Movie on Boy’s Holocaust Fate Premieres in Poland

Source: Monika Scislowska, Associated Press, January 8, 2014

WARSAW, POLAND — A stirring movie by German Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart about a Jewish boy struggling to survive the Holocaust is having its world premiere in Warsaw on Wednesday.

A German-French coproduction with mostly Polish actors, “Run, Boy, Run” is the true story of 10-year-old Yoram Friedman who escaped the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and — hunted by the Nazis — hid in the woods near the city. The child fed on snails and mushrooms, braved winter snow storms and hid in water to avoid Nazi sniffer dogs.

He occasionally got help from farmers, but also faced indifference, hatred and betrayal. Posing as a Catholic Pole, assuming the name Jurek Staniak, helped him find lodgings in exchange for work on farms.

His right hand was badly injured in an accident, but a surgeon refused to operate after discovering that the boy was Jewish. Another surgeon treated him, but too late to save the arm from amputation.

Talking to The Associated Press on the eve of the premiere, Friedman said he does not live in the past.

“I don’t go back to that. What happened, happened,” he said. He admitted, however, that dreams about his ordeal were still haunting him a decade ago.

He remembers the words of his father — quoted in the film — before he sacrificed his life for the boy: “Conceal that you are Jewish but never forget that you are Jewish.”

Friedman believes the movie will reach many people around the globe with the message that “we must never forget that this really took place.” He is now about 80 years old, not sure if he was born in 1933 or 1934.

Danquart, whose “Black Rider” won the 1993 short movie Oscar, told the AP the fact that a German director has made a story about a Jewish boy in the Holocaust that opens in Poland is a “sign of the new time, of a Europe that has come together … and that as people, as humans we can talk about it.”

Despite its dramatic story, the movie is attractive to watch, thanks to the beauty of nature in it and the inner innocence that the boy keeps, despite his ordeal.

“It’s not really a Holocaust movie. It’s more the adventure of a kid in the middle of the Holocaust,” Danquart said. His goal was to interest young viewers with a point of view that is more about life than death.

Friedman’s family, except for one sister, died during the Holocaust, and after the war he was taken to a Jewish orphanage in Poland. He studied mathematics and moved to Israel in 1962, and worked as a teacher there for 40 years.

This week he is back to Warsaw for the premiere with his wife, Sonia; his daughter, Michal; his son, Zwi; and some of his six grandchildren.

Jews represented about 10 percent of Poland’s population of some 35 million before the war, but they were half of Poland’s more than 6 million war victims.

The premiere at Warsaw’s Jewish History Museum also will be attended by Danquart and Israeli writer Uri Orlev, who told Friedman’s story in a 2001 book. The movie is to be released in Germany, the U.S., Israel and Japan, among others.

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2014/01/08/2764086/movie-on-boys-holocaust-fate-premieres.html#storylink=cpy

Alfred Hitchcock’s Unseen Holocaust Documentary to be Screened

Source: Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent, January 8, 2014

The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hitchcock to the horrific footage they filmed. When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by “the real thing”.

In 1945, Hitchcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.

“It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British,” suggests Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum. “Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there.”

The film took far longer to make than had originally been envisaged. By late 1945, the need for it began to wane. The Allied military government decided that rubbing the Germans’ noses in their own guilt wouldn’t help with postwar reconstruction.

Five of the film’s six reels were eventually deposited in the Imperial War Museum and the project was quietly forgotten.

In the 1980s, the footage was discovered in a rusty can in the museum by an American researcher. It was eventually shown in an incomplete version at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 and then broadcast on American PBS in 1985 under the title Memory of the Camps but in poor quality and without the missing sixth reel. The original narration, thought to have been written by future Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman in collaboration with Australian journalist Colin Wills, was read by actor Trevor Howard.

