Looking at the role of spiritualism in the face of hatred, an Emmy-nominated producer showed a portion of a Holocaust documentary last night.

Joshua Greene, filmmaker and senior vice president for one of New York's largest communications firms, presented the second half of his film Witness: Voices from the Holocaust and led a question and answer session.

Based on interviews conducted in the late 1970s by Yale University's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the film brought together the stories of various Holocaust witnesses to give a chronological perspective on the event.

"The people in this film are not called survivors, they are called witnesses because they are not just people who went through the camps," Greene said. "It's also . . . bystanders, clergy members, even perpetrators."

Greene was part of an effort to raise money to restore the nearly 30-year-old interview recordings and then to compile them into the film.

In the film, the witnesses told stories of the atrocities they experienced during the Holocaust.

"It was hell on Earth, the silence was hell, the nights were hell," one Auschwitz survivor recalled in the film. "It was never life to me -- it was destruction."

Another woman struggled to describe her feelings towards the German people after the war.

"I don't hate them. I can't hate them. I feel I would waste a lot of time doing that," she said.

Greene said events such as the Holocaust raise the question of how to deal with the human capacity for hatred while maintaining individual spirituality.

"Does God exist in these horrible events? Can we filter this through the eyes of God?" he asked.

Greene said that it is exactly when people separate God from their lives that hatred becomes possible.

"When you forget about the spiritual life that unites us all, you come into the possibility for discrimination," he said.

Greene also commented on what he saw as the tendency of other Holocaust films to create happy endings.

"We invent these things to make ourselves feel better. There's a danger in that," Greene said. "This says less about the history and more about our own fears."

The event was hosted by the Penn State Vedic Society. Greene's presentation was part of the Vedic Lecture Series, which began last semester.

Vedic Society President Aravind Mohanram explained how the event tied in with the organization's goals.

"One of the purposes is to discuss modern issues in the light of Vedic scriptures," Mohanram said. "We can get an idea of why such situations happen, what are the root causes, what we can do to prevent such situations and how spiritualism can help."

Tuvia Abramson, director of Penn State Hillel chapter, attended the event and was grateful to the Vedic society for hosting it.

"It seems to me that it's always the role of the Jews to remind the world of the Holocaust -- and they were the victims. So I want to thank you, who are not in the Jewish community, for showing this film," Abramson said.