Culture

A Return to Broken Branches

April 19th, 70 years ago, the Jews in the ghetto rose up against the Nazis. The day before Pesach, the day they were to be deported to certain death, they rose up and fought for as long as they could. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was ended on May 16th. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, in part because it’s the season, as it were, for remembrance and anniversaries.
I appreciate the extent of knowledge we’ve gained about the Shoah, but revisiting the past with no return to the future makes me uneasy. It ignores history since then, it makes us seem like a people who no longer live and breathe. So today, I wanted to highlight some Kickstarters that are telling the stories of Poland’s Jews, neither ignoring the Shoah nor focusing solely upon it.
In Broken Branches, animator Ayala Sharot tells the story of her grandmother, Michal Rechter. Rechter was sent from Poland to Israel by herself, on the eve of WWII. She never saw her family again. In a mix of line drawing animation, animated scenes, animation adapted photographs and oil paint-glass animations, she tells the story of her grandmother in 25 minutes. Sharot’s work that we see in the trailer is talented and well-suited to how she’s framed the story being told. The project has squeaked into being funded, but still has a few weeks to go.

 
In Adam Zucker’s documentary The Return, the documentarian takes his skills to Poland. Jewish life is still reviving, defining itself, exploring an identity that stretches into the past, but the future as well. In his project’s description it says “The film tells the very human story of acknowledging the past without being beholden to it.” The women the documentary focuses on are all negotiating identity, in a Jewish community devastated by a war from before they were born. The Return has a few weeks to go as well, but still has more than $25,000 to go. What footage is in the trailer looks like it was shot with a keen eye, and I look forward to seeing where the project goes.

2 thoughts on “A Return to Broken Branches

  1. You’re completely right about how folks in Poland are neither ignoring past nor are they beholden to it. So many Americans who do go to Poland seem to expect to find all Poles, and certainly those who are Jewish Poles, to have lives entirely shadowed by the Shoah. That just isn’t the reality. Jewish Poles understand how it destroyed their families and the world they had lived in, but it just doesn’t define their day to day lives, and dreams for the future.

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