Now, finally, the film is set to be seen in a version that Hitchcock, Bernstein and the other collaborators intended. The Imperial War Museum has painstakingly restored it using digital technology and has pieced together the extra material from the missing sixth reel. A new documentary, Night Will Fall, is also being made with André Singer, executive producer of The Act of Killing, as director and Stephen Frears as directorial advisor. Both the original film about the camps and the new documentary will be shown on British TV in early 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the “liberation” of Europe. Before that, next year, they are due to be shown together at festivals and in cinemas.

The decision to revive the film is bound to provoke anguished debate. It includes truly shocking footage of the camps (Belsen-Bergen in particular.) The film’s own commentary, which has been re-recorded with a new actor, has a phrase about “sightseers” at a “chamber of horrors”.

Billy Wilder, who directed Death Mills (1945), an American film about the German atrocities, was forthright about why he did not want atrocity footage to be seen in later years. Wilder questioned whether it had worked in “re-educating” the German civilian population about what their leaders had been doing in their name.

“They [the Germans] couldn’t cope with it. He [Wilder] told me people just left the screening or closed their eyes. They didn’t want to see,” Wilder’s friend Volker Schlöndorff recalled in a 2011 interview. “They found out it was almost unbearable to see these documents and almost indecent for the victims or the people related to the victims.”

In Memory of the Camps, there is imagery of heaps of naked bodies being piled up in mass graves. The footage seems as surreal as anything you might see in a Hieronymus Bosch painting but then you remember that these corpses haven’t been conjured up by some artist’s twisted imagination. These are real victims whose relatives are alive today.

In the documentary, we see the Germans themselves confronted with the enormity of the crimes committed in their name and forced to help bury the dead themselves.

As Toby Haggith acknowledges, the film is “much more candid” than any of the other documentaries about the camps. Haggith also describes it as “brilliant” and “sophisticated”. The editors Stewart McAllister (famous for his work with Humphrey Jennings) and Peter Tanner, working under advice from Hitchcock, fashioned an immensely powerful and moving film from the hours and hours of grim material at their disposal. The documentary isn’t all about death. We also see imagery of reconstruction and reconciliation. There is footage of camp inmates having their first showers and cleaning their clothes. The film-makers show the painstaking way that typhus was eradicated from the camps.

Haggith speak of the “brilliance” of the original cameramen at the camps, who were working without direction but still had an uncanny knack for homing in on the most poignant and telling images.

“It’s both an alienating film in terms of its subject matter but also one that has a deep humanity and empathy about it,” Haggith suggests. “Rather than coming away feeling totally depressed and beaten, there are elements of hope.”

The Trevor Howard voiceover narration in Memory of the Camps is strangely reminiscent of the one that director Carol Reed himself read over the opening of The Third Man (in which Howard co-starred.) It has the same sardonic understatement as it describes the devastation wreaked by the war. In the new version, the words will remain (but have now been recorded by a contemporary actor.)

Memory of the Camps was a title given to the documentary years after it was made. It will now be renamed. Haggith won’t reveal the new title.

For Hitchcock fans, the Holocaust film is a cause for both excitement and wariness. On the one hand, it seems obvious that his work on the documentary must have had a profound influence on him. He may have been a “treatment advisor” on the project rather than its actual director but his exposure to imagery as extreme as this must have coloured his approach to depicting horror and violence on screen.

The wariness comes from the sense that it is both distasteful and absurdly reductive to see a Nazi atrocity documentary as a ” Hitchcock movie”. We will never know exactly how much he contributed to the film, even if it seems certain that his ideas about how it should be structured were taken on board.

“Our experience with it has been similar to the experience of the cameramen really, in that the technical work has to some degree protected us from the meaning of the film,” Haggith suggests of the experience of spending many months poring over such gruesome and disturbing imagery. He adds that “the fact that we have been habituated to these images over the last 70 years” has meant that the restorers have been able to treat the film as “historical source material”.

The restoration is now almost complete. How will contemporary audiences react to a film which, when it was first being put together, traumatised Hitchcock himself and so deeply upset its original editors, who weren’t aware of what had actually gone on in the camps?

