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mugs. ♪ bmo ♪ >> -- could mend their broken hearts. >> can't hear the sounds of war here. you just close your eyes and you feel like you could fly. i believe the first piece was -- >> jeff koons is one of the most prominent and polarizing art stars in the world. his creations may look simple, but they can take decades to make and often push the boundaries of technology and sometimes taste. critics may scoff at times, but that's nothing new. jeff koons has been controversial since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bill whitaker. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm sharyn alfonsi. >> i'm jon wertheim. >> i'm cecilia vega. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories and more tonight on a special edition of "60 minutes."

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a bus filled with widows of war and their children left ukraine last august, bound for the austrian alps. as we first told you in november, they'd been invited to a charity summer camp, hosted by nathan schmidt, an american marine, who knows all too well the bereavement of war. mountain climbing was schmidt's path to recovery from three combat tours to iraq. so, when vladimir putin launched his attack on an innocent

people, schmidt offered ukraine what seemed like an impossible hope, that in only six days in the alps, he could teach grieving families to rise. the journey to an austrian hotel ended at 3:00 in the morning after 45 hours on the road. so, the trip already felt like a mistake to widows who packed enough skepticism to last the week. their husbands died defending ukraine. among the tens of thousands of ukrainian soldiers killed. time stopped for natalia zaremba and her two young boys. she told us -- >> translator: i think they still don't believe what happened, just like me. they're still waiting for daddy to come home from work. >> reporter: for daddy to fly

home to 8-year-old illia and 5-year-old andrii, who imagined mastering the air like their dad. mykhailo zaremba was a navy pilot, shot down in may 2022 in the unprovoked invasion of his home. >> translator: he loved ukraine, so he gave his life for ukraine. >> reporter: what is your hope for this trip? >> translator: i want to find strength for myself to be able to bring my children up, to bring our children up. i want to find the strength to not let my husband down and to give our children a good future. >> reporter: 13 widows and 20

children had come to austria from mykolaiv, a city bombed by the russians for 260 days. the bereaved families travelled 1,300 miles on faith to meet a stranger, still struggling to heal from his own war. [ speaking in a global language ] >> reporter: nathan schmidt, naval academy graduate, lieutenant colonel u.s. marine corp. reserve led shouts of glory to ukraine at the third summer camp hosted by his small charity, the mountain seed foundation. >> it comes from the bible. it was, you know, faith the size of a mustard seed, one can move mountains. we're not a religious organization, but that faith, that faith in something bigger, that faith in self, and if you

can reinforce that faith, we and you can move mountains. >> what do you hope these families have when they return to ukraine? >> we teach about the significance of rope in mountaineering. it signified community, signified team. you're never alone on the rope. it also signifies courage. because when you're on the rop, that means you're climbing a mountain. and courage doesn't mean that you're not afraid. it actually means that you are afraid and you're going to overcome that fear. >> reporter: there would be plenty of fear to overcome because ultimately this was his goal, to lead children on the last leg of a climb to the peek of mount kitzsteinhorn, at more than 10,000 feet. the first steps for the summit began with training for the kids, ages 5 to 17.

for their moms, there were daily group therapy sessions, and every day of the camp would raise the challenge for both. >> we're going to trust ourselves, the main thing, we're going to trust our equipment, and we're going to trust the team that we're with. >> reporter: the team of professional guides and other volunteers included dan cnossen. cnossen was schmidt's naval academy classmate. as a navy seal in 2009, he lost his legs in afghanistan. he's a three-time paralympian, but he'd never climbed since his injury. the first days of training looked dangerous. >> three, two, one. >> reporter: but there was always an expert on the rope. >> that's a little late. >> reporter: one professional guide for every four children, who eased the tension slowly for

kids, including 14-year-old myroslav kupchenkov. >> now, just lean back. lean back. totally trust. >> no. >> lean back. >> i can't. >> you can. >> i can't. >> you can. >> i can't. >> of course you can. >> myroslav, his adult sister, and their mother, natalia, lost oleksandr kupchenkov, a 53-year-old career soldier. [ speaking in a global language ] natalia told us, he was the man i wanted to spend my whole life with. he was the best at everything, wonderful husband, wonderful dad. people loved him. kupchenkov was hit by a russian missile march 2022, as he was running ammunition to his pinned down soldiers. [ speaking in a global language ]

