CHARLIE ROSE: Joseph Stalin’s reign of mass terror on the Soviet Union has been called the "other Holocaust." Millions of men, women, and children perished in his vast web prison and slave labor camps which Solzinitzin called "The Gulag Archipelago." Millions of others though somehow survived and were freed after Stalin’s death in 1953. A new book by an NYU professor and Russian scholar Stephen Cohen tells the stories of these survivors that is called "The Victims’ Return." I’m pleased to have Stephen Cohen back at this table. Welcome. / STEPHEN COHEN: Thank you, happy to be back.
As historian Stephen Cohen shows with sharp analysis and deep pathos in his new book, “The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin,” the question of what to do with the gulag’s victims, and the legacy of the man who put them there, did not end with their liberation. It has continued to haunt Russia for decades, along with ever-changing interpretations of how the country should address its own past. Memoirs by Solzhenitsyn and other gulag survivors, as well as recent best-selling studies such as Orlando Figes’ “The Whisperers,” have familiarized Western audiences with accounts of the gulag. But Cohen, a professor at Princeton University, is one of the first to focus on survivors’ experiences after their release. “The Victims Return” draws on literary journals, memoirs and interviews with former inmates Cohen befriended in the ’70s to survey individual experiences of post-gulag life. At the same time, it analyzes the political decisions at the top that shaped them.
CHARLIE ROSE: Elie Wiesel is here. He has spent a lifetime teaching and writing
about the Holocaust, calling for acceptance, dialogue, understanding and
memory. He’s been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United
States Congressional Gold Medal and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French
Legion of Honor. I 1986, he won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
He has just returned from Germany, where he visited the Buchenwald
concentration camp with President Obama and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel. Here is a look at what they said there.
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ANGELA MERKEL, GERMAN CHANCELLOR (through translator): We the Germans
are faced with the agonizing question how and why, how could this happen.
How could Germany wreak such havoc in Europe and the world.
BARACK OBAMA: To this day, there are those who insist that the
Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and
ignorant and hateful. This places is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts.
A reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our
history.
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