A new Holocaust documentary, Slawomir Grünberg's STILL LIFE IN LODZ, hits virtual

For awhile there, it seemed as though we were getting a new Holocaust documentary every few months, if not nearly monthly. TrustMovies is not certain what happened to stop this -- perhaps the onset of COVID-19 -- but the flow has certainly slowed down of late. After four years of the Trump administration, the rise of Q-anon and more lies and stupidity than you ever thought you've have to endure, it seems salutary, at least, to get back to history, even if that history covers a particularly awful period for much of humanity. All of which brings us to STILL LIFE IN LODZ, with direction and cinematography by Slawomir Grünberg (shown below), which is, while nowhere near the best of this genre, still a necessary addition to the record of the Holocaust.

Written by (and telling the story of) Lilka Elbaum, shown below, the doc covers her family's experience just post-war (1945 - 1968) in the city of Lodz, Poland, and in particular a painting that hung on the wall in the apartment in which Ms Elbaum and her family lived and has subsequently become hugely important in her life. 

Whether it will be for you (it certainly was not for me) is another matter. While the painting more or less holds this documentary (barely) together, it also makes for a lot of repetition and takes up an undue amount of time, even though the doc itself lasts only 76 minutes. 

Elbaum's own family story clearly did not provide content enough to fill up an entire film, and so two other people and their own stories are added here, that of New Yorker Paul Celler and Israeli photographer Roni Ben Ari, both of whom have family roots in Lodz. Yet in the hands of Grünberg and Elbaum these stories don't mesh particularly well, and so the movie simply clunks along, parceling out its history and information in rather catch-as-catch-can fashion.  

In terms of style, Still life in Lodz uses archival footage, along with drawings and animation (as above) to show what those archives cannot. This has been done in various previous docs, and it still works well enough here.

The most interesting segments cover the history of Lodz itself, prior to the Nazi invasion, as well as during and after. Poland has a long history of rabid antisemitism (it was yet another bout of this that led to Elbaum's family having to relocate), and how their neighbors and supposed friends reacted to the Jews being forced to clean the streets of the city once the Nazis took over is one of the film's more telling anecdotes. Others are provided by Mr. Celler (shown below) and Ms Ben Ari. (Celler's reminiscence about hot humid days and what they make him think of will pull you up short.) 

Among the most interesting visuals the movie offers are black-and-white archival shots of old Lodz that morph into present-day scenes in color (as below, just prior to the color being added). 

Elbaum's mother survived the final two years of Nazi terror via the kindness and help of a Polish gentile family who hid her, and we visit the offspring of this family toward the end of Still Life in Lodz. And then we get restoration of that painting to the wall of the apartment building in which it hung for so long. Perhaps you will be more moved by and/or interested in this moment than was I.

The documentary, mostly in English and with English subtitles in any case, opens this Friday, March 12, in virtual theaters across the country. Click here to see all currently scheduled screenings, with cities and theaters listed.

The survivor experience times six in Jon Kean's must-see documentary, AFTER AUSCHWITZ

As if the World War II Jewish Holocaust were not in itself awful enough, the continuing realization of what its few survivors (relative to the number of Jews killed) have experienced since their release from the death camps should bring any sentient/caring person up short.

First, there was the antisemitism  that greeted survivors immediately post-release. Then the need by almost everyone, Jews included, to bury the event and never talk about it.

Then, once the talk and the unfurling of its history began to occur -- via news footage, guarded and finally more open conversation, film and television documentaries -- the rise of the "denialists" claiming that the Holocaust never happened. Will the horror and shame never fucking end? Clearly not, as the subjects of this film realize by speaking out about the various genocides occurring before and after their own.

The fine and necessary documentary, AFTER AUSCHWITZ, by Jon Kean (the filmmaker is pictured above, center, with the six subjects of his film, three of whom are now deceased) joins last week's excellent doc, Nana, which addressed the life and history of but a single concentration camp survivor, as a kind of bookend pairing of a particular horror and its aftermath. Each film has much to say and says it well: Nana by showing us the mission of its main character, After Auschwitz via the varied experiences of six quite different women.