“Judging by the two test screenings we have had for colleagues, experts and film historians, what struck me was that they found it extremely disturbing,” Haggith says. “When you’re sitting in a darkened cinema and you’re focusing on a screen, your attention is very focused, unlike watching it on television… the digital restoration has made this material seem very fresh. One of the common remarks was that it [the film] was both terrible and brilliant at the same time.”

That, Haggith, believes is testament to the craftsmanship of the film-makers, who took some of “the most atrocious and disturbing footage that had yet been recorded in cinema at that stage” and turned into a film that was lucid, moving and instructive as well as appalling. The job now for those showing the film is to provide context and explanation. As Haggith puts it: “We can’t stop the film being incredibly upsetting and disturbing but we can help people understand why it is being presented in that way.”

Lou Reed and the Holocaust/2: Red Shirley

Source: Matt Patches, Watch Lou Reed’s Directorial Debut, the Holocaust Documentary ‘Red Shirley’, The Hollywood Reporter, October 28, 2013.

The death of music icon Lou Reed this past Sunday had pop-culturalists of every breed sifting through the musician’s vast body of work. For good reason: His time with Velvet Underground and his later work as a solo performer is an essential slice of rock ‘n’ roll history. But Reed’s creativity extended beyond music. Before his death, Reed made appearances in a number of films and directed one of his own, Red Shirley, a documentary portrait of his cousin, Shirley Novick.

In the film, available to view through up-and-coming streaming service SnagFilms, Reed interviews the 99-year-old Novick about living through WWI, fleeing Poland during WWII, settling down as a seamstress and eventually marching in Washington in support of the civil rights movement.

Reed co-directed Red Shirley with art photographer Ralph Gibson. The film debuted at the 2010 Vienna International Film Festival before appearing stateside at the 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival.

Along with his foray into documentary directing, Reed also appeared in a number of films, including Wim Wenders’ Faraway, So Close! and Wayne Wang’s Blue in the Face. His songs were used in The Royal Tenenbaums, Trainspotting and Velvet Goldmine among other films.

In 2011, Reed told The Wall Street Journal that Red Shirley was a labor of love and that he only intended to make films on subjects he felt demanded his attention. “I realized if I didn’t do this, a connection to a lot of things would be lost forever. So there was great impetus to do this. The only other thing I would like to do is make a movie about martial arts. Like, travel around to different teachers and tournaments, compare techniques and training.”

 

Lou Reed and the Holocaust/1: The Black Angel’s Death Song

A short excerpt from Jon Stratton, Jews, Punk and the Holocaust: From the Velvet Underground to the Ramones: The Jewish-American Story, Popular Music, vol. 24, n. 1, Jan. 2005, pp. 79-105:

The penultimate track on The Velvet Underground and Nico is ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ in which the lyric is intoned through John Cale’s screeching viola. It was the discordant howl of this song that got the Velvets fired from their residency in Manhattan’s Cafe Bizarre. Reed has only ever played the song once in his solo career and that was in 1972 when he, Cale and Nico performed together in Paris. (…) The lyrics begin by alluding to ‘his fate’. They go on to describe what, apparently, this man cannot lose:

Not a ghost bloodied country
All covered with sleep
Where the black angel did weep
Not an old city street in the east
Gone to choose

This dense web of imagery suggests a country in the east where the people have been destroyed; Poland perhaps, the Jewish population of the cities and shtetls destroyed by the Nazis. We can compare this with Sylvia Plath’s 1962 poem, ‘Mary’s Song’:

The same fire
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt out
Germany.
They do not die.

As ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ unfolds so we have a reference to a rally man, perhaps Hitler’s rallies, and to ‘the cosy brown snow of the east’, possibly Poland again. One line tells us that ‘Sacrificial remains make it hard to forget’. In its original Greek, ‘holocaust’ refers to a burnt sacrifice. Plath makes the same connection in ‘Mary’s Song’ where she makes the startling connection between the lamb Sunday roast and sacrifice. At this point in the 1960s, Jews were the main bearers of the memory of the Judeocide. It was yet to surface as a general Western cultural trauma. It is probably not worth continuing to try to elucidate the lyric of ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’ in terms of the Judeocide. I do not want to suggest that this track is ‘about’ the Judeocide but, rather, that, as an apocalyptic lyric it draws on Reed’s inchoate and unconscious reaction to the extermination. In this sense it is the closest Reed has come to confronting this trauma.

Accidenti alla guerra! (Harem Nazi)

Accidenti alla guerra! is a 1948 Italian comedy directed by Giorgio Simonelli. It can’t be listed as a “Holocaust film”, but there are very few Italian films dealing with this topic in the period between the end of the war and the 1960s, with few exceptions such as L’ebreo errante (G. Alessandrini, 1948) or Il monastero di Santa Chiara (I. Senese, 1949). Mentions of the Holocaust were almost absent in Neorealist films, and in the postwar years Fascist anti-semitism was a theme absolutely unpleasant not only to mass audience but to the Italian public discourse at large. That’s why this film is particularly interesting.

Starring the popular Italian comic actor Nino Taranto, Accidenti alla guerra! would be an anonymous slapstick film with a rather trivial plot, if it wasn’t for the fact that it takes place in a surreal “Institute of eugenics” during the Nazi occupation of Italy. Michele Coniglio (Nino Taranto), a coward and harmless musician, is mistaken for a Nazi officer and sent for a secret mission in a German Institute of eugenics. This little dark-haired Italian has to mate a gigantic German woman in order to create the “perfect soldier”. The Institute of Eugenics is indeed a sort of female college and health resort where beautiful girls (in Nazi-inspired swimsuit) practice sports.

Ten years after the Manifesto of Race (Manifesto della razza, July 1938) the film makes fun of Nazi ideology with no reference to the Italian complicity in carrying out the racist policies. Michele Coniglio is both the personification of the myth of the “Good Italian” and the stereotype of the Latin lover – evoked in the title of the French version, Harem Nazi.

A Glimpse of “The Day the Clown Cried”

Source: Richard Brody, The Front Row (The New Yorker), August 13, 2013.

Something of a cinematic miracle occurred this weekend: I was tipped off on Twitter by a friend, the critic Simon Abrams, about a post featuring footage from the making of Jerry Lewis’s unseen movie “The Day the Clown Cried,” from 1972. The story concerns a bumbling German clown, Helmut Doork (played by Lewis), whose mockery of Hitler lands him in a concentration camp. There, he tries to entertain a group of Jewish children. He is recruited by a commander, with promises of possible freedom, to continue to entertain them in Auschwitz; when he realizes that they won’t be merely imprisoned there but exterminated, he sacrifices himself to allay their fears and leads them into the gas chamber.

The plot is well-known because the script has long been available. The movie itself, though, has never been released. Shawn Levy explains the issues in his extraordinary biography of Lewis, “King of Comedy”: the story was conceived in the early sixties by the publicist Joan O’Brien, who then wrote the script with the critic Charles Denton. Lewis was recruited for the project by the producer Nathan Wachsberger, who, as it turns out, Levy says, “definitely didn’t have the rights to O’Brien’s material.” The producer also couldn’t afford to finance the film, and Lewis put his own money into the production. Lewis repeatedly expressed his desire to work matters out and release the film; O’Brien, who was unhappy with some of Lewis’s changes to the script, never authorized the release. (She died in 2004.) And, in 1993, when Levy asked Lewis about the film, Lewis responded to Levy by unleashing a torrent of verbal fury at him.

