Memorandum by Donald Brittain and John Spotton,1966, documentary

"[A]ll [scenes] examine the Holocaust from two perspectives - past and present - and they all remind the viewers of the character of the Holocaust as well as the deep feelings of its survivors, like Bernard Laufer ..." from the book The Technique of Film and Video Editing: history, theory, and practice, by Ken Dancyger, 2007

In 1965 Bernard Laufer, who had been born in Poland and after the war settled in Toronto, Canada, went with a group of thirty to revisit Bergen-Belsen, the last of many camps where Laufer had been a prisoner. Accompanying him was his son Joseph. The writer/director team of Brittain and Spotton made a one-hour documentary for the National Film Board of Canada on the occasion of this return visit.

The fact that this black and white documentary was made in 1965, forty-five years ago, and only twenty years after the war, points to its being part of a pioneering effort to focus on the Holocaust as a political/historical event that needed to be probed and investigated.

The creators of this documentary have embedded Laufer’s experience during the war and during his 1965 visit into the context of the larger war. They intersperse scenes of the trip and of on-going 1965 trials of Nazis with footage from WWII Nazi propaganda newsreels, with local street scenes in Germany, and with footage from WWII ghettos and concentration camps. Joseph Laufer, Bernard’s son, talks about his experience observing Germans in 1965 on their visit. He tries to reconcile the Germans going about their everyday business in 1965 with their counterparts in the 1930s and 40s..

The camera frequently trains its lens on Laufer as he contemplates Germany in 1965. The film ends up at the Bergen-Belsen memorial where the visitors say Kaddish. The camp itself was off-limits; in 1965 it was being used as a NATO artillery range. As the film shows newsreel footage of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and the wasted bodies that lay everywhere, Laufer explains that he was one of them. He weighed seventy pounds when the camp was liberated.

He looks around at the memorial and is upset. He reads the markers on top of mounds of buried victims where are inscribed the numbers of the estimated dead. (The narrator mentions that Anne Frank’s remains are interred somewhere in one of the mounds.) Laufer is convinced the count has been intentionally underestimated. He worries that in time the numbers will shrink further. He envisions “revised” markers. He does not like that the camp now looks like a German Garden.

You can watch the entire one-hour documentary, Memorandum, on the National Board of Film of Canada website for free. Click here to access the documentary.

Click here for a link to the new Bergen Belsen Memorial opened in 2009.

People
Bernard Laufer
    Joseph – his son
Peter Weiss
Simon Weisenthal
Klara Silbernik
Josef Rosensaft
Erika Millay
Norbert Prager
Herbert Weichmann
Zenon Gotaszewski


Places
Bergen-Belsen,Germany
Auschwitz, Poland
Buchenwald, Germany
Frankfurt, Germany
Hanover, Germany
Bavaria, Germany
Berlin, Germany

I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Bernice Eisenstein 2006

Trillium Award finalist, The Ontario government's award for literature

The author of this memoir, Bernice Eisenstein, born in 1949, is an illustrator by profession, so her memoir is as much art as it is text. She has created black and white drawings of all sizes to help tell the story of her growing up in Toronto, the child of Holocaust survivors. Yiddish was the author’s first language and there is a lot of Yiddish in her text. 

Eisenstein starts by telling the story of what she learned over the years about her father who grew up in Miechow in Poland and was deported to Auschwitz where he remained for eleven months until the camp was liberated. She then shifts to her mother who in 1995 agreed to a taped interview for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. Eisenstein talks about the experience of watching and listening to her mother on tape, of hearing the whole story for the first time. Her mother talked about having grown up in Bedzin, Poland, about being only fourteen when the war broke out, about being corralled into a ghetto and then being sent with her family to Auschwitz where she met her future husband as the camp was being liberated.

Eisenstein grew up knowing that her parents were tormented by all the losses in their lives, and it’s clear that she grew up feeling the burden of their past and that her life was shaped by it. Attending the 2003 10th anniversary of The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. to which survivors and their children were specifically invited, she was profoundly moved and gained a better understanding of her parents.

She artfully concludes the memoir with the death of her father, followed a few months later by the birth of her son. She re-creates the scene of her son’s circumcision, a rite that signifies his Jewish identity. The continuity of her family is reinforced in her naming him after her father.

To read an interesting interview with Bernice Eisenstein where she talks about the process of creating this memoir, click here.

Update - 9/27/2010: A representative of the National Film Board of Canada informed me that a film of this graphic memoir has been released. To see clips of the film as well as two interesting interviews with the director of the film, click here.

People
Father’s side of the family
Mordechai (Motel) Eisentstein – author’s paternal grandfather
Sarah – Mordechai’s wife; author’s paternal grandmother
    Bina (Binche) – their daughter; married Mintz
    Hanna (Chana) – their daughter   
    Barak (Ben) – their son; author’s father
    Regina  - Barak’s wife
        Sharon – their daughter
        Bernice – their daughter; author
        Michael – their son
Jacob (Yakov) – (Jack in America); married Jenny (Regina’s sister)

Mother’s side of the family
Moishe Oksenhendler– author’s maternal grandfather
Machele – his wife; author’s maternal grandmother
    Regina – their daughter; author’s mother
    (Jadzia) Jenny – their daughter
    Lemel – their son
Etta – author’s grandfather’s brother; her great uncle
Shifra – his second wife

Places
Birkenau
Auschwitz
Treblinka
Ravensbruck
Rakowitz, Poland
Plaszow
Miechow, Poland
Bedzin, Poland
Katowice, Poland
Bergen-Belsen displaced person’s camp
Toronto, Canada
Kensington Market, Toronto
Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada
Landskroner, Sweden