myroslav told us, every day he showed me how to be a good person, and he was always brave. he would never go back, only forward. and myroslav discovered in rappelling, going back is going forward, and terror was just one step before triumph. >> that's it. there you go. super. >> reporter: as the children learned the ropes, the moms seemed to be near the end of theirs. >> it will be hard for you to hear this. >> reporter: they were lead by clinical psychologist amit oren, with translation by iryna prykhodko. amit is an assistant professor at the yale school of medicine. >> the way i approach this group of people is not in looking at

their trauma. it's in looking at their strengths. >> and what strengths are you finding? >> capacity for love, honesty. these are the strengths that they're finding. all i do is take a flashlight, illuminate inside them, and let them see and remember who they are. >> reporter: but svitlana melnyichuk, on the left, didn't see the light. she didn't believe in break throughs. she brought her daughter, myroslava, while her adult daughter stayed home. svitlana lost her husband, yuriy, a civilian building inspector, who volunteered the day after putin invaded. svitlana mixed homemade explosives for the troops, as her husband sent text messages from the front. svitlana told us -- [ speaking in a global language ]

-- pictures started coming in, good morning, darling, with a photo of a flower taken right from the trench. it was spring already, right from the trench. the photos thrilled her because yuriy had always worked too much at the expense of the family, she thought. but after the invasion, family was all he cared about. his revelation lifted their lives. then, he was dead, and her rage is almost like blindness. [ speaking in a global language ] i became very distant and angry, and i kept all the sorrow inside. i didn't share it. >> reporter: nathan schmidt was keeping his sorrow inside when, in 2019, a friend invited him on

a climbing trip. schmidt wasn't a mountaineer. he's afraid of heights. to him, the idea sounded so difficult and frightening, it might just have the force to break his grief. >> yeah. you know, i spent the naval academy preparing myself for war. and nothing can prepare yourself for war. >> reporter: in 2004, schmidt was a 24-year-old first lieutenant, who dreamed of leading marines. he landed in fallujah on the eve of the bloodiest battle of the entire iraq war. >> two weeks after arriving in camp fallujah, i lost my teacher, who was a mentor of mine at the naval academy. >> killed? >> yeah. the rocket struck the office. i was the second one in the room. it was the first time i'd ever

seen anyone die in such a way. and it was my teacher. and that established a crack in me that had to be healed in another way that took years and years to heal. the problem was that was the first of many cracks. i lost one of our marines that was in my unit a month later. i then had my friend lose his leg. i took over his team. a few days after that, i lost my analyst in a gun tourette to our vehicle. by the end of november, the unit that i was with, which is a great unit, 3-1, was combat ineffective. we had lost over 20% of our unit, either injured or killed. >> reporter: and that was his first tour. he fought in iraq for three years. who were you after that third

tour? >> i thought, in my mind, that i was the strongest. but in reality, i was -- i was the weakest. i was strong physically. i could do as many pull-ups as you asked me to do. i could run. but, man, i was broke. and, you know, those cracks, they take a lifetime to -- to heal. >> reporter: you spend this week doing what you can to heal these families. and i wonder how much of that is healing you. >> it's huge.

this program has healed me in ways i can't even describe. and i feel sometimes i think it's selfish. but you're right. you're right. it works. and i'm not sure why. >> reporter: maybe it works because the children and mothers who arrived on the bus will not be the same people who return to ukraine. no one's quite the same after scaling a wall like this. when we come back, teaching the bereaved to rise. (♪♪) with wet amd, i worry i'm not only losing my sight, but my time to enjoy it. but now, i can open up my world with vabysmo. (♪♪)

