Shebrew in the City
Shebrew in the City is a podcast exploring all things Jewish. Combining interviews and informational episodes, join Nicole Kelly as she discusses her journey with motherhood, spirituality, and everything from Hanukkah to the Holocaust. Giving a voice to modern Jews and spreading love and joy, whether you're Jewish, Jew-ish, or not anything resembling Jewish at all, there's something here for everyone.
Shebrew in the City
"Summertime" - An Interview with 3X Emmy Winner Dana Arschin on Holocaust Education and Storytelling
Dana Arschin joins us for a profound exploration of her family's enduring legacy and the critical role of Holocaust education in today's world. Growing up in a predominantly Jewish community on Long Island, Dana reflects on the impact of her mother's experiences as a child of Holocaust survivors. She shares deeply personal stories of generational trauma and how they have shaped her identity and fueled her dedication to preserving Jewish heritage through her work. Dana’s unique blend of tradition and modernity offers insights into the resilience of the Jewish community, highlighting her commitment as a Holocaust storyteller.
As we delve into the heart of World War II survival stories, Dana recounts the harrowing journey of her "Poppy", Nat Ross, who faced unimaginable adversities. These moving accounts bring to light the indomitable spirit of those who lived through Nazi persecution, drawing strength from unity and hope. From forced labor camps to encounters with infamous figures like Dr. Josef Mengele, Dana vividly brings these stories to life, emphasizing the importance of remembering and sharing them. Her storytelling not only honors her family's past but also serves as a testament to the resilience and unity that emerged from such dark times.
Dana's transition from traditional journalism to Holocaust storytelling marks a significant chapter in her career. With an impressive background that includes an Emmy-winning documentary, "Forgotten Camps," she has successfully merged her passion for history with her skills in journalism. As the first storyteller for the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, Dana continues to raise awareness and engage audiences with impactful narratives. Her journey serves as an inspiring example of how personal history and professional ambition can intertwine to preserve crucial historical narratives for future generations.
TopDogTours is your walking tour company. Available in New York, Philly, Boston, & Toronto!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Visiting a city maybe for the second time, and don't want to visit the same tourist traps, check out top dog tours. We have lots of different options for walking tours of neighborhoods and attractions that everybody will love. We are in Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto and New York City. You can visit us at topdogtours. com and check us out on social media for offers and discounts.
Nicole Kelly:Hi, I'm Nicole Kelly and this is Shebrew in the City, and today I'm sitting down with Dana Arschin, who has some really interesting information and personal stories to share, which I'm really excited to talk to her about. How are you today, Dana?
Dana Arschin:I am good, Nicole. Thank you so much for your interest in me and the work that I do and for having me today. I really appreciate it.
Nicole Kelly:Of course. It's so important and this is actually the first podcast where we're really gonna be talking about the Holocaust, which is something that I have mentioned to you and I'm sure will come up a million times throughout my show that I'm super passionate about Holocaust education and I think you know, as we are losing survivors and statistics like you know, one in five children don't think that the Holocaust happened. Things like that that are going wrong. It's just so important. So I'm really excited to talk to you about your family story and about your work and your history as a journalist.
Dana Arschin:Thank you. Thank you so much.
Nicole Kelly:So I always like to kind of start off by talking a little bit about your background, so people kind of know who you are, where you're from. So where are you originally from?
Dana Arschin:So I was born in Queens, in Bayside, Queens. I lived there until I was three. My parents lived in an area that was like all Jews living in condos. Both of my parents were from Queens also. My mom was originally born in the Bronx, my dad in Brooklyn, and they both went to high school in Queens. So I was in Bayside till I was three and then we moved to Jericho, Long Island, where I grew up and I spent my whole life in Jericho. I went to college at the University of Delaware. I came back to Long Island for graduate school and then I lived in the city for the next decade plus and then I came back to Long Island.
Dana Arschin:And right now I live in Port Washington with my husband and my two daughters.
Nicole Kelly:It's so funny that you say that your mom was born in the Bronx and lived in Queens. My dad was born in the Bronx and ended up living in Queens, but they moved out to California when he was, I think, six years old my dad's side of the family. They were from the South Bronx and they were very New York.
Dana Arschin:Were his parents immigrants.
Nicole Kelly:No, they were first generation. Their parents were the ones who immigrated. So my last direct relative on either side to come to America was my mom's grandmother, who came in 1920. And I actually have her Ellis Island manifest on the wall behind me.
Dana Arschin:Oh amazing.
Nicole Kelly:I love that you're so into family history oh yeah, one of the guests that I'm hoping to have is a genealogist. I'm very into family history and someday I want to create this cohesive family tree art piece that includes people's Hebrew names, and I need a big wall for that. So so so we grew up for the most part in Long Island. Was Judaism a big part of your upbringing? Were you a member of a synagogue? Did you have a bat mitzvah?
Dana Arschin:Yeah, so I grew up in an area that was predominantly Jewish secular Jewish and it's funny, my parents are very worldly. They always had a lot of non-Jewish friends and always made sure that we went out for Afghani food and Thai food and Korean food and that was important to them. But after my mom's experience, you know, growing up without any grandparents because they were murdered in the Holocaust and without cousins, and she just never wanted to feel like that outsider who didn't belong, which is how her father and my poppy, you know, had lived in Poland and that's what life was like for him even before the war. So it was important for her that I, that her kids, felt like they were part of a community where they were accepted. I understood because you know, people always say to me like, oh, didn't you want some diversity? So that was just my mom's perspective and you know, a child of a Holocaust survivor just has very different perspectives than pretty much anyone else. The way they grew up is so unique.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, one of the other things that I'm super interested in as well is generational trauma, especially within the. Jewish community. So you're definitely. That's exactly what that is.
Dana Arschin:Exactly so we grew up there. She just really wanted us and it had an amazing school district. It's funny I was like more religious than most of my friends, but we were not religious. We didn't observe Shabbat, but we would walk to and from synagogue on the high holidays you know, not use electricity and we did keep a semi-kosher house. We had separate plates and silverware for meat and dairy, but my mom would bring in non-kosher house. We had separate plates and silverware for meat and dairy, but my mom would bring in non-kosher Chinese food and shrimp and we never had pork, but she would bring in shrimp and she'd put it on paper plates as to not un-kosher our silverware. And you know what? Growing up I never really understood it and now I do. That's kind of the beauty of Judaism you do what works for you and that was the best that she could do. And clearly it worked, because here I am as a very proud Jew and Holocaust storyteller, so she definitely did something right. But yeah, we grew up traditional, did you?
Nicole Kelly:have. Formed conservative, I'd say, yeah, I got that. That's actually like a common thing I hear from a lot of people Did you have a bat mitzvah?
Dana Arschin:I did. I had a bat mitzvah and my sister had a bat mitzvah. She chose to not have the huge party and to do a bat mitzvah tour in Israel instead, which was incredible. So I had, like, the big party that everyone has, and she had a very small party, and, and she had a very small party and we went to.
Nicole Kelly:Israel and that was so memorable. I know a couple of people who've done that and I've only heard good things, so it's something that maybe if my daughter is interested in doing that, but I have a feeling she'll also want a big party because she likes it. You know what?
Dana Arschin:When you're that age it's very hard to not opt to do what everyone's doing. But looking back now, I really pray that my children go for know, go for the Babbits from Israel, because it was so I was in fourth grade and I remember it so clearly.
Nicole Kelly:That's so cool, so kind of just jumping into your expertise and your family story. I know you recently lost your grandfather, who you called your poppy, and I'm so sorry about that. Thank you, he was. He was almost 102. Is that correct?
Dana Arschin:Yeah, he would have turned 102, march 8th coming up, so just a few months shy.
Nicole Kelly:My grandfather passed away when he was 94, and it really doesn't matter how much time you have with them, it's still like. I think it's sometimes harder in a different way because they've always been there and they're so old that you know it's a different kind of loss.
