‘Four Winters’ casts new angle on dark history
Documentary tails guerrilla survivors escaping Holocaust extermination
At one point in “Four Winters,” Julia Mintz’s haunting film about the thousands of Jewish partisans who fought back against Nazi occupation during World War II, Luba Abramowitz muses about the true nature of courage.
“I am not brave,” Abramowitz declares with a slight smile lighting up her weathered face.
In the context of the film, which spotlights stories of unfathomable strength, her statement feels hollow, until she explains that the gumption she and her fellow partisans showed over a period of four years, did not come automatically.
It took determination and practice to hone that sense of strength, she says. “It grows from you.”
Abramowitz is one of several surviving partisans who shares her firsthand experiences from one of the bleakest stretches in modern history.
The film will make its Boulder premiere this weekend as part of the Boulder International Film Festival. It will screen at 12:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Century Boulder, 1700 29th St., Boulder.
After Hitler broke his pact with the Russians and invaded Poland in 1941, Abramowitz was one of the millions of Jews across eastern Europe, the Ukraine and Belarus who were the immediate targets of the occupying forces.
She lost her only child and her parents in the wholesale slaughter that claimed millions of Jews, just in the first years of the occupation. Ultimately, she fled her native Belarus joined the thousands of Jewish partisans who escaped to the woods and wilds of eastern Europe; they smuggled weapons, they subsisted on starvation rations and they fought back against the Germans in whatever way they could.
While the number of Jewish partisans totaled more than 25,000 during the course of the war, Mintz and her documentary crew focus on the heart-rending testimonials of eight survivors, those who managed to escape systemic extermination and find a way to fight back. These interviews, along with archival footage, photographs and other primary sources, provide a new perspective on the Holocaust.
“Four Winters” offers notes of resistance, determination and strength amid the tragedy and inhumanity. The film doesn’t blanche from exploring the most tragic elements of the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe, but it offers a little-known counternarrative, one rooted is resistance.
That theme comes amid all the worst horrors of the Holocaust.
Michael Stoll, a partisan from Lida, Poland, describes jumping from a train headed for the Treblinka concentration camp, and in the process leaving his only surviving family bound for certain death.
Faye Schulman describes witnessing the death of her entire family in Lenin, Poland, before fleeing to the woods (“All I owned was my camera, a leopard coat and a grenade in case of capture.”)
As a 16 year old, Gertrude Boyarski witnessed the murder of her mother, father, sister and brother by Polish collaborators who hunted the family down in the forest after they fled the Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis.
These tales of personal tragedy come with context — the filmmakers detail the atrocities in the first 20 minutes of the film, sketching out with gut-wrenching efficiency the scope and damage of the German’s campaign.
But the film doesn’t linger entirely in hopelessness and slaughter. The survivors recount how they found their way to the forest, how they established a guerrilla group that managed to inflict damage on the German war machine for four years.
“Vengeance. That is the meaning of our life now,” Abramowitz recalls thinking. “(We) wanted to fight.”
That fight proved an effective nettle to the Nazi forces. The Jewish partisans gathered guns, munitions and explosives; they survived on food stolen from local villages. They derailed trains. They captured errant German soldiers. They exacted revenge in big and small ways, and the campaign against the invaders was hardly simple.
The film illustrates the victorious notes of the partisans’ campaign, even as it delves into the damage the vengeance took on the survivors of the worst atrocities imaginable. Stoll recounts leading captured German soldiers into the partisan camp, and joining his peers as they exacted the most violent revenge they could.
“The revenge is overpowering you. We killed them in cold blood,” he says. “The humanity drops out of you.”
Those moments are perhaps the most tragic of the film. Amid the notes of resistance, struggle and ultimate survival, the filmmakers capture the true toll of war in general, and of the depths of the Holocaust’s horrors.
The casualties were not only the millions and millions of Jews who perished in trenches, concentration camps and roundups. They were those whose innocence was permanently sullied, those who drew on vengeance and violence to find a way to survive unimaginable horrors.
Told entirely through the words and recollections of survivors, “Four Winters” is a stirring reminder of the true toll of one of history’s darkest chapters, even as it serves as a summons to fight back, even in the most hopeless of circumstances.