The Stairs is a poignant recounting by a Holocaust survivor of his most harrowing day at Auschwitz. He’s unable to tell this story to his son face to face, but he records his account of the day he arrived at the death camp and has the cassette tape mailed to his son after he’s died. But it turns out that the boy has already heard is father’s story. You see, he sat on the stairs as a ten-year-old boy listening to his father tell the tale to company he and his mom had invited over to their house one the evening.

“That 10-year-old boy was me,” writer Mort Laitner explains. Ten years ago, Laitner codified that experience in an eponymous short story that he had made into The Stairs some 18 months ago.

“Right now, I’m converting the screenplay for this 10-minute film into a feature film.”

Laitner sees it as his duty to pass his father’s message along to new generations. He does that not only through the film, but by talking to audience members at every film festival he’s able to attend. To date, The Stairs has been juried into more than 20 film festivals in seven different countries. Mort has personally attended seven of them, and he continues to be moved when people ask to shake his hand and share with him stories they’ve heard from Holocaust survivors they know or have met in their condos, schools and communities.

The children of people who lived through the Holocaust are known as second-generation survivors. There are an estimated 250,000 second-generation survivors living in America today. Like Leitner, many feel an obligation to document their parents’ stories whether in a book, personal computer or home video.

“Practically everyone wants to know about their family heritage, but most of us don’t realize how important it is until our parents and grandparents are gone,” posts Joey Korn on remember.org (A People’s History of the Holocaust & Genocide). “This goes for everyone, not just survivor families. I know there are many unpublished manuscripts out there, written by survivors. Many others can still get their stories down on paper. With self-publishing as easy as it is today, everyone can publish their own stories, even if just for their families. I encourage everyone to do this.”

And so does Laitner. He recommends that everyone write a 10 to 20 page memoir describing what they’ve learned in life. “Place it with your will in your safe deposit box so that it can be passed on to your kids or relatives,” Mort urges. “That way, they can learn from your life.”

For second-generation survivors, the life lessons they’ve learned from their parents is more important than ever.

“Tragically, and contrary to our resolve, anti-Semitism continues to thrive,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said this past January 27. “We are also seeing a deeply troubling rise in extremism, xenophobia, racism and anti-Muslim hatred. Irrationality and intolerance are back.”

The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly chose that as the date to commemorate the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jewish people, 2 million Romani people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

Each Holocaust Remembrance Day since then, hundreds of first and second-generation survivors, political leaders and representatives of Jewish communities throughout Europe make a pilgrimage to the Auschwitz memorial and museum in the Polish town of Oswiecim to pray over the ruins of the gas chambers. That happened again this year, with one notable difference. Echoing the U.N. Secretary-General’s remarks, many Jewish and Christian leaders warned of rising xenophobic hatred against Jews, Muslims and others. Poland’s Prime Minister, Beata Szydlo (who is from Oswiecim) recalled the “destruction of humanity” and the “ocean of lost lives and hopes” that resulted from the German genocide.

“History should be a lesson, warning and incentive all at the same time,” said outgoing Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Germany. Expressing concern over the political instability prevailing in the world today, he added, “There can and should be no end to remembrance.”

But one voice was conspicuously silent on Holocaust Remembrance Day – that of the newly-inaugurated president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. In fact, not only did he not publicly or privately acknowledge the date, he chose Holocaust Remembrance Day to promulgate an executive order imposing a ban on the admission of Muslim refugees from seven Middle Eastern countries seeking asylum in the United States, causing many to draw parallels to the United States’ refusal to admit Jews fleeing the Nazi regime in the 1930s, including Anne Frank and her family.

Obviously, there is work to be done both here and abroad, and that’s a huge factor in Mort Laitner’s efforts to show The Stairs to as many film lovers as he can. “I see that even with people who have very little knowledge of the Holocaust that I’ve opened their eyes a little bit,” says Mort with pride mixed with satisfaction. “Hopefully that will inspire them to learn more on their own.”

