Journey Through Love and War: Jill Demby Guest on the Biographical Life of Dr. Bernard Bail

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

Hello, I'm Cynthia Marks. I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Dr. Bernard Vail. Welcome to And Now, Love. Jill Demby Guest is our guest today. We're very lucky. She has had a lifelong passion for biographical documentaries and has had a career rich in endeavors as a writer, producer and director. And she's not even done yet. She has won several awards, three of them being for the documentary and now Love. And we'll tell you how to get there when we're finished with this podcast. Of course, this great film is very meaningful to me as it is about Bernard, his life's work and his theory during the course of research and filming.

I got to know Jill very well and now consider her a dear friend. Jill is here to tell us about her experiences with Dr. Bail as she truly dove deeply into his life in order to glean how he came to his discoveries. So welcome, Jill. Thank you very much for being here today. My pleasure. You woman of major amounts of information and knowledge and a passion about what you discovered through the course of working on this film. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Let's just start with how you came to find out about this project. I came to find out about this project through another psychiatrist who I knew who happened to be a protege of Dr. Bail, who contacted me and said, you know, they're trying to do a documentary on my, you know, mentor who just an amazing guy who discovered this really groundbreaking theory about the mother's imprint.

So you didn't know about. I knew nothing about Dr. Bail. I mean, I'd been in therapy in my life, but I had never been in psychoanalysis, so I didn't know. But he said, I don't know. I just have a vibe that this would be the right fit for you. And he said, Why don't you read Dr. Bail's book? You know, read Armed Guards Flute his memoir, and then read the Mothers Imprint book and let me know what you think. So I read Armed Guards flute, his memoir first. And I went crazy for it. I thought, this man has a story worth telling and I can get into why that was.

But not only was he an eminent psychoanalysts psychiatrist in Beverly Hills for years, but his back story was that he was a poor kid from South Philadelphia who, you know, made his way into the Army at an early age and became a lead radar navigator in World War Two, fighting the Nazis as a young Jew from Philadelphia. You know, he was all about oppression and fighting oppression even back then. So he became this lead radar navigator in World War Two and was he flew was 25 missions in Europe. And you're really only supposed to do 25. Right. So that that seems to be a number that everyone says 25.

And he was shot down. I mean, he had several mishaps. Third mission, shot down, survived, got lost over Iceland at one point and had an intuition that he should go in a certain direction, even though all systems were failing and seemed to come out of it at the right place. Then on the 25th mission, which is a key mission for so many people, he was shot down by the Nazis and it was towards the end of the war March 1945. The Germans kind of knew they were kind of losing the war. Thank God he didn't get shot and killed. But he was able to bail out of the plane and was taken to a hospital in Uppingham, Germany, for.

German officers. By German officers. And he was taken to hospital, didn't know if he was going to be killed. What they were going to do to him or were they going to ship him east, was going to end up in concentration camp somewhere? He had no idea. By some stroke of good luck, which he had a lot in his life, he was treated by a German nurse who fell in love with him, just wild. So he fell in love with this woman, Irmgard, a young German girl who also spoke English through this series of clandestine love letters that they had back and forth in his hospital room.

And it was a big relationship over a short period of time. A big, big relationship, because you imagine someone who was in such a vulnerable state. I mean, when they would come in the room to give him a shot, he didn't know if they were about to kill him. He didn't know if he's going to be poisoned. He had no idea. Every day could be his. Every day could be his last. And then there was people dying all around him. So it was just his colleagues. Other fliers were dying all around him. And he he had this lucky charm of this nurse, Irmgard, who would leave him glasses of wine at night, and he would respond to her notes in the bathroom because, you know, in a secret way, hide them because no one could find them.

But what she did was she, as I was saying, introduce him to the world of women in a way he had never experienced before, like what he called the divine feminine. What that meant was so many of the things that she wrote in this letter were about being able to kind of save yourself through love. You know, that love kind of trumped everything that we all kind of had one heart and it didn't matter if she was the enemy or not. Was that at first just sort of an alien unapproachable concept for him? Very much so, because I think, you know, he was a scrapper.

