Misha’s name is different in the French from the one she used in the American book?
In the American book the name she was given by the foster parents was De Wael. The foster family gave her the name Mme Valle. Why would you have two different names?
Sharon Sergeant. There’s too many discrepancies between the name changes and the pictures and so on. Fishy, yeh. Definitely seemed fishy.
JDaniels. If her story were true and I was doubting it there was something particularly vicious about doubting somebody that is telling the truth about something that’s happened. The callousness to say I don’t believe you. And the harm you can cause. That was in my mind. On the other hand, so many discrepancies. Why would you be saying things that aren’t true? Maybe she’s so traumatised she’s just lost her grip on reality. How much did that explain, I didn’t know. I needed a lot of answers at that point.
We need boots on the ground. In Belguim. (Brussels).
Sharon had a connection with a Belgian genealogist, who was herself a Holocaust survivor? As it turned out, she grew up in the area Misha claimed to have lived in.
Evelyne Haendel (The Holocaust Survivor) During the war, I myself was a hidden child. I went to a Catholic school. And I became a very good little Catholic girl. I have no recollection of anybody telling me what happened to my parents. I have no memory at all. I was about 40 and I went through a sort of terrible breakdown, which led me to find what happened to me, in fact. And what happened to my parents. And my family. And I started to make research.
I found out my father was deported to Auschwitz in September 1942. My mother was arrested in October in Brussels. And deported to Auschwitz. I was told they didn’t come back. So, I went by car to Auschwitz. I saw the camp. Where there was not a single soul. The chambers. The gas chambers were exploded. I found some candles we call ‘yeseh?’ still burning the rubble of the gas chambers. Before evening, I had a Star of David done in dried flowers. I just didn’t know where to put it. I couldn’t put it at the monument. So, finally, I choose the little pond. It floated there. And I think that was the time that I…Sorry…put my parents to rest. My parents. My grandmother, my cousin.
JR. Evelyne is a Holocaust survivor whose story is very much like Misha’s. So she was the perfect person to find out what was going on.
Sharon Sergeant. In the French book the foster family had a surname of Valle. In the American book the surname was De Wael.
Royal Library of Belgium. To reconcile the name changes Evelyne went through the city directories for the 1930 and 1940s.
Evelyne Haendel. I came for three days, searching for the De Wael and the Valle’s. The name Valle was not in the phone books. Valle name didn’t exist. De Wael, yes. Many, many.
Jane Daniels: Now you start to think the French book was distributed in Belgium. If something about Misha’s story wasn’t true, it would be important for her not to put her real name in that book. There would be somebody over there who would say, ‘I know the De Wael family. I know whether or not she was around or disappeared during the war’.
Sharon Sergeant, The fact that she changed the name in France and Belguim from DeWael to Ville suggest to me she’s trying to hide something.
JD: Sharon and I both looked at this and said. ‘Something’s really wrong with this story’.
So at this point, the book had been taken over by a French publisher. And it was a huge hit. I was published in 20 languages. She was speaking to school children, all over the French speaking world.
Marie-Claire Mommer. (The School teacher) In 2005, I was planning on creating a professor of psychology, a project on this young child who experienced all these adventures. The project became a huge magnificent exhibition. Then we had the idea of to try and bring her to Belgium.
We watched her get out of the train. It was a fascinating sight. She was dressed in blue, like a shining canary, with all its colours. With two, no three, big suitcases.
She came towards me all radiant and beaming. Right away, she exhibits a very dynamic character. Very welcoming. And very generous.
When Misha entered the exhibition she collapsed.
‘I was not warned of this. So when I visited the exhibition, I burst into tears. Because it touched me very deeply.’
She was so delighted to be there. But on the other hand, we saw the sadness come out. And the tears, the tears, the tears. It was very emotional.
JR: in the book, Misha says her parents were arrested by the Nazis and deported. Although she didn’t know their surname. Their names were GERUSHA and REUVEN. Evelyne? Said I have access to the Nazi records of deportation. I’ll take those records and see if I can find them. If they were deported, almost simultaneously with those names.
. When we examined the deportation list, we found they were not deported as a husband and wife.
War Victims Archive, Brussels.
Evelyne Haendel, During the war, the French/Belgian committee had made a list of hidden children. With the name of their rescuer and the name of their parents. There was a real, real, risk these archives would be taken by the Nazis. Children would be found. And killed. But it was quite clever. There were four different booklets. You needed all four to find the child. But all four of them were in different places. If any Nazi found a single booklet, they would not be able to trace the child. But, at the end of the war, with the four different booklets, there would have been a way to find whose child it was. And so I searched for Misha’s parents. No names of the parents. So, I knew there was something wrong. And in the list of hidden children, they didn’t have Misha. And they didn’t have DeWael. That is for sure. She was not mentioned.
Marie-Claire Mommer. (The School teacher) Misha’s book had a snowball effect. Already millions of books had been sold. Thereafter we had to work to prepare the conferences. And get her to them. So we were always together. At that time, she would often come back to our home. She would eat with us. She was like a member of the family. We had dozens of events. Of course, we took her to them. She was always welcomed by the organisers. And always with a lot of friendliness and kindness. Everyone left the conferences dazzled by this character.
War Victims Archive, Brussels.
Evelyne Haendel. I was stuck, really. No findings. But no proof. So that was the point that I thought that she could have been undocumented. Some children were hidden. But not necessarily through organisations. As extraordinary as her story was, I had to keep in mind she might have been a Jewish, hidden child.
Jane Daniels. So now the stakes go up. I will feel a lot of guilt, if this story is true. I’m digging into her past. And what if it is true. How unfair to challenge her. And even if it’s mostly true, but not quite…How unfair to disrespect what she’s been through. I felt I’d been cast in a play, I didn’t audition for. I didn’t want the part. I didn’t want to be in the play. It was devouring me. This had taken over my own life. But I’ve had this judgement hanging over my head for quite a while, I’d lost the appeal. I was looking at the possibility of being completely wiped out. So it was starting to get pretty uncomfortable. But I needed to get to the truth. So when we had no Jewish records to support her story, the question is, maybe she’s not even Jewish?
Evelyne Haendel, If she’s not Jewish, then she’s most likely Catholic.
Jane Daniels. If she was Catholic, perhaps she was baptised.
Sharon Sergeant, Misha’s bank records from the trial, said she was born in 1937, her mother’s maiden name was Donneville. And she was born in Etterb. A suburb of Brussels.
Evelyne Haendel: So in Etterb, I searched for different churches.
JD. The first, the second, the third had burned to the ground. I thought, we’re probably sunk now. Because the records were probably destroyed in the fire.
Evelyne Haendel. But the office of the Presbytery was in an adjoining street.
JD. They were preserved. So Evelyne was looking date by date by date. All the children born in that parish.
