Aida’s Secrets

While filmmakers Alon and Shaul Schwartz’s documentary centers on their own family, it also deals more broadly with the horrendous shadow that the Holocaust continues to cast over all of its victims. The story begins with the filmmakers’ uncle Izak, who was born in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in Germany shortly after World War II and sent to an adoptive family in Israel. Izak’s biological mother Aida visited him from Canada as a child, but he only recently learned of a younger, blind brother, who also moved to Canada with his father. That discovery initiates a quest to find Izak’s sibling, Shepsel, who is eventually located, and the two men not only meet but are also reunited with the elderly Aida, who is in a nursing home. But this is only the beginning of the family’s domestic mystery. Photos of the two boys as children with Aida also show not one man but two, and since Shepsel’s father has since died, he cannot be questioned. Nor does Aida, despite her ability to recall much of the past fairly clearly, offer any explanation. Stitching together archival material, home movies, and new interviews with various family members and friends, the film ultimately cannot provide answers to all of the questions it raises, but its acceptance of Aida’s need to keep some secrets, given the circumstances she had to endure, is both humbling and rather inspiring. Recommended. (F. Swietek)