Mr. Kean's film bounces back and forth between its thoughtful, intelligent and somewhat positive-though-always-tempered-by-reality women who now have children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren of their own. (In one of the more interesting scenes, one woman examines briefly the great difference in attitude toward the Holocaust between a survivor's children and grandchildren.) We learn these women's history, a bit about their camp experiences, and much more about what happened, as in the doc's title, after the camp.

The post-Auschwitz career of these women spans everything from teacher and social worker to fashion designer and deli-ownership. One even became the nanny to the family of actor Ricardo Montalban. Their stories, while in themselves interesting enough, are made even more so by their ideas, their passion and their exploration of subjects such as the meaning of "home." What one woman has to say about this at the film's finale proves as deeply sad as anything you'll have heard in quite awhile.

One idea gleaned from another doc covered this past week, Lives Well Lived, is how very important one's attitude toward a particular thing can be. The attitudes in this doc run the gamut and seem to account in good part for how these women have responded to life post-Auschwitz.

One thing they all seem to agree upon is the importance of keeping the memory alive of what happened during the Holocaust. No less a personage than General Dwight Eisenhower, who helped liberate one of the camps, insisted that camera footage be taken on the spot in case, years from then, anyone should attempt to say that these things never happened. How smart and how prescient he was!

From Passion River Films and running but 82 minutes, After Auschwitz opened today, Friday, April 20, in New York City at the AMC Empire 25 and will hit a number of other location throughout the country in the weeks to come. Here in South Florida, it opens next Friday, April 27, in the Miami area at AMC's Aventura 24 and Sunset Place 24, and in Fort Lauderdale at The Classic Gateway. The following week, May 4, it will play Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters, and at the Movies of Delray and Lake Worth, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Music Hall 3 & Town Center 5. Click here or here and scroll down to view all currently scheduled dates, cities and theaters.

Oren Jacoby's MY ITALIAN SECRET: Here's a Holocaust doc that'll leave you feeling... good

Everything is relative, of course. But the most surprising result of viewing MY ITALIAN SECRET, the new documentary from Oren Jacoby, about certain citizens of Italy helping to protect Jews during World War II, is how positive it will leave you regarding Italy's contribution to this hugely fraught, usually shameful, and now forever to be memorialized period of human history. This is a film that might actually leave you feeling, well, good. Amongst Holocaust documen-taries, even the best of them, this is a rarity.

Mr. Jacoby, shown at left and who has given us a number of docu-mentaries, including Constantine's Sword, brings together a wealth of archival footage, interviews with the friends and/or relatives remaining alive, and a few evidently necessary re-enactments, which fortunately don't detract much. The narration comes via Isabella Rossel-lini, whose rich voice is a pleasure to hear, as is Robert Loggia who lends his to that of famed bicycling champion, Gino Bartali (below).

One of the major ironies present throughout the film is our knowledge that Italy, along with Germany/Austria and Japan, was one of the aggressors fought by the Allies during WWII. And yet its treatment of its Jewish population, in most ways and until the Germans took over much of the country, was exemplary by the standards of the rest of Europe. Was this due to the "character" of the Italian people, if that word can be made to stand for an entire population (and I think it cannot). Still, the behavior of much of the Italian populace seems exemplary next to that of most of the other countries involved, conquering or conquered. And while not every tale told here necessarily stands in for all of Italian behavior, the stories & their participants add up.

These include everything from creating a fictitious but highly contagious disease possessed by occupants of a certain hospital ward so that Jews and/or partisans (below) could be hidden there to disguising the girls and women as nuns and hiding them in local convents.

One of the sweetest, most affecting stories comes from the man, now grown and old, who, after being taken into the Church and posing as a Catholic child, recalls a nun who obviously understood the importance of religious freedom and so who told him not to repeat the official Christian religious prayers during the ceremony but to quietly mouth his own Jewish prayer replacements.

