Untold stories of the Warsaw Ghetto
MOVIES
AAdrian Mack
s Roberta Grossman points out, the world has long been captivated by the diary of Anne Frank. “And rightly so,” says the filmmaker, calling the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles. “But there are hundreds of diaries in the Oyneg Shabes that have never been translated or read. It’s the largest eyewitness cache to survive the Holocaust. I think of it as the Dead Sea Scrolls rising from the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto.”
When the Jewish section of Warsaw was segregated by Nazis in 1940, a historian named Emanuel Ringelblum covertly gathered a band of 60 allies to maintain, at enormous risk, a record of his community’s experiences. This secret group was called the Oyneg Shabes.
It was all nearly lost. Three members made it out of the war alive. One of them happened to know where some of the archives were buried. Based on Samuel Kassow’s 2007 book, Grossman has brought this extraordinary tale to vivid life in Who Will Write Our History, arriving at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre next Thursday (November 1) as the opening film of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.
“I thought that I was more knowledgeable than the average bear,” says Grossman. “I was shocked that I didn’t know this story.”
Executive-produced by Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes archival material and dramatic reconstruction to make its story known, focusing on Ringelblum—played in the film by Polish actor Piotr Głowacki—but also on the journalist Rachel Auerbach, who decided to stay in the ghetto at Ringelblum’s request.
“When you see the few photographs that survived, and the diaries, and the posters that people risked their lives to tear off the walls during the great deportation—there’s a sense that this really happened,” Grossman says. “There’s an authenticity and a gravitas to it.”
The Oyneg Shabes—although providing the highest-resolution picture available of the appalling deprivations and suffering that instantly gripped the ghetto, and the terror of the deportations and hopelessness of the uprising—also records the “blazing anger” of a community sometimes turning on itself (largely through the manipulation of its captors). “Ringelblum wanted the good, bad, and the ugly to all be there,” Grossman says. “It’s a very full portrait of humanity, not ‘good Jews, bad Germans’.”
This partly explains why the archives remain relatively unknown. But it also suggests why the Oyneg Shabes is so crucially important right now.
“Even on the most superficial level, the archive was about truth versus propaganda,” Grossman says. “I’m thinking about the murder of the Saudi journalist and, on one hand, the attempts to cover it up and be cynical about it, [and] on the other hand the outrage around the world, and I think that even in that one story, you can see the kind of struggle that the members of the Oyneg Shabes were facing between barbarism and humanity. And it certainly behooves us to take a look at what happens when barbarism is given the upper hand.”
“I didn’t have the animation language to describe what I wanted. It’s literally, like, ‘How long do you want the ears? What kind of fur do you want? How matted? What texture?’ Little details like that. But we got there.”
Quite quickly, too. Kwan reports that “The Zoo” was in production for about a year, no doubt helped by the “crash course in animation” she was given by the Nfb—which is probably as good as a crash course in animation gets. Appearing alongside Amanda Strong’s VIFF/B.C. Spotlight award winner “Biidaaban” in the Made in Canada shorts program at the Vancity Theatre on Saturday (October 27), “The Zoo” is one of four new NFB titles screening at SPARK this year, all of them hailing from Vancouver.
Opening the festival at the Scotiabank Theatre on Thursday (October 25), Alison Snowden and David Fine’s “Animal Behaviour” joins Ann Marie Fleming’s “A Short Film About Tegan & Sara” in the Award Winning Shorts program. The following night (October 26), Hart Snider’s “Shop Class” comes to the Vancity Theatre as one of 17 Short Films After Dark.
Other short-film series include a Spotlight on France (October 27) and the female-centric Mothers of a Medium (October 28), while among this year’s feature films, SPARK is offering Another Day of Life, which recently screened in VIFF’S PIXL animation series, plus Denis Do’s Funan (both October 26), This Magnificent Cake, and The Last Fiction (both October 27). Korea’s The Moon in the Hidden Woods closes the festival at the Vancity Theatre on Sunday (October 28) with an introduction from director Takahiro Umehara.