I mean, he was from Philadelphia. He was just getting by. Yes. Getting by, you know, going through the Depression, having a tough time. He knew how to scrap. You know, he, you know, got nickels for making phone calls for people. As a young kid, he. Would wait around at the drugstore and the phone would ring and then he'd go tell Mrs. Schwartz. It was the corner candy store. And the owner of the Candy store said, Hey, I'll give you a nickel every time. You know, you tell Mr. Schwartz so-and-so is on the line. So he was making all this money. And and did that mean that Mrs. Schwartz had to come to the candy store?

Yeah. Mrs. Schwartz had to come to the can to go get Mr. Schwartz on the hill. Tell her to come down. My uncle's on the phone. So he did that. And then he would make all these nickels, and he'd take himself to the movie theater. And he in the movie theater, he'd see a whole other side of life. All these actors with beautiful, bespoke suits on and a life that he had no idea that he could attain at the time. But these were models to him, all these actors and the suits and the costumes. And he just was crazy for it. I wonder, did he put himself in those shoes, you know, in Ryan's thinking and he would be me.

Yeah. Because then he put it out in front of himself that, you know, those are the lives I want to live. And then he took himself to see Frank Sinatra, traveled by foot through the snow on the money he would make from the candy store. That's such a unique desire for someone in his position and at his age. Right. I mean, I think he was like, I don't know, seven, eight, nine years old. So then he had this short period of time with this fabulous woman, Irmgard Ryan. And you were reading all of this in his. I was reading it in his book, yeah. And so then they they had to in their relationship because the war ended.

Exactly. Well, the interesting thing reading that in the book, when I first read the book, I thought when I read that part, I read other parts and I thought, this is a great movie. But when I read the part about Irmgard, I thought, okay, this is this is a film. Here's this guy frightened in a hospital room in Nazi Germany, not knowing if he's going to live or die. When that door opened, he had no idea. He's in this dark room shivering, hurt, had shells in his head. And he's a. Jew and a Jew. Right When that door opened and a burst of light there was his savior.

He didn't know that at the time, but that was kind of the key image of like, this has to be a film. So that's a lot. And that's the doorway. And that's. We recreated the hospital room. Yeah, the German hospital room. And this experience then sort of became the jumping off point for the rest of his life. Absolutely. It steered him in a direction that he had no intention of going in. Absolutely. Because he had studied to be a teacher. I mean, that's what he started to do. His parents said, you know, go to school. You're not going to be a carpenter.

Are like your father, you know. His mother was very strong and said, no way are you going to be doing that? You're going to college. But then he joined the Army, but he was starting to study to get a degree in education because he was really smart. So what happened after that? This experience in the war was so transformative and really horrifying in so many ways. He thought, How are we still killing people so brutally? He said, I don't want to be a killer. I want to be a healer. And part of that came through his relationship with Irmgard, who had helped save him and heal him.

He was very fortunate. And he says really poignantly at some point in the film, he says, A lot of people helped me in my life, even the enemy. So he started to look at people as people, not as enemies. Right. I guess we're all wounded. We all hold onto. We're all coming from our imprint, Right. And in that way, we are on some level, all the same. Right. Those were things about him that were very compelling. And the other thing, I mean, there are so many other things, but the other thing is he was such a disrupt her even early on and he didn't know it was disruption, but he had a way to follow his own what he calls North Star.

And he did that early on. He was Jewish, but his parents didn't really practice Judaism because so much of it when you came to this country as immigrants back then were you were an American first. You were so happy to be an American and not have to run from shtetl to shtetl that American first, Jewish second. So it was an assimilation process. And were people then, even though they had made their way to the United States, kind of inclined to keep the fact that they were Jews sort of on the down low just to protect themselves. Many people did do that.

I know in the assimilation process because they changed their names. Sure. When they came over, a lot of them changed their names. They didn't want to be identified as Jewish because there was a lot of anti-Semitism even in America after World War Two as well. And so this North Star that he found himself following at starting at a very young age, though, was an unconscious thing. Very much. So. Make a point of I'm doing this different thing. He just was led to it. Right? He was he would pass at a local synagogue. And I think he would wonder, what what is that?

And he started taking classes on his own at a local Philadelphia synagogue. And he got very, very interested in the religion and the idea of God and spirituality. And then he came upon Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, which was his favorite story in the Bible. And it was all about dreams, which really kind of started to foretell his future unconsciously at that point. But he was leading towards that. And of course, he was an expert dreamer, now analyst. Yes. In his career. But there you see bits of it early on. Yeah. As a young child, just being so overcome with this idea of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat and Dream interpreter.