There are so many unique and special stories to be found here that these alone make the film worthwhile. But we also get some history lessons, as well -- including how, in the fall of 1943, Italy was divided into north and south, with Germany ruling the north and America and Britain the south, which made getting urgent information from south to north vital. This turns out to be where bicyclist Bartali could be of great use.

We also meet a 102-year-old man who tells us how, as a child, he saw his mother, father and grandfather for the last time. We also learn the Italian word sfotto, which seem to translate into something like "gallows humor," of which there was plenty in wartime Italy.

As these still-living Holocaust survivors meet again and offer thanks to their protectors and saviors, it will prove difficult not to be moved by learning what human beings are capable of, even under enormous threat and stress. Against all odds, My Italian Secret proves a joyous experience.

The movie -- distributed by The Film Sales Company, and running 92 minutes -- opens this coming Friday, March 27, in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Noho7) and New York City (at the Cinema Village).

Claude Lanzmann's documentary on Benjamin Murmelstein, THE LAST OF THE UNJUST, opens

If the concentration camps of the Holocaust were all horrible, then Theresienstadt -- located in Terezín, in what is now the Czech Republic (Theresien-stadt is the German name for the camp) -- was doubly so, for it was meant to maintain in the public's mind the image of a kind of "model ghetto," devised by Adolf Eichmann and designed to mislead the world in terms of its actual goal: the penultimnate step before the gas chamber's final solution. Claude Lanzmann's new film, THE LAST OF THE UNJUST, takes its title from the famous French novel by André Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just, an amazing work that turns the Holocaust into horror, hope and art. That novel was Trust Movies' favorite from his college days. (He has not read it since then but has been told that it holds up very well.)

Long, but less than half the length of his monumental (and finally monumentally boring: the trains, the trains!) Holocaust documentary, Shoah, this "new" film from M. Lanzmann (the filmmaker is shown above by, yes, another railroad track) was actually shot almost 40 years ago (at left, below, is the director when his hair was still black rather than grey), and an additional 30 years after the events recalled by its subject, Benjamin Murmelstein (shown at right, below), the last Jewish Elder of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. While all the Jewish Elders (there were several) at this camp were caught in the middle of the ultimate "rock and a hard place" -- serving as they did as middle men between the Nazi atrocities and the Jewish victims -- only Murmelstein managed to survive.

Instead he probes this man whom history hangs over like a shroud. Yet Murmelstein is remarkably jovial, with a memory, it would appear, like a steel trap. Here, above, Lanzmann interviews Murmelstein, who was brought to trial post-WWII for his supposed crimes and collaboration with the Nazis, but he was let go unscathed. The man explains some things, while completely leaving out any mention of others. He's full of spunk, clearly loves to talk and had what appears to be remarkable recall, though whether he was a completely "reliable witness," I rather doubt. (Still, what human being is?)

I’m not sure that I trust Murmelstein's remembrances, even though, in this film, he’s all we have. Lanzman offers a few pertinent questions and occasionally tries to draw the man further out, but to not much avail. Mumelstein has such energy and drive, however, that for quite awhile he pulled me in and kept me going. But as the movie wore on, by the end I was tired of his nattering voice and found myself questioning much that he said. His comments on how laughable is Arendt's "banality-of-evil" theory regarding Adolf Eichman completely bypasses, of course, her more important comments about how the Jews might better have survived had they not been so organizedly in thrall to leaders like Murmelstein. Tradition has its drawbacks.

Further, I would have liked to have known what went on at his trial, what happened to his family, and other things we don’t learn. But the film certainly deserves a place of importance in permanent Holocaust history by virtue of its subject, and the fact that this is the only such interview that exists. Even considering all the Holocaust movies I’ve already seen, I still learned a lot from this one. And I only nodded off a couple of times during the nearly four-hour film -- both of them when a certain cantor was singing (and singing and singing). M. Lanzmann seems intent on memorializing the victims via religion. As my regular readers will know by now, I have little taste for this sort of thing, or for organized religion of any kind.