If ever there had been a chance for a release, it wasn’t helped by a 1979 remark by the comedian Harry Shearer, for whom Lewis privately screened the film: Shearer likened it to “a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.” But, in this post, the writer and editor Brendon Connelly includes a clip from a public discussion with Lewis, who says that he himself will never let the film be seen because it’s “bad, bad, bad”; he says that he was “embarrassed” and “ashamed of the work” because he “slipped up”:

I didn’t quite get it. And I didn’t quite have enough sense to find out why I’m doing it, and maybe there would be an answer.

I haven’t seen the movie; but now I’ve seen these brief clips and I find them profoundly moving. When O’Brien came up with the idea for the film, the discussion of the extermination of much of European Jewry by Nazi Germany wasn’t as frequent and the historical documentation was far less copious than it is now. Elie Wiesel’s memoir “Night” was published in 1960. Raul Hilberg’s crucial work of history “The Destruction of the European Jews” was published in 1961. The term “Holocaust” hadn’t yet come into frequent usage. And, even in the early seventies, when Lewis worked on the film, his attempt to confront the practical details of daily life in an extermination camp was, at the very least, unusual and original. (I can recall a visit by Wiesel to our synagogue on Long Island around 1973; what he told his audience seemed to hit them with shocking force.)

When Claude Lanzmann did research for the film that would ultimately be “Shoah,” he discovered (as he later wrote in his autobiography, “The Patagonian Hare”) that

what was most important was missing: the gas chambers, death in the gas chambers, from which no one had returned to report. The day I realized that this was what was missing, I knew that the subject of the film would be death itself, death rather than survival…. My film would have to take up the ultimate challenge; take the place of the non-existent images of death in the gas chambers.

The deft and exquisite physical comedy that Lewis performs in the clip foretells the final routine, inside the gas chambers. Even if the specifics of the script bear no relation to actual events, it is known—as Lanzmann shows in “Shoah”—that the extermination-camp guards in fact relied on ruses and extended false hope to lure prisoners into the gas chambers. There may be no comparison between Lanzmann’s patient and relentless pursuit of personal testimony as a touchstone of ultimate history and Lewis’s sentimental vision of a clown who sacrifices his life in the interest of the ultimate consolation. But each, in his own way, sought to film the unfilmable. For Lewis, performance—even unto complicity with the ultimate evil—is the definitive act of solidarity; for Lanzmann, the <href=”#folio=014″>bearing of witness—even unto the evocation of the agents of ultimate evil—is the definitive act of solidarity. But both imagined themselves into the gas chambers.

I haven’t seen any more of Lewis’s film than these brief clips; of course, his own assessment of the work, and Shearer’s, may be accurate. If Lewis remains determined not to show it, if O’Brien’s wishes are respected, and if rights issues remain unresolved, we may never find out. But if these clips suggest anything of the rest of the film, any tastelessness, sentimentality, or clumsiness of Lewis’s effort would be beside the point. He was working in the dark, in a self-inflicted state of moral shock, and attempting the impossible.

They Spoke Out: American Voices of Protest Against the Holocaust

Source: Susan Karlin, Using Comics to Educate about the Holocaust, Co.Create, July 19, 2013.

For several years, legendary comic illustrator Neil Adams and Holocaust historian Rafael Medoff have partnered on projects that use comics and animation to teach about the Nazi genocide.

Their first DVD–They Spoke Out: American Voices of Protest Against the Holocaust–debuts at San Diego Comic-Con with an exclusive July 19 screening and panel discussion with Adams and Medoff. Episodes can be viewed at TheySpokeOut.com, and the DVD will be on sale at booths 1709 and 1829, where Adams will be signing copies.

“We’re not throwing the Holocaust at you,” says Adams. “We’re offering a way to help American kids experience the Holocaust through these videos, so they can make their own decisions as to how deeply they want to go into further study.”

Created by Disney Educational Productions and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studiesin Washington, D.C., it features six 10-minute motion comic episodes illustrated and mostly narrated by Adams–best known for his dynamic style and work on Batman and X-Men–and written by Medoff, the Wyman Institute director and author of 14 books. The episodes blend traditional animation and comic book-style illustrations with newsreel footage, photographs, and historical documents.