What's. What is that? You know, and. Right. And then he became the best at that, right? And he didn't know that's what he would be when he came out of the war, because, you know, everyone said, you hanging finish your education degree and you got to do that and you go back to school and you don't. Aspire to be Jonah's teacher. That's that top level you need to get to. Like his mother would always say to him, which was really funny, he says, You can fly, but don't fly too high. And what he said is just, you know, he had the experience in the war of being a leader because he was a lead radar navigator, which was a big job.

And what led him to choose to join the Army. He knew he was going to get drafted at some point, so he figured, why don't I pick what I want to be in and. Figure out a way to make my own choice? I'm too little to be on the ground or something. He didn't see himself, him as a small guy, didn't see himself on the ground forces. So he thought, why don't I learn to be a flier? He got trained. He got into a special training program to become a lead radar navigator, and that's what he did. And there were very, very. Few and there were very few of them at the time.

So he was one of one of the few. So there's a lot more to this story about what happens, you know, once he's in the psychoanalytic field and how he needs to become a rebel in order to support his case and so forth. But there was so much information even before you get to the place where you need to understand his theory. Absolutely. And then the main thing about Dr. Bail is his theory. How were you able to maneuver through this and tie all the bits and pieces together? Well, you know, it's interesting. In the creative process of putting together something like this, it is kind of a creative chaos in a way where you've got all these bits and pieces and you figure, how are you going to make this thematically work throughout?

And I, I started to see his life like a symphony. Everything is kind of musical to me and there's peaks and valleys and crescendos and fast periods and slow periods, and his life was very much like that. But I kind of start at the beginning and I thought, how are these early things impacting his later life? Is there a thread there? And there was this thread about following intuition and following my North Star, and then the dreams following what your dreams are telling you and believing that your unconscious will guide you to the right decisions and the right place.

And I think you wanted us to know that he had several near-death experiences that caused him to think, There's a reason I'm here. It's bigger than my own life. Absolutely. And that was one of the things that interested me about doing a film about him, which was exactly that point that he had come near death several times. And I wondered, there's so many people that have had that experience, like how do people navigate their lives after that? And the way he navigated his life was so inspiring because he really was dedicated to life is more than me.

And he kept going back to when he was in the war and he was responsible for all these men that every decision he made as a leader impacted everyone else. And so he followed that line of thinking and an action in manifesting the kind of life he had where he would be somehow impacting and helping to transform the lives of the people that he was able to be in touch with and touch. So that was an enlightening. And here he was saving the lives of these men. Yes, in war. And then he chooses to save the lives of people in peace. He would say, you know, there's a war inside ourselves, that everyone has some sort of war inside themselves and that on the planet today, we're actually each person internally is fighting those wars.

And that how important that is. And so becoming a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, he could see that in everybody. And then developing his theory later on was one of the keys to how people could unlock the wars within themselves. And really what's going on inside our selves is what's happening out in the world. What happens in our in our own lives is the physical manifestation of what's happening. Right. In the world where you see wars everywhere. I mean. And we just accept that this is how we. We accept round in. The world race war, right? And this is how we move around internally where we're fighting against ourselves.

Right. And there's resistance to peace and it's unconscious most of the times. Because if everyone could have peace all the time, well, then why wouldn't they? And there's something blocking or having us resist the light that always wants to come in. Because even with all the wars, you know, the light is still somehow overshadowing in other places in the world where there aren't wars. Not perfect, perhaps, but a start. A start when working on this film. And you were paying attention to this theory because you were going to be describing this theory, how hard was it to get a grasp on.

It was it was difficult to get a grasp on, but I knew I had to make it in a way that laymen could understand it. And I really do love doing that. That's probably my sweet spot is is really sort of deconstructing difficult material and making it palatable and understandable to people who don't understand it. So I just went down a lot of paths interviewing neuroscientists. And what did, even though they made not have known his theory, they knew pieces of the theory like neuroscientists who study epigenetics, where Bernard would say his theory isn't exactly epigenetics.

