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The Amanpour Hour
Interview With Former Canadian Opposition Leader And Former Rector And President, Central European University Michael Ignatieff; Interview With "Challenger" Author Adam Higginbotham; Palestinian Community Fears Erasure After Settler Attacks; Interview With "A Thousand Miracles" Author And International Criminal Tribunal For The former Yugoslavia Former President Theodor Meron; Remembering The Holocaust. Aired 11a-12p ET
Aired January 31, 2026 - 11:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[10:59:57]
BIANNA GOLODRIGA, CNN HOST: Hello everyone, and welcome to THE AMANPOUR HOUR.
Here's where we're headed this week.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: Are America's allies getting cold feet about a friendship that's lasted since World War II? I asked a former leader of Canada's Liberal Party about that, and how Prime Minister Mark Carney could be leading the breakup.
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, FORMER CANADIAN OPPOSITION LEADER, FORMER RECTOR AND PRESIDENT CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY: We cannot rely on the United States, period.
GOLODRYGA: Then a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. 40 years since the U.S. Space shuttle Challenger exploded and shocked America, I spoke to bestselling author Adam Higginbotham about his minute-by-minute account of the tragedy.
Plus, hopes of progress in Gaza. But in the West Bank, Israeli settler violence continues to decimate villages.
Jeremy Diamond reports.
Also ahead, Christiane's conversation with the Holocaust survivor and legal titan. 95-year-old judge, Theodor Meron, reflects on a lifetime pursuing justice.
THEODOR MERON, "A THOUSAND MIRACLES" AUTHOR AND INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA FORMER PRESIDENT: I must admit that we live in a moment of retraction, a retrogressive step for international criminal justice.
And as the world marks Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, from Christiane's archive, how the Nazi slaughter of 6 million jews shocked the world into outlawing genocide once and for all.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Bianna Golodryga in New York, sitting in for Christiane.
As the United States faces chaos within and creates instability beyond its borders are Americas oldest allies hedging their bets? The answer was written across the world this week.
In New Delhi, India and the European Union finalized what they called the mother of all deals. In China, Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer, dropped by seeking new investment deals there, a visit that comes just as America's neighbor to the north, Canada is also negotiating a new strategic partnership with Beijing.
It's something President Trump wasn't particularly happy about, threatening Canada with 100 percent tariffs.
All this fallout came after a headline grabbing speech by Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos, where he warned middle powers to prepare for the end of the rules-based international order. And he made it clear this week that he's not walking back on that statement.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARK CARNEY, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER: But to be absolutely clear, and I said this to the -- to the president, I meant what I said in Davos. It was clear. It was a broader set of issues that Canada was the first country to understand the change in U.S. trade policy that he had initiated and we're responding to that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Michael Ignatieff is a historian and a politician who preceded Carney as head of Canada's Liberal Party. He calls Carneys warning a wake-up call.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: Michael, welcome to the program.
So, in your opinion, is Prime Minister Carney right, essentially saying that middle powers like Canada and E.U. members can only survive by now admitting that we're in a world where, as he put it, the strong do what they can?
IGNATIEFF: I think he is right. I think we're facing a world divided into three big blocks -- the United States in the Western Hemisphere, China in East Asia, and Russia right at the border of Europe.
And none of these powers -- China, Russia, and the United States -- are respecting the sovereignty of other states, and that was the basis of the rules-based international order.
So, we are in a new world. And he's saying, look, middle states like Canada, and most states are middle states. You know, most states don't have this kind of nuclear power, financial power.
These middle states then have to get together, begin to trade with each other, begin to play one big power off against another, and that's a strategy for survival.
GOLODRYGA: In some of the commentary, the blistering commentary, that we heard from President Trump. Basically, I'm not even putting words in his mouth, he literally said Canada survives because of America.
Here's what Mark Carney then said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARNEY: Canada doesn't live because of the United States. Canada thrives because we are Canadian.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: I mean do you think this is Canada now really being put on the back foot and having to wonder how these types of threats impact the country's economy?
IGNATIEFF: The United States depends on Canada as much, if not more than Canada depends on the United States, is the idea here. We ship a lot of electricity. We ship a lot of oil. We ship a lot of lumber, ship a lot of aluminum.
And that's going to feed through into domestic pressure on Mr. Trump. If Mr. Trump, President Trump, imposes tariffs on Canada, it has blowback domestically.