Evelyne Haendel, I knew two things, her date of birth, 12th May 1937. And the mother’s name. And in that book, I found her. Monique Emesfina Josipshiux De Wael. Daughter of Roberti Floneca Ernesti and Josiphina Germane Barbashei Donil.
JD the revelation was that Misha’s father’s name was De Wael. So her real name was Monique De Wael. It wasn’t a name given to her by foster parents to hide her from the Nazis. It seems she was born Monique De Wael. She was a Catholic. She was baptised Catholic. Her father was De Wael. However, it wasn’t proof conclusive. Because in those days they used to take names of dead children and give them to Jewish children, by way of hiding them.
Sharon Sergeant. It was possible that the DeWaels had taken in a Jewish child and their own child had died.
Evelyne Haendel. I needed further proof.
[what did you do next?]
Off the record, this is a good question.
JR. Evelyne figured out, where can I find this proof?
Evelyne Haendel. She would have gone to school.
Sharon Sergeant: I tried to find the school, in the tram track she mentioned in her book.
Evelyne Haendel: And as I walked by, I had the school. The door was open. I walked in and asked if they had any someone with the name of Monique De Wael.
JR. So, we’re biting our fingernails to the point where they’re actually bleeding, waiting for this information. Either we’ve got the records or we don’t. (2/9/37). That was the final proof. Both the Baptismal certificate and her attendance in the school.
JR. I got to the phone and I picked up the phone and it was Sharon. And Sharon could hardly contain her excitement. Practically, screamed into the phone, we’ve got the records. We’ve got the records. That was the smoking gun. Now I’ve caught her in a lie. My life had been contaminated by a whole spiderweb of lies. And here it is. Exposed as a hoax. Now, I thought, the whole story she tells in the book, falls apart. At that point I knew she was not who she said she was. Not only was she not a Jewish child hiding in the forest from the Nazis. She was a Catholic child, safely enrolled in school. She wasn’t anywhere near wolves. She was playing to an audience. She knew exactly what she was doing. Now we can see this not just a little white fib. This is a massive conspiracy over 20 years to propagate what was a complete falsehood. This was not the real Misha.
Evelyne Haendel: I had many feelings. I felt angry. I felt disgusted. I just saw the fake history. The fake identity. A way to get money out of the Holocaust. Somebody stole a very painful part of my life. I felt it for myself. And for all the hidden children. The dead children. Through the Holocaust. For all the parents. For my parents. But, in fact, for all the Jewish community.
JR. At the point we got the records, the book was a huge bestseller, all over Europe. And the book had just came out. And the movie was called. ‘Surviving with Wolves’.
It had Premiered in Paris, ‘Based on a true story’. And here we’re holding these documents. So we said, let’s go with this. Let’s put it on my blog. And email somebody over in Belgium.
The next morning it had broken, front page of all the newspapers. We had fired a truth bomb. It had landed. The whole fake thing blew up.
Jonni Soffron, I went home. Put her name on my computer. And there it was. And it felt like my blood just drained from my body. You know, how can this possibly be? I was angry. I was sad. I was hurt. I felt betrayed. I felt used. She became that close to me that when we had a litter of pubs born, we named one, Misha. It was just heart-breaking. Absolutely heart-breaking. We were duped. Just like the rest of you.
Karen Schulman. That fact that she lied, made me cry. Misha played on sympathy. That’s how she became a wonderful storyteller. Sympathy. That’s how Misha was able to fool people. Sympathy.
Pat Cunnigham: I burst into tears. I felt so taken advantage of and lied to. The lies and bitterness came out. Some of my neighbours did give her quite large sums of money. We’re talking $25000, $30 000. To help her save the house. She’d go to the Rabbis and ask for donations from the temple. The entire community. The neighbours than knew her. Nobody talked to, that I know of. Everybody felt betrayed. Yeh…
Marie-Claire Mommer. There was a kind of anger that rose up in me, which never left me. The students that took part in the project. The day I entered the class there was a state of revolt. You have to imagine a pack in revolt. Rants. Tears. Cries. They were standing up on the benches. I was no longer in control. And I usually contained my students very well. I contacted Misha straight away. I wanted to be honest and authentic with her. But she said, ‘Don’t worry, it must be the doing of the publisher in America.’
Jane Daniels. And then came the next twist in the story. It couldn’t have got more bizarre. I said to myself I could never make up this plot, if I did, they would say, this is preposterous. This would not happen.
Marc Metdepinnigen (The Journalist) Every journalist dreams of a scoop. The question for me was if the story was false, what is the real story? What I did was simply go through the Brussel’s phone book, where there are approximately 400 De Waels. So I started going through them. One after the other. And at the forty-third or forty-forth, I stumbled across a woman Emma De Wael. My meeting with Emma, Misha’s aunt was extraordinary.
Marc Metdepinnigen :She didn’t go in search of her parents?
Emma De Wael: Good god, no. Her grandfather and grandmother
Marc Metdepinnigen. She told me her niece had always been delusional. That she would create imaginary worlds for herself.
Emma De Wael: I went and fetched her regularly with the number 56 tram to Anderlecht and brought her to Schaerbeek. In the evenings I took her back to Uncle Ernest.
Marc Metdepinnigen, Emma De Wael told the truth about what happens during war. What happened to Robert, Misha Defonseca’s father.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) Robert De Wael worked at Schaerbeek Town Hall. He was really very patriotic. And very engaged with his role as a reserve officer.
Marc Metdepinnigen, I met Jean-Philippe Tondeur by chance. But he had a lot of documentation on Misha Defonseca’s father. So I went to consult Robert De Wael’s file.
On 10th May, 1940. Germans invade Belgium. They crush the Belgian army during an 18 day campaign. The king surrenders. And Belgium is occupied. Robert De Wael joins the Resistance. And begins to recruit resistance fighters. As a resistance fighter, Robert DeWael was involved in gathering weapons. Activating intelligence networks. And transmitting intelligence to the Belgian government which had gone to London.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) Robert De Wael wasn’t very discrete about his activities for the resistance.
Emma De Wael, he had a loose tongue, because he was proud of what he was doing. Because I knew he had secret documents. He even showed them to us at home. My father told him to be careful. That he was becoming careless. He risked address.
Marc Metdepinnigen. He was denounced by a Nazi collaborator. And was quickly arrested. Robert DeWael, his wife and 41 resistance fighters were arrested. And are deported to Germany. And sent to Bruweiler prison in Cologne. The Cologne prison had a very harsh regime. He’s interrogated by the Gestapo.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) Robert De Wael starts to scream. He cracks. He made a deal in the Cologne prison. This deal involved him handing over the names of his fellow resistance fighters in exchange for his wife being protected. And to once again see his daughter, Misha.
In 1942, after betraying his fellow officers, as the Germans demanded of him. Robert De Wael got one last opportunity to see his daughter. And that would be the end for Robert De Wael. He would later be deported. Robert and his wife Germaine would die in the camps.
