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It's Live in the Bream with the host of Fox News Sunday, Shannon Bream. This week, we have a giant in so many ways on Live in the Bream. I joked with him before we got started, but it's really true. It's hard to know how to introduce him because he's really good and successful at so many things. You'll know him probably
mostly as an author. He has multiple number one New York Times bestsellers. But what's also interesting is that he's good at so many different genres and so many different topics. A lot of people can't move around in the space like that. He's written and performed music. His work has been turned into movies. He has charities that are making a difference on the ground, impacting people. And he's got a brand new book that is just so timely. It is my honor to welcome Mitch Albom to Live in the Bream.
Dan, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for having me as a guest. So this brand new book, The Little Liar, I can't imagine when you were writing it that you had any idea of the moment in history in sort of which it would arrive. It is a novel about the Holocaust, the fallout from that. How would you describe the timing of this and what motivated you to tackle this topic?
Well, you're right. I didn't have any idea when I wrote it that it would become this timely. I started a couple of years ago. I wanted to write a book about truth and the value of truth and the preciousness of it and what happens when we lie and the ramifications of even a single lie. And I couldn't think of a period of time in history where lies were more prevalent or more damaging than during World War II and particularly during the Holocaust and what the Nazis did. So I wanted to set a story
about a boy who loses his innocence by being tricked into lying for the first time in his life and the ramifications of that lie for the rest of his life on him, on everybody who was around him. And so I sat down to create The Little Liar. But as you said, who knew when it came out, literally like weeks after stuff that was happening in the Middle East,
that there would be a lot of other overtones to it as well. And it was just such a time of devastation and where people were confronted with is a lie. Can a lie be a good thing in some circumstances and innocent lives destroyed, taken just such so many emotions that people,
evoked in this book are back for a lot of people now in a new and different way where we thought, most of us, that just decades after the Holocaust, we wouldn't have become so numb to some of the real threats and big issues that are going on out there. So how does this book maybe help people have those conversations, remember the reality of what you describe in the book, The Little Liar?
I think you said the phrase in the sentence, maybe inadvertently, remember the reality. We are getting to a point here now where when I grew up, there were people who lived on my block, Jewish people, older people who wore long sleeves wherever they went. And I remember asking my mother, why are those people wearing long sleeves? It's so hot outside today. And she said, well, they have numbers tattooed on their arms and they don't want people to see them. And, you know, my mother had to explain to me what had happened during that time.
Well, that was when we were living amongst people who could turn around and say, do you want to know what it was like? Here's what it was like. Those people are almost all gone now. And with them goes the proof of what took place. And then you give birth to people denying that it ever actually happened. And if there aren't witnesses around to talk about it.
That's easier to do. So it's very, very important to to have stories like this. I thought it was one of the reasons I thought it was important at least once in my career to write a story that would contribute to the idea of never forgetting what took place. And and I said it actually, Shannon, in a little city in Greece, that.
because I wanted to show that most people think they know everything there is to know about the Holocaust in the period of time. And yet when I tell people that this was a real city in Greece that was really attacked, people say, I didn't even know the Nazis invaded Greece. I didn't even know they had Jewish people in Greece. Well, it turns out that the largest Jewish populated city in all of Europe
was in Greece. It wasn't in Poland and it wasn't in Germany where all those other Holocaust books are set. It was in Greece in the city that I set this book in Thessalonica. And within three years, it was wiped out completely. There were 60,000 plus Jews before the war started and maybe 1,000 or 1,200 left alive after it was over.
And one of the accounts I read or review of the book said, "Album says he's ready to embrace his quote obligation as a Jewish writer to publish a novel set during the Holocaust." You just touched on this wanting to be part of the record of the memory. But did you feel a special weight with this book? Or was it a labor of love or some combination of those things?
