I wish I could say there was an epiphany that lead me to start 3 Generations. The summer of 2004 was beautiful and I hiked a lot. I also surfed the internet daily and gradually became aware that a genocide was unfolding in Darfur.
With the growing awareness came a growing urge, then conviction, and finally an obsession with going to Darfur myself to see (and understand) what was really happening. The problem was I couldn’t figure out how I would get there: I was living in a ski resort in Colorado with 4 young children, I didn’t really have any useful skills for a conflict zone, in fact I was writing a cook book at the time. But, consumed with the idea of going, I would ask anyone who would listen, “Hey any ideas how I could get to Darfur?”
One night as I did the dishes with a neighbor she said, “Why don’t you talk to Lee?”
“Who’s Lee?” I asked. 10 minutes later, Lee Bycel, a distinguished rabbi visiting from Los Angeles, was in my home, sipping water, still ashen and shocked from his recent trip to Chad where he had spent Yom Kippur among genocide survivors from Darfur. This was the coincidence I needed. I was on my way – I didn’t let Lee leave until he promised to take me with him the next time he went.
As our plane approached Nyala airport in South Darfur about 3 months later I was able to see Kalma Camp from the air. It is still the largest IDP camp in Darfur and home to well over 100,000 refugees and some of the most brutal stories of dislocation, murder, rape and pillage you will ever likely hear. The camps of Darfur were a long way from home and there were moments when I wondered why I hadn’t just sent a donation to Save the Children or Oxfam and got on with my life. It was only months later I understood why.
After seeing and hearing about the genocide first hand, the rest kind of fell into place: I wrote articles and I became an advocate. The cookbook is still on the back burner.
When I got home I met Brian Steidle and decided to help him and his sister Gretchen Wallace fulfill their dream of making a feature documentary about Brian’s important witness of the genocide in Darfur.
As I started to work on The Devil Came on Horseback I saw surprising parallels between the experiences of Brian Steidle and those of my father Sidney Bernstein. My Dad was with the Allied Forces that liberated the Nazi camp Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 and was responsible for filming what they found there. Both men returned with irrefutable documentary evidence of genocide yet were ordered by their superiors to not share with the public what they had recorded. In the case of my father his footage and his script for a documentary about the Holocaust were classified by the Allied governments for 40 years and not available until 1985. As an old man he told me the biggest regret of his life was not completing his film Memories of the Camps. After coming home to the USA with proof of genocide in Darfur, Brian Steidle was asked by the State Department to stop showing his pictures. He was not under military command and decided he could not do that. Hearing this and remembering my father's regret I felt impassioned to help Brian tell the world about the Darfur genocide; I realized I would be correcting an ancestral wrong in helping to make this film. I formed 3 Generations for the people of Darfur, but I also for my father and those of his generation, those who were lost in the Holocaust and those who survived.
I wanted to create a place where survivors can tell their stories exactly as they wish to have them told, with no agenda except to share their stories. I believe in the power of storytelling.