[11:04:50]
IGNATIEFF: So, Carney is making the assumption that as a politician, Trump will get this blowback and eventually come to a deal with Canada. And it's not just an economic blowback. The president is getting huge blowback for the events that are occurring in Minneapolis.
So, I think Mr. Carney is making the assumption that Trump doesn't hold all the cards here and that it is possible to get some kind of deal, not free trade, not the old CUSMA, but something.
GOLODRYGA: I want to ask you about an op-ed in the "New York Times" from a columnist -- conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, who claims that Carney's plan for middle powers to work together is probably easier said than done, and let me quote from it.
"It's worth considering where the logic of Carney's vision of world order might lead. Certainly, middle powers and economies can sometimes work together against greater ones.
In crucial areas, though, the new world order is not truly multipolar, and its middle powers are ill-equipped to bandwagon. Rather, they often face a binary choice in which the more independence they assert from the United States, the more they risk subordination to China." So, would you agree with that binary framing from Ross Douthat?
IGNATIEFF: I don't think that Canada has a choice, a binary choice between you either cozy up to the Americans or you cozy up with the Chinese.
Canada will try as best it can to play one side off the other, infuriating both sometimes. But we've been at this for a very, very long time. The country is still in place after, you know, a couple hundred years next door to the United States. And I think we don't believe that our choices is submission to one power block or another.
And as all of the countries in the middle range face this huge pressure from China and the United States, they're going to have a strong interest in getting together and pushing this pressure back because no one wants to be a slave to, you know, the new imperial powers of the 21st century.
You know, I say this personally, and I was educated in the States. I love the United States, but no one is going to force Canada into a subaltern, dependent position on the United States. It's just not going to happen.
GOLODRYGA: So, there's the approach that Mark Carney is taking.
And then there's the rhetoric, at least publicly, that we're hearing from the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who has developed quite a close relationship with President Trump and told members of the European Parliament just yesterday that President Trump was, quote, "doing a lot of good stuff." Let's listen to what else he said.
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MARK RUTTE, NATO SECRETARY GENERAL: And if anyone thinks here, again, that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming. You can't. We can't. We need each other.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: OK. So, I think he's speaking more from a military national security perspective, but some -- you know, trade is also a big factor here. Is he wrong in your view?
IGNATIEFF: Look, every European hopes that America will continue to make its basically nuclear guarantee of the security of Europe.
But if that goes, if Trump basically says, I'm not going to send, you know, American troops or, you know, soldiers or anything to die for Lithuania or the Baltic or any of these states in Europe, then Europe will have to face that reality.
And let's not forget that, you know, France has a nuclear deterrent. Britain has a nuclear deterrent. You know, we need to think some very new and slightly scary thoughts.
We have to imagine the world anew, make new trade partnerships, new defense partnerships, beef up our own investment in our own security because we cannot rely on the United States, period.
GOLODRYGA: Michael Ignatieff, thank you. Thank you for your time. We appreciate it.
IGNATIEFF: Pleasure.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: Coming up next, 40 years since the Challenger disaster shocked America and the world, we discuss what went wrong with journalist Adam Higginbotham.
And later in the program, on the ground in the Occupied West Bank, how Palestinians are being forced out of their homes.
[11:09:00]
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GOLODRYGA: Welcome back.
This week marks 40 years since the Challenger disaster. On January 28th, 1986, 73 seconds after taking off. the U.S. space shuttle exploded live on television. Millions of Americans watched in real time as seven astronauts lost their lives, including Christa McAuliffe, a civilian selected for the NASA Teacher in Space project.
This is the moment that disaster struck; footage that, even 40 years later, is still so hard to watch.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Engines beginning throttling down now at 94 percent. Normal throttles for most of the flight, 104 percent.
We'll throttle down to 65 percent shortly. Engines at 65 percent. Three engines running normally. Three good fuel cells. Three good APUs. Velocity 2,257 feet per second. Altitude 4.3 nautical miles. Downrange distance 3 nautical miles.
[11:14:51]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Engines throttling up. Three engines now at 104 percent.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Challenger, go at throttle up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Challenger, go at throttle up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One minute, 15 seconds. Velocity 2,900 feet per second. Altitude 9 nautical miles. Downrange distance 7 nautical miles.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously, a major malfunction.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: The tragedy unfolded as Christa McAuliffe's parents and students were watching on the ground in Florida. And nearly everyone watching on television that day remembers where they were when it happened. But how did it happen?
