By Arielle Cohen, Staff Writer
There are very few students in Beachwood who have not learned about the Holocaust. Many of us have studied it, written essays about it, or been tested on it. Some of us have grandparents or great grandparents who lived through the Holocaust. However, many of us feel somewhat removed from it. It takes something powerful to truly connect us to this unbelievable point in our history. This documentary, created by BHS staff and students, manages to do just that.
It all started in the summer of 2006 when Superintendent Richard Markwardt initiated the Holocaust film class with drama teacher Shiela Heyman. By Spring of 2007, the first class of BHS students would begin their four-year project. Eventually, the total number of students involved would grow to 31. The project would evolve from a 40-minute documentary into a 90-minute feature film. Intended for educational purposes, the film is centered around the stories of sixteen Holocaust survivors who settled in Cleveland.
This film is different from most Holocaust films. It allows the viewer to hear the survivor’s stories of what happened during the Holocaust, but also to understand their journeys from childhood trauma in Europe to adult lives in Cleveland, where many of these survivors have made major contributions. These people become architects, entrepreneurs, researchers, and even major supporters of nonprofits and charities. Each life helped make Cleveland a better place. Watching this film connects the viewer to history, but also to the lives of these brave, inspiring people.
As lead editor and production director Brad Charna said, “It opened my eyes”.
In Heyman’s words, the survivors teach “lessons of sacrifice, determination, courage, and dignity” The film itself weaves factual information and still images with video clips of the survivors, leaving the viewer with both an informational and emotional understanding. The interviews with the survivors are set up so you feel as if you are in their home. You can see their faces and their hands as they talk to you about their lives, their struggles, and their achievements. Seeing each individual and their contributions, the viewer realizes how much each person matters. As student pre-production director Marc Eisenberg said, it’s “sixteen compared to six million.” Just hearing “One story, one human,….six million of those.”
The journey that this documentary takes you on is one that illustrates the capabilities of humans to be both cruel and cold hearted or kind and resilient. As Eisenberg explained, it makes you realize that the events that led us to say, “Never again” could have occurred to many of us had we been in Europe at that time. For him, being strongly connected to his family and the Jewish community made the impact of meeting the survivors even stronger. Hearing their stories made him realize that he is truly “lucky in comparison”.
Brad Charna feels similarly about being lucky. As he puts it, “we all have issues in our lives, but hearing the survivors’ puts our struggles in perspective.”
The film premiered on the evening of Thursday, May 27th at Temple Tifereth Israel. Over 600 people attended. When the opportunity comes again, go see this movie. It truly demonstrates the words of one survivor who said that tolerance “will come. It must come.”