Dana Arschin:And I hate when people say, oh, but he was 102. Like that's amazing, you still never get to see that person again, it doesn't matter how old they are. But you know, nobody knows. It's very hard to figure out the right thing to say. But age doesn't matter. And I have to tell you I really thought this man was going to live forever.
Nicole Kelly:That's how I felt about my grandfather.
Dana Arschin:I'm still convinced that there's something that could have been done to have saved him and like that's just who I am Like, I'm always going to feel that way. But like I interviewed 110 year old Holocaust survivor last year, who's now 111. And I was convinced that my poppy was going to be the next 110 yearold, I wasn't done with him yet.
Nicole Kelly:No, I definitely get the idea of not done with him. I'm sorry about that. But I do want to honor him by talking about his story, so I'd love to hear about his life before the war in Poland, what happened to him during the war and what he accomplished after the war.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, so my papi was born on March 8th 1922, and he was named after his grandfather, who had just passed away in 1921. His grandfather was a really big deal His name's Natan Torfstein, and he was the chief rabbi of Stanisławów. Hopefully I'm pronouncing it correctly. I'm practicing the pronunciation. There were two Stanislavovs One was in Poland and now is considered part of the Ukraine, and the other one was closer to Warsaw. So he was the chief rabbi of this town that was closer to Warsaw and he was a huge scholar, and so it was so fascinating to me that my poppy was named after him.
Dana Arschin:My poppy was born. His Hebrew name was Chaim Newsom. His Polish name was just Newsom Rosenberg Rosenberg with a Z, yeah, which is later changed with an S, and he grew up in a very, very poor home. But I don't know if that's because they were poor or because they had 11 children. Wow, which has to be difficult. Two of them sadly died before the war. One of them their names were Reuven and Joseph, and one was run over by a horse and buggy in the street and the other one fell out of a crib and banged his head and died. Crazy, right, isn't it wild? And apparently like these stories aren't so uncommon for that time I had my grandmother's sister.
Nicole Kelly:I mean, they lived in, you know, the Bronx. She was hit by a truck while she was riding a bicycle and died. So, these crazy stories of, like, small children and these terrible accidents and diseases and things.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, he remembers walking one of his siblings who passed away, that they wrapped him in a talus, which is a Jewish prayer shawl anyone unfamiliar wrapped him in a talus and the whole family walked through the street together to the graveyard and to the cemetery and buried him, and traditionally I guess you do just wrap Natalis. I've learned that recently and this vision of the family walking through the street holding this little boy's body, natalis, I always think of this. This was 100 years ago in life. It's so drastically different. This was 100 years ago in life. It's so drastically different.
Dana Arschin:His father, yonkel Rosenberg, came from a long line of rope makers making ropes for everything for horse and buggies, for different types of equipment and anything that needed a rope. His family made that for generations. And then his mother, sarah, or Sarah Torfstein. She was the daughter of Natan Torfstein, the chief rabbi my poppy was named after. They lived in Poltusk, poland, so they had gotten married his parents and settled in Poltusk, or Poltusk it's about an hour north of Warsaw and it was a very, very small town but had a large Jewish community. They didn't have electricity.
Dana Arschin:Just two months ago I went to interview my poppy because I had more questions and I just found out. They had no electricity, that they only bathed once a week. They would walk to the local mikveh or like a Jewish bath hall, and they would all shower, take their bath in the public mitzvah once a week before Shabbat. I just learned this two months ago and that's why I'm like I'm not done with him yet. I had so many more questions, but it just life was fascinating, just it's so. You know, we can't fathom living like that, and I always say this, this, but they don't make people of that strength anymore, like none of us would be able to live the way that they did, um and what else it's funny that you say that, because it was snowing yesterday, two days ago, and I was pushing a stroller and I was like this is why my relatives left russia right because they didn't want to deal with all this.
Nicole Kelly:and I'm you, you know walking around the Upper West Side with a $2,000 stroller, all covered up, and I'm like this is terrible. But you know like that great grandmother, who came in 1920, had stories about being a child during World War I in Russia and I think I'm like that's the craziness, crazy.
Dana Arschin:People don't, we're a little pampered. And they lived. He was in like a wooden bed, he said, with straw, with like five of his brothers in one bed. It's just unbelievable. He said there was a lot of anti-Semitism before the war. He couldn't even walk on the sidewalk. His non-Jewish neighbors would call them pids and say walk in the street, you're not welcome on the sidewalk. It's notJewish neighbors would call them pids and say walk in the street, you're not welcome on the sidewalk. It's not to fully generalize. He did have some neighbors that were very kind, who were not Jewish, but he said for the most part anti-Semitism was rampant before the war.
Nicole Kelly:So how old was he in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland?
Dana Arschin:I believe, he was 18. Let me do math he was born in 1922.
Nicole Kelly:He was 17 or 18 years old.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, okay 17 or 18. And you know, thank God he was able to get his education. Obviously, education was ripped away from all his siblings, his younger siblings. They came into his city and the first thing they did was rounded up all the men with beards. So they rounded up his father, yonkel Rosenberg, and they remembered him being dragged away by Nazis, and his father turned and looked at them with this terrified face and he's never been able to get that image out of him. That was the last he ever saw him and it turns out all those men had been shot and thrown into a mass grave just for having a beer.
Dana Arschin:So from there my great-grandmother, sarah, took her children who were still living with her. Some of the children were a little older and had moved out and they walked to Warsaw. They, because they thought it was a bigger city, would be easier for them to hide, and they walked at night and hid during the day and it took them days and days to get to Warsaw. They finally got there and soon after they were rounded up so quickly and they were brought to a ghetto outside of Warsaw not the Warsaw ghetto. They lived in that ghetto. I don't have all the timing on me, but I definitely know the chronological order of it all. So they were in the ghetto and then they were rounding up one male from each family and my papi volunteered and he went to a forced labor camp called Comar which was near the German border. It was only about 50 workers in the entire camp and one of the craziest stories that I'll never forget, that I always talk about, was at Comar.
Dana Arschin:Every few weeks they would have the prisoners take off their uniforms and throw them in a big pot of boiling water to disinfect themselves and to make sure that the Nazi guards living among them weren't infected with their diseases. So my papi there had been assigned to work in the sewers to clean out the sewer system and he had found every few weeks some rotten potatoes and some rotten vegetables that had just been thrown and found Not much, but every now and then he'd find some old rotten food down there and he found a way to tie them into a very small pocket of his uniform and every few weeks, when they had to boil the water, he'd throw in these little scraps of food that he could find and boil them and disinfect them, and that's how he got just a tiny little bit of nourishment. And he had been doing this for some time and eventually he was caught. He still never figured out how he was caught. He doesn't know if someone ratted him out, he doesn't know if a piece fell out and German guards were saying whose potato is this? He has no idea.
Dana Arschin:But they told him to start digging his own grave. And he was digging his own grave. Sure that he was going to be killed. They had him lay down to see if he fit into the grave and they said you know, it's still not deep enough and wide enough. Keep digging. And he kept digging with a gun held to his head. Keep digging. And he kept digging, with a gun held to his head and a few feet from him. Just a short time later another prisoner collapsed, probably from starvation and dehydration, and they shot that prisoner, threw him in my poppy's grave and said isn't today your lucky day, oh my gosh.
Dana Arschin:And in the USC Shoah Foundation video led by Steven Spielberg I know you're aware of this that he went around his volunteers and interviewed tens of thousands of survivors back in the 1990s my papi. In that interview he speaks and he had the most incredible memory. He remembers the German words that were said to him like today is day and Jew, lay down and see if you fit. And he says these words and it's incredible to hear them in this video. And the fact that he survived. That was unbelievable. But he also lived with guilt his whole life, guilt that this poor prisoner was shot and killed, and not him. It's just what happened. Each step of the way, every survival story of his, it's just more unbelievable than the next. I mean, if that man hadn't collapsed, I wouldn't be here today.
