An Interview With Edward Sylvan
America has suffered the last several years of bitterness, bigotry and violence, in some measure because a large part of the population is unaware of where bigotry and violence can lead. The conditions today are eerily reminiscent of what transpired in Europe 90 years ago. “Unstoppable” tells the story of an Auschwitz survivor with mesmerizing oratory skills and an over-the-top personality, a cross between Shakespeare and Jackie Mason, who survived forced labor, torture, starvation and came to America with a volcanic determination to make something of the second chance at life that he’d been given.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Joshua M. Greene.
Joshua M. Greene is a popular lecturer on Holocaust history and an author whose biographies have sold more than a half-million copies worldwide. Greene’s groundbreaking book on the Dachau war crimes trials, Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor, was deemed “Riveting — historical writing at its best” by Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian for CNN. He is the 2022 Laurel Vlock Fellow at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. His newest book, Unstoppable: The Incredible Journey of Auschwitz Survivor Siggi B. Wilzig, is distributed by Simon & Schuster. For more information, please visit joshuamgreene.info.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I came on the scene in 1950 and grew up the only child of a single mom, a woman liberated before the word was chic. We lived in a slum neighborhood — at least until ten years later when Lincoln Center went up three blocks away. Now the neighborhood is so upscale you have to have a passport to walk down the street. We read classic literature, attended concerts, played piano, and because my mom was a PR executive, I spent weekends stuffing press kits while other kids were playing stickball. What I remember most was having friends from both sides of the aisle. Sure, we disagreed about stuff, but the discourse was civilized and there was a sense of hopefulness in the air: Kennedy, King, the freedom marches, the moon landing — there was excitement and optimism about the human experience. That’s a part of my nature now: a kind of bug-eyed optimism about what we humans can achieve.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
Stuart Little grounded me early on in the dual aspirations of noble character and initiative. By age 19, the Eastern book of spirituality Bhagavad Gita became the guiding light for the rest of my life. The teachings felt almost familiar, as though I was coming home to something I had known long ago.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?
ON THE PLANE FROM MOSCOW — After spending 13 years in the ashrams of India, learning how to see life as sacred and how to demonstrate compassion towards all — something happened to show me I had a long way to go before achieving enlightenment. Coming back to America after India, I landed a job as a television producer. In the early 1990s, I was producing a series of animated adaptations of picture books for PBS. The animation studio was in Moscow. In those days, every plane to Russia was filled with Christian missionaries, armed with boxes of Bibles, storming the gates of the former Soviet Union — Satan’s last bastion. On one trip home, some fellows in my row were boasting about the preaching they had done. Then, to my disgust, they started swapping stupid homophobic jokes: “How do tell if a Russian is gay, yuck, yuck…” And I started fuming and turned to the guy sitting next to me. “How do you live with yourself?” I asked. “Where’s the Christian charity in your behavior?” The guy telling the jokes went silent. Then he said, “Let me tell you about myself. My great-grandaddy founded the Ku Klux Klan chapter in my hometown down south. I was a racist, a drunkard and a womanizer. One day, the local preacher talked to me about another way of living my life. It took me a while, but now I’m usually walking around ghettos, looking for kids who do drugs and asking them to rethink their life the way I did.” Then he thought about my complaint and added, “I guess I have a long way to go.” So much for my thirteen years of yoga and meditation. I was ready to condemn this poor guy for a bad joke. He wasn’t the only one with a long way to go. Ever since I’ve been careful about not judging people by appearances.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
America has suffered the last several years of bitterness, bigotry and violence, in some measure because a large part of the population is unaware of where bigotry and violence can lead. The conditions today are eerily reminiscent of what transpired in Europe 90 years ago. “Unstoppable” tells the story of an Auschwitz survivor with mesmerizing oratory skills and an over-the-top personality, a cross between Shakespeare and Jackie Mason, who survived forced labor, torture, starvation and came to America with a volcanic determination to make something of the second chance at life that he’d been given. He ended up building an oil and banking empire with more than $4 billion in assets. From what readers tell me, his example of what we humans are capable of doing, even having gone through the darkest of times, is an inspiration in their own perspectives on life.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
The book is a collection of such interesting stories. One of my favorites is how Siggi, once he had ascended the ladder of success in America, was so thrilled with his life, so happy to be alive and productive and supportive of the Jewish people, that he would spontaneously stand up in restaurants and start singing and dancing. People would elbow his kids and ask, “Does your father own the restaurant?” “Nah,” they’d answer. “He just loves his life.”
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
After writing about a dozen biographies from the Holocaust era, I didn’t want to stay stuck in that dark period of history. I thought I was done writing survivor biographies. Reading Siggi’s testimony for the Shoah Foundation changed my mind. Here was someone brilliant at conveying his experiences in a manner that engaged American audiences, particularly young people. That brought me out of my funk and compelled me to sit down again at the computer.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
There are examples in the book. The son of an officer in one of Siggi’s banks was headed toward suicide. Siggi — who by this time was courted by heads of business and leading politicians for his advice — dropped everything and drove to the son’s house to convince him to give life another chance. “If I can live through what I lived through in Auschwitz,” he said, “there’s hope for you too.”