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nathan schmidt's week-long summer camp for bereaved ukrainian children and their mothers began with training in the austrian alps. then, serious work began, the kind of challenge that might rise to a revelation. the hohe tauren national park embraces some of the highest peaks in the austrian alps and a feat of engineering. the mooserboden dam would be the first big challenge for the 13 widows and their children. a zip line flew them to the concrete face, where they found a steel cable to clip their harnesses to. footholds were set across the span about two and a half football fields wide. the children and moms literally could not fall, and yet the mooserboden dam remained 32

stories of doubt. natalia zaremba did not like the measure of it. the russians had killed her husband, the father of her two boys. was this risk foolish? why do you put them on this dam. >> we put them on this dam because we want them to confront discomfort. we want them to confront their fears. >> reporter: nathan schmidt cofounded the mountain seed foundation charity. we met in the 700-square-mile park, where the dam, finished after world war ii, is a tourist attraction for rock climbers. >> what makes this safe, in your view? >> first off, we have professional mountain guides. the second thing is all the equipment we have, they train throughout the week on it. they know how to use the equipment. and particularly the little children, they are also short roped into a guide. so, there's multiple layers of

security for them. >> reporter: and so, with all that security, the challenge was not so much under their feet as under their skin. >> and here we go. >> reporter: myroslav kpchenkov, who told us his late father never went back, always forward, was following his father's lead. >> you know, in life, sometimes the thing that gets you through a difficult point is knowing that you've already done something more difficult. >> reporter: what difference do you see in them when they reach the top? >> the sheer look of joy on their faces.

>> perfect! >> it's hard to even comprehend. and we know that that will be a strong point for them when they go back to ukraine. they will know that they've -- they've conquered this wall, and they will -- they conquered their own fears. >> reporter: fears conquered by natalia zaremba, who, at the end of the climb, was walking on air. >> yeah! >> reporter: she told us, she came to austria to find strength to raise her boys alone. >> nice! [ speaking in a global language ] >> reporter: she said, it was something incredible. as soon as i stepped on the ground, the children ran to me, hugged me. there were no flowers there, so my older son gave me a branch from a bush. you know, i see you smiling, and i suspect there hasn't been a lot of that.

>> translator: i don't feel joy the way i used to. wherever i am, no matter how good a time i'm having, it's hard, knowing my husband could have been with us. but he's not. and even when i smile, the pain in my heart is very strong. >> reporter: the pain is strong, but maybe not invincible. natalia was listening at the meetings, and words of inspiration, like those of navy seal dan cnossen, were getting through. >> that bomb in afghanistan took my legs, and i can't change that fact.

[ speaking in a global language ] >> but ultimately it has to be up to me to decide if it's going to take the rest of my life too. thank you all very much. [ applause ] >> reporter: still, for others, especially svitlana melnyichuk, words fell short. she had told us her husband sent photos of flowers from his trench until the russians killed him. she said -- [ speaking in a global language ] >> translator: life is a look you read your whole life. when my husband died, i stopped turning pages in the book. >> reporter: but opening a new chapter is what clinical psychologist amit oren had in mind. so, she took the widows to a storybook castle, where she hoped to scale the walls of svitlana melnyichuk. >> and i started to talk to her

about castle walls, that we're going to see a castle, where there are always very deep, tough, impenetrable walls, and that i thought that her face looked like that, that it was hard to see what's inside, like this castle. and i brought them to a wall, a side wall, of the castle, where there were teeny, tiny windows. and i said to them, right now, i think you're here at the bottom. and as you go up, you're able then to see three windows. i said, unless you open that window, you can't peer out and see the beauty around you. you're trapped. and ultimately what happened is several of the women stood there on the grass and opened up to each other. she was one of them. >> it was choking you. it was choking you.

>> reporter: the next day, after the group session, svitlana had been thinking. >> she came up to me and said to me, it was a very painful conversation we had, and i made a decision. my anger was choking me, and i decided to let it go so i can breathe. >> congratulations. you've done hard work. i'm so happy for you. >> she has a long way to go, but she's understood that it's a choice at least. the few things she can control in this world is how open or closed she chooses to be in her own castle. >> you know, as you talk to the mothers, none of them expected what happened in february of

