01/26/05

LC050126

For sixty-seven years, Town Hall Los Angeles has educated and
inspired audiences through dialog with newsmakers on vital
issues. It supports democracy by fostering civic participation.
Information on membership and programs is on our website.

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Young and old from near and far. What drove these people to
make such a journey? The right to vote.

Wahab Al Hindawi>> We live in good life now. We have a
beautiful life now. We are Americans. But we are doing it for
our kids in Iraq, for our future in Iraq.

Val>> And then, they're not the longest in the world or the
most famous, but Los Angeles's bridges are second to none when
it comes to style.

All that and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> It's a chance to vote for the leaders of their country.
Their country is Iraq and the voters are Iraqi Nationals here in
the United States. There's just one catch. There are only five
cities in the entire United States where they can vote. But as
Toni Guinyard tells us, some Iraqis are willing to travel
thousands of miles for their first in a lifetime experience.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> They arrive alone, in groups of friends or with
families. They arrive for what is the first step in a journey
like no other they've experienced before. They are Iraqi ex-
patriots making history by registering to vote in Iraq's
transitional national assembly election.

Kadhim Alrobaie>> This is the chance for us as Iraqis to give
back to our land, to experience our freedom over there.

Sam Jawad>> This is the first opportunity for us and the Iraqis
overseas to have this opportunity and vote for our new
government.

Toni Guinyard>> But in order to vote, each person is required
to make two trips to the same polling place, first to register
in person and again January 28 through 30 to cast a ballot,
choosing slates of candidates in some cases they know little
about.

Fatima Alawadi>> I'm not very sure about my husband. He's
saying that we'll vote for that person or that person.

Toni Guinyard>> You're taking his direction on who to vote for?

Fatima Alawadi>> Yes.

Toni Guinyard>> And you?

>> Yes, me too.

Toni Guinyard>> If Iraqis living in the western United States
want to vote, this is where they have to come. The former El
Toro Marine Base in Irvine, California is one of only seven
sites in five United States cities hosting out-of-country voter
registration and polling. Members of the Iraqi communities say
they know where they must go to register, but getting here is
the problem.

Emanuel Hinawer>> We drove almost four or five hours to get
here.

Toni Guinyard>> Each eligible voter that has come here has a
story to tell and many tell stories about taking extraordinary
efforts just to get here, but others come with stories of
frustration from people who are not able to make the trip.

Haider Alansari>> We take about twenty-eight hours to come to
here and there is too many people who can't come to here because
it's too far. We have old men, we have old women, we have some
people who are sick, some people are working and they can't come
to here.

Toni Guinyard>> Mission Viejo businessman, Salem Aljawad, is
the El Toro site polling center manager.

Salem Aljawad>> Quite frankly, there have been a lot of
limitations not by us, but just the process itself where they
have to be here twice. But we are concerned about that. They
are concerned about that, but I'm sure that those who want to
vote and I have seen people make a tremendous amount of effort
to go through this.

Toni Guinyard>> Traveling to and from the polling stations has
become a test in determination and devotion, an example of how
far some Iraqis are willing to go to participate in the process.

Wahab Al Hindawi>> Believe me, they're going to tell me to walk
here to vote, I'm going to come and do it. I'm so excited.
It's really unbelievable.

Toni Guinyard>> The thought of making two trips here, one to
register and another to vote, is little more than an
inconvenience to some. Several of these men are from the
Seattle, Washington area. They flew to Los Angeles, took a limo
to Irvine, registered, then held an impromptu celebration in the
parking lot.

[Film Clip]

Adil Rikabi>> My people in Iraq, everybody today, is happy. I
am happy. I don't. . .

Toni Guinyard>> While it's difficult for Adil Rikabi to find
the words in English to describe his joy, draped in an Iraqi
flag, there is no mistaking that this is a day he's been waiting
for. The ink pen he used to register to vote becomes a
keepsake.

Kadhim Alrobaie>> He said this is my first use for this pen.
I'm going to keep it for the next eighteen years for his son who
was just born two days ago. He said, when my son is going to be
eighteen, he's going to use it again to vote for a new
government in Iraq.

Wahab Al Hindawi>> We feel Iraq is part of our heart. We have
to do something for it, not for us. We live a good life here.
We have a beautiful life here. We are Americans. But we are
doing it for our kids in Iraq, for our future in Iraq.

Emanuel Hinawer>> Now we hope it will be better than the old
system of Saddam.