“Teens raised on YouTube, video games, and other visual media are likely to be more receptive to comic books about the Holocaust than heavy textbooks about the Holocaust,” says Medoff. “This presents today’s educators with a whole new set of challenges.”

One episode, Messenger from Hell, is narrated by former Marvel Comics chairman Stan Lee, cocreator of Spider-Man, Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.Messenger tells the story of a Polish courier, Jan Karski, who smuggled himself into the Warsaw Ghetto and the outskirts of the Belzec death camp, then risked his life to bring the news of the Holocaust to the free world. The DVD release coincides with the 70th anniversary of Karski’s meeting at the White House with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Another episode is The Dina Babbitt Story about a teenage cartoonist and future Warner Brothers animator who survived Auschwitz by painting prisoner portraits for Josef Mengele. Before Babbitt died in 2009, Adams and Medoff (along with the late comic legend Joe Kubert) attempted to retrieve her art from The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, by auctioning original artwork by noted comic illustrators to earn money for her legal bills.

“My work with Neal Adams began when I approached him about Dina Babbitt’s struggle–she was an artist fighting for the return of her original art,” says Medoff. “Neal had led the courageous and successful fight in the 1970s to convince comic book publishers to return original art to the artists. As Neal and I were talking about ways to help publicize Dina’s cause, he said, ‘Let’s do a comic strip about it.’ The strip was called The Last Outrage and was published by Marvel. That brought a tremendous amount of attention to Dina’s plight. Then Disney Educational Productions suggested making The Last Outrage into a motion comic, which led to the They Spoke Out series.”

Read the full article.

Ghosts of Soviet Holocaust Cinema

Source: Lea Zeltserman, Tablet, June 12, 2013

A doctor walks into an operating room and asks if the patient is asleep yet. As he is about to operate, a group of Nazis in uniform marches in—a round of “Heil Hitler” is followed by orders that the doctor put his scalpel down and leave the hospital. In the next scene, the doctor is paraded down a crowded street, still wearing his white uniform but with the word Jude scrawled across his chest in thick letters.

We know the doctor is headed to certain death, because that is what happens in Holocaust films. But this is no ordinary Holocaust film. This is a scene from Professor Mamlock, a Soviet film released in 1938 that tells the story of a German-Jewish doctor living under the Nazis. Part of a small, but significant, wave of anti-Fascist Soviet films, it was one of the first films in the world to address the issue of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany and was seen by millions of people in the USSR before it was banned in August 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a not insignificant number of Soviet-Jewish families took the warning of the film to heart and managed to flee ahead of the Nazi invasion.

This past April, a newly subtitled print of Professor Mamlock was screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, followed by a Q&A session with Olga Gershenson, a professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the preeminent name in Soviet Holocaust film history. Wherever a Soviet Holocaust movie is screened, Gershenson is there, leading the discussion and translating the Soviet messaging for contemporary audiences. Her third book, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe, which will be released next week, traces the story of a shadow Soviet film industry that only rarely managed to represent the tragedy that filmmakers, directors, and screenwriters sought to warn against or memorialize. While films like Schindler’s List are often the way Westerners are first exposed to the Holocaust, there are no parallels in Soviet/Russian culture—Professor Mamlock was shown briefly after Hitler invaded the USSR, but had disappeared from Soviet theaters by the end of the 1940s.

Read the full article

The Holocaust and the War on Terror

Sam Glanzman, “There Were Tears in Her Eyes”, in 9/11 The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers and Artists Tell Stories to Remember, Vol. 2, Jennete Khan (ed.), New York, DC Comics, 2002, pp. 207-210. In this four-page graphic story, the Holocaust is evoked to support America’s War on Terror. This and other examples have been keenly analyzed by Juanjo Bermúdez de Castro in his article Nine-Elevenismo (L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 7/2011. The article is in Spanish). We thank Prof. Bermúdez de Castro for the image.