It was as close as I could get. Can you share with us laypeople what you're epigenetics is? Epigenetics are part of your genes that can either get expressed or not expressed. Say you have parents who were once an alcoholic, once a drug addict on for it. You know, if that happened that you could have a predisposition. Genetic li to that. And depending on your nature nurture environment as you grow up, those genes may or may not get expressed. So there's there's a certain amount of feelings that are affecting your genes. Absolutely. And as Bernard talked about, I mean, these are all the neuroscientists that I talked to were in the realm of what happens in utero as well.

On a scientific level. While Bernard's theory is not a hard science, part of it is applicable, His was more in the realm of feelings and energies passing between people, which is also part of the in utero situation that gets passed and get passed down to the fetus. Nicotine, drugs, feelings, fear, all of that. For some reason, it's easy for us to think that drugs and nicotine get passed down. Sure, harder to grasp, you know, a sense of sadness being passed down, but just as valid. Absolutely. I mean, especially there's been a lot of studies about it, especially during World War Two.

You had the famine and how that affected births later. You know, there's big studies on that. There's a lot of studies about the in utero passing down of transgenerational trauma, especially when you think about in Europe at the time, people running from place to place, women were pregnant, carrying babies. They didn't know if they're going to a concentration camp or where, you know, even if there were hidden somewhere, there was intense fear going on. So bearing the burdens of the mother post natal or the trauma that Bernard was dealing with.

And interestingly enough, I think the clientele he probably had then had a lot of parents who were in the camps or in the war, and so often the parents didn't talk about it, but they lived in a kind of fear that was kind of passed down. In so many instances that and other terrible situations that happen around the planet, there's there's no room to talk about it. It's just too frightening. And I think as parents, we don't we think we want to protect our children from those things, but meanwhile, we've already given it to them unconsciously. That's absolutely true.

Yeah. You spent a ton of time with Bernard. How did you find him? Was he easy to talk to? Was he intimidating? Was he interested in answering all of your questions? Well, it's interesting. When I first met him to talk to him about the project, he was gruff. He was kind of a toughie. Why do you want to do this? And you know that and not so much on the second meeting. And then before I decided to commit to the project, I really wanted to talk to him without a camera, which I tend to do. So I think I spent 20 hours with him and you guys, you know, just recording audio and I wanted to get a feel of him and what his personality was like.

And he did open up he. And he did open up and he was funny. And that's that's the thing that really made it for me because he was he was an elderly man. He was 95, I think, when I started talking to him. I think so. And he was cogent and funny. And and he spoke in a way that not many people spoke. He had a beautiful sense of the language. gorgeous. And words. And and he was he was a kind of romantic guy. I think that you and he began to share where you had common ground like music and theater. And he he loved that. And he sort of felt a warm connection with you, the.

Great American Songbook and Frank Sinatra and certain songs we we really liked together. Was it easy for him to share the details of his theory, of his of his life with you? I feel like it was. It seemed like it was easy for him to share those details with me because he was always happy to talk about the imprint and the theory and the dream interpretations and how that fed into it. So yeah, he he would talk about that. I see this in the film. So he he shared with you sort of his own imprint too. I mean, through this process, he discovered the imprint that he was given by his mother.

I think he, over his lifetime, continued to deal with that, as we all do, you know, sort of chip away at it and you remove some trash out of the waste bin, but you never get to all of it. You see it when it comes up and maybe you figure out how to, like, tamp it down a little bit. What was his imprint? When I gleaned that really the film ended up being about his imprint and almost his removal of that imprint that his whole life story was really about. His own imprint was pretty fascinating. And I didn't get that till later because his mother and father had a tough relationship.

You know, they're fighting all the time. And and in the film, at some point he goes, they were fighting and I just wish they would shut up. You know, she had had a love before the man she married in Russia. She was madly in love. And then she had to leave Russia and she was in an arranged marriage pretty much with her husband. And they had Bernard. And so she was yearning. She was always yearning for a lost love and. Probably a little pissed. Off and pissed off kid had a relationship before. Irmgard But it wasn't the kind of relationship that he had with Irmgard.