Emma De Wael. We called her the traitor’s daughter. Because it was said that her father sided with the Germans.
Jean-Philippe Tondeur (Military Historian) The Municipal would prescribe a plaque with the resistance fighters who died during the war. Robert De Wael, whose name was listed last, was later erased.
Marc Metdepinnigen, on 28th February 2008, when things became very clear, we published Robert De Wael’s whole story. The betrayal. The falseness of the story. Misha Defonseca’s account. And in the hours that followed a statement was issued. This was Misha Defonseca’s statement:
‘They called me the “Traitor’s daughter” because my father was suspected of having spoken under torture. This book, this story, is mine. It is not the actual reality, but it was my reality. My way of surviving. I ask forgiveness. All I ever wanted was to exorcise my suffering.’
‘I felt so rejected. But I could not explain it to myself. Neither to my grandmother of my grandfather. I am not the girl I thought, but there are times I hesitate. I say to myself, “Did I or did I not, experience it?” I have to think.’
‘Particularly, with animals, I can still see myself, rolling on the ground with wolves.’
‘Have you seen my lovely picture with wolves? They will always be my wolves. I will be at their side. Even if I know the truth now. I am at their side. I got into a bubble. A world of my own. And this world of mine was filled with animals. Animals that defended me against humans.
Candy O’Terre. The Radio Host. Listening back to this intro the first words in this were ‘sometimes a story is so astonishing, it’s unbelievable. That’s very astonishing. Those were the first words. Then it turns out, it’s not true.’
I believed her. I didn’t see anything in those eyes that made me think she wasn’t telling me the truth. All I was doing was looking for more truth to confirm what I already believed. In hindsight, it’s chilling. But for me, at that moment, I was so respectful of someone’s experience of what we think of as citizens of the world will recognise was the darkest time of the history of the world. Far be it from me to question her.
Deborah Dwork (The Holocaust Historian) When it comes to questioning Holocaust survivors, one brings a great deal of diffidence to those claims. But the danger of believing everything puts history and the historical reality of genuine survivors at risk.
In December 1996, I got a letter and a manuscript from Jane Daniel. That manuscript was Misha (a memoir) during the Holocaust. I called Jane Daniel to explain why this narrative just didn’t work. I said to her, I would not publish this book. I have thought over the years why Jane Daniels decided to go forward with publication. She clearly hoped that the manuscript was true. But she clearly worried, it was not. I think it was greed that powered her, this narrative. For Misha and Jane Daniels. And then, as those sales’ figures rose, more and more people accepted the memoir as real. As true.
JD: I admit it. I created this monster. I created this monster with enormous sympathy as a character. Somebody that had suffered terribly. Somebody that deserved respect. In fact. Awe. And nobody wants to admit they were tricked. And I admit it, I was tricked by her. I believed her. Everybody was seduced. The American jurisprudence system. The judges. The juries. We were all seduced by this story.
Evelyne Haendel: It’s human to believe. Creditability is something else. It’s your need to question things or not that will help you discern what’s true and what’s not.
Marie-Claire Mommer: I have enough distance to take a more analytical look at Misha’s character. Misha created a world for herself. A world of her own belief. Misha sought refuge in fantasy and with time she slowly becomes a character in her own story.
Deborah Dwork (The Holocaust Historian) I think we would like to believe that Misha Defonseca believed. That she was a survivor of the Holocaust. I think we would like to believe that we were not so naïve. That we believed it, because she believed it. And we would even like to believe that this narrative has a redemptive purpose. Because it made right the wrong of her childhood. I think it’s nonsense. There is no redemptive purpose. We were so naïve. It was all a fabrication.
Evelyne Haendel: I feel about her today, (shrug) mixed emotions. I think she was a protagonist in the story but she was not alone. There were other people that helped to make this biography be a bestseller. Just talking about her right now, the search and the years that went by- some pity, ah, some repulsion, maybe it’s too hard a word, but I’m feeling some understanding. As a child it must have been very difficult for her after the war. The fact her father was called a traitor. A collaborator. She is both the victim and the villain. She’s both. She is both in the story.
The real Misha Defonseca still lives in Massachusetts with her husband and animals.
She chose not to be interviewed for this film.
The financial penalty against Jane Daniels was partially overturned.
‘The Island of Jersey is a self-governing possession of the British Crown separate from the UK with its own laws, financial rules and Parliament.’
Some of its most influential figures are appointed by the Queen.
When secrets from its past surfaced in 2007 they revealed deep distrust and division between those now running the island, proud of Jersey’s reputation.
And those who saw themselves as underdogs campaigning for change.’
Whose side are you on, the have-nots or the have-yachts? That’s the set-up for this documentary. Let’s deal the money issue first. Jersey launders money. It’s an offshore City of London. A New York Times headline, 6th November 2017 for example showed. ‘After a Tax Crackdown, Apple found a new shelter for its profits. Island of Jersey.’ Leaving billions of dollars untouched by the US government.
Baker McKenzie [Apple, the richest company in the world] asked for assurances that the local political climate would remain friendly. Are there any developments suggesting that the law may change in an unfavourable way in the near future?
New York Times headline 6th November 2017 shows how this works. Apple decided that its new offshore tax structure should use Appleby’s office in Jersey. Jersey makes its own laws and is not subject to most European Union legislation, making it a popular tax haven.
John Christensen, Former Economic Advisor to Jersey tells the viewers.
We can only guess the assets hidden here as half a trillion US dollars. The wealth itself is not in Jersey. There’s very little investment in Jersey. Just wealth that is booked there. But invested elsewhere. Very often in real estate in Britain or Europe or…North America.
Establishing Jersey is a tax-dodgers paradise is the easy part of the narrative. Secrecy is part of the package, but it’s called discretion. Most of Jersey’s 88 000 residents have little or no say in the way the island is governed.
John Chirstensen. One of the things I discovered was the government was captive to the finance industry. They were saying, we want this law. And it would go through parliament on the nod because…
The finance industry loved it. You weren’t going to get challenged. You always had the same people at the top. And those people were very amenable to bringing forward pieces of legislation which they themselves commissioned. [the blank cheque]
Wendy Kinnard, (former Home Affairs Minister). Any small island has to find its niche. We are very reliant on the finance industry, and all that goes with that.
Christensen: that ties in with what we call the Jersey wave. Don’t ask inconvenient questions. These places do not like to have publicity unless it’s favourable publicity.
Wendy Kinnard. My experience, anything to do with finance went to the top of the list in terms of priority. If you take the sex offenders, I began doing some work on that in 1973. I saw 27 drafts turned around in order to try and get this legislation. At the time of Operation Triangle we had no significant pieces of legislation in terms of child protection. Contrasted with financial legislation because our economy is based on financial services
Neil McMurry (Citizen Journalist) on a boat. ‘This is my escape. I don’t drink. I don’t drug. (I sail). What about the victims and survivors and some say it’s the lucky ones that died. If I had a choice between knowing what I know now. And not knowing, if I could turn the clock back…I wish I could. I wouldn’t want to know what I know.