A combination of those things. You know, ever since I wrote a book about 26 years ago called Tuesdays with Maury. Oh, we know it well. Yeah. And ever since I wrote that book, all of my books that have followed have probably had a little slice of Tuesdays with Maury in them. You know, I sat with an old college professor of mine as he was dying from Lou Gehrig's disease week after week after week every Tuesday. And we talked about what was really important in life once you know you're going to die. And every
Every week we had some different topic, family, marriage, money, culture, whatever it was. And in one particular week, we talked about forgiveness. And I wanted to have a book that dealt with that as a theme. So I thought about, well, what's the biggest lie you've ever told in your life?
And what would you do to be forgiven for that lie? And that theme became like a perfect way to tell this story set during the Holocaust that I'd always, as you said from that interview, I'd always been meaning to do at least one. So basically what I created, Shannon, was a story about an 11-year-old boy who's never told a lie in his life. He's known in his neighborhood for his honesty. And there's a 12-year-old girl who loves him because of this. And when the Nazis invade this city...
They find out about him and they decide to use him as a weapon. So they kidnap him away from his family and they say, "You can go back to your family very soon. All you have to do is just help us out. Just stand on these train platforms and people are going to be coming and they're not going to be knowing where they're going. So you just tell them they're going to good jobs and good homes and everything's going to be good and just do this for a couple of weeks and then you can go back to your family. You'll be spreading good news."
And thinking that, you know, he's telling the truth because he's never told a lie and he trusts people. He does this every day and people listen to him and they get into these trains. And then on the very last day, he sees his family and the little girl being shoved into a boxcar. And he finds out that these trains are actually being sent to Auschwitz and the concentration camps. And he realizes at that age that the first lie he's ever told in his life
is the worst lie he's ever going to tell. And the book then follows him for the next 40 years, him and the girl who loved him, the rest of his family, and the Nazi who tricked him, and shows the ramifications of one lie on all of those people, just that one moment, and how it changed their lives forever, and how he tries to seek forgiveness for what he was tricked into doing, and how the girl who always loved him tries to find him again over the decades to forgive him for it.
So I wouldn't call it a Holocaust book, Shannon, in terms of like it doesn't begin at the start of the Holocaust and end with liberation. It really follows 40 years after the war. It's more about the lies that were told during that time, the accusations that were made, the lives that were destroyed, and how forgiveness and an open heart is about the only thing that you can –
you know, used to combat a period of time like that. We'll have more live in the bream in a moment. Precise, personal, powerful. It's America's weather team in the palm of your hands. Get Fox weather updates throughout your busy day. Every day. Subscribe and listen now at Fox News Podcasts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're talking to Mitch Albom about his new book, The Little Liar. You talk about forgiveness. A lot of people look at that period in time and the fallout from it and the idea of forgiveness feels really difficult. I mean, how do you walk us through that?
Well, it depends on who you're forgiving. You know, forgiving a little boy for being tricked into lying to his own people, his family, you know, coming to forgive him. That's a lot easier to do than forgiving the people who committed the atrocities against you. And, you know, but forgiving doesn't mean forgetting. And I think that that's what people have in mind when you hear the phrase forgiveness.
never forget, applied to the Holocaust by Jewish people. I don't think they mean, you know, look at us, we're victims. Look at us, we're victims. They're not trying to say that over and over again. They're just saying, please, please don't allow the circumstances that led to that terrible period of time to ever happen again. And therefore, don't forget what happened. And if you look at it, Shannon, what happened was you had
You had a nation, Germany, that was unhappy, that was in turmoil and wanted to blame something, somebody for their troubles. And along came a leader who started pointing at one group of the people and said, they're the problem. They're the problem. If we get rid of them, we'll be better off. And then if we get rid of them everywhere, they'll be better off. We get rid of our neighbors, they'll be better off. And the country followed him.
And I always say the Nazis didn't do what they did because they had bigger guns. They did what they did because they had bigger lives and people fell for them. And so that's the kind of thing that people warn about today when we're in a dangerous climate of blaming people and pointing our fingers. And this is not just about the Middle East. I mean, it's about America.
all kinds of stuff going on in America today where we blame the other, you know, and they're at fault and they're the reason why. And they're that kind of, you know, that's the seeds of what took place back in the 1940s. And we don't want to do that again. Yeah. When we look at other people and we want them to be other, we do want them to be somebody who could never find common ground with, you know,
So it's astonishing to me. I remember as a little kid when I first was learning about the Holocaust in school and thinking, my goodness, why didn't more people say something? Why? You know, it's hard as a child to understand how these things can happen. And then as an adult, when you see how cruel we can be to each other and how just illogical and hateful that we can be, I think it's always good to have reminders, whether it's in the form of an entertaining and thralling book like this.