2022, the invasion, losing their homes in many cases, losing their future, or at least a future being unknown. and it's one of those moments in climbing where you look all around and you don't know where you're going to put your hand and you don't know where you're going to put your foot. you don't know if you're going to be able to stay in that position or fall. this program is meant to show them the footholds and the handholds to fill the cracks that they have too and then lead their children back up the mountain. >> reporter: on day five, one mountain remained. nathan schmidt took the first steps from a high tram station on an ascent to the peak of mount kitzsteinhorn. it was a steep and icy 570 feet

to the ultimate test of the camp. like the dam earlier, there was a fixed cable to hook onto. but, like the dam, glancing down looked fatal, and looking up, a cold, thin glare exposed hours of struggle. we followed schmidt's lead and remembered what he told us about the rope we were on and its three lessons, community, courage -- >> and the last thing is responsibility. and this is probably the most difficult one. and that is, when you're on the rope, you're responsible for those that are on the rope with you. when they're weak, you pull them up. when they are showing signs of fatigue, you encourage them. >> look at me, breathe in. two, three, four, hold, two, three, four. >> we hope that when they go home that they build their own communities, they add people to their rope, that they encourage

them to face their fears and have courage. >> reporter: courage lifted them 10,508 feet, a summit reached by everyone. >> let's go! >> reporter: including nathan schmidt's naval academy classmate, dan cnossen, on his prosthetics. >> it's tough, but i'm happy to make it to the top. and it was great to do it with everyone. seeing the kids climbing gave me a lot of inspiration to keep pushing. >> reporter: natalia zaremba's kids pushed to the top. she had come to austria to find strength within herself. but from the peak, she could see where that kind of strength truly comes from. >> translator: we have something that bonds us more now, some new

achievements, which we experienced together and that taught us to be braver and stay together because only together can we overcome this. our strength, she said, will be from being together. >> reporter: also among the climbers of the summit was myroslav kupchenkov, who told us, now he could do anything. what is your hope for them? >> my hope for them is that they can remember the achievement that they've had, and i also hope they can remember the stillness and the peace of these mountains. can't hear the sounds of war here. you just close your eyes and you feel like you could fly. >> reporter: even svitlana melnyichuk took flight, rising to the summit, and at last to

the high, open windows of her castle. >> translator: i was screaming. to be honest, i was simply screaming. having breathed in full lungs of air, i was screaming with my head toward, i don't know, god, nature. i don't know. i was just getting rid of all the negative. >> reporter: has this helped you in some small way to heal? >> translator: oh, well, at least i managed to open the bag of my sorrows. >> reporter: to open their sorrows to the sky five days before they clip to a rope, a string of broken souls. now they would return to the war. but this time resurrected in strength and love and invincible hope.

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- lift the clouds off of... - virtual weather, only on kpix and pix+. jeff koons is one of the most prominent and polarizing art stars in the world. perhaps you've seen one of his giant balloon dog sculptures, or the stainless steel inflatable rabbit that he made that he sold for $91 million a few years ago, the highest price ever paid at at auction for a work by a living artist. his creations may look simple, but as we first reported last may, they can take decades to make, and often push the boundaries of technology and sometimes taste. critics may scoff at times, but that's nothing new.

jeff koons has been controversial since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago. you'll find the largest collection of jeff koons' work at the broaden museum in los angeles. visiting it is like showing up at a children's party long after the kids have gone to bed. there's a giant painting of a party hat, a porcelain michael jackson and his chimp, bubbles, a kind of pop culture -- the hulk even makes an appearance. the star attraction, a 10 foot tall stainless steel balloon dog structure. koons showed it to us after hours. >> we had to make machines to make this work. it didn't exist. >> it may look like it's filled with air, but balloon dog weighs more than a ton and took jeff koons six years to make. >> i started with a balloon. i blew it up. i twisted a balloon dog. >> did you know how to make a balloon dog? >> no. i just got a little book. i saw how you do it. i probably made about 50 of them. i made a mold of it, and then that was used to make the

stainless steel pieces. originally, when i made this piece, i thought that i could make it for about $300,000, which still, that's a lot of money. but it ended up, just to create the piece, ended up costing me 1.6. and that was more than what i had sold the work for. >> that's classic koons. he's famous for going overbudget. and his obsessive attention to detail is legendary. he spent 20 years figuring out how to turn this mass of aluminum into a ten-foot-tall pile of play-doh. to get these basketballs suspended in the air, he enlisted the help of a nobel prize winning physicist. and he used more than 60,000 living flowers to create this sculpture of a puppy. he often takes famous characters and plays with them. adding a gazing ball to the mona lisa, or he elevates everyday things, making them larger, shinier, or surreal versions of