Graham Powell, Former Chief of Police on Jersey. Many people said don’t take an island job, they always end in tears. Unless you can afford to walk away from it. Well, I could, but didn’t.
I took advice from an old officer. He told me what the politicians expect you to do is lock up the drunks on a Saturday night. Catch a few burglars. Don’t look for trouble.
Lenny Harper, former Deputy Chief of Police, Jersey. Impeccable references from the Met. My first 6 weeks were spent getting to know people. The head of the law department told me he was convinced there was a paedophile ring operating in the island, but he couldn’t get any persecutions. I examined cold case files. There had already been several trials involving the sexual assault of children and one name kept popping up: Haut de la Garenne children’s home.
Haut de la Garenne. Jersey State Children’s Home 1867-1986. Gurren mean rabbit warren. We had a lot of children living in the home. Not only from Jersey, but Guernsey as well. You had a lot of French immigrants that came to work on the farms. They were poor people as well. They found no accommodation for their children. So they ended up in the Home.
Kevin O’Connell, speaking 2008. Myself and some other lads had broken into a shop and we’d stole some cigarettes and chocolate and some other things. So I was sent to Haut de la Garenne. I was there between 1963-1964.
It was run by a man called Colin Tilbrook. Headmaster, during the 1960s he ran it like an army camp.
He was a very aggressive man. He didn’t speak to you. He shouted at you.
A particular case file in which there were gaps. I was given excuses why that was the case. When we looked into it, those excuses fell apart. That was the real beginning of Operation Rectangle.
The few victims I met totally impressed me with their sincerity.
Marina Cremin. I was born in Jersey to Irish parents. They were from Cork. When I was five I went to Haut de la Garenne.
Cremin: I was terrified that he’d (Tilbrook the headmaster) call me into his little office. Because I knew what he wanted. It wasn’t just myself. He used to call on other children as well. We used to say we’re going to tell somebody. And he used to say, ‘go ahead, nobody is going to believe you’.
Cremin: He would tell me what to do. He would take his belt off and make it do a flicking noise. And he would use that on me if I didn’t do what I was told. He’d always have a pillow under his arm. If you screamed out, he’d put the pillow over your face. And tell you to be quiet.
Chief Constable: Operational officers are saying there is history of abuse. We’re getting snippets of it from other enquiries.
Senator Stuart Syvret (former) Health and Social Services Minster: Jersey is a very small community. He told the chief of police if you don’t do something I’m going to whistle blow. In 2006 word reached me about abuse that was still going on and had been covered up in the past. I began making my own enquires. A failure of the Island’s government and to protect its population. This went back decades and decades. A lot of meetings I was having with survivors was deeply harrowing.
Frank Walker Chief Minister 2005-2008.
I’m a life-long Jersey resident. And I served in Jersey’s government for 18 years. Everybody believes child abuse takes place, but not here, or in a very limited way.
Wendy Kinnard (former Home Affairs Minister). At the time of Operation Rectangle, my role was oversight of the police service. I was in a meeting with the chief and deputy chief of police and when I was briefed about how far they had got in terms of the covert operation, and now they felt other ministers had to be told, in particular, the Chief Minister. And that very soon we would have to make the whole operation public. I did say, they won’t like this one little bit and we could all lose our jobs over this.
Stuart Syvret made an announcement in relation to Child Protection. 16th July 2007: ‘We are failing badly in this area. And I’m probably going to seek to initiate a major independent review of the whole sphere of child welfare and child protection in Jersey.’
Chief Minister found that unacceptable and tabled a motion that they get rid of Syvret.
Syvret: By saying these things I was bullying staff. Pretext of having me sacked.
Chief Constable, Graham Powell: He was thrown out of office and subject to negative briefing in the media. I was horrified and made clear I wasn’t getting involved in this sordid business (of name calling).
Stuart Syvret. There’s a tremendous amount of money here. Wealth. The elite want the status-quo to remain.
Deputy Chief Constable, Lenny Harper. We knew that Stuart had been canvassing public opinion, and we felt we had to go public ourselves. We were completely open with the media and told them we would not tolerate any interference from Jersey politicians.
Syvret: A huge weight lifted from my shoulders.
Graham Powell: I wondered if the phone would ring. Within a week or two we had hundreds of victims coming forward.
Peter Hannaford speaking in 2008. You were subject to constant abuse. It was begun with the rape of older kids. Encouraged by the staff. It was constant, every night. You were scared to go to bed, because you didn’t know if you were going to be the one to get hit or if it’d be someone else.
Carl Denning, speaking in 2008. There was an occasion in the sickbay when I was made to fondle another boy. If you didn’t, you were threatened you wouldn’t come out of there alive.
Jean Neil. Grouville Home for Girls. Speaking in 2017. I was told that anything that happened in the home, you don’t tell anybody else. Because nobody would ever believe you. And if you do let it slip out, the punishment is you will have your tongue cut out. Some of the girls got pregnant. They’d get the baby taken away from them. And my question is, and always has been, where was the authorities and what where they doing?
5th December 2007. Syvret, As senior senator I gave my (Christmas) speech
Voice of Sir Philip Bailhache, Baliff of Jersey1995-2009. Cuts him off.
We have a dysfunctional democracy. The real power sits with Crown appointees.
The Queen appoints: Attorney General (Crown Prosecution), Baliff (Chief Judge and Speaker of Parliament) and Lieutenant Governor.
Speaker controls debates in Parliament. Who can speak. Who can’t speak. What questions can be asked.
Deputy There were also statements from people at the home that children had been dragged from their beds and were never seen again.
Statements saying staff had chased one child along the corridor that had then leapt out the window. And that child was never seen again.
Then we had a solicitor who approached us who had a client that said he saw a dead body.
I heard a story about dead bodies and rapes and beatings. And I made a disclosure to the police as you’d expect somebody in my position to do.
Chief Constable: We felt we had to search. And ridiculous as it may seem now, we felt that we could do it discretely.
19th February 2008.
Deputy Constable: we put Eddie, the cadaver dog into the ground. He reacted very positively in an area of the home. Anthropologists should dig at that spot. The next morning I was at home when I got the phone call, a human bone had been found. Forensic anthropologist described as a human skull.
James Perchard, Former Jersey Senator. My family has farmed here for generations. Perhaps even the 12th Century. I honestly knew nothing of the ill-treatment of children. It didn’t get to me.
Neil McMurray, Citizen Journalist. There’s a presumption that anyone living in Jersey is a millionaire. Well, that’s not true. There’s the haves and the have-yachts. There’s a lot of poverty in Jersey. The governments predominantly conservative run by the rich for the rich. So some noise can be made in our Parliament by the socialists. But they’ve got no power. We thought, brilliant. We’ve got a politician that represents us. Stuart. A lot of survivors came forward because of him.
