Fighting the Nazis by Recording Life and Death

What was it like to be forced from your home into a ghetto for Jews during World War II?  

And then to realize that the Germans were planning a systematic extermination of the 400,000 people in your ghetto?

The new documentary Who Will Tell Our History? provides a graphic view of Jewish culture in Warsaw from 1939 to 1945, particularly the way these confined and starving people carried on with schools, theater, music, and the writing of their own history.

The film tells the story from the point of view of a survivor--Rachel Auerbach, a writer and theater critic who was recruited to interview people in the ghetto and record living history.  She became one of sixty journalists and researchers organized to preserve the experience of ghetto life and German atrocity.  The group's founder, Emanuel Ringelblum, gave this secret effort the code name of Sabbath Joy--Oyneg Shabes.  All but three of the sixty were killed.

Roberta Grossman, writer/producer/director, and Nancy Spielberg, exec producer

"Why does one person survive while another dies?" muses Rachel in the opening scene.  "What are the factors?"   Sitting on a train, she takes out a notebook and begins writing and reflecting.  

Soon we are seeing life in the ghetto: meetings of the Oyneg Shabes team, Rachel serving food in a soup kitchen, Nazi soldiers shooting people, children begging, and people starving.  


Two women sitting next to me left at this point.  Fortunately, they did not see camera footage of bodies being picked up from the street, stacked on a cart, and dumped in a shed.  Many had been stripped of their clothing, exposing stiff and painfully skinny limbs.  

I sat there stunned, saying to myself, "But media don't show dead bodies, do they?"

In the Q & A afterward, the film's writer, producer, and director Roberta Grossman explained that the film has three components: photos and film taken by the Nazis, words and dialogue taken from the Oyneg Shabes archives, and actors who dramatize scenes from the ghetto while speaking lines taken from the archives.  

She based the film on the book by the same name written by Samuel D. Kassow (Indiana Univ. Press, 2018) and well as on other historical materials such as the books written by Rachel Auerbach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpXB2UruoUc

I was disturbed to realize that these Polish Jews were mostly speaking German, the language of the people killing them.  But then I realized they were speaking Yiddish, which is mainly German with some Hebrew words mixed in.

To my great relief, a rabbi who is writing in his daily journal (part of the required work) switches from Yiddish to Hebrew after his wife and child are killed.  He can't use the language of the murderers to record this event or express his grief.  

Executive director Nancy Spielberg described how the documentary is being released.  

• First it was shown at selected film festivals (and continues to be screened at others).    
• Then on January 27. Holocaust Remembrance Day, there was a global showing in 55 countries on 355 screens.
• It opened at selected theaters in New York and Los Angeles in February and continues to San Francisco and other cities now.
• On January 27, 2020, there will be another global showing, as well as on Yom HaShoah.
• Then it will be distributed to schools and colleges.

Roberta Grossman, Nancy Spielberg, and Michael Berenbaum, AJU president

And yes, Nancy is the sister of Steven Spielberg, who directed Schindler's List in 1993 and then started the Shoah Foundation to videotape the personal histories of Holocaust survivors. Nancy and Steven's father lost 16-20 family members in the Shoah. 

Emanuel Ringelblum collected humor from the ghetto as well as grim documentation.  Here's one joke:

Adult to child:  "What would you like most if you were Hitler's son?"

Child: "To be an orphan." 

Thank you to my friend Tovah for telling me to see this film, and thank you to the American Jewish University just off Mulholland in Los Angeles for tonight's screening with the director/writer/producer and the executive producer.