themselves. >> the rabbit's from '86. >> like that rabbit resold for $91 million. he made four that look at first as if they're just plastic inflatables. but they're highly polished stainless steel and weigh about 150 pounds. >> it's iconic because it can represent so many different things. i can think of easter. i can think of a politician. with kind of a microphone. somebody making proclamations. i can think of a playboy rabbit. i think one of the most important things to me, the reason it's reflective and reflecting you, reflecting me, you know, the viewer finishes a work of art. it's about your feelings, your experiences. it's about your potential. >> maybe you're thinking jeff koons sounds like a phony self-help profit. plenty of critics do. but he does see art as something that can help people have a personal transformation.

>> art can be anything. i mean, it really can be. my personal experience of art is that you just don't have to bring anything to it other than yourself. >> so, your message to people is you don't need to have a thesis in art history to interact with art and what you feel from it is valid? >> it's as valid as anybody else could experience. >> why balloon dogs? why gazing balls and inflatable rabbit? >> memories. you know, around easter time, i would see a lot of inflatable rabbits in the yards. i would see gazing balls in people's yards in their gardens. our neighbors who do that, i mean, how generous they are for us that we're just driving by or walking by and we can look and we can have a little awe and wonderment just for that second. to me, they're symbols of cultural history. >> koons grew up outside york, pennsylvania n a rural community, where you can still find gazing balls in people's

yards. he has eight children, six with his second wife justine, to whom he's been married 22 years. they still live part time in pennsylvania, part of an 800-acre farm, where they raise horses and cows. >> i think most people don't envision this is the life you have as a world famous artist. >> well, you know, i'm very involved with my work. but on the weekends and summers, holidays, it's a really important part of my life. >> koons has been drawing and painting since childhood. 1974, while studying art in college, his mother helped him meet one of his favorite surrealist painters. >> my mother called me and said, i just saw in a magazine that salvador dali spends half his year in new york city at the st. regis hotel. and i thought, oh, okay, maybe i'll call. >> wait a minute, you just thought you'd call him? >> i called the st. regis, i

asked for salvador dali's room, and they put me through. i was quite nervous, but i told him i was a fan and i would enjoy very much to meet him. he said, can you come to new york this weekend on saturday. i said, yes. he said, be in the lobby at 12:00, and i'll meet you then. and he was spectacular. >> it would never have occurred to me to, like, just call salvador dali in his hotel room. >> i had nothing to lose. >> koons and dali spent the afternoon together. and at the end of it, he asked the world renowned artist to pose for this picture. >> he put his mustache up and he was telling me, kid, hurry up, i can't hold this pose all day. but i left new york that evening feeling like i could do this. >> after finishing school, he hitchhiked to new york and started making art in his lower east side apartment, buying cheap plastic inflatables and

putting them on mirrors. koons had grand ambitions but he needed cash to realize them. >> i became licensed and registered to sell commodities and mutual funds. that's what i started to do to be able to make more money to make the works. >> that's not a career move a lot of artists make. >> you know, i did it -- i could make enough money to make my vacuum cleaner pieces. >> the vacuum cleaners he's talking about were what first got him noticed in 1980. he bought about 20 brand-new vacuums and displayed them in cases with fluorescent lights. it was part of a series called "the new." >> i was showing them for their newness. this was a brand-new object. it was never used. you can see it's clean. it's pristine. its lungs are pure. and there's also some sensual aspects to it too. >> sensual aspects? >> sensual. you have the handle. you have the bag right there. it could be looked at as masculine.

