“Honoring Thy Father on Yom HaShoah”
By Mort Laitner
Being the child of two survivors, I have talked with acquintances whose parents were also in the camps. Many of them believed their parent’s Holocaust story deserved to be put on film. They said, “It is not Schindler’s List but it will be a movie worthy of critical acclaim. I want to honor their memory. I want to tell the world about their suffering.”
I can relate to their desires because since I was 10, I knew that my father’s story fell into that category. So nine years ago, at age 57, I wrote a short story, entitled “The Stairs” about one of my dad’s war-time experiences. Seven years later, that story became the first chapter in my book, “A Hebraic Obsession.” Two years ago, I wrote a movie script based on my short story. One year later, I produced an independent short movie with the same name.
During the production of that movie, I watched the actor who played my father, so convincingly that I cried. The actor had hit a nerve that brought back memories of how much I missed my deceased dad.
So were is my honor-my-father project-today? Well my film is making the rounds in European film festivals, We entered Poland’s Two Riversides Film and Art Festival, the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival.
I am struck by the thought that a small portion of my father’s Holocaust story is going home; back to the lands of my father’s and my birth, back to the lands where my forefathers are buried and back to the lands that almost decimated my family’s lineage.
Back to the lands where Nazis forced Jews into paving roads using tombstones of Jewish cemeteries. Back to the lands of Jewish ghettos. Back to the lands of starvation, disease, slave labor and extermination.
My film has gone back to those lands. My film is being viewed by a number of Poles and Germans 71 years after my dad was almost gassed to death at Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
My hope is the film kindles thoughts and tears of what happened in those camps in the minds of those film-watching Germans and Poles. They need the remembrance.
I doubt that my father, when he was alive, ever thought a small part of his Holocaust story would be watched in Berlin, or Warsaw or some small towns in eastern Poland. I think he would be proud. I know I never did and I know I am.
This Year Yom Hashoah is observed on May 5, 2016.
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I am surfing the net and low and behold, I learn that Amazon has a separate sales page for “A Hebraic Obsession” under the title of “Paperbacks.” My book has three reviews that I have never read.
