Destination Unknown, which opens in New York tomorrow, is a collection of testimonies from Holocaust survivors culled over a thirteen-year period. Jewcy had the chance to speak with director Claire Ferguson, producer Llion Roberts, and 92-year-old survivor Ed Mosberg about how this film came together and why it’s vitally important to keep talking about the Holocaust.

Jewcy: How did you begin working on this film?

Roberts: In 2001, I went with my brother on a trip to Auschwitz like millions of other people have done. When I got there, I came across a picture of a 13-year-old girl named Christina. She had been in Auschwitz from December 1943 to May 1944; she only survived six months. She was the spitting image of my own daughter, who was also thirteen at the time. That struck me, so when I went home, I immediately started researching.

Eighteen months later, I made a call to a company in Ronkonkoma, New York, that was the only place that had some equipment I needed, and eventually I got through and they explained to me that they were closed for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. The conversation quickly turned to the Holocaust, and soon I was on conference call with one survivor, and then another. Ed Mosberg was the third, and this continued for the next fourteen years. In 2013, a sampler of the survivors’ interviews was put on Blu-ray. We met with Claire in December, and all 400 hours was put into her Avid.

Ferguson: I looked through all this extraordinary material, and it was then a question of how to piece together the jigsaw puzzle. What film do we make from this? It’s not possible to make a history of the Holocaust. It’s a well-trodden subject: the more you learn about it, the more it becomes unfathomable. How could you have a life with so much pain and then live with this? Focusing on the trauma of survivors and the lives they made afterwards seemed like the most powerful direction.

It was a huge challenge. Llion filmed thirty survivors, and in the film we only used twelve. Trying to tell a story with a narrative arc that would link these twelve survivors and still hold on to their individual stories was a delicate balance. The detail is what makes this film special. We even have love stories of people who survived and were reunited. There are important, moving details among horrible traumatic memories.

Jewcy: Ed, the sight of you wearing your uniform from the concentration camp and a tallit in the film is extremely powerful. Can you talk about what motivated you to do this?

Mosberg: Before the war, I had my whole family, and then everybody was murdered. This is what motivated me to do everything. My wife can’t talk about the war and what she lost because she was ashamed that she survived. Many tried to cover or eliminate the numbers on their arms. I was never ashamed. It is my duty to tell the world and show them what happened. I was wearing that tallit in Birkenau when I donated a Torah to the Israeli army. This was the end of the line of the railroad tracks: whoever came in there didn’t leave. Soldiers were saluting my wife at that time, and it was very powerful.

Jewcy: Ed, I read that you donated a Torah to Steven Spielberg’s synagogue. Can you tell me about some of the philanthropic work that you can do?

Mosberg: I’ve rescued about twenty Torahs from the Holocaust. I make them kosher, and then donate them. My mother was a religious woman – I think she would be very proud of it. I donate to Yad Vashem, to the Shoah Foundation, to rabbinical schools. Anyone who needs, I give to them, especially places where the Holocaust is involved. It’s very important that they teach people what can happen. When the camps were liberated in May 1945, Americans didn’t let them out from the camps because they were afraid that they would kill the Germans. When Patton was in charge of the camps, he said, “I cannot give to the Jews better food than other prisoners they will say I am discriminating. They want to go to Palestine, and English don’t want to let them in.”

If you were not there, you don’t know what it was. This was a terrible life. In October 1943, a group of rabbis came to talk to President Roosevelt to get him to bomb railroad tracks leading to the camps but he wouldn’t meet with them. If he had, maybe my family would be alive today.

Jewcy: What stands out to you most from your experiences?

Mosberg: When they liquidated the ghetto, I was there. I saw a baby taken from his mother and shot. Parents put a child in a knapsack and then the Germans shot into the knapsack. They made sick people run across to the other side or be shot. It was like a game for the Germans. Mauthausen was the worst concentration camp. There were 186 steps we had to walk on from morning to night, and whoever fell behind or couldn’t do it was punished horribly. They were burning and shooting those people. The smell never left me. I always smelled this. I can never forget this.