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
- Support Holocaust education in classrooms;
- Deepen the examination of the Holocaust beyond merely reading the Diary of Anne Frank;
- Foster awareness of the signs of bigotry and hatred, so that young people will know to speak out.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
There is a difference between management skills and leadership skills. Management skills seek to preserve best practices of the past, keep projects on track, and maximize benefits. Someone possessing leadership skills will be prepared to challenge past practices as possibly irrelevant to current changing circumstances, derail projects if they lack larger context, and risk immediate benefits for the sake of greater returns down the road. This includes the courage to redefine such familiar concepts as success, profit, and performance.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
- Slow down. It’s not just a Buddhist thing. Reasoned, effective decision-making occurs most often when information is allowed extra time to filter through the brain’s various storage bins of prior experience. It was when I began chanting mantras, controlling breathing, and holding impatience at arm’s length that options came to me that would never have occurred otherwise. Here’s a simple application: Before making an important decision, take a few deep breaths.
- You’re capable of more than you know. The contemplative practices look to focus our attention on a core self — what some might call the soul — that is not compromised by external circumstances. We have traumas, but they don’t have to define us. Siggi Wilzig, the subject of “Unstoppable,” never could shed the nightmares of what he went through in Auschwitz, but he learned to make use of the nightmares: He channeled that energy into a psychic engine that drove his fearless entry into the highly antisemitic postwar American industries of oil and banking.
- If you want to get out of feeling miserable about your life, try doing something meaningful for someone else. Siggi had seen what hatred of Jews could lead to. 59 members of his family were murdered by the Nazis, and he barely escaped with his life. Years of forced labor, concentration camp tortures, starvation, humiliation, and death marches left him weighing 82 pounds when he was finally liberated in April 1945. After achieving success in America, he turned his attention to supporting the Jewish people, speaking out against injustice, and educating young people about Holocaust history. That focus on doing meaningful service for others brought him immense joy.
- Never give in to despair. If you just lift your head up from the ground, you’ll see opportunities that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. On the death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in January 1945, Siggi’s shoelaces holding together his flimsy wooden shoes broke from the rain and snow, and the shoes slipped up and down against his heels. Prisoners were not issued any socks, only a small rag-like piece of cloth that failed to cover their feet, a splinter from a wooden shoe would easily penetrate the rag and pierce the foot. A splinter could create a wound, which could turn septic and fill with pus, and the body of a starving person had no strength to fight infection. What to do? He lifted his head up from the sludge and mud, and there was a little birch sapling. When the guards weren’t looking, he crawled over to the tree and with the edge of a spoon he scored strips of bark — strips as thin as his finger — and massaged them a little to warm them up. Then he twisted two of them together and tied them around my shoes. He stood up and walked cautiously — and sure enough, the strips held. His life was saved by looking up and finding options he would never otherwise have seen.
- Chase a rhinoceros. My teacher, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, used to say, “If you’re going to go chasing something, chase a rhinoceros. If you fail, people will say, ‘What did you expect, he was chasing a rhinoceros.’ But if you catch ’em, now you’ve done something extraordinary.” Go big, chase a rhinoceros.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Hard to do. Life rarely comes packaged in quotable lessons. My experience has taught me that simple is not always better. In Holocaust education, for instance, history has been reduced to a name, a place, and a number: Hitler, Auschwitz, and 6 million, which tells us nothing about the details of what occurred. Perhaps if there is a life lesson quote in this, it would be distrusting life lesson quotes as they tend to over simplify complex issues.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
My younger self. I’d like to share some of the above with him.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
joshuamgreene.info
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
About The Interviewer: Growing up in Canada, Edward Sylvan was an unlikely candidate to make a mark on the high-powered film industry based in Hollywood. But as CEO of Sycamore Entertainment Group Inc, (SEGI) Sylvan is among a select group of less than ten Black executives who have founded, own and control a publicly traded company. Now, deeply involved in the movie business, he is providing opportunities for people of color.
In 2020, he was appointed president of the Monaco International Film Festival, and was encouraged to take the festival in a new digital direction.
Raised in Toronto, he attended York University where he studied Economics and Political Science, then went to work in finance on Bay Street, (the city’s equivalent of Wall Street). After years of handling equities trading, film tax credits, options trading and mergers and acquisitions for the film, mining and technology industries, in 2008 he decided to reorient his career fully towards the entertainment business.
With the aim of helping Los Angeles filmmakers of color who were struggling to understand how to raise capital, Sylvan wanted to provide them with ways to finance their creative endeavors.
At Sycamore Entertainment he specializes in print and advertising financing, marketing, acquisition and worldwide distribution of quality feature-length motion pictures, and is concerned with acquiring, producing and promoting films about equality, diversity and other thought provoking subject matter which will also include nonviolent storytelling.
Also in 2020, Sylvan launched SEGI TV, a free OTT streaming network built on the pillars of equality, sustainability and community which is scheduled to reach 100 million U.S household televisions and 200 million mobile devices across Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung Smart TV and others.
As Executive Producer he currently has several projects in production including The Trials of Eroy Brown, a story about the prison system and how it operated in Texas, based on the best-selling book, as well as a documentary called The Making of Roll Bounce, about the 2005 coming of age film which starred rapper Bow Wow and portrays roller skating culture in 1970’s Chicago.
He sits on the Board of Directors of Uplay Canada, (United Public Leadership Academy for Youth), which prepares youth to be citizen leaders and provides opportunities for Canadian high school basketball players to advance to Division 1 schools as well as the NBA.
A former competitive go kart racer with Checkered Flag Racing Ltd, he also enjoys traveling to exotic locales. Sylvan resides in Vancouver and has two adult daughters.
Sylvan has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and has been seen on Fox Business News, CBS and NBC. Sycamore Entertainment Group Inc is headquartered in Seattle, with offices in Los Angeles and Vancouver.
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Joshua M Greene Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.