Or just having important conversations with people that maybe you think you don't have anything in common with. Because the more divided we are, the more I think susceptible we are to bad actors. As you said, just sort of leveraging that into something that can be a complete nightmare. And by the way, one of the reviews of your book says this. Truth be told, this is album at his enthralling best.
After all these years and all this success, do you read the reviews? Do they hurt your feelings? Do you not care? Some people are really good and have a tough, thick skin about this. But after such levels of success, do you read what people have to say about your work? Well, I didn't read it in the early days before I had the success, and I don't really read them now. There aren't quite as many as there used to be, and the book review business has kind of shrunk significantly.
But I remember, you know, even if you say to yourself, I'm not going to read them because they're good. I'm just going to say, well, OK, you know, and maybe my head gets too big. And if they're bad, you're going to remember them forever. And and in the end, you know, I have a great relationship with my readers. So I'm not really worried about my relationship with reviewers.
But I do remember somebody, people will send them to you, Shannon, even if you try to avoid them. Someone always says, hey, did you read this thing? And, you know, it was really bad. Did you see it? And I remember one reviewer on one of my earlier books was making fun of me for being optimistic and called me sentimental, things like that. And at the end, in the last paragraph, dismissed me with the sentence, he's just the king of hope.
And I said to myself, that's not a bad throne to be stuck on. And I realized even in a criticism, that was nicest thing that somebody could ever say about me. So I've tried to maintain, as I say, I have a very good relationship with my readers. I know what it is that they're looking for from me. And I know what it is that I want to deliver in a book. And in the end, no matter what story I tell, and this story probably has the darkest backdrop of any story that I've told, but
It's not a dark book and it's not an ultimately sad book, even though there are moments in it that are heartbreaking. It's a hopeful book. And I believe in hope. I am, I guess. Oh, I don't know the king. That's too lofty. But I'm definitely in love with hope. And I want that to be a takeaway from all of my books. And there's a scene that I work very hard on in this book.
during the concentration camp where it's probably the toughest part to read about the stuff that goes on during the concentration camp. But at night, Nico, the boy, his family, all of them who are imprisoned in this camp,
gather around in the barracks and in whispered voices so that the guards won't hear their grandfather, who's a patriarch of the family, insists that everybody say one good thing that happened to them that day. And can you imagine what could what possible good thing could happen when you're a prisoner in a concentration camp?
So one of them says, well, I had an extra spoonful of soup today. And one says the rotted tooth in my mouth finally fell out. One says the guard that beats me every day had the day off so I didn't get beaten. And one says I saw a bird.
And what is it, Shannon, that makes us, you know, remember seeing a bird or turn that into something positive and look for one hopeful thing that we can fly away from our troubles like that bird one day that keeps us going. And I'm sure you're familiar with the famous book, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. And he was a concentration camp survivor. And he wrote about, you know, how people survive the worst of circumstances. And he said that the ones who survived survived.
those terrible conditions were the ones who believed that there was a tomorrow. And the ones who gave up and said, "This is awful. This is hell," they died. None of them made it. And it just speaks to the fact that the thing that keeps us going the most, and I think this is very true of Americans, maybe more than a lot of other countries in the world, is hope.
But deep down, we still think that tomorrow could be better. We just have that kind of built into us. You know, we'll fix it. It'll better. We will improve. We'll work harder, whatever it takes. And I like to celebrate in that. And even in a book that has a dark setting at the beginning, there is hope for all of the parties involved in this by the end. And you, outside the pages of this book, live this out in real life as well. You and your wife run a number of charities.
including an orphanage in Haiti, which is a place that everybody who's been there, I have not been, I have a lot of friends who work in that area too, who say it feels like a very hopeless place. Tell us a little bit about your work on that front.