Using everything from art (above) to maps and diagrams (below) to present-day visuals (at bottom), Lanzmann weaves an emcompassing look at Theresienstadt throughout the documentary, so that we enter history from the three time periods: during the Holocaust, the interview 30 years later, and now. Yet the time spent, it seems to me, could have been used more wisely and cogently by less wandering around and sharper questioning of Murmelsitein.

Still, The Last of the Unjust is an important addition to Holocaust history, and as such deserves to be seen and argued over -- and kept available for posterity to view and argue over in perpetuity. Thanks to Lanzmann, we've got Murmelstein. But you'll come away from the film wondering how thankful the Jews of Theresienstadt actually were that they had him.

From Cohen Media Group, in French and German with English subtitles, and running 218 minutes (yes, that's 3 hours and 38 minutes), the movie opens this Friday, February 7, here in New York City, exclusively at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal and Town Center 5 -- after which the film will have a limited national rollout.

NICKY'S FAMILY: Matej Mináč & Patrik Pašš bring us feel-good Holocaust -- that works

You may try to resist, but I would suggest giving up fairly quickly and simply going along with this multi-award-winning 2011 Czech documentary just now reaching our shores. NICKY'S FAMILY tells the very fine story of a young British man named Nicholas Winton, back in 1938, when Europe was gearing up for World War II and the Jews of Germany, Austria and nearby countries were fearing for their lives -- and especially for those of their children. Instead of going on his planned skiing trip, Nicholas was corralled by a friend into coming to Czechoslovakia, where he learned first-hand what was happening and what Germany had planned for one of its next-door neighbors. So Winton immediately began working toward getting as many children of Czech Jews out of the country as quickly as possible.

The reason it is so easy to fall into the swing of this film is that the documentary -- directed, co-written and co-produced by Matej Mináč (at right), and edited, co-written and co-produced by Patrik Pašš (below) -- is quite beautifully organized. It incorporates, and near seamlessly, archival footage and photos with present-day (or thereabouts) material, while its re-enactments thankfully are only visual, with none of the thudding dialog that so often weighs down these re-creations, making them seem more important (but less well-done) than the actual documentary footage.

Why did Winton undertake such a mam-moth effort? This is a good question, and it's one that the film only partially answers. Perhaps, 70 years later, the man himself -- now 104 years old and still going relatively strong! -- barely knows. At the time however he saw what needed to be done and simply set about doing it. As he tells us, in one of his more famous quotes: "Anything that is not actually impossible can be done, if one really sets one's mind to do it and is determined that it shall be done."

In any case, the filmmakers detail how the job was planned and then accomplished (hundreds of children were saved, though most of their parents died in the concentration camps); what happened to the children (Britain was the only country at the time that would accept them); what all this cost in terms of time, effort and money; and how, decades later, the survivors actually, and for the first time, learned who Nicholas Winton was and what they owed to his efforts. (That's Nicholas, below, seated at right in the foreground, with some of his "survivors.")

The film does not dwell on the horrors of the Holocaust but instead concentrates on the saving of these kids. You can fault it, I suppose, for that, though by this point in time, we've certainly gotten plenty of the other kind of documentaries and narratives. (We do hear one awful anecdote about the gas chambers new to me: "When you take your children into the gas chamber, sing with them. If you sing, you will inhale the gas faster and will die more quickly.") At times these grown and now elderly survivors do talk about their parents and must stop to wipe away their tears and wait for their composure to return. But mostly they, along with their own children and grandchildren, want to show their appreciation for Winton's good work.