Nicole Kelly:It's crazy to think. I read a lot of books about the Holocaust and a lot of people have crazy stories of almost like chance reasons that they're alive and things like that.
Dana Arschin:I know what you're saying. I was just with a Holocaust survivor last night. I lead a group of students every other Thursday and we meet with survivors, we hear their stories and they actually act out the stories in a play at the end of the year. Oh, wow, and one of the survivors was saying she's a proud Jew but she doesn't believe in God, you know, and, and how can I blame her? Right, she was taken to a concentration camp. Her family was killed, um, and I said my poppy always did, but it's, but he served.
Dana Arschin:You know, it's so easy for those who survived. Um, yeah, I believed in God because God saved me, um, but what was so interesting is that we were trying to reconcile, like how, how did this happen and how can you still believe in God? And like what you just said, that yes, some people were meant to live, and how I try to think of it is look at how Jews in the world came together after the Holocaust. The same with October 7th. Came together after the Holocaust, the same with October 7th. What's so sad is do we need these catastrophes to keep happening to bring Jewish pride, you know, to make it stronger, to bring Jews closer together? It's such a crazy way to think about it, but that's the only way that I can justify any of this.
Nicole Kelly:No, I completely get that. I mean we have this terrible joke that all Jewish holidays are like they tried to kill us. They didn't. We now eat food, but it's kind of like a systematic thing that throughout the last 5000 years that's just what keeps happening. But you know, going like talking about what's happened since October 7, I feel like you know, I've become slightly more observant. I know a lot of people have started celebrating Shabbat. They're wearing a lot of Judaica, they're very proud. They're possibly scared, but yeah, exactly, she's showing her necklace. You can't see if you're not watching the video. My Hebrew name Yosefa. So it's kind of crazy that with these events and things like that, you do get the larger group of people kind of coming together. So he's in the labor camp and I know he eventually found his way. Found his way. He ended up at auschwitz uh, what was?
Nicole Kelly:what was how? You know? Was he directly sent there from the labor camp? Was he sent back to a ghetto? I know a lot of survivors ended up in a lot of different camps in a lot of different places. It wasn't just like you went one place and you were there the entire war.
Dana Arschin:Yeah. So from my understanding he was taken direct and I've spent so much time trying to study his story. It is so complex, but he was taken directly from Comar to Birkenau. In Birkenau for anyone unfamiliar there's two parts of Auschwitz. There's Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, which is more commonly known as Birkenau. Auschwitz I is our beit macht frei. That those famous words work will set you free. When you see the gates of Auschwitz, that's Auschwitz I. Mostly it was non-Jewish political prisoners who were kept there. And if you know all this, it's me just explaining to the listeners no, no, no, I know all this.
Nicole Kelly:My guests don't know all this, and that's one of the reasons we're doing this is because a lot of people don't know this.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, and Birkenau was mostly, and there was a mix of all different prisoners there, but the majority of Jews were kept in Birkenau. Birkenau you were selected to work or you were selected to be gassed. You were selected to work or you were selected to be gassed. My poppy was face to face with the notorious Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele, who was the person who was in charge of selections. He, what did they call him? The angel of death, the angel of death. Thank you, he was so handsome.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, he was a really good looking man, but he was a terrible human he was this young looking man and he would smile.
Dana Arschin:He would call everyone mother, like in this endearing term, oh hi, mother, go on over here. And he would be sending them to be gassed, yeah, for their death. Face-to-face with Menga, who chose him for work, and at Birkenau. So he spent only three months at Birkenau and then he was sent to an Auschwitz subcamp called Yavorzno and he spent approximately the rest of he was in and it was considered Auschwitz. Auschwitz had a lot of subcamps, it was maybe about 50 miles away, and he spent the rest of his time in Yavorzno and the conditions there were. He watched 18 people get hanged who had they had built a little bit of a tunnel underground to try to escape and they were caught and they hanged them in front of the entire camp to set an example. They were Czech prisoners and he said they were all singing the Czech national anthem while the nooses were around their neck, right before they were hanged. I mean, how do you ever get a vision like that out of your head? And anyone who looked away was shot.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, they made you look, you were forced to look In Javoršno. He was working in the coal mine and he was sure that he was going to be killed by the fumes and by breathing in the toxic coals and he just one day decided to take his chances. They weren't as organized there. Everyone had been assigned to work detail, but it was kind of like you go there, you go there. They didn't write names down of who was in each group. Detail, but it was kind of like you go there, you go there. They didn't write names down of who was in each group. And one day he just walked with the other group and I believe that was to pave the roads, and I mean just every decision he made probably saved his life.
Nicole Kelly:I was just reading that, like I was texting you, but I just read like a 400 page book on Auschwitz, this woman who I know you're familiar with, canada, where they would take at Berkenau, where they would for those of you that aren't familiar, this is where they would take all the stuff that people left at the train, so basically people's food and baggage and stuff. This woman one day literally just went to Canada and they called it Canada.
Dana Arschin:What was the reason that they called it Canada?
Nicole Kelly:I've heard two reasons. I've heard one because they thought it was kind of this wealthy nation. And then there was another one that had to do with a word, another language that I can't recall right now, but she basically, just one day, was like I'm going to go over and work in Canada and the people who worked there got to wear their own, got to wear normal clothes and they got to keep the women got to keep their hair and they had food because they were taking food from the luggage. So it was a much-.
Dana Arschin:Was it the tattooist of Auschwitz that you read? The Tattooist of.
Nicole Kelly:Auschwitz that you read. No, no, no, this was like a nonfiction book. It's literally just called Auschwitz. I can't remember who the author was, but she just went to Canada and she was like this is where I work now. So it's kind of crazy that even within this kind of very regimented thing, there were still stories of people kind of going and doing that.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, there's a nonfiction book the Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Nicole Kelly:It's a true story but you are familiar with it. Yeah, I was just reading an article last night about the movie that they're making.
Dana Arschin:There's some controversy. I thought it was a wonderful book, but some people feel that it didn't make the Nazis look that bad because this prisoner who they profile had it really good comparatively. But I don't find nothing wrong with that. That's one person's perspective and every perspective is so different.
Nicole Kelly:I think that's the important thing to remember when you're talking about the Holocaust, and survivors is it's. These are individual people and everybody who survived survived because of their specific story and what happened to them, so you can't just, you know broad stroke saying, well, this was everybody's story.
Nicole Kelly:You know people had to do sometimes terrible and crazy things to be able to make it out of the Holocaust. So that's why I, like you know, that's why what you do is so important, which we'll get to in a little bit. So he was in this sub camp and is that where he was when liberation happened, when the Russian army came?
Dana Arschin:So he was there, but he was forced on the death march. They knew the Nazis were coming and they forced him. I wish I had all the numbers on me. I'm sorry that I don't. They forced him and I believe tens of thousands of prisoners on a death march. I'm sorry if my numbers are wrong.
Nicole Kelly:Was this the one that was going to Bergen-Belsen or Maffhausen, because I know that those are two places people ended up.
Dana Arschin:I don't know, but there were a lot of death marches happening. What I do know is that he was walking in the freezing cold in the winter of you know 1945. Yeah, yeah.
Nicole Kelly:Liberation from Auschwitz was January 7th, but this was, this would have been like right before, because they knew, yeah, they knew they were coming, yeah, december of 1944 would make sense, or January, right before.
Dana Arschin:I believe it was January, right before liberation. Um, and he was walking. For days People were dying left and right from frostbite and from again, dehydration, starvation. It was freezing. He just had this thin prisoner uniform and he talks about the wooden clogs that he was wearing no socks, just wooden shoes. The blisters and the pain was impossible, was impossible. He didn't think he'd be able to survive anymore and it was getting very unorganized.
Dana Arschin:The Nazis were not able to keep track of everyone and they were trying to run for their lives as well. So my poppy and a bunch of prisoners, when they had all taken a break at one point and remember, the Nazis were shooting anyone who stopped for a second. It was just complete chaos. As they're all walking through the forest, basically together, my papi and a few prisoners hid in a haystack and they stayed there for I don't know a day or two. And then a new group of Nazi guards had found them and they were able to convince them that they were political Polish prisoners and not Jewish prisoners, which is unbelievable.
