Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the Second Annual Bonita Springs International Film Festival observed the occasion by screening The Stairs, a Holocaust remembrance film. Part of Florida Short Films Package #1, The Stairs features an elderly man who listens to a tape recording of his father describing his most horrific experience in Auschwitz during World War II – the day he was excluded at the last minute from being gassed with other Jews who’d been brought by cattle cars to the infamous Nazi death camp.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. The United Nations General Assembly chose this date in 2005 as an international memorial day on which 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.

In Poland, survivors gathered with political leaders and representatives of Poland’s Jewish community at the site where Germany murdered about 1.1 million people during World War II, mostly Jews from across Europe, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others. Jewish and Christian leaders prayed over the ruins of gas chambers, with some warning of rising xenophobic hatred against Jews, Muslims and others. Poland’s Prime Minister, Beata Szydlo (who is from the Polish town of Oswiecim where the Auschwitz memorial and museum is located) recalled the “destruction of humanity” and the “ocean of lost lives and hopes” that resulted from the German genocide.

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

In Germany, outgoing Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his nation sticks by its obligation to take responsibility for the crimes committed by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. Noting the political instability in the world today, Steinmeier said, “History should be a lesson, warning and incentive all at the same time. There can and should be no end to remembrance.”

Many other commemorative events were held across the world. However, the commemoration was marred by protests over U.S. President Donald Trump’s tone-deaf announcement of “extreme vetting” for Muslim refugees from seven Middle Eastern countries seeking to immigrate to 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.

The Stairs starts and ends with a flashback to a night when 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 night. 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 the camp. The filmmaker, Mort Latimer told the film festival audience that he was the boy on the stairs and that it was his father who’d cheated death at Auschwitz that day.

Latimer went on to say that he’s aware of a number of Holocaust survivors who’ve seen The Stairs, and that all have been deeply touched by his presentation, which continues his father’s mission of ensuring that people never forget what took place there during the Second World War. In that vein, he is most proud of the outreach the film performs among younger generations, who have read or heard about the Holocaust but have no first-hand knowledge of the tragedy.

January 27, 20

This Friday past was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and marking the occasion at the Second Annual Bonita Springs International Film Festival was a 10-minute short titled The Stairs.

The film 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 told the Bonita Springs International Film Festival crowd who’d just seen the film. Ten years ago, Laitner codified that experience in an eponymous short story that he had made into a film some 18 months ago.

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

Based on these experiences, Laitner 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.”

The Stairs was shot in Portland, Oregon in just a single day. Filming began at 11 in the morning and continued until 11 that night. “Out of all that footage, we got 10 minutes,” he says ruefully of the filming/editing process.

Laitner also has some advice for fellow filmmakers – exercise patience during the editing process. “My editor promised he’d be done in sixty days. When I hadn’t heard anything after 120 days, I started freaking out. But 30 days later, I got my movie. Everything I’d read about filmmaking said under no circumstances bother the editor. By not bothering him, I got a really well done edit job and I’m very happy with the outcome.”

The benefits of homework and preparation cannot be overstated either. “Dennis Fitzpatrick played my father in the film. I spent an hour the day before telling him about my father, and when he started manipulating his glasses as he sat at the table and began telling my father’s story, a tear came out of my eye because my father came back to me in that scene.” It’s impossible to put a price on authenticity, but your actors are only as good as the script and backstory you give them.

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 21 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.

“I see that even with people who have very little knowledge of the Holocaust that I’ve opened their eyes a little bit,” he adds with pride mixed with satisfaction. “Hopefully that will inspire them to learn more on their own.”

As Holocaust Remembrance Day underscores, it’s never too late for people to educate themselves about the dangers of targeting particular cultures or ethnic groups. For more on this aspect of the film, read here.

January 29, 2017.

One of the films being screened in Friday’s Florida Short Films Package #1 at the Bonita Springs International Film Festival is The Stairs. It features an elderly man who listens to a tape recording of his father describing his most horrific experience in the Auschwitz death camp 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 night. 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 the camp. 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.

But in this film, the man’s father was cognizant that his son was listening in. “He knew I was on the stairs,” says the film’s protagonist. And it is this small, almost throw-away line that draws in the viewer and makes the dad’s story of surviving Auschwitz personal in a way otherwise unimaginable.

That’s important because Millennials, Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers lack first-hand knowledge of the massive death and incomprehensible horror associated with the Holocaust. When you hear the statistic that 6 million Jews perished during the Shoah, it’s little more than an abstraction.

Even the man who devised, implemented and orchestrated 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 a cold 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 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 not far from the train depot that had brought them to the very gates of hell. Where others saw in him bravery and endurance, the father saw only cowardice and shame.

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.

January 26, 2017.