And I think when he left the war, when they parted, he never got Irmgard address, which still that was the one thing that just fascinated me that I could never understand, right? It seems like such a shock. So he was never able to really find her. And that seems clear to you now, that didn't happen. Exactly, because. To be love. Right? He didn't feel like he could have that kind of love, which was such a big, all encompassing love that he didn't feel like he was worthy of that. He did marry and then had two children, then later divorced, but then tried to find Irmgard again.

And there was he was already a very successful psychoanalyst at that point. And he was going back to Hamburg, Germany, where there was an international psychoanalytic convention, and he thought he would meet up with her, you know, after his divorce. That kind of fantasy of this, did I miss the love of my life? Could this come back? Boy, that kind of yearning, the. Yearning was constant. So it was not to be. And it was the thing in his therapies that never could get sorted out. I mean, and that was the question I think I was always asking him, what was the problem with your therapist?

And well, they could never really drill down. They could really never get to it. And I was like, why have you, you know, And finally he met you. And I think that became the love of his life. That was the gift we gave each other. That was the gift, right? So he did say to me that in his therapy he was with these fabulous analysts. Anybody would just be thrilled to have their time and knowledge. And he was, too. But he said, you know, I don't know. It's just we never got into the unconscious. We had these unbilled, perceivable intellectual conversations back and forth.

And I always came away wanting to go back, but always forever unsettled. I'm not getting anywhere. And if I'm not getting anywhere, how am I getting my patients somewhere? I think he spoke to you about just giving up on all known methods. Can you talk about that. A little bit? Yes, He did say that he wasn't getting anywhere. I mean, he'd given up the Freudian route. He'd given up the clinic and route, pretty much which all the institute was taking that on as well. The Institute of Psychoanalysis in L.A.. And the clinic and Route would take people back further than the Freudian right route.

But. But not back in the beginning. Yeah, the cleaning room would take them back to maybe age two or maybe age one one. I'm not totally clear on that. But further back than Freud. And he said, No, no, no, this has to go back further. So that's when he realized he just wasn't getting any help. There was something pre-birth that was being affected. So that's when he he started to really come from nothing. You know, I think I don't know whether he took a break. I think he did, because he had been in that feud with the psychoanalytic institute. And that was because.

Because the psychoanalytic Institute was very their minds were very shut down on letting new ideas in. Not just his. Not just his, but the entire institute was Freud bound. So it was very hard to explore anything new. And so new people coming to the field were kind of obligated to that Freudian route if they were going to make any headway at all. To get any respect, to get training, the training that they desperately wanted. Had to be down that road. Had to be down that road. So it was like a tight knit situation there. And he was already in the community, but now starting to come up with different ideas and wanting to share those because he felt like he was on to something.

So when he started sharing his new ideas, no one was interested and they were really shutting him down. In a big way. To shut him down in a big way, got rid of them, got rid of him as a training analyst, you know. So how did he manage to have all these patients that were still interested in working with him? Well, I think that he must to have the patients still want to work with him. I think he must have gotten somewhere with them, for them to have the loyalty and the confidence to continue, because psychotherapy, psychoanalysis is a very you put yourself in a very vulnerable position.

So they must have felt safe with him, which is a huge thing in any client therapist relationship. And also he loved people so much. People would feel that he had their best interests at heart. So I think they felt that and so they would continue. I look back on some of his old calendars and date books, and it's just filled day after day, you know, ten, 12 patients a day, five days a week. So there were clearly a lot of people who were being helped or who were intrigued by the possibility of the help that they could get, whether they made it or struggled.

But amazing that that many people found their comfort zone with his theory. Absolutely true. And so he, as I understand it, just started listening to the dreams of his patients just one after the next. Over time, thousands of dreams. And it's right to say that he eventually saw a pattern and people were making comments about their moms, about their upbringing, about what life was like as a baby, which he then was able to take back before they were born. The one thing that stands out for me is when he it was a pivotal moment in a session where he was listening to the dreams of everyone, of course.

But a woman had come in with a new baby and he realized if the mother was upset, the baby was upset. And he started to make this connection like, there's something in there that he started to then grow his theory from that. I mean, it wasn't the only session he had like that. But but that's an moment and it was as if soothing the mother would soothe the baby. Right? Exactly. That gives me goose bumps. I know. It still gives me goose bumps because you think about that and it's like. I know because we're so quick or maybe we're not even thinking about it.