or you could look at it and say, oh, the bag is the womb. >> art definitely is in the eye of the beholder. >> what do you think of jeff koons as an artist when he first came on the scene? >> i was interested in him and i also was kind of repulsed by him. >> robert storr, former dean at the yale school of art was a curator at the museum of modern art in new york when it acquired some of koons' vacuums in 1986. >> i think some of the work is unpleasant but that doesn't mean it's not serious. >> what's unpleasant about it. >> the imagery is vulgar. vulgar means many things, means of the people rather than of the elites. >> it's taking an object which the new york elites might look at and think, that's tacky, that's trashy, that's something you buy in a gift shop. and it's blowing it up and making it perfect and saying that this has value? >> it has meaning, not necessarily value. but it has meaning. >> what is the message of that? >> the message is that it is there to be embraced, that it is

not to be mocked, that one should not be smugly sure of one's own taste to the point of denying the possibility of other tastes. >> and is he being honest about that? >> he's being totally honest. and i think that he has made all of that fair game in a way that we have not seen since warhol. >> like andy warhol, jeff koons has a factory of sorts, an assembly line of painters instructions. and dozens of craftsmen all over the world helping make his complex pieces, which are often inspired by very simple things. >> this is, like, a very modern grandmother's closet. >> turns out koons was fascinated by his grandparents' porcelain figurines as a child and has collected hundreds of them. he decided to make that $150 ballerina into a multimillion dollar eight-foot-tall marble sculpture. but it wound up taking him 12 years.

he used a cat-scan machine to digitally map every detail of the figurine inside and out. then it took five years and the help of m.i.t. scientists to turn them into instructions to carve the structure. the actual carving took another seven years. >> now the work will really progress quickly -- >> we went to a workshop in pennsylvania to check on the progress and found ayami and her team carefully polishing the ballerina by hand. do you have a sense of how many hours of work is done on a piece? >> 33,000. >> 33,000 hours? >> just for the hand work. >> it must be exhausting. and monotony and difficulty to it is incredible. >> yeah. it is a really unique job, i would say. >> that looks like, sort of, a dental tool. what is that? >> that's for suction.

>> really? >> you'll notice jeff koons isn't doing the sculpting or painting. he comes up with the ideas, but his artisans do the labor, which has led to criticism. including from our own morley safer. >> what do you say to the man? >> 30 years ago, morley did a story critiquing contemporary art. and likened koons to a p.k. barnum, selling o suckers. >> he doesn't actually paint or sculpt. he commissions craftsmen to do that while he goes shopping for basketballs and vacuum cleaners. >> is that a legitimate criticism. >> it's a legitimate criticism if you look at art in a way that you kind of want everything to be done by the artist themselves. but it becomes very limited what you can do within one life if you're being responsible for everything. it's, like, the production of this program right now. anderson, if you had to be responsible for the lighting, if you had to be responsible for editing --

>> if i was responsible for the lighting, we wouldn't see you or myself. >> if you had to be responsible for everything, i mean, how many programs would you be able to create? i've designed. i've worked on the systems so that the whole process at the end of the day, it's as if every mark was made by myself. >> at 68, koons has reached a level of commercial success few artists ever imagine. he's helped design cars for bmw, an album cover for lady gaga, even a superyacht. and later this year, he hopes to create a permanent art exhibit on the moon. he's made 125 small stainless steel moon sculptures and mounted them on a lunar lander that will hitch a ride aboard a spacex rocket. >> is there something about the atmosphere on the moon that would affect the life span of a work? >> almost everything. you know, you have tremendous radiation. you have the temperature change, at least 250 degrees difference

from night to day. one of the most inhospitable environments you could imagine for a work of art. >> the moon sculptures are for sale, of course, along with an nft, or nonfungible token, which serves as digital proof your artwork is actually up there. you'll also get one of these larger moons to show off here on earth. he won't say how much it'll cost you, but with jeff koons, it's a safe bet the price tag will be out of this world. those smaller sculptures finally made it to the moon about two weeks ago, but it didn't exactly go as planned. an instrument malfunctioned before touching down, causing the lunar lander to tilt on its side. but jeff koons tells us his sculptures are intact and are now considered to be among the first works of art on the moon.

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"the last minute" of "60 minutes" is sponsored by united health care, there for what matters. it happens every year near the start of spring, as most americans make the transition to day light saving time. this collective jet lag doesn't save or stretch or lengthen daylight. it only manipulates our clocks. we can't fool the sun, just ourselves. we've observed it since world war i, when congress voted to shift clocks to get more daylight hours into the workday, both for farmers and their

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