Never Forget to Lie

Source: Menachem Wecker, The Washington Post, May 13, 2013

Sometimes mundane, seemingly innocuous details can best impress the enormity of a tragedy on those who didn’t experience it. It’s the things that one carries, or “humps”—chewing gum, photographs, an illustrated Old Testament—that define one’s wartime experience, Tim O’Brien has suggested. “They carried all they could bear, and then some,” O’Brien wrote of the soldiers in Vietnam, “including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

Holocaust survivors carry different sorts of objects and memories with them, but some of the details that emerge in the new, brilliantly-written documentary Never Forget to Lie by Emmy Award winner Marian Marzynski are particularly poignant—and terrifying—for their plainness.

Watch Never Forget to Lie on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

One survivor tells Marzynski about the “clean, beautiful, awesome, shiny boots” of the SS soldiers which she still remembers. “For some reason, I was afraid of those boots,” she says. 

Another survivor recalls the salamis his mother gave him when she sent him to ride the trams all day. He was only to return after nightfall, he tells Marzynski, because his mother didn’t want him to be home in case there was a Nazi raid.

And as a three-year-old, Marzynski remembers playing a “strange wartime hide-and-seek” game with his older cousin. The two hid in a wicker laundry basket from Nazi soldiers. When he was a few years older, Marzynski remembers his Jewish mother dropping him in a courtyard outside a Christian charity with a sign around his neck stating that his parents were dead. She gave him his favorite sugar sandwich so that he wouldn’t follow her when she left, he says.

“My childhood seems to be my psyche’s unfinished business,” the filmmaker says at the beginning of the documentary. “For almost 50 years, I’ve been filming other people’s lives.” His own tale starts in a horse-drawn carriage, where his parents turned him over to a family friend who covered his mouth as he screamed, “I want to go back to the ghetto; I want to go back to mommy.” He’d been told to forget that he was Jewish; his mother survived the war, but he would never see his father again.

Walking through Warsaw, where he notes that no more than 28,000 of the half a million Jews survived, Marzynski notes what is left of the ghetto—“some condemned buildings now being converted into luxury condominiums.”

In an apartment where Marzynski once lived, a Polish woman tells him that Germans were so trigger-happy because they were brought up that way. “I can’t even stand their language. I hate them,” she says. “I know it’s not right. God doesn’t allow it.”

Marzynski’s own view of God has changed dramatically. Using family watches and golden teeth from his father, a dentist, as bribes, Marzynski successfully evaded exposure by a known blackmailer and many neighbors of Christian families that hid him—“what might be called a bed-and-breakfast for Jews in hiding.”

“We spent days in Warsaw churches, then slept in basements, attics, and behind fake walls,” he remembers. Marzynski became the “most dedicated altar boy, a favorite of the priests. … I was fascinated by the power of religion. God was the most powerful man that was. I saw him as someone with enormous shoes on the ground and his head high in the clouds.”

His transformation was so complete that when his mother showed up after the war—an “old woman with sunken cheeks”—he didn’t recognize her. He initially told her not to speak during mediations, and even after she took him back to Warsaw, he made her bring him to a big church so he could serve Mass. When he dropped the sacrament on the priest, he realized his church days were numbered.

“God didn’t want me anymore,” he says.

Marzynski’s mother once told him that God was taking a long nap during the Holocaust. “People often ask me if I am religious,” he says. “A son of secular Jews, I was raised Catholic but abandoned God after the war. … I call my religion survival.”

One story of survival from the documentary stands out in particular. One survivor tells Marzynski of a German soldier pointing a gun at her and putting her up against a wall. Pleading with him, she tried a variety of tactics. “If you kill me, and I will be dead, you will never forget my face. You will always remember that you killed a little girl, an innocent little girl,” she says, no doubt reliving the terrifying moment. The gunman let her go, although her face remained burnt in his memory, no doubt, just as it will for everyone who watches the film.