Voice of Sir Philip Bailhache, Baliff of Jersey, unjustified denigration of Jersey is the real scandal.
Group of survivors met outside the home and challenged his statement. Confirmed abuse took place for years.
Sir Philip Bailhache apologised for what he said nine years later, saying his words were ill-chosen.
Neil McMurray I was being fobbed off. Lied to and it was sickening what Sir Philip Bailhache did. I started blogging. Mainly to ministers the media. Basically, they weren’t replying to me. It was called voice for children.
Sack Walker, reinstate Sylvert.
Brian Flynn former Sun journalist. As an outsider it seemed to me a lot of people didn’t trust the government who were in control and anybody that rocked the boat, anybody that caused problems, wasn’t welcome. If you weren’t among the cabal running the island, you were voiceless. This wasn’t a story that needed to be sensationalised. They were sensational enough and needed to be investigated.
Carrie Modral. Jersey Care Leavers’ Association. Care leavers are adults who lived in children’s homes if not all, or most of their lives. The abuse had been rattling around for years. As individuals they had been shut down. But as a collective group, this was the perfect opportunity to escalate.
Kinnard. There were two camps in how we should deal with Operation Rectangle. Stuart Syvret was very keen that everything should be made public (transparency). And you’d the chief minister and many of the council of ministers who felt it was important to keep the lid on this [important to who and for what reasons?]
The reputation of Jersey should be preserved at all costs. And any negative publicity would likely have a detrimental effect on our economy.
Chief Constable: I was having my ear bent by senior politicians. It wasn’t about who were these people and how can we get their collars felt. That wasn’t the tone of conversation. It was look at all those horrible things newspapers are saying about us. How can we put a stop to all this?
More than 160 people came forward to claim they were abused. Two bodies found.
O’Connell. There was a member of staff that would come for me in the middle of the night, bang my head as we walked along the corridor. He’d take me to the cellar, put me in the bath and sexually abuse me. He’d leave me there after he’d satisfied himself.
Brian Flynn, former Sun journalist. One of the things that came up time after time was Jimmy Saville had visited the Island. Visited the home. Before he was unmasked. What was striking was the vehemence which he denied going to Haut La Garrene.
Cremin: I told the police about Jimmy Saville in 2007. But he denied ever having been at the Home. I said my sister is in a photograph with him.
Christensen (economist) this is the worst kind of public relations disaster. As they say on Jersey, they don’t want to look under that stone. But when the headlines say this is the centre of child abuse, no banks, no accounting firms want to be associated with a place that has a long history of child abuse that has been largely ignored.
It was a byword for cruelty in the 1960s when I was growing up. We were threatened with if you don’t behave we’re sending you to La Garrene.
In 2007 The UK press particularly damning of Jersey and the cover-up.
David Rose, Mail on Sunday. A friend of mine phoned me and said have you heard about these children murdered in a children’s home? Well, there’s a guy in Oxford called Tom Higham who you should talk to, because he’s got some very interesting information. It was later afternoon, and he said come round now, and I did. I went round to his lab. We’ve been trying to tell the police in Jersey this for weeks, but they just won’t listen. They’ve been coming out with all this stuff in the media, and we’ve had enough. It’s time the public learned the truth.
I got Lenny to admit there were people that had reservations.
18th May 2008. Then I did the story that Sunday.
I’d already written a few articles questioning these very heavy moral panic type investigations. Especially in children’s homes and schools. And when the Jersey story started I was immediately very sceptical, thinking really?
eg Bryan Ely, 67, in Dartmoor, alleged to have attacked children.
I should tell you, I’m a Jimmy Saville sceptic too. What I do know is that some to those that claimed to be abused were lying to claim compensation. And I say that without any hesitation. They just made it up.
Headline: It’s official. There was no child abuse in Jersey.
Prof. Tom Higham, Oxford University. We were sent this sample in March 2008. It too probably 40 seconds to realise what I had in my hand. Lenny Harper said it’s the piece of a child’s skull. It’s no such thing. It’s a piece of coconut shell.
DC. Lenny Harper. Collagen is only found in mammals. There was no trail of testing. The package wasn’t booked in or logged. No control over it, whatsoever. But what we didn’t realise at that stage was that it would be used as a stick to beat us with.
Frank Walker Chief Minister 2005-2008. I think the biggest turning point was the revelation on the Mail on Sunday by David Rose. It was both welcome news and a shock. Then the trust in the police leadership came into question. (Harper and Graham Powell).
What I saw was a fast-moving investigation that involved leads that Harper wasn’t afraid to follow. In real time. It’s easy to say he got them wrong. But he was trying to disseminate the information in a way that signalled to those abused that this time stones weren’t being left unturned.
DC Harper. Rose had this history of being very anti-child abuse. Cites Lord Jenner’s report, for example, and a witness that admits to lying about a care home boss.
We’ve took over 150 tons of material which is all being itemised. We’ve recovered 65 children’s teeth.
Wendy Kinnard: there was criticism that Harper held up to the media a coin that was a Jersey coin and not an English coin. This again was damaging the reputation of the island. Then I got phone calls from the senior minister saying get rid of Lenny Harper. Take him off the tv screens. He should be removed from even Operation Rectangle. He became the folk demon by those that wanted the child abuse enquiry to go away.
Before I resigned
I’d a difficult time. I did feel very bullied on occasions. Receiving emails from the Chief Minister saying there are calls for your resignation. I felt that I was being put in a position that I was being removed, in the same way Senator Syvret was removed. So I resigned.
I was advised that I should sign over my powers (of oversight to the police and operation Rectangle) to my assistant minister Andrew Lewis. I just felt that I was being absolutely side-lined. Andrew Lewis felt the same way that I did about Chief Constable Powell. That he was doing a good job.
News report. The officer in charge may never know that children here were murdered. Even though they found the partial remains of at least five children. Experts have difficulty dating the teeth and bones aged between four and eleven
The removal of Lenny had to happen. His investigation was out of control.
The detective, who led the enquiry, retires next week (news report). Case unsolved.
31st July 2008. DC Harper. In many ways the community is no different from anywhere else. What has happened doesn’t make Jersey unique or evil. And what has happened, I think the people has responded magnificently.
News report the teeth and bones found here aren’t pieces of evidence. They’re pieces of children. Pieces of vulnerable lives of children whose stories will now never be told.
Chief Constable. Lenny left and David Warcup, his successor and my successor was appointed. Then we had the appointment of Gradwell, who was going to be senior investigating officer. I could see the wolves circling. As long as Wendy Kinnard was there…she fell. I thought you’re on your own now. So as things when they developed didn’t come as a surprise.
