Holocaust
All Videos are $19.95.
AMBULANCE - 9 Minutes
This classic film depicts the essence of the Holocaust in one single incident:
the gassing of unsuspecting, innocent school children, using an ambulance
to lead them to their death. The ambulance, symbol of good, is used for
evil as the viewer enters the phantasmagoric world of evil and watches
the reactions of the children, their teacher and the German executioners.
Unencumbered by dialogue, the film uses only the visual to create a story
of lasting impact.
THE BIRD MAN - 12 Minutes
“The Bird Man” is a personal and moving portrait of Eitan
Porat, concentration camp survivor, who today keeps an aviary in Israel.
Mr. Porat evinces a deep aura of humanity in his love of birds and people.
Through his aviary, visitors from all over the world come to learn about
the Holocaust and Porat's hope for the future.
CHILDREN OF THE EXODUS - 28 Minutes
Filmed in Israel and narrated by Zero Mostel, this documentary chronicles
the search made by the UJA for a group of child survivors of the Holocaust,
twenty years after their arrival in Israel in 1947 on the illegal ship
“Exodus.” It encompasses the surge of a modern saga; the scope
of recent Jewish history; the near unbelievable pace of a people's passage
from the gates of Auschwitz to the Holy Western Wall of Jerusalem, and
the miraculous rebirth of these children's lives in Israel.
THE BOOKSELLER - 30 Minutes
A dramatization, based on the book, Rescue in Denmark, of an actual incident
of Danish resistance to the Nazi persecution of the Jews during the World
War II occupation of Denmark. This resistance included the evacuation
of the Jewish community to a haven of safety in neighboring Sweden.
A FIELD OF BUTTERCUPS - 30 Minutes
The moving story of Dr. Janus Korczak’s devotion to his “Our
Home,” an orphanage for Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto, during
the time of the Holocaust. Based on the book by Joseph Hyams, the film
portrays how Dr. Korczak chooses to remain with his 299 orphans who are
marked for extermination by the Nazis, although he himself has an opportunity
to leave in safety.
I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY - 30 Minutes
Based on the book of the same title containing the drawings and poems
of children at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia during
1942-44. Commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the camp's liberation,
the program includes documentary film shot in Prague and at Terezin, and
presents a fictionalized account of one of the hundred children (of 15,000
who passed through the camp) who survived the war.
IN THE BEGINNING - 30 Minutes
The touching story of Noah, a teacher, who, trapped in the Warsaw ghetto
with a few remaining Jews, insists on celebrating the festival of Simhat
Torah.
INTERROGATION IN BUDAPEST - 60 Minutes
A dramatization of the story of Hannah Szenes, based on her diary and
poetry, eyewitness accounts and the recollections of her mother. In 1944,
at the age of twenty-three, she parachuted into Nazi occupied Europe to
rescue Jewish children and was captured, interrogated, tried, and executed.
THE ITINERARY OF ELI WIESEL: FROM SIGHET TO JERUSALEM - 60 Minutes
Eli Wiesel wrote the script of this film which retraces the steps of his
life from his native Sighet (in pre-World War II Romania, now in Hungary),
to Jerusalem. Filmed on location in Europe and Israel, the program includes
an interview with former Prime Minister Golda Meir.
SIGHET, SIGHET - 27 Minutes Available in VHS, $19.95 or DVD, $24.95.
Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel returns, ghostlike, to the Hungarian town
where he was born and where, twenty-five years before, the entire Jewish
population disappeared into the maw of the German cattle trains. The camera
pans slowly over the towns cape and cuts to photos of it from happier
days, as Wiesel reflects mournfully and ironically on what has happened.
A very low-key but gripping film, suited to audiences knowledgeable
about the facts of the Holocaust.
THE LAST RABBI - 30 Minutes
This story portrays the heroism and courage of the victims of the Warsaw
Ghetto. Based on the actual documents left by Jews in the ghetto, the
video relates how the last surviving rabbi refuses to accept an opportunity
to escape death at the hands of the Nazis.
ONE MAN - 30 Minutes
A dramatic reconstruction of the mysterious case of Raoul Wallenberg,
the Swedish diplomat who disappeared from Budapest behind the Iron Curtain
in 1945, while attempting to save the Jewish community of that city.
THE LEGACY OF ANNE FRANK - 30 Minutes
A dramatic documentary which features interviews with Dutch citizens who
knew the ill-fated young diarist as a child, as well as captured German
films of the Nazi occupation of Holland. Filmed on location, the program
shows the school Anne attended and the house where she and her family
had their hiding place. Appearing on the program is Anne’s father,
Otto Frank, the only family member to survive the Holocaust.
THE REMNANT - 30 Minutes
Filmed on location, “The Remnant” deals with the miracle and
mystery of the continuation of European Jewry, its rise, decline, almost
total destruction, and rebirth. It dramatizes the financial, cultural
as well as metaphysical contributions of European Jewry to European civilization,
and traces events from the year 70 to the revitalization of European Jewry
by the establishment of the State of Israel.
JAPANESE RELOCATION - 11 Minutes
“Japanese Relocation” was an early attempt to provide an official
explanation for the removal of 110,000 people of Japanese descent from
the “potential combat zone” of the West Coast. These people
(two thirds of them U.S. citizens) were forced to leave their homes, farms,
and businesses, to spend the duration of the war in “relocation”
camps located in the American interior.
POLAND - 17 Minutes; and KOLBUSZOWA - 27 Minutes
Any student of the Holocaust or of European Jewry should see these two
films which show typical shtetls of Poland as they existed in the late
1920’s and 1930's. The Jews and the Poles live side by side and
yet they are apart. It is easy to see images of Jerzy Kosinski's novel,
The Painted Bird, when seeing the vacant Polish faces at the marketplace.
These films cut through the mystery of Jewish life in Eastern Europe,
and enable the viewer to imagine the inevitable horrors that will follow.
MEMORANDUM - 58 Minutes
Bernard Laufer, a Jewish glass-cutter from Toronto, and his son make a return pilgrimage to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, "because," he says, "I am alive." Here, Mr. Laufer meets with other survivors as well as the British commander who liberated Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Mr. Laufer survived imprisonment in 11 camps including Auschwitz, but his family all were murdered in German gas chambers. Through him some of the atrocities perpetrated are recalled, but the picture of post-war Germany shown in the film is of a country forgetting its horrible past and smug in its present prosperity.
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