Best-selling author and journalist Adam Higginbotham digs into that question in his book "Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space", which traces forensically how it all went wrong.
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GOLODRYGA: Adam, thank you so much for joining us. This is such an important book. It's so well-researched. Why do you think it had such an impact on how Americans, how the world view the space program?
ADAM HIGGINBOTHAM, AUTHOR, "CHALLENGER": Well, I think there's a few reasons for that. But the main one is that, you know, by 1986, NASA had really built a reputation for being able to do the impossible on a regular basis. And even their failures in the past had, you know, been recast as these amazing achievements of last-minute innovation and derring-do.
So, you know, the Apollo 13 accident, where, you know, three astronauts were almost marooned in space to die of suffocation, you know, a quarter of a million miles from Earth.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've had a problem here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is Houston. Say again, please.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. Houston, we have a problem.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HIGGINBOTHAM: You know, the engineers in mission control managed to engineer a last-minute solution and bring them back and rescue them. And so that was recast famously as an event in which failure was not an option.
And so, by 1986, you know, having sent men to the moon, having rescued people in Apollo 13, having sent up Skylab, they seemed to be able to do anything they put their minds to.
So, the idea that seven astronauts could die live on television in a space shuttle, you know, that was also carrying the teacher in space, the first citizen astronaut, seemed totally inconceivable.
And so, I think that's one main reason why it's lodged in the minds of Americans, because in 1986 nothing like that has happened before. You know, it was completely unprecedented.
GOLODRYGA: So, walk us back in 1986, where was the NASA program relative to the great space race versus the Soviet Union? And how many missions was NASA undertaking each year?
HIGGINBOTHAM: The whole idea of the space shuttle program was that NASA was going to make space travel routine. It was designed really to function as a sort of space truck that would launch, you know, eventually, as frequently as once every two weeks or once a week.
And NASA had really succeeded to a certain extent in bringing that about in 1985, because by the end of the year, they had four space shuttles in operation, a fleet of space shuttles, and they launched almost once a month.
So, they'd succeeded really in kind of making space travel seem almost quotidian by that point.
The American public really kind of got bored with space flight, to the extent that the three national networks actually stopped broadcasting space shuttle launches live, because they seemed to be happening so frequently.
And the initiative that they introduced in order to try and re-engage people with the space shuttle program was the Space Flight Participant Program, which was the idea that they were going to bring space travel within the reach of ordinary citizens.
And the first group of people that they chose to select their initial candidate from were American schoolteachers.
And so, the Challenger launch was going to be the first of these space flight participant launches. And it therefore carried Christa McAuliffe, who was a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who'd been selected from 11,000 candidates to be the first citizen in space.
GOLODRYGA: So then, obviously, there's the tragedy itself and you really set up how the tragedy unfolded.
Talk about the meeting the night before the launch where you had engineers on the record saying they did not feel that it was safe for the shuttle to take off the next day, given the temperatures and they were overruled.
[11:19:54]
GOLODRYGA: You really pinpoint that meeting and the gravity of it, obviously, given the aftermath.
HIGGINBOTHAM: Yes. I mean, that's one of the most kind of dramatic turning points in the story is that when the engineers at Morton Thiokol, who were the contractors who were responsible for manufacturing the solid rocket boosters, heard news of the impending weather at Cape Canaveral overnight on the 27th and 28th.
They immediately got together and called their bosses to organize a teleconference with NASA officials at Cape Canaveral and the Marshall Space Flight Center to call for the launch to be delayed. And so, they had this late-night meeting that was right on the eve of the launch. And they presented their data and they said, look, you know, we've seen information and evidence from previous launches in cold weather that that the seals in the solid rocket boosters might fail if they've been left out in the cold overnight before a launch.
And if they do, there will be a leak in the rockets and there will be catastrophic results. And you stand an extremely high risk of losing the solid rocket boosters and with it the shuttle and its crew.
The problem was that NASA was under enormous pressure to get this launch off the ground because it had, as you say, been repeatedly delayed. And it was also an extremely high-profile launch because of the presence of Christa McAuliffe on the mission.
So, although the engineers presented all of their data and they felt that they had presented a very convincing case as to why the launch needed to be delayed at least until weather improved and the temperatures rose, the NASA officials to whom they presented this data made it very clear, without explicitly saying so, that they really didn't want to hear this, and they wanted to go ahead with the launch regardless.