David Warcup, Acting Chief of Police. We’ll use every effort to bring this enquiry to a proper conclusion.
Andrew Lewis, Home Affairs Manager (after Kinnard’s resignation).
I was under considerable pressure and from the Chief Minister of the day, Frank Walker. With remarks being thrown around the table from the Council of Minister consistently. ‘You’ve got to get rid of that bloke. You’ve got to sack him’.
Frank Walker Chief Minister 2005-2008. I had no doubt at all Graham Powell had to go. I would have liked him to come out of this with great credit. And he could have done, had he not let Lenny run riot with media briefings.
A legal review found the suspension was flawed and unfair but no part of an attempt to block the investigation.
Graham Powell’s handling of Operation Rectangle was later criticised in a report by another police force.
12th November 2008. David Warcup, Acting Chief of Police The forensic recoveries do not indicate there has been murder of children or other people at La Garrene. Nor do we believe that bodies have been buried, destroyed or hidden.
Mick Gradwell, Senior Investigating Officer. There are no reported people missing. There are no credible allegations of murder. There is no suspect for murder. And there is no specific time period for murder. 170 pieces of bone, which were mainly animal, were found in the area. Three fragments that are possibly human. The biggest piece is 25mm long. 65 teeth found in the floorboards. One elsewhere. These teeth have the appearance of being shed naturally. The officer is about five-foot five tall. It’s not a dungeon and it’s not a cellar.
James Perchard, Former Jersey Senator. There were specialist PR people brought in to help protect Jersey’s image. I suspect that’s what happens when such terrible, terrible news has been made public.
Headlines rebound and reboot. Media: Main witness had a history of psychotic fantasy and alcoholism. 2) Detectives took lavish meals in London restaurant.
Carrie Modral. The media tried to sensationalise what was going on. Then trash what they sensationalised. It wasn’t just one day. It spanned over a couple of weeks. As if this was all premeditated. I was angry with the care leavers, because they thought, right, we’ll never get justice. Everything we were working towards seemed to be sabotaged.
DC Lenny. Graham was suspended. I was side-lined. That was when Neil and Rico came in.
Rico Sorda, Citizen Journalist. It was clear to anyone that Graham Powell was shafted. By the establishment of Jersey, because he had the audacity to let Lenny investigate
The editorials prior to that had praised Lenny and Graham but afterwards Jersey Evening Post headlines ran along the lines of Celebrity Lifestyle of Lenny Harper and his officers. Meals in top-class.
We went up there and filmed them. What difference does it make if you call them cellars or vaults? We measured them –Bob Hill measured them-and they were six-foot deep. There’s certainly enough room down there for a child abuser to do what he wanted.
Neil: Evidence not audited when it left Jersey. How does a piece of skull become a piece of coconut? It came back a different texture, size and colour.
Forensic Anthropologist Report. Since I initially examined the fragment, it had dried out considerably and changed in colour, texture and weight.
Could it have been switched? Nobody answered that question. It was ignored.
Carrie Modral, we called a meeting and invited Mick Gradwell along. He said you better drop your case. None of you are going to get what you want.
We were so angry with his response. We had to ask him to leave. And it wasn’t about a piece of coconut. It was about children being systematically abused. Time after time after time and ignored.
Dannie Jarman (resident) Blanche Pierre Children’s Home. I didn’t want to go through with it in the first place. Then I managed to build up the courage to speak out and come out what had happened. There was evidence there to prove what happened, did happen. A lot of it was never brought up in court.
Houseparents subjected children to physical and sexual abuse.
Neil: I tried asking many questions of our politicians and they ignored me and ignore me. I had to go out and doorstep them.
Wendy Kinnard. I remained concerned for the victims that were obviously hurting. 11 or 12 cases dropped. On the other hand the attorney general was concerned he didn’t want to take forward prosecutions he wasn’t sure he was going to win.
Attorney General of Jersey 2000-2009, Sir William Bailhache, revealed there will be no further action against the couple arrested in June as part of the enquiry (Blanche Pierre Children’s Home).
Sir Philip Bailhache Bailiff of Jersey 1995-2009. My brother became Attorney General after me, one remove. And for some that was evidence of corruption. Two brothers in Crown Office and that was ipso facto corrupt.
The reason for this mistrust rested with the police and children’s services and not with his office.
Some pretty middle of the road people convicted of offences, but no one of any stature was ever taken to court. Colin Tilbrook, the pillow man, his step daughter came out and said he raped her when she was ten. He’s dead now. Jimmy Saville dead. Wilfred Krichefski, died in 1974 was a former senator. Jeff Le Marchand. This wasn’t one bad apple.
Operation Rectangle identified 192 victims and 121 living suspects. 30 suspects were already dead.
Eight people were tried in the Jersey courts, with seven successful prosecutions.
Frank Walker Chief Minister 2005-2008. Sylvert was daily denouncing the service we were providing. That pressure was incredible. To have this constant criticism, at that time.
Sylvet. At a press conference he told me to go and top myself. And at a press conference some months ago he told me to go away and slit my wrists. Now I imagine anyone expressing those views their position as health minister would be untenable.
I said something I shouldn’t have, but under massive provocation. Perhaps I should have punched him. I paid the price politically. I resigned a few months later and didn’t see re-election.
Sylvert. One morning three cars with six policeman drew up outside my house. They arrested me for breaking the data protection law. This was them branding the fist. As they’d made an example of Graham Powell. They wanted to terrify everyone. And make them keep their mouths shut. And their heads down and not rock the boat. My god if these people can do that to a police chief and a senior senator. Then what chance have we got?
Stuart Syvret’s jail terms were as a result of repeatedly failing to comply with court orders to stop publically accusing individuals of serious crimes online.
Two three months periods so far. I fully expect to be jailed again.
Wendy Kinnard. I think the role of the blogs was incredibly significant. Neil’s and Rico Sorda’s blogs. And I don’t think that without them we would have got the care enquiry.
A public enquiry into Jersey care homes was finally scheduled to start in 2014, six years after it was promised.
Carrie Modral, Jersey Care Leavers’Association. It really was a rollercoster. To have this enquiry up and running. A collective effort of keeping it alive. And that was the main thing. After each government, it died. Keep it in the media, to get where we got. At the beginning it was just La Garrene, but we had to get it to include all, including foster homes.
eg Blanche Pierre Children’s Home. La Preference Children’s home. Heathfield Children’s Home.
4 objectives, i) apology to all those that had suffered as children. (ii) to gain a sense of identity, through records so people knew where exactly they came from. Where they went to. (iii) redress some form of compensation (iv) enquiry into how all these things were allowed to happen.
Marina Cremin visits graveyard. Peter Hannaford (dead) he was in Haut de la Garenne, terribly sexually abused. Nearly every night he was abused. He was such a heavy drinker. It’s just so sad.
Many of the children in the home, committed suicide, or died of drugs or alcohol.