Kadhim Alrobaie>> We as Iraqis really need to thank all
Americans who support Iraq, all troops who fight for Iraqi
freedom.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> In stark contrast to the celebratory mood at
the El Toro polling site, miles away outside the Federal
Building in Westwood, people demonstrated against the start of
the second presidential term of George W. Bush and protested the
war in Iraq.

Sarah Knopp>> To me, what they're trying to do with the
elections is give legitimacy to the United States occupation, so
I support the people who say, you know what, I don't want to
legitimize the occupation by voting for something that's not
truly democratic.

Toni Guinyard>> This is where we met Ban Al-Wardi.

Ban Al-Wardi>> I'm a first generation Iraqi-American.

Toni Guinyard>> She is the President of the Los Angeles Chapter
of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. She is
eligible to vote in the Iraqi election, but has decided against
casting a ballot.

Ban Al-Wardi>> Who are the people who are even running in the
election, you know? I've basically chosen not to vote because I
don't feel that it's in my place to dictate the destiny of those
Iraqis living inside of Iraq who really have to live with
whatever government is chosen eventually.

Toni Guinyard>> Al-Wardi is another face of Iraq free to voice
her opinion. Her words cut through the crowd of noisy
protesters. What she has to say is a reminder of the different
opinions about the election.

Ban Al-Wardi>> We have entire cities and towns and urban
centers in Iraq that are under siege right now who are not
allowed to vote, who are living in Iraq today and not allowed to
participate in their own election.

Sam Jawad>> Since the first time I hear about it, I said these
people choose not to vote.

Toni Guinyard>> For Downey resident, Sam Jawad, the formation
of a new Iraq begins here. He registered to vote with his
father and sister-in-law. After years of dreaming of
participating in a democratic Iraqi election, it would take only
minutes to begin the process many Iraqis have waited decades
for.

>> "Make sure that I spelled your name right."

Toni Guinyard>> The family leaves the registration table with
small receipts authorizing them to vote, leaves with the
handshake of thanks that seems to bridge the language gap
between registrar and would-be voter. Are you happy to be able
to vote?

>> Yes, I'm very happy.

Christina Kanoon>> God bless America.

Web Karan>> Even though I was born here, I can help for a
better life for other Arabs or other Sunnis, Shiites or Syrians
that live back in Iraq.

Toni Guinyard>> Web drove his grandmother from Turlock,
California to the Irvine polling site, two generations from one
family taking part in history, willing to make a five-hour trip
to have a voice and a vote.

Salem Aljawad>> This tells me that eagerness and the
willingness and the distance that those people are willing to go
in order to go through this and to make sure that their voices
are being heard.

Suhaila Alhaddawi>> I came from Iraq twenty-four years ago. I
never went back. I left everything back home. I didn't go
back. So now I need to go to see my family, to see my friends,
to see everybody happy.

Toni Guinyard>> It's a dream shared by many other Iraqis
calling the United States their home away from home. I'm Toni
Guinyard for Life and Times.

[Film Clip]

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts
and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most
interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life
and Times".

Val>> About once a month in a small house near USC, an unusual
meeting takes place. It's a gathering of Germans and Jews, but
not just any Germans and Jews. This is a meeting between the
children of Holocaust survivors and the children of Nazis. The
program is called German-Jewish Dialogue. Among its founders
are Morrie Kagan and Cornelius Schnauber. Morrie's parents are
Holocaust survivors. Cornelius's father was a Nazi. The two
men are close friends. I met them at the Max Kada Institute for
German, Austrian and Swiss Studies at USC where they told me
about their lives.

Cornelius Schnauber>> I was born near Dresden, the East German
city, the beautiful baroque city of Dresden, and my father was
an early member of the Nazi party.

Morrie Kagan>> In many cases, as in my parents' case, they met
at a concentration camp. So you could always say that, if it
wasn't for Adolf Hitler, I would not be here today. A rather
sad statement, but a fact.

Cornelius Schnauber>> He was not ambitious as though he didn't
want to become one of the leaders, but when the Nazis took over,
he had a good job first in the Nazi unions and then later on
during the war in the Nazi Red Cross.

Morrie Kagan>> Eventually, though, they were separated and sent
to different camps. After the war, my father actually traveled
throughout Germany trying to locate my mother and eventually, of
course, did in the displaced persons camp outside of Munich.

Cornelius Schnauber>> My grandparents brought up the issue of
where did the Jews go? Where did they take them? Then my
father said they were deported to a foreign country, so he never
accepted the fact that Jews were intentionally killed.

Val>> Cornelius Schnauber was six years old when the war ended.
He became a noted intellectual and professor. He met his wife,
an American from Stanford, and they settled in Los Angeles.