And so, when they realized this, the managers at Morton Thiokol then asked for a recess in the meeting to go offline and talk about it amongst themselves. And they used this opportunity to then actually decide to reverse their recommendation, which had been given in writing as a no-go for launch, to make it a go for launch. And they did so despite the objections of their own engineers in the room at the time.
So, then they went back at the end of the caucus and they agreed to reverse their recommendation, and then they gave the go-ahead for launch.
GOLODRYGA: And it's just notable. Here we are 40 years later and about to send humans back to the moon with the Artemis program. How far this program indeed has come.
Thank you so much, Adam. I really appreciate it. I loved the book. And thank you for your time today.
HIGGINBOTHAM: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: When we come back, Palestinian Bedouins say they have no choice but to pack up and abandon their West Bank homes.
We have a report from Jeremy Diamond, who asks settlers why they're doing this.
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JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT: You can't tell us what happened. We just want to understand why the Palestinians here are being forced to leave.
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[11:23:00]
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GOLODRYGA: Welcome back.
Now, this week there was a long-awaited moment of closure for Israel's hostage families and the country itself, as the remains of Ran Gvili, the last Israeli hostage taken on October 7th, were finally returned and laid to rest.
For Palestinians in Gaza, this raises hopes that the second phase of the ceasefire deal could be imminent, and that the Rafah Crossing will be reopened to allow in more desperately-needed aid.
As Palestinians live in a torturous limbo in Gaza, in the Occupied West Bank, settlers continue to rampage, attacking Palestinian villages and leaving families devastated as Jeremy Diamond finds in this report.
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DIAMOND: This isn't just the sound of a home being taken apart, it's an entire community being erased. Mattresses are gathered and piled high before being packed into cars. Security cameras that fail to deter Israeli settlers are removed.
After decades on this land, the last family in the Palestinian Bedouin community is being forced out and the uprooted take stock of all they're about to lose and why.
Sulayman Hwangmae (ph) points out the four Israeli settler outposts that have made life here impossible. He is besieged and not just by settlers.
"We didn't get to this place because a shepherd or a settler attacked us -- no. The issue is bigger than that. The shepherd is a tool -- a means of the occupation," he says.
For years, residents and activists say these settlers have carried out a campaign of intimidation with impunity. We saw some of them here two weeks earlier, goats and camels brought to graze on privately-owned Palestinian land. Israeli soldiers standing idly by.
Palestinian residents say settlers have stolen hundreds of sheep, cut electric cables, and blocked their access to water.
[11:29:49]
DIAMOND: This is all that's left of what was once a thriving Palestinian Bedouin community here. More than 100 families -- some 700 people altogether and now they've had to abandon this area. This is what is happening across the West Bank. Dozens of Bedouin
communities have been displaced over the course of the last two-plus years.
And activists say that this is what could happen to all Palestinian herding communities in the West Bank should those actions by Israeli settlers continue to go unchecked.
The impact on those being uprooted is difficult to put into words.
It's gone.
Pieces of lives lived still scattered all about.
Standing in what was once his home, Sulayman begins to explain how difficult this all is.
"Enough," he says. That's about all he can muster. He is overwhelmed with emotion.
Sulayman's brother and sister-in-law's house has also been stripped down.
Kitchen, living room, her children's bedroom. Muntaha (ph) can still see her home as it once was. "All my memories are here," she says. "I've been here since I got married."
So we're driving up to the settler community now, which is part of the group of outposts that have been harassing this Palestinian community of Ras Ein al-Auja. We're going to see if we can ask them a few questions.
We introduce ourselves to the first settler we see. "We don't accept journalists," he tells me, before ushering us away.
You can't tell us what happened? We just want to understand why the Palestinians here are being forced to leave.
That's it? No answers to our questions?
But the next man isn't any more willing to answer our questions. He starts filming us and then they call the police.
Obviously they're not interested in giving us their point of view or explaining what the Palestinians say have been attacks on them over the course of the last two years.
In what remains of Ras Ein al-Auja, the departing residents are setting fire to what they are leaving behind -- a final act of defiance for a community overpowered but unbroken.
Jeremy Diamond, CNN -- Ras Ein al-Auja, the West Bank.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: When we come back, a Holocaust survivor who went on to shape international justice, Judge Theodor Meron. That's next.
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MERON: Sometimes the worst atrocities can produce the most important changes in the law.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[11:32:48]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GOLODRYGA: Welcome back.