Carrie Modral, You’ve got victims and survivors. Victims are those that can’t let go. Whether it was ten or fifty years ago, they’re still living it and it’s a living nightmare for them. They’ve got drink addiction, they’ve got drug addiction. They can’t work. They’ve got emotional problems.
Survivors, like myself, who try and get on with their life. And try and not let what happened to you as a child dictate how you live as an adult. You try and rise above it.
Kevin O’Connell. I was too frightened to tell anybody. I spoke about it to my brother. He experience exactly what I went through. And it was just too much. It ended up he hung himself. I firmly believe that was because of the abuse, the sexual abuse. He was only 40.
Carrie Modral. They are not going to get their day in court. But they are going to get their story hear. I believe that is so important. And it had a right for it to be made public as well.
22nd July 2014, Start of the Public Enquiry.
Neil; One adult told how he was raped as an eight-year-old child and his anus bled for days. The care assistant packed it with toilet roll, but they had to take him to hospital.
Frank Walker Chief Minister 2005-2008, did I have a duty to protect Jersey’s reputation? Of course I did. But my prime duty, motivation, was to get at the truth. To protect the children and prosecute the criminals. We had nothing to hide and we wanted everone in Jersey and further afield to know we had nothing to hide.
3rd July 2017, Public Enquiry: Conclusion. Voice of Frances Oldham QC, Enquiry Panel Chair. We find that there is no doubt that a significant number of children under the care of the state suffered instances of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional neglect. We find it deplorable that the state of Jersey has failed to understand its role as corporate parent. There were no external inspections of children’s homes. Or children’s services. For approxiamately 20 years. No difficult questions asked. This is unacceptable. On the 9th May 2008, Jersey’s Bailiff Philip Ballache made the liberation speech. We cannot accept that he made and I quote, ‘an unformatted juxtaposition of words’. We find the Senator Sylvert highlighted relevant issues about child abuse that needed to be addressed to insure the protection and safety of children in Jersey. We note the suspension of Graham Howe, for alleged past failings. All policing decisions were made conscientiously and properly. We have concluded that there has been no political appetite in Jersey to address social issues regarding the welfare of children.
Children may still be at risk in Jersey. And children in the care system are not receiving he kind or quality of support they need.
Senator Ian Gorst, Chief Minister.
Too often, children were not believed. Unpalatable truths were swept under the carpet. Because it was the easiest thing to do. I am deeply sorry. We did not do, what we should have done. People cared more for the status-quo, for a quiet life, than for children.
The Panel said Frank Walker and the majority of politicians accepted the Attorney General’s advice not to interfere with the investigation.
It concluded that the removal of Graham Powell and Stuart Syvret was not motivated by a wish to cover up abuse
Neil: it’s still ongoing, because nothing has really changed. If you look at the two camps, those that lost their homes, lost their livelihood for speaking out. Yet those that tried to protect the reputation of Jersey have all done pretty well for themselves. They’ve been decorated by the Queen. What about the people who risked their lives? What about the survivors? Don’t they deserve some kind of recognition?
Bob and Marika Tur captured the police chase on the Los Angeles freeways and the arrest of O.J. Simpson as he parked up his Bronco. Streamed live, it was watched by over 80 million- largely-America viewers. They were at the peak of their power. They witnessed the highs and lows of the eighties and nineties in The City of Angels.
It had started off with Bob being just another stringers using police scanners and chasing police cars on the freeway to arrive at the crime scene. Being first was everything. Marika started out as being his front for the footage. She became his wife and junior partner. Every job was their last, and they needed to keep the foot down to make a living.
Even when they had two children, a girl and a boy, the obsessive and consuming nature of their work meant that the children were drafted into their high-speed chases. Bob admitted to big dreams. He’d squirreled away $50 000 and went to look at helicopters. He didn’t have a license, but he learned and got credit for $500 000.
Up in the air, they could be first to accidents and murders and carnages such as a plane disintegrating and coming down on housing. Forest fires brought in the bucks. Floods were good too. Any kind of apocalypse could be monetised in the continuous news cycle.
Bob employed another pilot, Laurence Welk III. He had the right stuff. Business was on the up and up. Marika’s mum ran the office that sold the footage they created to media outlets.
Bob was hovering above the 1992 riots, after being filmed beating Rodney King police officers were cleared of assaulting him.. Shops were looted and set on fire. Traffic was stopped and a man in a truck dragged out and his head kicked like a football. No police were seen, but Bob was. His footage resulted in convictions. He was sent hate mail and a bullet through the post. His children remembered him sleeping with a gun under his pillow, and telling them not to touch it.
But it was difficult to imagine Bob sleeping much. He said he went 90 straight days without a day off. He was an adrenalin junkie. The edge, the excitement, kept him going after bigger and better stories, but his life was imploding. He verbally abused his wife continually. They divorced in 2003.
Another narrative playing in Bob’s head was that he’d turn out like his old man that had beaten him as a child. His father had died at thirty-five with a heart attack. Bob also had a heart attack in his thirties. He admitted to hating his old man, but also of having turned into him. He, finally, took time off and attended The Burning Man festival. That was the place he first met trans-women.
Bob transitioned himself with an operation in Thailand in 2013. Bob became Zoey. He was no longer the big man. She hoped for a quieter life…outside the twenty-four-hour-news-cycle.
Here we have Claud Cockburn’s maxim as a rule of thumb, ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied’.
Director David France’s documentary shows clearly that gay lives don’t matter in Chechnya, or in Russia, generally. Imagine George Michael had went missing at the height of his pomp and Margaret Thatcher (Section 28 legislation) came on the telly and told you, he wasn’t missing. And there was no such thing as gay people in Britain, and if there was ‘They are devils, subhuman.’ They should be taken to their families to be killed.
This is the rhetoric not of Thatcher, but of Ramzan Kadyrov, a Vladamir Putin appointed strongman, leader of the Chechnya Republic telling the public how it is in relation to Chechan’s George Michael and gay community. Imagine, instead of George Floyd being choked to death by policeman while other cops watched him die, you had police trophy footage of men and women beaten to death at the side of the road and raped to show they are dealing with the gay plague, the lesbian problem. Transsexual doesn’t register. Kadyrov labelled men that love men and women that love women, subhuman, not human and that’s the way they are treated, a problem that needs to be solved or eradicated.
Anna Politkovskya, Chechnya: A Dirty War 1999-2002 gives us context. Vladimir Putin’s ‘anti-terrorist campaign’ destroyed the Chechnya capital, Grozny in a way we’ve become familiar with television pictures and reports of the indiscriminate Russian bombing of Syria and Ukraine and the targeting of, for example, hospitals. Terrorists are those on the ground. Chechnyans were labelled by Putin a ‘nation of criminals’. In February 2001, Politkovskya was detained and threatened with rape by senior Russian officers when investigating a Russian torture centre. Perhaps she was naïve to think there was just one. Refugees talked of the indiscriminate murder of children, pregnant women, old men. Putin won the war in Chechnya as he’s winning the war in Syria and the Ukraine. Anna Politkovskya had made enemies in high places. On 7th October 2006 she was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow. Three Chechens were arrested, but acquitted and re-arrested.