Dana Arschin:And these guards brought them to a prisoner of war camp where a British brigade had been captured and was being held, and there was some type of agreement between the UK and Hitler at the time where they weren't killing British soldiers, and there was a Jewish soldier on the British brigade who took my papi under his wing, even though my papi spoke no English whatsoever, and they kept him with them in this POW camp and said that my papi was part of them, and they gave him a uniform to wear of a British soldier who had passed away, named Standish James.
Dana Arschin:My papi never forgot his name and he went by the name Standish James, and he held a cross and he wore this British uniform in the POW camp, and that's where they had been liberated. Actually, no, no, they were all taken out of the POW camp, then was sent on another march, but he was with the British Brigade, and from there American troops liberated them while they were on the march, and he said he was kissing the ground and it was the happiest day of his life, he said for months after, though he was always looking over his shoulder, thinking that there was an officer German officer following him. He just couldn't get used to the fact that he was free.
Nicole Kelly:I feel like that would be really crazy after years of dealing with somebody literally pointing a gun at your head all the time to be. The transition must have been crazy.
Dana Arschin:You could just see how complicated the story is yeah Well that's the thing is.
Dana Arschin:Every few years I'm like an expert on it. I'll rewatch the show of foundation video, I'll take every single note and know all the details. And then you know, I interview a survivor every single week. So it's like all the survivor details get like jumbled in my head. So I just I get a little like. And then from there he went to like three different countries before he made his way to England where an orphanage took him and then a Jewish family in England adopted him the Leaf family. We are still in touch with all the descendants of the Leaf family today. They came to my bat mitzvah. We visited them in England. This family adopted him in a Jewish family in England. He lived with them for three years. From there he went to Canada where an aunt had been living. They did not treat him very well and didn't really make him feel welcome. From there he left, went to the United States, met my grandma on Orchard Beach in the Bronx and the rest is history. There's a lot more to the story, but that's it in a nutshell.
Nicole Kelly:No, every survivor's story that I've ever heard. It's very complicated and a lot of people moved around a lot. You know it makes sense that all the details wouldn't be there, because it's a heard it's very complicated and a lot of people moved around a lot and it you know it makes sense that all the details wouldn't be there, because it's a lot. It's a lot it's amazing that he remembered all of that.
Dana Arschin:Incredible. He, just up until the day he died, he remembered everything.
Nicole Kelly:He was very sharp. He was all there. I love that.
Dana Arschin:I love that he only had a two day decline too, before his death. It happened so suddenly His just lungs were starting to fail, but he was with it. He saw me with him right before he passed and yeah, but you know what, it was better that than for him to suffer for a long period of time.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, of course. Of course. When did you become aware of everything that your grandfather had been through? Was he very open about this with people, about his experience? Because I know there's kind of two camps of this. There's people that didn't talk about it at all. They were so scarred with what happened to them they barely even let people know what had happened to them during the war. And then there were people who were very outspoken about everything that happened to them. They felt it was almost their duty to tell the stories of other people who hadn't survived.
Dana Arschin:So my papi was a very quiet, reserved man always Growing up. He did not talk about it but he would have if you asked him about it. No one asked him. He did always show me his number. I don't believe he went around showing other people his number Later on in life he did, which I'll get to in a minute but I always knew that he had a tattoo on his arm 143499.
Dana Arschin:That was the prisoner number he got at Birkenau and from a young age that was actually the first number I probably ever had memorized and I always knew he was a Holocaust survivor. But of course, as a little kid you don't really understand what that means, but I had always been aware of it. As he got older I was the only one in my family who would, you know, ask him question after question after question. My mom, who was very protective over him, would say you know, that's enough, that's enough. And I was like no, he wants to talk, he's answering me, he wants these stories to be remembered. So he never talked about it unless he was asked.
Dana Arschin:And then later in life we joke, as he's in his like 90s and hitting 100, he would be in the doctor's office and pull up his sleeve and show the doctor. But I got him to speak a lot Just in the past few years. He's gotten so many interviews. They had moved down to Tampa just about two and a half years ago, three years ago during the pandemic and in Tampa Fox 13,. Tampa started interviewing him all the time Newspapers came out. So I think as he was starting to see that people were really interested in his story, he became a lot more open with it later on in life and a lot of survivors, as they start to feel their mortality, all of a sudden start to open up and speak about it.
Nicole Kelly:You know, it takes also, I think, a while to kind of not get over or deal with, but to feel comfortable discussing that, because trauma never really goes away when you've experienced something like that, but I think the severe pain of it becomes a little bit easier to deal with. So we're going to pivot completely and talk about your career in journalism. So what inspired you to become a journalist and how did you get started? In such a competitive field it's really difficult to break into that that's a great question, so it's funny.
Dana Arschin:I like to say that my passion started in fifth grade because I was chosen to be one of three reporters for the first ever TV station at my elementary school, that's so family.
Nicole Kelly:We didn't have one of those.
Dana Arschin:It's a great story to say that I post those videos sometimes, but the truth is I went to college actually, as the reason I chose University of Delaware is because I was obsessed with Spanish. I was the president of my Spanish Honor Society. I was an AP. Spanish was always my best subject. I won, like, the Spanish award for my high school. It was just like Dana's, a great Spanish student. So I didn't know what I was going to combine it with. But University of Delaware had a really unique study abroad program where I went away for a month. They had these like six week winter breaks and you could study abroad during that time and during semester. So I went away for like five weeks to Costa Rica, my freshman year, for five weeks during winter break to Mexico, my sophomore year, and then for a full spring semester four months to Spain, my junior year. So I went for their Spanish programs and it was just. It was incredible. I learned how to speak Spanish really well. I definitely have a terrible accent where you know I'm American, but I knew I'd combine it with something I just didn't know what.
Dana Arschin:And I applied for an internship at NBC because at that point I wanted to be a writer, like I wanted to be behind the scenes writing scripts for TV shows and it was my sophomore year. I applied to be on, like the Conan show which was there at the time, or SNL, and they call me and say congratulations, we're putting you in the newsroom. And I panicked. I was in college. I didn't really watch the news that much. I was always running around, I didn't know anything about the news, I wasn't interested in the news. But NBC calls you with a newsroom internship. You don't turn that down. And it was WNBC, so the local NBC in New York, channel four.
Dana Arschin:And I fell in love with the news industry. I was sitting at the assignment desk and 30 Rockefeller Center answering calls and pitches. They'd send me out with reporters in the field and I just felt I, just I loved it for a few reasons. I loved how educated it made me feel. Every single day I got to shadow reporters who became experts on a different topic every day. They were forced to learn about every politician and every issue impacting the city and the tri-state area and I, just I loved learning every day. Secondly, it was so fun to see different parts of the city and the tri-state. One day you're in Staten Island, the next day you're covering a story in New Jersey, then you're on Long Island. So it was really exciting, exciting to understand the whole region that I lived in my whole life and didn't really get to know that well. And then, lastly, I loved meeting new people. To meet the most diverse people, from public housing tenants who are fighting to get their heat turned back on to someone who just started the most unique company, to politicians. It was just so exciting.
Dana Arschin:And I reached out to this professor at Delaware named Ralph Begleiter. He was like a 30-year foreign affairs correspondent for CNN, a really incredible reputation and career and he started working at Delaware as his professor in residence and I begged him to let me into their broadcast class in the fall, right after my summer internship was ending, and he said you know, this is just for juniors and seniors. You need to have all these prereqs. And I begged him to let me in. I said I learned so much, let. And I begged him to let me in. I said I learned so much, let me in. So he let me in. Am I rambling? Do you want me to keep going?
Nicole Kelly:No, no, no, no. This is so interesting. You're so passionate about it too, which is great, because sometimes, when people are like well, I got involved with medicine because, no, like your face is lighting up it was the first time.