Although this might seem like an old and one-off kind of situation (a "Schindler" in Britain, as Nicholas has been described), there appears to be a large and strong movement of young people dedicated to emulating the work of this man, keeping alive his and their own desire to help the helpless. Seeing this movement come into focus, which ends the movie on a very "up" note, is bracing and stirring indeed. (That said, all this feel-good-cum-lighted-up-cell-phones does go on a little too long: Less would have meant more.)

There appears to be an effort afoot to see that Mr. Winton is a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. Why not? If that idiot committee could bestow its 2009 prize on Barack Obama for doing absolutely nothing at that point in time (you can bet they'd never give it to him at this point!), why not on a man who accomplished what we see in this excellent documentary? (Shown below is the young Mr. Winton with one of the Czech children.)

Nicky's Family, from Menemsha Films and running 96 minutes, opens in New York City this Friday, July 19, at five venues in the New York area (The Quad, the JCC, Kew Gardens, Malverne and Soundview) and four in Los Angeles (Laemmle's Royal, Town Center 5, Playhouse 7 and Claremont 5). See all the current, past and upcoming playdates by clicking here and then scrolling down.

Holocaust underground in Janet Tobias' spelunker special, NO PLACE ON EARTH plus a quick Q&A with the filmmaker

Just when you imagine that you must have seen it all -- having viewed over the past few years twenty, thirty, fifty or more films (documentaries and narratives) about the Holocaust and what those Jews who survived had to do in order to manage this -- here comes one of the most surprising and amazing stories of survival to yet come out of World War II. In NO PLACE ON EARTH, producer
/director Janet Tobias recounts the tale of a group of men, women and children who went into hiding in the safest place they could find, and in the process endured the longest uninterrupted underground survival in recorded human history.

Ms Tobias, shown at left, begins by letting us know how all this was uncovered, as the few people remaining alive who underwent the experience were not out there on the front lines shouting about it. Instead, it fell to British-born, U.S.-raised fellow named Chris Nicola, shown below, who explores caves in his spare time, to come across, while spelunking in the Ukraine, objects (such as the key shown further below) found deep in the caves that indicated the presence of human beings that had perhaps lived there.

Further investigation uncovered rumors, which led eventually to verification and the discovery of the remaining survivors, now living far from their original home in the Ukraine. Once found, these survivors tell their story -- and what a tale it is -- as we are whisked back in time to the 1940s.

It is fortunate, I think, that this story is such a good one because the construction of it, as given us via the film, leaves something to be desired. Ms Tobias has chosen to use re-enactments throughout the movie, so many and at such length that eventually, one wonders why this was not made as a narrative film. Agnieszka Holland managed it marvelously with her last year's "Oscar"-nominated narrative-based-on-fact, In Darkness. (TrustMovies and the filmmaker talk about this is the Q&A that follows this review, and Ms Tobias's reasoning does indeed make sense.)

The actors used to portray the real characters are fine -- no problem there (that Katalin Lábán, above, as Esther Stermer) -- and the recreations are believable, as well. (These are so much better than those recreations seen in last year's documentary Orchestra of Exiles.) But there are simply so many of them, and they go on for so long that this particular hybrid combination of narrative and documentary seems, at best, off-balance.

Along the way, the film offers a story with everything from narrow escapes to betrayals and murder, even the necessity of finding yet another, deeper cave in which to live. Hearing the survivors recall this time now is moving indeed, and the documentary builds to a very effective climax and denouement in which viewers will be greatly touched, as the survivors' grandchildren see the caves and learn firsthand how their elders lived.

"We were in the right place at the right moment, and that was our luck," one of them surmises. But Mr. Nicola insists on another view: "These were amateurs," he tells us, "who turned themselves into world-class cavers." And once again we learn that when, at the end of the war, the cave dwellers appeared in their town once again, not a single person came out to greet them. Only a dog appeared, who remembered them. Little wonder surviving Jews all over eastern and western Europe, Russia and the Ukraine could not, would not remain in a place they had once called home, but had to strike out for somewhere even remotely welcoming -- in this case the United States and Canada. You will not walk out of this movie unmoved.