Truth does not need to be subversive, but it does need to be true. France shows how it works in Chechnya. After a police raid around 2017, a gay man’s phone was taken from him and examined. We usually use words like forensic her—forensically examined—for links to other crimes to do with drugs or other offences so the authorities can label them criminal. Terrorist is a popular word choice. What the officers found was gay messages and images. Gay men, or women, were taken to Argun Prison in Grozny and tortured, with many beaten to death, reminiscent of Lubyanka and Stalin’s reign of fear. Victims were forced to give names of other gay men or women that the police could roll up, torture and kill, to get other names. This reign of fear France labels a Gay Purge, which is denied by authorities in Grozny and Moscow, using the logic that such people don’t exist and even if they did, there’s no official notification of it or them. While at the same time, Ramzan Kadyrov promises to ‘cleanse the blood’ of Muslims and eliminate those people that don’t exist.
France’s film follows Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transsexual (LGBT) activists in Moscow, such as Olga Baravov, who have helped Chechnyan LGBT victims escape. We follow, for example, Akmad aged 30, (not his real name). Identities are protected by digital remastering because of a risk of reprisals at home in Chechnya. The rescue of ‘Anya’, aged 21, takes the viewer from Moscow to Grozny and had elements of a thriller. ‘Anya’s’ uncle told her he’d out her as a lesbian unless she slept with him and she had to be smuggled out. LGBT activists helped provide an underground ‘railway’ and safe houses. They try and relocate victims of torture and state violence. Asylum seekers of whatever sexuality are not popular (America, as you’d expect, is not on their list). Canada figures strongly. 151 victims processed by LGBT activists in Moscow, 44 men in women seeking asylum when filming took place.
‘Anya’ disappeared from her safe house. Olga Baranov and her child had herself to seek asylum in Canada after been outed by the Russian authorities. Moscow was not safe with its anti-gay rhetoric and threat of reprisals.
Maxim Lapunov, his real name, returned from asylum and challenged the authorities in Chechnya and accused them of state torture, placing a deposition in the Russian Municipal Courthouse. His digital mask protecting his identity was dissolved. The case was, of course, flung out. For Putin acolytes, gays don’t exist in Russia or Chechnya, and even if they did, they law does not exist to protect the likes of them. Lapunov claimed he’d take his case to the European Courts of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Watch this space, if he’s not disappeared or dies mysteriously, he might just do that, but I doubt it.
George Orwell recognised ‘to be corrupted by totalitarianism’— for example, the moron’s moron in the Whitehouse—you ‘do not have to live in a totalitarian country’, the un-United States of America. We’re all corrupted now. Putin the strong man goes from strength to strength. Ramzan Kadyrov does not have the final word. He does what he’s told. The gay purge hurts no one—that counts—and nobody is counting.
I missed the first few minutes of this. I expected to see (not that I watch porn) blonde hair and silicon breasts and a solid arse so big it would have shamed a Kardashian and housed half of dancing Africa with bongo drums. Instead I got this guy, who called himself Jonathan Agassi and he was in Berlin. He dressed down to go out in a pair of tight-fitting swimming trunks. He went to a Berlin nightclub to collect an award for the being the best new gay porn star. He won the category, best porn actor, United States.
Fucker, you better believe it. He didn’t live in the United States. The best, or so he thought. This is the rise part, before the world goes back to being less than a Cabaret tune. ‘Come to the Cabaret my friend, Come to the Cabaret’. Another song set in Cabaret (Berlin of the 1930s Weimar Republic) sets the tone: ‘Money, makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around. Money makes the world go around…’ It still does. When Agassi is the queen of the porn industry and doing what he’s told, money pours in. The next big thing is always standing behind you.
I found Agassi’s relationship with his mum weird. She’s in Israel. He’s in Berlin. They Skype. He looks for reassurance he’s still beautiful. She gives it. Then he goes back to visit her in Tel Aviv. There were some uncomfortable moments such as Agassi dressing in fishnets and high-heel shoes and his brother telling him this wasn’t Berlin, but Tel Aviv. In other words, don’t go out like that ya sissy. But he’d went to school there. Threatened suicide, when he was at school and ready to jump from a high window, his classmates shouted, ‘Jump’. I guess Israelites are too busy gobbling up the land of their poor Palestinian neighbours to be overly politically correct.
We meet Agassi’s dad back in Berlin. Things have turned more difficult. Agassi’s bum is still for sale but the price is dropping out of the market. Worse, his dad is the worst kind of arsehole. Agassi remains fixated on his dad calling him ‘a homo’ when he was twelve. We all know the cure for that from right-wing (let’s call them) Americans who imagine a good shag with a good girl will cure them of that kind of malarkey. That was certainly my da’s view, when his best mate, Jimmy Mac, told him his son was gay.
‘No, Jimmy, yeh, cannae have that,’ were my da’s immortal words.
Agassi’s da went further. When he was twelve he set him up with this then female partner. You know, the good-shag cure, which in other societies would be looked on as paedophilia and procurement, but not here. Not in Berlin.
Later, Agassi and Da meet again. His son is out of his face on drugs most of the time. He’s filmed sleeping on top of a parked car. And admits he hadn’t slept for two days. Worse, his wanger is playing up, gone off solidarity and on strike, he can no longer ejaculate on cue. The money shot is no longer the money shot. Things are slipping.
Da talks about his mum as if he loved her. Maybe he did. But he tells the big lie. Mummy was depressed because she wanted a girl and instead had a boy, Agassi. That set her into depression, perhaps post-natal, perhaps something else. Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink. Your mum hated you and it’s your fault for being born.
Mummy soon put Agassi right. She was stuck in New York, penniless and young, with two kids and daddy was out spending what little money that had and whoring. That’s when I got on mummy’s side. Now I kinda liked her. She was spunky.
Agassi dresses mummy up in designer clobber and claims she looks beautiful. The answer here on this side is no, she doesn’t. She looks like an ordinary wee woman. Since we’re on the male gaze, I don’t think Agassi looks anything special either.
He ends up working in a supermarket. The kind of guy you pass every day. Gives lectures to kids about the dangers of drugs. When I watched Louise Theroux’s programme about escorts £200-an-hour seemed to be the going rate. Agassi around $4000 an hour. Must be hard, working on the checkout, minimum wage, made to eat shit. Lack of money does that to you. Porn, like anything else, is an overcrowded market. It eats the young. Hates the old. I’m sure there’s some kind of metaphor waiting to pop up.
odonnellgrunting 