Dana Arschin:I was like this is what I need to do. And he let me in and I was so unadvanced in this class. So at the end of the class you had to everyone voted. I wanted to be an anchor reporter and I really never cared about being on TV, I just loved reporting the facts and being the one to go out and to learn it all. And I wanted to be voted into the anchor reporter slot and they voted me for the final TV production to be like the back of the room camera girl and remember they had all been doing this major for years. But it was a wake up call like wow, I have a lot to learn. Meanwhile, I think I'm the only one who became a reporter from that class.
Dana Arschin:And for the rest of my next few years at school I was heavily involved with the student television network. For all broadcast classes. I did a double major in Spanish and com. I was on the student radio station, so I just kind of became my my passion. And then, when I was at NBC, there were a few reporters that I shadowed, including a reporter named Greg Sergel who was like the main reason I wanted to become a reporter. He just treated me with so much respect. He'd let me go out with one of the cameramen and do interviews on my own and I he had gone through a program called Long Island News Tonight LI News Tonight through the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island and it was a very popular program for journalists in New York.
Dana Arschin:It has now closed. It closed the year after I finished and you could go through just for a semester at a time to make a resume tape, or a reel as we call it. Or for me, I'm like, if I'm paying to go through it, why don't I just get a master's degree at the school? So I got my master's there. I did it in three semesters and part of this news program is you were going out in the field every single day on Long Island alongside reporters from every station, and that's how I was able to put a reel together. I can keep going and tell you how I got my first job. It was a journey.
Nicole Kelly:That's so interesting and a lot of people I feel like would probably be like well, I want, like you said, wanted to be a reporter since fifth grade, but you kind of randomly fell into something you were really good at. Yeah, and you were. We know you're really good at it because I wasn't.
Dana Arschin:I wasn't always that good, I thought I was really good. And then people kept humbling me along the way and letting me know what I needed to fix my my mentor in grad school, who I love, and still just talked to him yesterday. Uh, I had said to him you know, it's so impossible to get your first job in New York. There's only like five, six stations that hire 15, 20 reporters. It is it is the most competitive field. And I said do you think I can get a job in New York? He goes, I'd be very surprised. And then he said but I've been surprised before and I was like, no, I'm going to make this happen. So I knew that if there was any job I could get, it would be at a small station. There was a local station, news 12, which is in New Jersey, long Island, westchester. It's in all the suburban areas, also in the Bronx and Brooklyn, I found I it's in all the suburban areas, also in the Bronx and Brooklyn. I went through my alumni database at the grad school I was at found a reporter, a cameraman at News 12, reached out to him. He got me an internship at News 12, long Island From News 12, long Island.
Dana Arschin:I spent a semester there in grad school and they said if you have any shot of being hired, it'll be at News 12 in the Bronx or Brooklyn, where they hire one-man bands or a one-woman show, where you shoot, write, narrate, edit, drive, do everything yourself. So from there they got me an internship my final semester at News 12 in the Bronx and I showed my reel to someone there halfway through the internship and the guy in charge said would you like to go through our training program here? And I ran into the bathroom, called my mom screaming. I knew about the training program. It was literally my end, my goal and, long story short, I went through the training program After three weeks.
Dana Arschin:It's like American Idol. You sit down with the heads of the station, they watch everything you did in three weeks and they either say yes, we're taking you or no, we're not. And they hired me. I spent six years there. I won my first Emmy award there. It was incredible. I was. I was a one woman show. I shot, wrote, narrated, drove myself all over Bronx and Brooklyn and from there I got really lucky, getting my next job at Fox 5 in New York where I spent the next six years.
Nicole Kelly:It's so impressive.
Dana Arschin:I know I could talk and talk, and talk. You know what? It's not that I stand out in any way. I always believe in being confident. Whether you are or not, you have to exude confidence.
Dana Arschin:Make it till you make it and you need them to like you, and you need them to like you and you need them to know who you are, because they get dozens and dozens of candidate emails a week. So how do you stand out? So I always just made sure people I got to meet the right person and that they knew me and that they'd see that I wasn't giving up.
Nicole Kelly:It obviously worked out as you mentioned. You got your first Emmy working for that station. How did you find out that you were nominated? Was there a ceremony? My husband didn't even know that that news reporters got Emmys and I was like, oh yeah, they get Emmys.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, so it's the same organization, like the Emmys, the big Emmys that you see on TV, but it's just a different chapter of it. So these are the broadcast Emmys and they have different regions. Obviously, new York's the most competitive. I had actually gotten another nomination that year and so I got two nominations. One was for a newscast, so I won alongside my colleagues. We all were reporting, so it was me and two other reporters, an anchor, a weather person.
Dana Arschin:It was a massive snowstorm. I was out covering the storm in, I think I was in Red Hook, brooklyn, and it was just pure craziness. It was like another petite reporter like myself who was like recording me as I was talking about all the, the, whatever, the, whatever was happening and all the stats of the storm and all the power outages and it was wild. So that was amazing. But I got another nomination, which I was more proud of, I should say that same year, on a boy named Leiby Kletsky. He was 11 or 12 years old, he had been murdered and dismembered and his body a Jewish, orthodox boy turns out. Another Orthodox person had been the one to. You have to look him up.
Dana Arschin:You have to look up the story of Leiby Klecki L-E-I-B-Y last name K-L-E-T-Z Klecki it was. It was this frantic search for this boy's body. His body had been found in a garbage can, all dismembered, right by my station. And I was so invested in this story. I was covering it for days and days and days. I had found out I had interviewed someone who met him and I was one of only, I think, just one or two reporters who or maybe I was the only reporter to get that contact. I just, I just remember playing such a huge role in that story and when I got that nomination, that was all I was focused on. And when we're at the awards ceremony and I didn't win, I was all bummed out because I put my heart and soul and I wanted to do a sports memory lie.
Dana Arschin:And then, all of a sudden, I hear my name called for the other nomination, and so that was my first nomination on the snowstorms. But when I think of that year and that ceremony, I really only think of this boy, lybie Kletzky, and you'll find hundreds and hundreds of articles on him. It was what a story. I believe this is 2013, 2014.
Nicole Kelly:I will have to look that up.
Dana Arschin:Yeah.
Nicole Kelly:We didn't move to New York until August of 2013. So this was probably. I would have remembered hearing about that.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, it was, and I knew you were going to ask me about my Emmys and the questions you sent, so I brought this one over, oh so fancy. This was my most special one. I don't know if you could see this was the Forgotten Camps on my journey to Poland in 2018. My other one just came in the mail a few days ago. My most recent one. I have three Emmys and they're all four years apart 2014, 2018 and 2022.
Nicole Kelly:You where do you keep them? I'm jumping up head a little bit. Where do you?
Dana Arschin:can't see them right now. I keep them on the mantel place of um on top of my fireplace.
Nicole Kelly:I've heard it's very popular for people to keep awards in the bathroom because everyone uses the bathroom when they come to the house so they'll always see it and Kate Winslet apparently like has a special shelf for her Oscar so people can make like Oscar speeches and hold it in front of the mirror, which I think is so funny.
Dana Arschin:That is so cute, it's so funny, like I. You know, I got my first one a while ago now, so I don't think that much about it anymore and I forget about them until someone comes and they're like oh my God, can I hold that, or is that real? Or some people say what is that? Some people do not know what it is, uh, yeah, but I definitely know what an. Emmy is it's very cool. It actually looks really shiny right now.
Nicole Kelly:Is it heavy Because I Tony awards?
Dana Arschin:are not heavy, okay, yeah.
Nicole Kelly:Because I know I've held an Oscar. They're heavy. Tony Awards the base is made of plastic. They're not heavy.
Dana Arschin:So I'm always curious about that this is heavy.