Cornelius Schnauber>> And there was a drawing --

Morrie Kagan>> -- this is a pen and ink.

Val>> Morrie's parents also settled in Los Angeles. His father
was a jeweler and an artist. His work captures some of the
horrors of the concentration camps.

Morrie Kagan>> They were carrying a number of bodies to a
funeral pyre where they were going to be burned. Cornelius
Schnauber, who I also call my brother in history, came into my
life in late 1986.

Val>> That was when the German-Jewish Dialogue began. About
three hundred Germans and Jews have participated in these
intense conversations guided by specific rules. How do you talk
to each other with that kind of history?

Morrie Kagan>> Well, you know, it could be very easy to sit
there and point fingers at people, but we learned and we realize
that the people we're talking to were not the perpetrators.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Nobody who participated in the German-
Jewish Dialogue made me responsible for what happened during the
Nazi period, but I always have guilt feelings because I come
from the nation which put Hitler into power.

Morrie Kagan>> One of the key elements was how do we as Jews
and Germans define the term Nazi? We as Jews discovered that we
had a far broader definition of the term Nazi, as did Germans.
In the Jewish world, almost all Germans were Nazis and this
comes from the heart and the gut. It's a very visceral
response. Germans looked at it a bit more clinically. Nazis
were individuals who were members of the Nazi party.

Cornelius Schnauber>> You can say in one sentence that six
million Jews were killed between 1933 and 1945 and that's one
sentence, but each of those six million Jews was a person like
you and me and that I wanted to tell the future generation.
Don't take it just as descendants of home history books.

Morrie Kagan>> The Dialogue is not an intellectual
conversation. You are not there to be an academic. You are
there, you're speaking from the heart, you're speaking from the
soul.

Cornelius Schnauber>> You are at home, have a nice home
probably, and then suddenly in the nighttime, the SS knocks at
the door, pulls you out, puts you in a train where they usually
transport animals and then a concentration camp. Either you
were killed or you had to do slave labor.

Morrie Kagan>> Anger remains a very dominant factor within the
Jewish community to this day. Many, many Jews will not set foot
in Germany or buy German products.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Fortunately, during this Dialogue, many
of these angry people became, I will not say soft, but they now
have second thoughts.

Morrie Kagan>> It's important to know that the Germany of 1933
to 1945 is no more, that Germany today has transformed itself.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Let's say, if you're in Germany now and a
skinhead attacks you as a Jew, you can always get help from the
government. But at that time, and that makes you even more
frustrated, it was the government itself which killed and
discriminated against the Jews.

Val>> What was one of the things you learned that was kind of
revelatory for you in the course of the Dialogues?

Morrie Kagan>> Of course, we had much more in common than not.
Also, the fact that pain is relative. That is, I could feel my
parents' pain and I feel the pain of loss and I feel the pain
that I never knew my grandparents, that they died in those
years. That is my pain and I own that pain, but I also learned
that the Germans -- and we also have Austrians in the group as
well -- suffered from pain as well. The pain of shame is a
different kind of pain, but nevertheless a pain. So we had to
learn to value that as well.

Cornelius Schnauber>> I cannot put guilt feeling into the third
generation and not my goal either, but responsibility. I always
tell them that, if you are proud that you come from a nation of
Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Einstein, who had to escape
from Germany, then you also should take the responsibility of
what happened between 1933 and 1945 and work hard that something
like that should never happen again.

Morrie Kagan>> I'm afraid that anti-Semitism in the world is an
ongoing thing. It's been here for millennia and I don't think
that the German-Jewish Dialogue will end it. I'm not that
naïve. Although we learn from history, it tends to repeat
itself, so I can only speak for my generation and perhaps hope
that my son's generation, our children's generations, can learn
a bit more from it and teach that to their children.


Val>> The German-Jewish Dialogue has been going on for nineteen
years and this month, sixty years ago, Allieds liberated the
Nazi Death Camp, Auschwitz. Tonight KCET presents a powerful
documentary called "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State". That's
tonight at nine o'clock right here on KCET.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or
contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> And now for this Life and Times story update. You may
remember about a year and a half ago, we told you about the
drastic cuts that cities and states were making to the arts. So
what has happened since? Well, for one long-standing art center
in East Los Angeles, the news is not good.

For more than three decades, Self-Help Graphics has helped
promising East Los Angeles artists get their start through
print-making, a metal workshop, a gallery and theatre. But hard
times have put the nonprofit art center on a precipice. About a
fifth of their budget that used to come from government sources
have been slashed and the recent storms have done about $150,000
damage to this seventy-five year old landmark building on Cesar
Chavez Avenue.