To dismiss those kinds of connections, really, that that that sort of umbilical cord doesn't go away, right? It doesn't go away. I mean, in terms of his therapeutic underpinnings when he talks about whatever blocks you're experiencing in life, whether, I'm not lovable enough or I'm not able to do this or that or whatever, I can't love whatever you're feeling, that those were the burdens handed down to you in utero through your mother. Her feelings were coming down to you. And it's you know, like you also said, it's not people always ask, is it just the mother?

And of course, there's father involved and there's nature and nurture what environment you're grown up in, and that can affect everything. But he he always said that everyone has a trauma to a greater or lesser degree. And if you just start asking questions of people, you'll find out pretty quickly what that is. Even as a layperson, if you start thinking about your dreams and writing them down and thinking about the people in your dreams or the activities in your dreams and relate them back to how you live your life, you'll start to see some glimpses of what you've been carrying around in terms of trauma, right?

Like you said, you know, the dreams or the railroad to the unconscious. In getting through all of this with Bernard and and really understanding the imprint, did that affect the way you live your life? It did in a way in that I was working with my daughter, who worked on the film with me a little bit, and I saw our relationship more clearly. In what way? What do you. I thought that I could see how ways that I navigate life, my shortcuts or whatever, a certain anxieties that they would be present in her to, too. And you two spent a lot of time.

We spent a lot of time together. Yeah. And we we get along really well. But but I when I look back on my own childhood, in my own mother, I felt once I learned about his theory, I could see very clearly not I couldn't see. I could feel very clearly my mother's imprint on me, which is really that I'm always trying to make the 801 train to New York. You know, there's my mother, like just shooting ahead of working woman in New York in the in the fifties. You know. Tell me a couple of ways that that sort of presented itself to you are some some examples of yeah, I see I'm doing that thing and I'm not happy doing that thing.

Yeah, I have situations where my mother was very kind of high strung and I will I will get like that. And when you're in those moments, whatever they are, can you catch yourself and say, Ah, this might not be my true self, this could be my imprint? Well, when I'm in those moments, let's say I have a boss who was kind of difficult and then I would think it might be, you know, kind of my brother criticizing me or something. I can catch it if it's not too intense. Depends on the trigger. But yeah, I can look at it. Which I think for a lot of us, most of us, we aren't going to have access to people like Dr. Weiner or the few people who get to practices this fabulous mode.

So I think we have to be curious about this work and read Dr. Bails books and essays and watch your great film. I mean, all of those will help us kind of come to a path where we can start to consider things. And I hope that this curiosity, you know, sort of expands and we share with our friends and neighbors. I think that was really telling after the film when we would have all these screenings at different places and libraries and universities and Holocaust centers that the Q and A's at the end really told me everything. So many people at the end were crying.

And it wasn't. Sometimes it was sadness, crying, but some times it was relief, crying like people would come up to me or to him and say, I understand my life for the first time. So to me that's an important aspect of whether you can afford psychoanalysis or this kind of theoretical insight into your life that in a way just having that and saying to your therapist, Hey, I saw this film and they talked about this when it had such an effect on me viscerally. And that's where it is. It's in your feelings. And that's what Dr. Bail always said. It's about feelings or everything.

And so if you get in touch with that, just from seeing a film, you might want to explore further. Yeah. So the curiosity is there. If people will sit and watch and hear the story. Through Dr. Bails life. You say you saw this thread connecting all of these things and you, after the fact in a way discovered that really this film was about him dealing with his imprint. So I'm guessing you never had an opportunity to talk with him about that? No, I did, actually. I absolutely talked to him about that fact, because as we were getting so starting to get towards the end of the film, I said to him, I really feel like this film is like the arc of your whole imprint, that you're working out your imprint here.

And he agreed he's he didn't say yes, but he said, Yeah, I think that that is a possibility. But that's what it felt like to me, that he was really working out his own print imprint in his life and in his work, which was pretty astonishing. The story of Bernard parachuting out of this plane that had been shot out of the sky and how he made it to the hospital is unbelievable and terrifying. Share with us a little bit about that. Well, when he was shot out of the plane on his 21st mission, that was the time they were shooting down Airman. Like target practice.