Nicole Kelly:So, talking about kind of how that award you just showed me happened In 2018, you went to Poland to learn about your family who had been murdered there. You wrote and produced three short films during this time. So you wrote and produced three short films during this time. So what kind of inspired this trip and what parts of Poland did you visit? I also know that this, this trip was with Holocaust expert Dr Michael Berenbaum, and this is literally because I was watching your, your short film. This is literally what I want to do when I'm done with grad school, because my husband, I own a tour company and I am hopefully going to be a Holocaust expert someday.
Dana Arschin:So what I want to do is that you own a tour company. Yeah, my husband and I own a walking tour company. Take me on as the documentarian and I'll I'll record your whole journey.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, but literally the trip you went on is what I want to go to grad school to be able to do is to take groups of people over to Poland and Germany and other parts of central and Eastern Europe to talk about the Holocaust. So what?
Dana Arschin:what inspired Separately because the March of the living, I mean.
Nicole Kelly:They're always looking for people like you, so when we're done recording, we'll talk about this because I know I like this not that we're going to record this, but I because I, as Patrick said, I was an actor for a very long time, so I never finished my BFA because I was like I'm working, I don't need a college degree. So I'm Monday going back to school at the new school, for I have a year left. And then Gratz in Pennsylvania has this MAP to PhD program in Holocaust and genocide studies and it's all online so I can do it while being a mother and working.
Dana Arschin:So that's kind of my way. I had so many questions, so we'll talk about this after, because I have a lot of resources for you. That's great, yes.
Nicole Kelly:No, no, and I'm super my I, poor Patrick. I was like so when I decided I was going back to school. I was like, just so, you know, like the next, like seven years of our life are just going to be like all Holocaust all the time. It'll be worth it, I promise know. Just tell me all about it. I'm so curious.
Dana Arschin:So I had heard about the March of the Living. They go every year on. You know there's two Holocaust Remembrance Days.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, International is a week from today.
Dana Arschin:Correct A week from tomorrow A week from tomorrow.
Dana Arschin:Okay, saturday the 27th, okay, but the main one that's really recognized even more across the. I mean, they're both recognized, but I think Yom HaShoah in the spring Holocaust Remembrance Day in the spring is generally more I don't want to say celebrated, but I do think that people come to get more recognized. But, um, so every year on Yom HaShoah, the march of the living, an organization takes thousands about 10,000 kids a year, mostly high school students to Poland on a nine-day journey and they go to all the concentration camps, they go to ghettos, they tour different towns and they, on Yom HaShoah the actual day, they walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau now, so from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II, and then they spend the day in Birkenau listening to speakers and walking around the camp. It's really an incredibly emotional day. I had heard about this program. I really wanted to go on it. While it was mostly geared to high school students, there were a few young professional groups who went for people in their 20s and 30s and 40s not many.
Dana Arschin:I found one, only one that year that was going, and it was based out of a synagogue in LA called Temple Sinai. It was majority Persian Jews from LA, which was fascinating to me because, while they have their own persecution family stories. They really weren't affected by the Holocaust per se. So the fact that they were all spending this time and money to go on a trip, I was blown away by their dedication. So it was majority. It was like 35 persians from la me, an ashkenazi jew from new york and a few other ashkenazi jews, there was one non-jewish girl from australia, there was, uh, two other australians and I think then maybe someone from chicago, just a few scattered in, but majority was from the synagogue. And then I brought a friend with me, actually from New York, who last minute decided to come. So we flew over, we met them in LA and I brought my camera with me.
Dana Arschin:Oh, I had gone to my boss at Fox 5, where I was no longer a one woman show. I had a camera crew, I had editors, I had a photographer who would drive me everywhere and but we're a local New York, new Jersey, connecticut station and I asked my boss would you let me go to Poland and, you know, create documentaries or short films on my work? And he is a Muslim man who is so into the Holocaust and my biggest supporter. And he is a Muslim man who is so into the Holocaust and my biggest supporter, and he is a huge history buff and he was like absolutely, and his name's Ahmad Oscar. I'm going to give him a nice shout out because he's one of the most incredible people I've ever met and he did so much for me and for my career. And he said you know, you're on a local news station. I can't pay for you to go, you're going to have to pay your own way and I can't send a camera crew with you, but I'll give you our best equipment, our small equipment, and you can shoot the whole thing, and I'll give you an editor when you get back and I'll give you plenty of time to put together a story or two. Wow, so that was amazing.
Dana Arschin:So I had to teach myself. They had this amazing tiny little cinematography camera and I had to teach myself how to use it. It was really complicated. So I spent like weeks doing YouTube tutorials leading up to the trip and then I learned how to use it really well Every day. My footage got a little better on the trip, but I recorded literally every second of my day and I came back and I put three short films together. The first one's nine minutes long. The others are about five or six minutes long and I could have kept going. That's how much footage that I captured. And we went around to all these different camps.
Dana Arschin:This trophy is based on my first film called the Forgotten Camps, and I thought it was really important to do this story, because everyone hears of Auschwitz, understandably so. More than a million men, women and children were killed in Auschwitz alone. It was the largest death camp. But we also hear so much of Auschwitz because it was such a massive camp that there are so many Auschwitz survivors because they were needed for labor. So that's, in a nutshell, why we know so much about Auschwitz. But there were so many other camps that had almost no survivors.
Dana Arschin:There's a camp called Belzec. People pronounce it differently. Michael Berenbaum calls it Belchik, other people call it Belzeix, but it's B-E-L-Z-E-C. There were only two known survivors at the entire camp. It was a strictly death camp.
Dana Arschin:Treblinka was strictly a death camp. It had a handful of survivors, and when I say a handful I really mean a handful. People were taken off the cattle cars and gassed immediately. There were no work camps. So all these camps that I felt like were forgotten about. There's a camp called Majdanek, which the fact that Majdanek existed is mind-blowing, because it existed on top of a hill overlooking all these Polish towns. These people knew what was going on right in their backyard. People knew what was going on right in their backyard and here and at Maidana today, there's still a massive pile of human remains that have been I forget how many pounds that has been preserved. So this story focuses on all, not all, the different camps. There were tens of thousands of camps in the landscape of Europe that people don't even know about, small camps like Colmar, where my poppy was, but I really thought it was important to focus on camps that we don't hear every day.
Nicole Kelly:I was. I literally text you about this because in that book they called it it was Operation Hydric, after Reinhard Hydric, who was one of the designers of the Holocaust and he was. He was assassinated in Czechoslovakia. It was a whole thing. You can Google it. It was very interesting, but they were literally like they was just pure gassing, and I think it's so, like I was saying it's so important, I was saying to you it's so important that people know about this because, like you were saying, auschwitz is kind of like the big one and it was. Yes, it was a terrible, awful place, but there were places where really people, people just got off a train and they were immediately sent to the gas chambers and.
Nicole Kelly:With no option to live?
Dana Arschin:Yeah, it was. It's kind of crazy. No possibility to live.
Nicole Kelly:I should say yeah and I think that a lot of people you know Did you learn? Did you learn from?
Dana Arschin:the forgotten camps. I did, I did, I learned and I didn't know any of that. And there's so many other camps like that. We also visited Plashov, which was the camp where Schindler correctly took his, and a lot of these camps don't exist anymore. It's just monuments and plaques to mark the camps. So, yeah, that's why I really thought it would be an interesting.
Nicole Kelly:There's this crazy diagram that I saw in Auschwitz that I have a picture of on my phone and I posted on Facebook, where it shows all the thousands of camps throughout Europe, and I think a lot of people don't realize there were other camps. So that's why works like your short film are so important, because I think people kind of have an idea about these things, but there there's a lot of very specific stuff that they're not really.
Dana Arschin:I think Dr Darbaum was at 40,000 camps in the landscape of Europe that he said in that film it's a lot of camps. I mean, yeah, it's. It's unbelievable.
Nicole Kelly:So you went on, as we've been talking about, to win your second Emmy for this. I was this more meaningful than your first because of the subject matter.