Well, you're absolutely right. It can feel hopeless. It's the second poorest country on Earth. It's the poorest one in the Western hemisphere. The life expectancy there is almost 20 years less than America, and it's only 700 miles off of our shores. I went there after the earthquake in 2010 to try to help an orphanage that I heard had been destroyed. It turned out it wasn't destroyed, but it was overrun. I saw things there, Shannon, that I'll never forget.
never forget, you know, people missing arms and legs and wandering the streets covered in white dust and people crawling up mountains of rubble, pulling rocks out and trying to find a loved one who was buried underneath it. And the orphanage itself, it was so poor that the kids were using holes in the ground for toilets. And at night,
If they had to use it during the night, they would take a rock and a match so that they could see. And they would bang the rock on the other rocks to chase the rats away so that they wouldn't get bit on the rear ends when they pulled their pants down. And then when they were finished, they used the rock as toilet paper because where are you going to get toilet paper at a poor orphanage in Haiti? I mean, it was so primitive that way. And so I began to go back.
The next month, the next month, the next month. And I bought a bunch of guys from Detroit and we built the first toilets. We built the first shower, first kitchen, ultimately a school. And after a few months, the pastor there who had been running it,
didn't have any money, was in his mid 80s. And he said, I don't have any money to run this place. And the kids were starving. And I kind of blurted out in one of those sentences, years later, you ask yourself, what was I thinking? I said, well, I could probably run this place. I run charities in Detroit.
And he said, thank you. Hallelujah. And we didn't see him again, you know, and I inherited an orphanage. And it's kind of ironic because my wife and I never had children of our own. And all of a sudden I was in charge of an orphanage. But and I made every mistake possible.
that a guy without children could make in running an orphanage, but the kids were never mistakes. The kids were brilliant. We had children there and we take in four or five new children every year and they come from backgrounds where some were left under trees to die out in the woods. Some were dropped off at medical clinics and no one ever came back for them. Kids without names, without birth certificates, without any medical records,
But we bring them in and we give them love and food, which I find is, you know, you can do almost anything with love and food. And we raise them there. We don't adopt any kids out, you know, because I feel they've gone through enough already. They don't need to worry about leaving a home again. And they stay with us. We have a beautiful school now that does four hours in English and four hours in French. It's top notch quality with a great number of teachers for the kids. And every one of our kids so far has graduated at 18.
And has earned a college scholarship. And I've got 12 of them right now in America in college and almost all of them on the dean's list. And one of them is in medical school now. So and they come back after they're done and they work for two years at the orphanage for free and whatever they trained in to give back.
And it is a beautiful, loving, faithful, joyous place with no internet, no phones, no computers, no television. And so I get to see what childhood really looks like, Shannon. And I can tell you it's a...
It's a remarkable thing when a child will sit with you and talk with you for hours on end and not want to swipe anything or be distracted. It's just beautiful. And you are more than welcome to come join us there. I think you'd be an inspiration if the kids met you and if you ever want to make a trip. I go every single month of my life. You know, I have since 2010 and I will for the rest of my life. I'm there for about a week or nine days every month.
And I'm very proud of those kids and what they have overcome and their inspiration to me every day not to complain about my life or my situation here. We don't know how what we call poverty here in America. You know, we only have one TV set. It's not it's not comparable. Yeah.
Well, listen, bless you. This is amazing. I would be honored to come with you sometime and meet these amazing young people. I love that out of such a dark thing, again, you found the hope. You found a way to change lives for other people that will have ripple impacts on them, their precious lives, but probably for generations to come.
because of your willingness to step into a difficult situation. So Mitch Albom, brand new book is The Little Liar. It's been such an honor to talk with you. And I think that we leave you now with what I didn't have in the beginning, which is the right intro for you. The King of Hope.
Mitch, thank you for being with us. My pleasure, Shannon. Thank you. Listen ad-free with the Fox News Podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
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