No Place on Earth, a rare documentary release from Magnolia Pictures and running 84 minutes, opens this Friday, April 5, in New York City at the Angelika and Elinor Bunin Munroe film centers. The following week it opens in California and elsewhere, and then further across the country in the weeks to come. You can see all playdates, cities and theaters by clicking here.

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We spoke with filmmaker Janet Tobias by telephone, and below is what we covered, with TrustMovies appearing in boldface and Ms Tobias in standard type.

There is so much re-enactment used in the movie that I began to wonder why you didn’t decide to do a narrative film instead? Does narrative film take many more resources than documentary?

I thought it was impossible for people to imagine the world of the cave and the underground and these circumstances without using drama. The story itself – a record-breaking 511 days total underground, with 344 uninterrupted days for women, children and older men – was so dramatic and difficult to imagine by only using the the narrators' words, so in order to have people really experience that it became clear that we had to use some real drama in the film. 

I actually did originally think of making it into a narrative film. You quickly think about that when you’re confronted with the caves and the situation and all the drama. But when you do the interviews with the Stermers and talk with Chris Nicola, you realize, well, this is the last time we will ever hear from the people who were eye witnesses to these events of the Holocaust. When people first started taking testimony, some 20 years ago, you could say then, Well, we don’t have MUCH more time. But now we have NO time. This is the last time we’ll be able to do this. So I thought, we want to take the spine of their great story-telling used as drama but also to let people see them see these wonderful witnesses while we can, while they are still with us.

This is how I ended up with both drama and documentary.  We tried to do this with a lot of thought because this is the best way to both honor what we hear and the real people who actually experienced the events. This combination also seemed the right way to give audiences an experience of the claustrophobia of the caves, the darkness.  It is so easy for so many of us not to be able make this leap that they made. And remember, these people were then mostly only children, teenagers and young adults. 

There is no credit for writing?  In the re-enactments, I seem to remember some dialog. Or was this my imagination and it was narration over the re-enactments?

No. You're right. There was dialog. Basically the credit for writing is mine and a man Paul Laikin. We were the two writers. What you hear through the reenactments and drama are the actual words of two people: Esther Sturmer and her nephew Sol Wexler. In certain cases, we adjusted the grammar and edited things so that they would flow more easily. It is basically their experience, however: the mother of the family, Esther, and then her nephew Sol Wexler, whose mother and brother were killed after the experience of the first cave. Sol then wrote a letter to his father, who had managed to get out and go to the USA, in which he explained all that had happened. And this was taken from that letter.

This is such an incredible story, really, and what they accomplished is so amazing and heartbreaking. So you need the drama, you need the immersive expeience that the film gives. What they did is also a great feat of adventure/survival. The pace of the film needed to be that feat of adventure/survival. These people were masters of their own fate They did that by acting. The were not just living in their head but with amazing physical capabilities: Making a sleigh. Lifting a huge grindstone. We wanted viewers to have that experience. 

Did you see the film In Darkness?

Yes, I did. And the big difference here is that the Sturmers did not have any main protector, as did the Jews in In Darkness. They had to do it all themselves. They did, and as much as you could during that time, they controlled their own universe. When they came into the cave, what was normally have meant darkness and nightmare was reversed. The caves became the place of safety, while the real evil was outside. 

What do you have planned next?

I am working on one documentary and one drama.  The doc has to do with The World Memory Games, about doing incredible things with memory and memorization. This is an incredible Spellbound-like and fascinating story about how memory works and how we remember. And about the event itself.

I am also working on a narrative drama about the oil industry and one of the richest oil fields back in the 1920s. This is one of the early great investigations that came about when people started murdering people for the oil. 

Do you have names for these projects?

Not yet. Both are still in progress. It took us awhile to even come up with the name of this current documentary – which comes from a line in Esther’s book.

Janet: Thanks so much for your movie and for your time today.

And thank you for caring so much about movies!