Like target practice. Yeah, but he made it. And he had to take off those dog tags. That's right? He had to take off his dog tags because he was Jewish. So the presence of mind to do that while you're bailing out of a plane. And being shot at and. Being shot at takes a lot of presence of mind and courage to do it, because you take that off and you have no idea. Pretty much. I mean, I guess he had a thing that said Bernard Bail on him. But and then, I mean, you saw it. How am I going to make it out of here? You know, he was in a field somewhere.

I made it to the earth. Yeah, I made it to Earth. And now what? And I think he was taken in by a family overnight and then taken to a train station. And where's that train going? Yeah, Stuttgart, Germany. Taken to a train station There. And everyone's yelling. Everyone's yelling and throwing rocks. And I still feel like he was born under a lucky star, because even at that point, people were throwing rocks at him. There was a German airman on the platform and he broke up the crowd. Gosh. Stroke of luck. He broke up the crowd. And in in the film know, Bernard said, I saluted him because that's where it's a policy among airmen.

You know, that's what you do even though they're the enemy. And that is such a poignant moment. Also another kind of life saving moment where he was just kind of there was something him. So great, so perfect that he eventually listened to all of those bits that were guiding him. Right. And that he strung those together. Right. And found his path on you do. So that train then eventually took him to the hospital where I spoke about right guard. And so that took him to the hospital. And then he had the experience there and was saved by the nurse pretty much.

But then in the film, I thought it would be an interesting idea to take him back to Germany. Was he pretty receptive to that? Was very receptive to it because he was going to Europe. So I said, You guys are going to Europe. How about we go back to Germany, to the room You were incarcerated in? And he thought it was a good idea. So we went to Germany and took him back to the room. Boy, the anticipation of that. Moment and well, one of the interesting things is when I was researching the room that he was incarcerated in, we had a German team helping us with locations and scouting from the book.

You know, we thought it was room number 102 or something, the description of it. And I was asking, Bernard, is it is it this room or that room? And he would tell me. So we scouted a few rooms there and we picked one room that we thought it was. But when we got him to Germany and he walked up the steps into the hallway, the corridor where those rooms were, it was like he was like a sniffing dog. And he, you know, because he couldn't see very well at that point. He had real macular. I think degeneration very hard for him to see, but it was like he had a nose for it.

He just went down the hall. We were going to go into this room to the right. He went down the hall, felt his way to a door, opened the door and said, This is the room. Wow. It's like he sniffed it out. And we were like, you know, it was just like this moment of, like, chills. That trip, I think, really affected him good and bad. I think terms of the, let's say, the imprint, he had been traumatized really from where to drop the bombs. So he knew he was stepping on ground, where he basically had been in charge of killing people. So he was now on German ground.

He hadn't been there in 71 years and it was very difficult. So I think while the German people were fantastic. They were unbelievable. Loving and welcoming. It was very healing. Yes. And they asked so many great questions. Right. And they asked questions to him. And he was so open and as were they. So that was a real turnaround. I mean, to go back to a place where you almost died and relive it in a way that the world has changed. What a great thing to be touched by. Yeah. After all of the experiences he'd had over those 70 years. Absolutely. And he was talking about Irmgard, too, while we were there.

And we went outside and he was talking about the room and how he had survived and how lucky was, and then how Irmgard had been this gift. And then as he was talking, church Bails started ringing and he said, She's here, you know, she's here with me. Who could have foretold, right? That thing which once. Again, and. How he was kind of fortunate in certain ways. But a connection to his unconscious that I don't know somehow even presents itself in the real world. Yeah, it's like he brought it on. It's like he could foretell these situations almost.

We are so fortunate to have had this man walk this planet and we have so much to learn from him. Still, I feel like we need to carry this on. And. And I so appreciate your film and now love and there is a website and now love. The movie and now love the movie. Dot com. And if you go to our web site and now love dot com, we will connect you to the movie, which is fabulous. And we just touched on elements and. Absolutely the movie is on Amazon and Apple TV and a host of other. To access. Very easy to access. I know this story of course but it was really terrific for me to kind of relive this and talk about it with you because you know more than anyone about all things Bernard and I can't thank you enough for being here and sharing.

And if you have questions about this or questions for Jill, I'm speaking on your hack. You can ask us and we'll answer. I thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you next time. Bye for now. Thank you.