Dana Arschin:Absolutely, and this was like all me, like I shot it I. I didn't edit it, I shot it, I wrote it, I produced it. Um, this, I put my blood, sweat and tears into into filming this. So, yeah, this was pretty amazing. What was sad is that I won this. So it's always the Emmys are like for the following year.
Dana Arschin:So this was at the height of COVID the ceremony and this is so funny, so we had to watch it live and there were two ways to watch it. You can watch it, stream it live from the Facebook the Emmy's Facebook page that year, or from the Emmy's website, and I forget which one I was watching on and you're not even gonna believe this. My category is called, they announced the winner and then, blank, my screen just goes out and right away I start getting bombarded with people saying, oh my God, what happened? What happened? And then another group of texts saying congratulations, congratulations.
Dana Arschin:So one of the webs people were watching from one of the two. One of them had completely just gone down in that moment, but the other website was still streaming. So everyone watching was either like, oh, oh my God, did she just win? And the other half had heard that I won and I didn't, and my husband's next to me recording and he was recording the screen and they're like, and the winner is, and then it just goes blank. I'm not even exaggerating, it was that exact moment. And then you hear me screaming what, what, what just happened, and I have this all recorded. It was like the craziest thing. So I didn't actually get to hear it live, but some people did.
Nicole Kelly:Were you able to find video of it later?
Dana Arschin:Yeah, I don't. I think I went back and was able to find it later.
Nicole Kelly:Okay, so you got to hear her name.
Dana Arschin:That's so nice, yeah, I think the recorded one wound up being up on the Facebook page after that. But yeah, it was crazy.
Nicole Kelly:So you've kind of transitioned from traditional reporting to now working for the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County as a storyteller. So what exactly does that mean? I saw on the website that you're their first storyteller. So what does that mean and what made you decide to make this transition into something similar but a little bit different?
Dana Arschin:It was a really, really, really hard decision for me to make. I had worked so hard to become a journalist, to become a news reporter, to get my first two jobs in New York. But I'll be completely transparent as I was starting to make creative family, I would get home at 9 o'clock at night and I was pretty much a stranger to my daughter. We had been in the city. When we were in the city it was fine. I was actually a quick walk to work at Fox five. But during the pandemic my husband was working fully remote and we were in a tiny little one bedroom apartment with a six month old and he just needed to get out. So we moved to Long Island and that made the commute really difficult for me and I can tell you I had maybe three Thanksgivings off in the entire 12 years. Um, between both jobs I worked every single weekend. I worked almost every single holiday.
Nicole Kelly:It's like being an actor you miss funerals, weddings, birthday parties, yeah.
Dana Arschin:I did miss a funeral that I'll never forgive myself for. I just I. I my husband's gone by himself to weddings. He was by himself and, and you know, I started to fill in at the anchor desk, but that means that I was working Saturdays. There's really like no way to win in this industry, and even you know the anchors who have been in the industry forever, who are veterans. They're working the morning show, which is a 3 am start time. I worked the morning show for six months. I was in the door at work at 2.30 in the morning.
Dana Arschin:So it was getting very difficult for me. I had a second baby on the way and I just felt like I needed to be a little more present for my family. And mentally, I mean, it was a very draining job but I love it. I have so much respect for anyone in this field, but after 12 years I was ready to try something new, but I would not leave unless I had the perfect situation lined up. I wasn't going to risk my. I didn't want to lose my career that I had worked so hard for. So I was thinking what could I do that would be just as meaningful, just as impactful and I wouldn't feel like I was losing my whole skill set that I had honed so well and I had started a Holocaust series at Fox 5 after my journey to Poland. I had interviewed oh my God, I don't even know so many survivors. I would go all around the tri-state area interviewing survivors. I did a half hour special on Holocaust survivors that I anchored and wrote. That aired on January 27th of 2022, which was an Emmy nomination that I just had. That I didn't win, which was also a huge letdown, but I won another one, which was also very special, but that was just this past October.
Dana Arschin:But anyway, I was like I want to be. I just want to tell Holocaust stories. It's all I want to do. So I start reaching out to other stations and contacts I have and bigger networks and while people thought it was really fascinating Holocaust was 80 years ago being a Holocaust reporter, no one's really going to open up that type of position. Yeah, so I'm like who would? So I'm like a Holocaust museum.
Dana Arschin:So my first thought was I want to go big. I want to do this for the Holocaust museum in DC, because I can interview survivors anywhere and just post stories online. I spoke to a contact in DC, spoke to local, smaller museums and what I realized is that the smaller museums needed me way more than the bigger museums, because the big museums have these huge PR teams. Small museums didn't have anyone. So the museum on Long Island a half hour away from me called the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, which we call HMTC.
Dana Arschin:I spoke to the chairperson at the time, andrea Bolander, and she loved my idea. So I pitched being the first ever storyteller, basically doing the same quality stories that were airing on Fox, but instead of having a TV platform blasting them all over social media the museum's Instagram, facebook, youtube pages and she loved the idea. Number one, it was a way to keep survivor stories alive and number two, to put this museum on the map. And it has been so incredible. My stories are now getting over 100,000 views. The following on the museum and on my page has grown exponentially.
Dana Arschin:I thought that leaving news that I'd kind of become irrelevant and I feel like my career is just growing and I think, in general, when people like to follow others who are passionate and whose work is their true calling, and I think anyone who hears what I do knows that this is what I'm meant to be doing and it's been an amazing time, and I can still win Emmy Awards. That's the cool part. That's very cool. Emmys have changed their qualifications because so many organizations have gone to streaming platforms. So if you continue to do this broadcast type segment in a way that is airing on your organization's website for a local audience still can be submitted. So my dream is to get first a nomination for the museum and hopefully one day a win for the museum.
Dana Arschin:I shoot, write, narrate and edit everything myself now, which is what I wanted to do. I wanted to have full control. I've interviewed about 50 survivors in just the past year, almost all of them in person, and it's been incredibly rewarding. I create documentaries. They each take me about four months to put together because my schedule is wild and I wait for archival video to come in and it's a process, but it has really been fascinating and I just it is exactly what I've meant to be doing and Fox five is having me on their show next week to talk about my job. A CBS morning show had me on um, interviewed on News 12 all the time I was on WABC. So I still kind of get to keep my I'm like a spokesperson kind of for the museum now I still get my broadcast TV fix a little bit just enough, but I really just get to do this incredible work that will live on, hopefully, for generations to come.
Nicole Kelly:Is this a museum you had been to before taking on your position, like even had maybe grown up going to?
Dana Arschin:Yes, I was very familiar with the museum. It's only it's about 30 years old. We're actually in our 30th year right now. I had been there actually for news stories over the years and I had gone in graduate school. I did a 15 minute thesis on Holocaust a video thesis on Holocaust survivors as my thesis project in grad school. I did a 15-minute video thesis on Holocaust survivors as my thesis project in grad school. So Holocaust has been in me for a long time, even before, and at News 12, my first job, I had done a two-part series on survivors. But yes, I had been to the museum. I interviewed a bunch of survivors there when I was in graduate school.
Dana Arschin:And it's not a big museum, it's small. You could probably do the whole thing in an hour. What we are, more than anything? We're an education center. So almost every school district across Long Island comes through our doors Monday through Friday the entire academic year. We have about 5,000 students a month that we're educating either at our center or we bring survivors and trained educators to their school. So most importantly is that we do in-person education with students.
Nicole Kelly:That was my question, kind of what sets you guys apart, which I think is really great, because some of the larger museums I'm sure they deal a lot with students, but a lot of them are it's weird to say like tourist attractions where if you're visiting Washington DC, it's a museum you'll visit. But having local museums is very important as well. So, you've talked a little about interviewing these survivors on behalf of the museum, so what does that process entail?
