Wolf Blitzer recalls recent harrowing discovery in speech at RIAS awards ceremony
June 2, 2023
Wolf Blitzer recalls recent harrowing discovery in speech at RIAS awards ceremony
Wolf Blitzer said he was deeply honored that his documentary film about the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC told masterfully through the prism of his own family’s history in Poland, Germany and the United States for CNN had won top honors at the 2023 RIAS Media Prize awards ceremony. Blitzer, the son of Holocaust survivors, spoke about a harrowing discovery he made a few weeks ago while visiting a gas chamber in Auschwitz on a guided tour that it was where two of his grandparents had been killed.
Blitzer told the audience of 220 German and American journalists and supporters affiliated with the 31-year-old exchange program at the ceremony in Berlin that he and his CNN team that worked on the prize-winning documentary “Never Again: A Tour of the U.S. Holocaust Museum” for nearly a year. He said that he knew his father’s parents had been killed at Auschwitz but little else about the details of their deaths until visiting the former concentration camp’s gas chamber in Poland a few weeks ago — when a guide informed him about details he didn’t know about.
“This was one of the most emotional moments in my life,” Blitzer said, recalling the moment the guide asked him the town where his Polish Jewish grandparents came from. “He looked at me and paused. It was very dramatic. There were a bunch of people in this gas chamber. We were all watching and listening. He said to me ‘Your grandparents were killed in this gas chamber where we’re standing right now because this is where they brought the Polish Jews. They brought the Hungarian Jews and other Jews to Birkenau. But the Polish Jews, especially from the towns outside Auschwitz, were brought to this gas chamber. So your grandparents were killed in this gas chamber.’
“I was standing there and saw this gas chamber,” Blitzer added. “And it was a very, very emotional moment for me to learn – I didn’t know that – that my dad’s parents were killed inside this gas chamber where we were standing. And I did what I thought my grandparents and my mom and dad, who have both passed away, would want me to do at that moment. A very emotional moment. I said the Jewish memorial prayer, Kaddish, in memory of my grandparents. Knowing that when they were killed at Auschwitz, in this gas chamber, there was nobody to say Kaddish for them. So I said it. And it was just a very emotional moment for me. And it was, of course, something I’ll never forget.”
Blitzer, who received a standing ovation from the audience after telling the story of the recent visit to Poland, said that his parents had met on a train in Germany soon after surviving the Holocaust and lived for a time in the Bavarian city of Augsburg near Munich, where he and his older sister were born. His family immigrated to the United States when he was a toddler and settled in Buffalo, New York. He also praised American Ambassador Amy Gutmann, who was the keynote speaker at the annual awards ceremony paying tribute to outstanding German and American broadcast journalism that transcends borders, for talking about her father’s fleeing from Nazi Germany before she was born.
He also spoke about his father’s ever-lasting pride in seeing Blitzer, who began working at CNN 33 years ago, appearing on the network with a worldwide audience.
“He thought for him, personally, the greatest revenge to Hitler was to see his son report the news on worldwide television,” said Blitzer, 75. “It was for him so important that the next generation, that a Jewish reporter, could be seen on CNN reporting the news. It was just a very, very powerful feeling of revenge. His message to Hitler: take a look. See what you’ve done. You didn’t kill all the Jews and here is Wolf Blitzer, reporting the news on CNN.”
Blitzer, who has also been a guest speaker to RIAS Berlin Commission groups of visiting German journalists in Washington, said he was a believer in the power of exchange programs such as RIAS, which was created in 1992 after the Berlin-based German-language Radio in American Sector (RIAS) went off the air after the Cold War ended. And he vowed to continue to support RIAS programs in Germany and the United States.
“I promise I will be a very, very active and wonderful alum,” he said.
Blitzer said he and his team at CNN were especially honored to win the RIAS Berlin Commission’s Grand Prize for outstanding broadcast journalism in 2023 precisely because it was a German-American organization.
“This is so powerful for me. I’ve received many awards over the years for my journalism. But when I learned that this documentary that we did on CNN, ‘Never Again, a tour of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’ was being honored with this grand prize….it says ‘Grand Prize’, not just ‘Prize’…. but ‘Grand Prize’….when I realized we were getting this Grand Prize, not from some American organization or some European organization but a German media, a German-American media organization…. Everyone, all of us at CNN were so excited. That it was this organization, RIAS, that it was decided they were going to honor CNN, and honor me, for this Grand Prize – it wasn’t just me; it was a whole team at CNN working on this documentary for almost a year, getting it ready — and it was just a very emotional experience for all of us. I’m just so glad that CNN decided to do it.”