Now to a Holocaust survivor and a titan of international law. 95-year- old Judge Theodor Meron escaped death by minutes and went on to devote his life to accountability for genocide and war crimes. Meron has helped shape the modern system of international justice, advising on ICC indictments of Israel and Hamas leadership.
Now, as the rule of law itself is under strain, he's released a memoir on his extraordinary life called "A Thousand Miracles". And he spoke to Christiane about whether the world is in danger of forgetting the lessons of the Holocaust.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Let me ask you about surviving the Holocaust. You were born in 1930 in Poland. When you were nine, Germany, the Nazis invaded and you lost much of your family in the --
MERON: Most of it.
AMANPOUR: Most of your family. Thank you for reminding me -- in Treblinka. How do you think you survived?
MERON: Well, tremendous amount of luck and tremendous resilience and tremendous will to survive. But mostly luck, luck, luck. I think God was on my side.
And when my mother and my maternal grandparents were arrested because Jewish resistance was digging a tunnel in our house and somebody denounced what was happening and they were captured and taken, driven out of town and executed.
Had I come home 10 minutes earlier, I would have gone with them.
AMANPOUR: And your brother, your older brother, how did you survive his killing?
MERON: I found it extremely hard. In fact, his loss was in a way more difficult for me than the loss of my mother. I always dreamt for years that one day the door will open and he will walk in, but this never happened.
And of course, this was augmented by the fact that I knew that he was in the resistance.
And then he participated in the rebellion and the uprising of prisoners in Treblinka, which was an act of great courage. And he lost, he lost his life there or immediately after that.
[11:39:46]
AMANPOUR: It is extraordinary, maybe or maybe not, that you then put your life's work into getting justice and accountability for these kinds of criminals.
MERON: Well, this was, I think, quite natural that this would be the result of that. You learned, you had those lessons, the loss of autonomy, the loss of childhood, the loss of school, the loss of company of people your age, the loss of reading.
And then you try to say to yourself, is there anything you could do not to eliminate the possibility of those things recurring in the future, but at least reducing that possibility?
AMANPOUR: So, I want to bring you back to when we first met.
MERON: Sure.
AMANPOUR: Because we spoke about a recently discovered by the journalist Gershom Gorenberg, the Israeli journalist, who wrote in his book about the 1967 war and the resulting building of settlements.
And he found your memo from, I believe, September 1967, in which --
MERON: Which was designated as "Top Secret".
AMANPOUR: Top Secret.
This is one of your most famous things, your most famous opinions, where you found Jewish settlements at the time in the occupied West Bank to be illegal under international law. And that you issued to the government at the time, to the foreign minister, because you were the legal advisory.
You concluded that creating Israeli settlements in occupied territories would violate that --
MERON: The Geneva Convention.
AMANPOUR: The Geneva Convention -- period, end of story. Do you think, did you ever think that had the government then accepted your ruling and done what the International Community said it should -- don't build illegal settlements -- that we would perhaps be, if not in peace, but a lot more close to peace?
MERON: In the process of reconciliation, at least. I thought about it quite often, and I am particularly sad, because had the government at that time followed my advice, we would really have been living now in a different Middle East, in a different Israel, in a different context of relations between Jews and Arabs. I think, who knows, maybe we would have had peace then.
But things are getting worse and worse and the current government multiplies settlements without worrying much about the question whether the settlements are or are not established on private Arab property.
I am very worried. I am agonizing about what I see and read about the treatment of Arab villagers on the West Bank by Jewish settlers. And this gives me -- it gives me tremendous worry about the future.
AMANPOUR: The ICC has presented war crimes charges to President Putin and one of his henchwomen for the war in Ukraine and the way they have forcedly deported children from Ukraine. There's that.
Then you've got U.S. striking boats in Venezuela.
(CROSSTALK)
AMANPOUR: I just want to put these together for a moment. And you've got a whole load of world leaders who are, A, not signed up to the ICC, and B, don't give a hoot about international law.
President Trump recently said, you know, I don't need international law. I've got myself and, you know, my own morality as judge.
Do you fear that all this that you've given your life to is at a risk right now, the principle of international law?
MERON: Well, for the moment, I must admit that we live in a moment of retraction, a retrogressive step for international criminal justice. But sometimes the worst atrocities can produce the most important changes in the law.
Take the Holocaust. At that time, the term "genocide" did not exist. But we, in fact, witnessed a prime example of what we mean by genocide.