Dana Arschin:So it's funny. People say you're having trouble finding survivors. It's as if everyone knows about my work. I have a list of like 100-something survivors and I can't even call them all fast enough, which is amazing. I try really hard to do. The oldest survivors, the camp survivors who are still with us, are all hitting 100 and beyond. But the fact that they're still alive actually has shown I have seen that a lot of them are really just like my poppy, like with it up until the last minute. Clearly their genetics are incredible.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, those are usually my best interviews, not because they're any more amazing than any of these other young survivors that I interview, but their stories are a lot more harrowing what they went through. But our youngest survivors are in their 80s, in their about 83 to 86. They were either just born as the Holocaust was happening. One survivor, leo Ullman, who I do all of my work with or majority of my work with, because he's so articulate, I bring him as like my guest on a lot of the shows. He was a toddler in Amsterdam and he was two years old when a Christian family hit him for a few years and that's how he survived a Christian family that risked their lives in Amsterdam to save him. So yeah, you know every story is very different. But yes, the younger survivors were either don't have much of a recollection of it. They share their parents' stories more. And the older survivors are the camp survivors and I'm trying to get the older ones as quickly as I can.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, it's so important because it is literally a dying out generation.
Dana Arschin:Yeah, and you said what does it entail? I try really hard not just to focus on how did you survive and what happened. I love hearing about everyday life before the war. What do you remember your mom cooking on Shabbat? What was the smell like of the baked challah in the oven? What was your favorite thing to eat? Usually my best soundbites are them describing some part of their family life or something that they ate or some type of holiday. And I try really to humanize my interviews and I have a pretty casual way that I do my interviews. I don't have any questions written down ever. I try to be really in the moment and just bounce off them. But I do a heavy focus on life before the war, before I lead into the war breaking out, and life during the war and post-war.
Nicole Kelly:Which leads me to what I had a question about is we talked about the Shoah Foundation, which is after I think it was like around the time Schindler's List came out, Steven Spielberg. They've interviewed tens and thousands of survivors. Is that one of the things that you think sets your interviews apart, as opposed to the Shoah Foundation interviews, as you focus a lot on pre-war life?
Dana Arschin:No, I don't think they're necessarily so different. I think, you know, there were so many volunteers who went around and conducted these interviews and they all had different styles. As I'm doing this, I'm learning more and more and more, so I mean, my style has even changed in the last year. So, no, I don't know if anything necessarily sets me apart. There's nothing more special or more important about my interviews than those interviews. They're all just as important, and I just yeah, I'm grateful for anyone who has taken the time to do this.
Nicole Kelly:Is there maybe one specific interview that you've conducted that kind of stands out to you as being especially memorable, other than, obviously, your poppy?
Dana Arschin:I can a few come to mind really quickly. There is a survivor who still takes tango dance lessons every single week, takes tango dance lessons every single week and I went to interview her at the end of one of her lessons and captured her dancing with her young instructor and doing dips and twirls and it was so fascinating. I had another. I interviewed another survivor who is still boxing and she had taken a break during the interview, but I just saw her this week and she told me I'm back to boxing now, so I want to invite you to come, and they're all in their 90s. She's like I want you to come to a session and watch me kickboxing. It's amazing. And you could follow her Her name's Gilda Zielinski on Instagram. She posts videos of her boxing. It's so cool.
Dana Arschin:I interviewed a few women survivors who have beautiful voices and who sang and played piano for me two women who play piano and there's they're beautiful, beautiful voices. And one of those women, her sister, wrote a diary like Anne Frank's diary. It's unbelievable. It's hundreds of pages about her hiding during the war and I got so emotional. I usually don't cry, I'm usually kind of numb on these interviews and I was tearing up. It was so emotional reading the words of. You know, it's so easy to just to hear the story related to you from someone else, but to actually feel the ink and see this person's emotions on page, that was really difficult for me. One woman she was tough as nails, I mean, she didn't crack a smile and her story was fascinating. She's an auschwitz survivor. The number on her arm uh, her tattoo prisoner number adds up to 18 high and I posted that video. It also, I think it hit a hundred thousand views. Um, it just people went. It went viral because people were so fascinated by the fact she says I survived because these numbers equal high and it's just.
Dana Arschin:Each interview truly is so. There's not an interview I do where my jaw doesn't drop, even interviews where they weren't. As you know, there's one survivor where his story is not very tragic. He was born in Potenza, southern Italy, and they lived in an area where it was like free confinement, where Jews could actually live freely in this area and while his story wasn't tragic, it was just fascinating. I had never heard that before. It was a really rare city that was protected. So just every single story I do, I learn something so unique. Really, they're all incredible.
Nicole Kelly:So this last portion of my interview is kind of like the actor studio. They're just short form questions that I ask all of my guests, so no need to kind of overthink any of this. What is your favorite Yiddish word?
Dana Arschin:It's a good question. So the word I use the most is schlep, like, oh, I have to schlep her to school in the snow, or sorry, you had to schlep all this way, but I like chutzpah. He has a lot of chutzpah. Um, what is my, what's my mom say when? Um, why can I think right now, when someone's really cheap, oh, um, why am I blanking on the word? You know what I'm talking about.
Nicole Kelly:I do know what you're talking about, but I don't know the word.
Dana Arschin:Okay, I can't think of it. I use mensch a lot, um, oh, my God, this word's bothering me. But yeah, um so those are my words.
Nicole Kelly:What is your favorite Jewish holiday?
Dana Arschin:Okay, You're going to laugh, but I love Yom Kippur. So for a few reasons I feel like my life is so privileged, Like what we talked about before, like they don't make strength like that anymore, For I can go one day of no food and no water to just honor what my ancestors endured for generations, and I feel so connected to my poppy and to my ancestors on that day I just it also. Just it just brings me back down to earth a little bit. Just I, we just have it so easy. So for me it's not about the religion, it's about just making a sacrifice because I'm so privileged to live the life that I live.
Dana Arschin:And then breaking the fast is my favorite day of the year. So right after Yom Kippur, where we fast all day we've been hosting the past few years I make a fresh mac and cheese, we get bagels and lox and we do like a dairy meal, and so just fasting during the day, I just like that connection I feel to my ancestors. And then breaking the fast with all the food is the best part, of course.
Nicole Kelly:If you were to have a bat mitzvah today, what would the theme of your party be?
Dana Arschin:Circus. So I'm a huge flying trapeze circus girl. I've been doing trapeze since I was 10.
Nicole Kelly:I juggle.
Dana Arschin:I have a lot of really weird hidden hobbies and talents, so it would definitely be circus girl. I've been doing trapeze since I was 10. I juggle. I have a lot of really weird hidden hobbies and talents, so it would definitely be circus themed.
Nicole Kelly:What profession other than your own would you want to attempt?
Dana Arschin:Being a professional flying trapeze acrobat.
Nicole Kelly:That's one I will probably not get from any other guest ever. If heaven is real and God is there to welcome you, what would you like to hear them say?
Dana Arschin:I would like to hear God say you did well.
Nicole Kelly:So thank you so much for joining me, Dana. If someone was interested in visiting the museum you work at or watching your videos, what would be the easiest way to get that information?
Dana Arschin:So find me on Instagram, facebook, twitter or X as Dana Arshin A-R-S-C-H-I N. I post all my stories there. Our museum is H-M-T-C-L-I, which you can find also on all those platforms, and if you want to come, we're open pretty much standard business hours like 10 to 4-ish every day, saturdays as well. Come visit the museum. It's incredible, and what's great about the museum is you could do it in a half hour. You could do it in five hours. You can take your time. It's small but there's a lot of information, so it's a really great place to visit for the day and just support us.
Dana Arschin:Sorry to make a donation pitch, but we're a nonprofit. You know we can't run without our generous donors and grants that we receive. So, and I'm also looking for someone to fund my position as well, because, while my position is so important, it doesn't make the center run like our education team makes the center run. So any philanthropists feeling inspired out there and wants to make sure that I can keep up my passion of interviewing survivors, reach out to me and let me know. But otherwise, just your support, watching our stories, your views, your likes, your comments, your engagement that means everything.
Nicole Kelly:Great. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been Shebrew in the City and I'm Nicole Kelly. Thank you.