Jewcy: What lessons do you think today’s generation can learn from the Holocaust?

Mosberg: We should not forget and not forgive. We have no right to forgive! Only the dead can forgive. As long as I love this is my duty and obligation to go and talk and talk until the last day of my life. Whenever I talk, they should listen and hear it. There are plenty of deniers. If you didn’t live through this, you can’t understand.

Destination Unknown opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 10, and November 15 in Bangor.

Image: Ed Mosberg in Destination Unknown.

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Presented at Lincoln Center each year, the New York Film Festival, now in its 55th year, is always Jewish experience. For example, last year, the festival presented documentary The Settlers, an incisive look into one of Israel’s most contentious issues.

This year’s most Jewish content comes in the Special Events section of the festival. This weekend is the screening of  Claude Lanzmann’s Four Sisters. Lanzmann, now 91, is a French filmmaker most well-known for his epic and important documentary Shoah, which was released on PBS in 1987 and runs over nine hours. Rather than recreate history with a fictional narrative or attempt to recreate the lives of the survivors he interviews, Lanzmann’s style has always been to let them speak for themselves. Their stories are immensely powerful (understandably), and now Lanzmann returns with the presentation of four new interviews completed decades earlier— complementary pieces to Shoah.

The notion that there can never be too many Holocaust stories has never felt truer than in Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath, the only one of the four films screened for press ahead of the public showing of the series. Viewers who expect anything other than a straightforward question-and-answer session will be disappointed: this is simply a filmed interview between Lanzmann and survivor Ruth Elias. Yet, it’s much, much more than that. Ruth, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1922, lived with her family for several years at the start of the Holocaust before being sent to Theresienstadt, and later Auschwitz.

What distinguishes Ruth’s story – though each person’s experience during the Holocaust was horrifying and needs not be qualified by a standout event – is that she interacted closely with Josef Mengele, who conducted experiments on her after she gave birth to a baby. It is not easy to hear Ruth tell this tale. Ruth projects a quiet confidence, speaking in English throughout the interview and eloquently recalling the horrors she suffered during that time. She also shares positive memories of her childhood and, most stirringly, of the friendship she has made with the woman she now considers her mother, a doctor in the camp whose courageous act gives the film its title.

With many new films using cutting-edge styles and clever techniques to share their truths, it proves surprisingly rewarding to see this very matter-of-fact, simple film, which also appears grainy (this interview was conducted in the 1970s) and is not always easy to understand. Sitting near her, Lanzmann appears occasionally as he asks a question or follows up on something she has said, listening attentively just like the audience. At no point does he interject or try to prompt her to dig deeper on a given subject; this is her story and all he desires to do is get her to share it. He even sits by as she plays her piano accordion with an impressive passion, recalling songs in Czech and Hebrew from her childhood.

Ruth’s resilience shows in her survival of the Holocaust and her building of a new life in Israel. The other three films in this series, which showcase women from four different areas of Eastern Europe, are sure to be just as powerful. This is documentary filmmaking at its barest and purest, and this feels even more relevant now as survivors are getting older and Holocaust stories are becoming part of the past.

Find out more about Claude Lanzmann’s Four Sisters, which screen from Saturday to Tuesday, October 7 to 10, on the New York Film Festival website.

Photo from Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath.

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Serena Dykman is a granddaughter of survivors. She has directed, and appears in, Nana: A Transgenerational Documentary on Tolerance. This groundbreaking film tells the story of her grandmother, Auschwitz survivor Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, and the journey of her mother, Alice, and herself to come to terms with their past. If you believe that you have seen every statement of resilience and every vision of horror eloquently related, you will find a renewed and different connection to the legacy of the Shoah after you see this film.

Jewcy: How did you conceive of this project, of presenting the experience of your grandmother, who had died when you were eleven years old, to a new generation?