And after that, what was the reaction of the International Community? The Convention Against Genocide, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the tremendous revolution of human rights on the positive side that we have seen.
So, I'm hoping that we are perhaps in the best period now, that in a few years it will change. You cannot be an international criminal judge or an international criminal lawyer without being a tiny bit of an optimist.
AMANPOUR: Oh, you have to be an optimist. And I believe that if people like you continue to fight for it, it will come back to where it's meant to be.
AMANPOUR: Thank you.
MERON: Thank you very much for inviting me.
(END VIDEOTAPE) GOLODRYGA: And when we come back, as the world marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, a look back at how leaders knew what was happening and did nothing.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ELIE WIESEL, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: They knew.
AMANPOUR: And they had a direct shot at stopping it.
WIESEL: They knew.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[11:44:51]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[11:49:49]
GOLODRYGA: Welcome back.
Earlier this week, the world observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. When the Holocaust occurred, the evidence was known and the silence was deafening. The world not only failed to protect the 6 million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, but failed even to act.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had lost nearly his entire family, would invent a word for this crime, "genocide", and try to force the world to stop it.
And in the concentration camps, one young prisoner clung to life, Elie Wiesel. From Christiane's archive, here is her 2008 conversation with Wiesel eight years before his death in her report on how the world was finally spurred to take action.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WIESEL: How could they kill children? I don't know. How could they?
AMANPOUR: As Wiesel suffered in the camps, word of the slaughter reached America. But it seemed of little interest to the press and the politicians.
Raphael Lemkin was outraged.
RAPHAEL LEMKIN, POLISH LAWYER: The impression of a tremendous conspiracy of silence poisoned the air. A double murder was taking place, it was the murder of the truth.
AMANPOUR: Jewish groups pressed Washington to bomb the camps, or at least the rail lines. The allies refused, even though their planes were scouting targets nearby.
26,000 feet below, Elie Wiesel, seen here in a barracks was clinging to life. They knew what was happening?
WIESEL: They knew.
AMANPOUR: And they had a direct shot at stopping it?
WIESEL: They knew. Some 10,000 to 12,000 men and women and children were killed every single day. The trains were running, running, running.
AMANPOUR: But the U.S. didn't want to divert military resources from winning the war.
WIESEL: The truth? It wasn't a priority.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The wrongs which we seek to condemn --
AMANPOUR: After the war, the architects of the Holocaust were tried at Nuremberg. They were sent to prison, or to the gallows. But the world powers made no commitment to intervene, should it ever happen again.
Lemkin knew he must act. He set his sights on the fledgling United Nations, put everything aside and worked himself to exhaustion for two years to create an international law against genocide.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The convention is adopted by this assembly by unanimous vote.
AMANPOUR: Finally, in 1948 the Genocide Convention became law, and it required nations to act to stop genocide. Some called it "Lemkin's Law".
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Article 1, the contracting parties --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Genocide, whether committed is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
AMANPOUR: It was a hard-won victory after a lifetime of sacrifice. A decade later Lemkin would die penniless and alone.
GOLODRYGA: Remembering the Holocaust means confronting not only the horrible atrocities, but also the silence that allowed them to unfold.
And when we come back after a lifetime devoted to justice, Judge Meron shares a poem about love and loss.
[11:53:32]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GOLODRYGA: And finally, after a lifetime spent judging the worst crimes known to humanity, Judge Theodor Meron shares something with us far more personal.
His wife, Monique was his moral compass, his fiercest defender, and his closest friend. After her death, Meron put his grief into words. And we just wanted to share with you this touching poem that he recited to Christiane about the quiet dread of a life without the person who once filled it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MERON: I dread boredom and loneliness, a dark empty room's ghastliness.
Crackling walls and howling wind, not having a nearby kin.
Half-finished tasks, complaining look, lack of companion that God took.
An empty bed with cold sheets, No human touch and no heartbeats.
Missing her clutching hand and her love. Long sleepless nights' grief.
Haunting dreams and sweat of fear. Eyes that are fighting tears.
A dining table with only one chair. A life without flair.
A brain I could no longer pick. Memories ever-slowing rhythm (ph).
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: Beautiful words of love and loss.
[11:59:45]
GOLODRYGA: And that is all for us today. Don't forget, you can find all of our shows online as podcasts at cnn.com/audio and on all other major platforms.
I'm Bianna Golodryga in New York, thanks so much for watching. And we'll see you again next week.
