Thursday, July 22, 2010

Films about Holocaust Survivors

Stronger Than Fire; The Eva Olsson Story  (2008)



This is a very moving film about the experiences of Holocaust survivor, Eva Olsson. She regularly visits schools to teach children and adults about the Holocaust. Then she gets them to relate to her story by showing that Nazism was a form of bullying. She encourages her listeners to not put up with bullying.Her message is one of forgiveness for the past. However her main goal is to change people's behaviour in the present and future so that this evil will not recur.








The Boys of Buchenwald
Directed byAudrey Mehler
Produced byDavid Paperny
Narrated bySaul Rubinek
Distributed byNational Film Board of Canada
Release date(s)2002
Running time47 minutes
Country Canada
LanguageEnglish
http://www.ipexview.com/solution/videos/National_Film_Board_of_Canada/The_Boys_of_Buchenwald/75/
Synopsis

Robbie Waisman, Elie Wiesel and Joe Szwarcberg were three Jewish boys who knew the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp. Their friendship began in 1945, soon after the American troops liberated the camp. As the trains left Germany, full of orphaned children, the boys began to create a fraternity based on need, banded together against a world they did not trust. Their new life began at a children's home in France. Two of the former staff members recall the boys' struggle to adjust. They hoarded food, burned mattresses and fought, leaving many adults to regard them as damaged beyond repair. But slowly, the boys began to find good in people. Elie Wiesel, who went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize, explains: "We had to learn how to rediscover joy and affection." Almost 60 years after their liberation from Buchenwald, the "boys" meet again, touring the homes in France and attending a reunion in Jerusalem. The bonds of friendship that helped them to rebuild lives after the Holocaust are still strong. A treasure of archival footage and photos, seamlessly blended with the present, tells a remarkable, personal story.
This is a truly inspiring story of the resilience of the human spirit. Even though these children had lost most if not all of their families and had been brutalized beyond imagination they were able to learn to trust again and form deep, positive human connections.





Fateless (2005)






Fateless is based on a a semi-autobiographical novel written by Imre Kertész, a Hungarian concentration camp survivor, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2002.

A young Hungarian boy, Gyuri, on his way to work is taken off a bus and sent to Auschwitz. On his arrival fellow internees urge him to lie and say that his age is sixteen. This advice saves his life. Through the support of others he is enabled to survive the war. We see the brutality of the guards and the sweet comradeship of the inmates through the eyes of a boy becoming a man.

He had difficulty adjusting to regular life after liberation. A hungarian citizen asks him if he ever saw the gas chambers. Gyuri says of course not or he would be dead. The woman living in his childhood flat slams the door in his face. A few neighbours who recognize him. They greet him warmly at first and ply him with food and questions. But they are not interested in his replies and quickly send him to meet his mother.

Gyuri misses his friends from the concentration camp.

This is a beautiful and dream like film. The tender love of a father and his sons as they try to survive the war as a family is very touching.



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