Can a language save your life? Yes it can, even an ancient one from the 15th century. Saved by Language tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo (born 1930), who spoke Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, his mother tongue, to survive the Holocaust. Moris used Ladino to communicate with an Italian Colonel who helped him escape to a Partizan refuge after he ran away from the train taking Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi death camps. By speaking in Ladino to a Spanish-speaking US pilot in 1944 he was able to survive and lead the pilot, along with his American and British colleagues, to a safe Partizan airport.
Karski & The Lords of Humanity is a feature-length partially animated documentary project. The film tells the story of a member of the Polish underground who acted as a courier during World War II and whose most prominent mission was to inform the Allied powers of Nazi crimes against the Jews of Europe in an effort to prevent the Holocaust.
Taking place at the Concentration camp Buchenwald at the end of March 1945, prisoner Hans Pippig discovers in a carrying case of an incoming prisoner a Jewish child. If reported the three-year-old is sure to die. On the other hand, a violation of the rules of the camp would threaten the long prepared uprising of the concentration camp prisoners against the SS.
Former classmates at a school in the Southern Germany city of Ulm, Jewish and non-Jewish, recall their childhood in Nazi Germany.
The economy is not doing well and in a few months Lucia will lose the mortgaged house where she lives with her two children, Mr. Carlos the owner of the Second-hand store, Sergio, Clown by day, waiter by night, and his wife Victoria. Julieta, the youngest child, is the family's salvation. She just graduated from law school when, on the morning of November 6, 1985, she leaves for her job at the Palace of Justice and never returns. There are witnesses that claim to have seen her alive after the Palace burned down after the Guerilla attack, the habitants lives of the house won't be the same. Based on true events and on a play in Colombia, 1985.
In 1943, Max Fronenberg spent one year digging a secret underground tunnel to escape out of a prison camp in Warsaw, Poland during the Holocaust while saving fifteen other prisoners in the process and forced to leave behind the love of his life, Rena, in the prison.
An exploration of the shocking impact of the Holocaust in Ukraine, where some of the most horrific Nazi massacres of World War II occurred. Featuring contributions from Holocaust survivors.
This is a visit to the exhibition of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem museum built as a memorial for the victims of the Nazis and the heroes of the Ghetto resistance. This documentary depicts the atrocities of the Holocaust in which six million European Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis, through hundreds of photographs, documents and authentic film footage.
Newsreel footage from both sides of World War II make a case for convicting Nazi war criminals.
Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.
MY ITALIAN SECRET tells a heroic story that was all but lost to history, until now. The film recounts how WWII bicycling idol Gino Bartali, physician Giovanni Borromeo and other Italians worked with Jewish leaders and high-ranking officials of the Catholic Church, risking their lives by defying the Nazis to save thousands of Italy’s Jews.
The twenty-seven-year-old protagonist of the film suffers from borderline personality disorder, chronic depression and insomnia. After nine years of intensive treatment with no positive results, she has decided she does not want to live any longer. Because she doesn’t want to traumatize anyone with her death she chooses self-euthanasia. She tells her father and best friends about her death wish to give them the chance to come to terms with her decision and say their goodbyes. We see Sanne in her final weeks, in which she looks forward to the day she will finally find peace. Letting you go is a short documentary about a psychiatric patient’s right to self-determination, the longing for peace and the biggest sacrifice a father can make out of love for his child.
Can you imagine what it means to grow up as the child of a mass murderer? Hans Frank and Otto von Wächter were indicted as war criminals for their roles in WWII. Nazi Governors and consultants to Hitler himself, the two are collectively responsible for thousands of deaths. But what stood out to Philippe Sands were the impressions they left on their sons. While researching the Nuremberg trials, the human rights lawyer came across two men who re-focused his studies: Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter. The men hold polar opposite views on the men who raised them.
The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.
Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman, the last two survivors of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, recount the horrors they experienced during the war and talk about their lives after their escape in a prisoner uprising in 1943. Willenberg would go on to become a hero of the 1944 Warsaw uprising while Taigman would be called as a witness during the infamous trial of Adolf Eichmann.
Recalls the day when Holocaust survivors took their first steps into freedom, unaware of their future. Every Face Has a Name puts a name on those nameless faces and lets them recount their feelings of that day, the 28th of April, 1945.
A former inmate of the Auschwitz concentration camp, accused of being a kapo, is serving a life sentence. From the monologue to the camera, we learn the story of an average man destroyed in terrible times.
We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
The history of the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-43) as seen from both sides of the wall, its legacy and its memory: new light on a tragic era of division, destruction and mass murder thanks to the testimony of survivors and the discovery of a ten-minute film shot by Polish amateur filmmaker Alfons Ziółkowski in 1941.
The story of the only three minutes of footage —a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938— showing images of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk (Poland) before the beginning of the Shoah.