Over the past year, this grassroots arts organization has had to
cancel exhibitions and lay off half a dozen employees. Those
remaining have taken a pay cut. Despite the challenges,
Executive Director Tomas Benitez says his Board is steadfast and
artists and supporters have stepped up to the plate after
hearing of their plight.

Self-Help Graphics has spent thirty-two years building up a
national reputation. It's survived tough times before and
Benitez says it will survive these.

When you think of cities with great bridges, you think of San
Francisco and New York. But Los Angeles has some picturesque
bridges of its own. They may not have the span of the Golden
Gate, but they have their own classic style. We thought we'd
open up the Life and Times Vault and bring you this story from
Gay Yee.

Gay Yee>> Living here in Los Angeles, some of us spend half of
our lives in a car, totally oblivious as to what's underneath
our wheels. On any given day, we could be driving on any number
of these bridges, bridges built to get us from here to there and
bridges built to be things of beauty.

Clark Robins>> You know, Los Angeles's bridges were unique. I
haven't seen any like it anywhere. That's why I was impressed.

Gay Yee>> Clark Robins oversees the city's bridges. Since the
day he arrived, a wide-eyed civil engineer from Utah in the
1960's, he's had a love affair with these structures.

Clark Robins>> We see uniqueness. We see beauty. We see a lot
of care taken in how they were constructed. We see fine
architecture that doesn't have to be there, but it just adds
depth and meaning to the structure. Every time you drive over
it, it feels good.

Gay Yee>> Among the most beautiful are a dozen or so built
between 1910 and 1934. Concrete was poured to form graceful
arches, finials and balusters. Before concrete, truss bridges
like these used by the railroad were the norm, extremely
functional, but they didn't have much curb appeal. The city of
Los Angeles felt it deserved better. A City Arts Commission was
established in 1906. No bridge could be built without its
approval, and its expectations were high. It wanted fine
architecture with lasting beauty, like this one in Los Feliz.

Clark Robins>> It's called the Shakespeare Bridge. We don't
really know where it came from, but if you look at the turrets,
there are four of these turrets on each end of the bridge, for a
total of eight, and they kind of look like Shakespearean or
something you would see at a tower in London or something.

[Film Clip]

Gay Yee>> Each bridge is different. This one connecting East
Los Angeles to downtown used to be the Macy Street Bridge. It's
now renamed the Cesar Chavez Street Bridge. It's Spanish
Colonial in architecture. It has wrought iron lamps,
elaborately ornamented pylons, smooth concrete handrails with
fluted balusters.

The Washington Boulevard Bridge near the city of Vernon is
distinguished by a series of terra cotta friezes with figures
depicting a bridge construction crew. Each bridge is a
monument. But over the years, the bridges were neglected and
their artistic embellishments eroded by the wear and tear of
time.

Clark Robins>> Many of them, the railings were gone.

Gay Yee>> Like these stone railings?

Clark Robins>> Right. These concrete railings were completely
missing and had been changed to metal or some other form.

Gay Yee>> In 1990 voters approved funding to quake-retrofit all
the city's bridges. Robins and others wanted to be sure they
were also aesthetically sound. They convinced the federal
government to give them sixty-six million dollars to return the
bridges to their grandeur. But relying on original blueprints
and old photographs, it's been painstaking work with attention
to the minutest detail

Clark Robins>> Just simple things as scoring lines in sidewalks
that weren't shown on the plans. On the North Broadway Bridge
over the Los Angeles river, where we wrote a change order on
that contract halfway through to add these special scoring lines
in the sidewalk, just because we found it in a photograph.

Gay Yee>> Restoring these old bridges will be the capstone of
Robins' career. When the project is completed in the year 2000,
he says the bridges will be good for another seventy-five to one
hundred years. And he has faith, faith that future Angelenos
will continue the legacy.

Clark Robins>> I would imagine there would be another person
like me at some point in time and another population like
today's citizens who will want to preserve what's here and do it
over again, if necessary.

Gay Yee>> I'm Gay Yee for Life and Times.

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

Stranded by Mother Nature. One reporter's firsthand account of
trying to get out of Ojai.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> This is Santa Ana Road, a road that
bypasses the main drag out of town. It's now coated in mud from
smaller landslides that led to this. I don't think we'll be
getting out this way.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.

For sixty-seven years, Town Hall Los Angeles has educated and
inspired audiences through dialog with newsmakers on vital
issues. It supports democracy by fostering civic participation.
Information on membership and programs is on our website.