As this past Holocaust Remembrance Day underscores, it’s never too late for people to educate themselves about the dangers of targeting particular cultures or ethnic groups. Do your part. Make sure you see this film during the running of the Seventh Annual Fort Myers Film Festival. Laitner plans on attending the Fort Myers Film Festival. Be sure to bend his ear.

February 10, 2017

One of the films being screened at this year’s Fort Myers Film Festival is The Stairs. It depicts an elderly man who listens to a tape recording his father made prior to his death in which he describes his most horrific experience in Auschwitz during World War II.

The film is a short, dense, multi-faceted story susceptible to multiple, sometimes conflicting interpretations. The film starts and ends with a flashback to a night when the man, then a 10-year-old child, sat at the top of the stairs eavesdropping on his parents’ conversation with a couple they’d invited over for the evening. It’s a cinematic device that gives the audience a nostalgic point of entry into the terrible story his father tells about how he was spared from being gassed on the day of his arrival at Auschwitz. Most people have had the experience of listening in when their parents have company over – whether it’s from the top of the stairs, the hallway around the corner or some other vantage where discovery is unlikely. And so, like that wide-eyed 10-year-old at the top of the stairs, we too find ourselves leaning forward and straining to hear the broken cadence of the story his father now tells.

This is important, even crucial, since most viewers have no first-hand memory of the Holocaust. True, some Millennials, Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers have met one or more Holocaust survivors. But their stories seem surreal. After all, when you hear that 6 million Jews perished during the Shoah, the number comes across as little more than a cold, almost meaningless abstraction. In fact, the very man who carried out Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Problem understood this reality.

In the fall of 1944, Adolf Eichmann was with a group of high-level SS officers in a Budapest casino discussing the inevitability of Germany losing the war. One of the officers asked Eichmann point blank whether he was worried about what would happen to him when that day finally came. “Eichmann gave a very astute answer that shows he knew how the world worked,” said Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal when recounting this story. “‘A hundred dead people is a catastrophe,’ Eichman answered. ‘Six million dead is a statistic.’”

The filmmakers understand this, as well, and thus they provide a number of strategically placed emotional cues in the film in order to make the father’s story both personal and accessible to viewers for whom the Holocaust is just an antiseptic historical fact. But what The Stairs does not address, unfortunately perhaps, is the reason the father chooses to tell his story of survival to an interviewer rather than to his son.

What the father could not, would not share overtly with his boy was the guilt that never left him for living when everyone else died. “And that’s how I failed,” he says at the end of his story, describing how he’d picked up his clothes, quickly put them on, and never looked back at the columns of naked Jews being herded like cattle into the gas chambers after one of the guards pulled him out of line at the very last minute. Where others saw in him bravery and endurance, the father saw only cowardice and shame.

Today, survivor guilt is an element of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, but it was first recognized by psychologists, psychiatrists and researchers in the early 1960s in Holocaust survivors. The phenomenon expresses more than just the feeling that they don’t deserve to have survived when so many others perished. Survivors are often haunted by actions they took or failed to take in order to survive and can occur in the aftermath of any traumatic situation, including combat, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, a plane crash or train derailment, or even an epidemic like HIV/AIDS or Ebola. Plagued by his experiences in Auschwitz, Holocaust survivor Primo Levi explored his survivor’s guilt extensively in his autobiographical books, notably in I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved). His death was reportedly a suicide, and towards the end of his life he suffered from depression, possibly induced by his experiences.

Whether it is more about remembering the Holocaust than exploring the universal phenomenon of survivor guilt, The Stairs is definitely one of the films you should make a point of seeing during the running of the 7th Annual Fort Myers Film Festival. The Stairs is an independent film directed by Hakym Reagan and produced by Blake Laitner and Mort Laitner. The cast includes Dennis Fitzpatrick, David Poland, Anne Voxx, Daniel Timothy Treacy, Peter Glazer, Drew Thacher, Elizabeth Zimmerman and Max Albright.

February 9, 2017.