Dykman:  It happened quickly.  I always knew that my grandmother was a survivor. I was completely aware, but I did not understand what that meant.  I am from Paris and Brussels.  I went to Brussels the day of the attack at the Jewish Museum; the next time I traveled to Europe was after the attacks on Charlie Hébdo and the kosher supermarket.  I had been traveling with the memoir my grandmother had written, but I had not opened the book.  When I came back to New York, I realized what she had stood for.  Saddened that she was not here to tell her story, I realized that her message of tolerance and hope needed to be heard by a new generation.

In my last semester at NYU I took a documentary film class.  Three weeks after the course I was filming on location at Auschwitz.  If I had thought carefully, I would not have had the courage to go through with it. I retraced my grandmother’s memories, reading aloud while physically retracing her steps.  Back in NY, many people who had heard about the project sent me archival footage, over 100 hours, including interviews with my grandmother. Then the film started taking a different shape.  I discovered my grandmother more in the editing room than I had in her memoir.

Jewcy:  Some explorations of the lives of survivors, their children, and grandchildren, report the continuation of unspoken trauma, even dysfunction, in these families.  Your film is centered in the strong bond between mother and daughter.  How did your relationship with your mother inform your vision in this film?

Dykman: I have always been close to my mother.  It all came together; I began to realize, to learn, “this is why she reacts this way.”   I finally understood how heavy the weight of the heritage has been for her entire life.  My grandmother was outspoken. As a child, when my mother asked her mother, “where are your parents?” the response she received was that they had been gassed by the Nazis.  The second generation had to suffer for what their parents suffered. They had the responsibility to pass on their parents’ survival story.  It was hard because they were so close. As a member of the third generation, I was close, but not so close that the process would kill me.

Jewcy: Your grandmother’s personality is strong, ironic, proud.  In footage of her interviews by those learning about the Shoah, she seems at times surprised by their naivité. In response to the question, “Why did Hitler choose to persecute the Jews?” she answers “I don’t know. Hitler didn’t confide in me.”

Dykman:  My grandmother was changed by the war, but not completely.  She had an incredible sense of humor. People who see this ask if she was like that before the war.  Her memoir reveals this characteristic in her childhood and teenage years.  After the war she met and married my grandfather, a non-Jewish Pole. She was not, she believed a “regular person.” She educated herself after the war. She studied the Bible and wanted to understand society and human intolerance.   She had been raised in a liberal setting and was not religious.  Speaking for myself, my Jewish identity is more cultural than religious.  People would sometimes ask my grandmother if she believed in God.  She would answer, “After what I just told you, do you think I believe in God?  

Jewcy: Your grandmother relates several instances of the Nazis’ sadistic use of language and of the attempt of your grandmother to subvert this torture.  In one anecdote, she describes hauling rocks as part of her slave labor in the camp.  A Nazi guard repeatedly asks her what she is carrying; every time she answers, “a rock” he threatens her, finally telling her it is not a rock, but a stone. How does your film try to recover language from this lethal assault?

Dykman:  Reading aloud is what started the whole film.  My grandmother had a distinct way of phrasing things. French was not her first language; her syntax was unusual.  Her style was to never complain.  Rather, she would act out what she was saying, but not in a theatrical way.  She speaks as if the story takes place in the present and acts out dialogue.  People who refer to the Holocaust as something that happened seventy years ago hear her speak and learn of its relevance today.

Jewcy: How did recent terrorist attacks in Europe become a framework for your film?

Dykman:  My perspective changed while making the film.  I made the film after witnessing the attacks in Paris and Brussels.  The first screening was after the subsequent airport attacks in Brussels.  What had happened to the Jewish people was also happening to others, and my grandmother’s call for tolerance needed to be timeless. Rather than add references to more specific acts of terror, I wanted to film to be timeless, and to exclude no one. I worked with an amazing editor who understood the framework of the film.

Jewcy:  As your mother states with conviction in one of your conversations about her struggle as a child of survivors, “Long live life. Long live Nana.”

Nana: A Transgenerational Documentary on Tolerance premieres on November 6 (Maryla’s Birthday), at the St. Louis International Film Festival.

Image from Nana.

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