A Story About a Bad Dream

Recently, my 14-year-old niece said to me, "The Holocaust? What is that?" Shocked that her well-respected school had not included it in the curriculum, I tried to give her a brief summary. But how can you summarize in a few words the events that forever altered the lives of millions of people, particularly when you yourself were not a witness? Only the survivors can adequately tell the story, and there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors alive today. A docu-drama based on the experiences of one such survivor, Eva Erbenova, a young girl living in Czechoslovakia during World War II, A Story About a Bad Dream combines archival news footage, photographs, children's drawings, dramatizations, and comments from Eva herself. With alternating narration between the voice of the young Eva (chronicling her experiences in the present tense) and the older Eva (who provides the past tense perspective), the film delineates Eva's life before the war, and then takes viewers to the Terezin ghetto where she was no longer referred to as human, but given a number. After her father is taken away, Eva and her mother soon find themselves transferred to the Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, where the true horror begins. One of the best personal narratives I've seen on the Holocaust, with a childlike viewpoint that makes it very useful for trying to convey to children a sense of these terrible events, this is highly recommended. Aud: I, J, P. (J. Asala)