Diamonds In the Snow; We Must Never Forget: The Story Of the Holocaust

At one point in Mira Reym Binford's autobiographical film Diamonds in the Snow, we look at an eerily anomalous photo: Binford, a Jewish child being sheltered by the Dyrda's, a non-Jewish family, poses with one of the Dyrda boys, decked out in military regalia, home on leave from Hitler's army. The photo is a poignant reminder that behind the broad strokes of historical tragedy lie individuals who do not conform to the story. Filmmaker Binford, Ada Raviv, and Shulamit Levin, three of the estimated twelve Jewish children from the town of Bendzin, Poland, who survived the Holocaust, tell the stories of what no eyes--let alone the eyes of children--should ever have to witness. Separated from parents who were, often, bound for the concentration camps, the children lived through the war years in fear and hiding. Binford recalls how Mr. Dyrda beat her mercilessly without provocation, yet risked his life--as a non-Jew--to shelter her from the Nazis. Combining interviews with the other women, herself, and Polish Christians in the Bendzin community, Binford and the others return to the painful scenes of their childhood and attempt to come to terms with that terrible period in their lives. Dovetailed into this story is another, reminiscent of Oskar Schindler's as portrayed in Schindler's List. Non-Jewish factory owner Alfred Rossner, who made a fortune off Jewish labor, gave food, clothing, and shelter to the Jews until he was finally imprisoned. Diamonds in the Snow is an excellent film about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances--part sinners, part saints, but all saviors to three little Jewish girls in Poland. Highly recommended.Aimed more towards young people for whom the Holocaust might have little or no meaning, We Must Never Forget: The Story of the Holocaust is a powerful overview which combines the wrenching testimony of Holocaust survivor Rosa Katz, with an exceptionally cogent (especially for an "overview" tape) tracing of the political and economic factors which gave rise to Hitler's rapid ascent in Germany. While Hitler was certainly not alone in his twisted anti-Semitic feelings, his power placed him in a position to act on his hatred, and on January 20, 1942, at the now infamous Wannsee conference, the "final solution"--wholesale genocide against the Jewish people--was given the official go-ahead. Katz, who was held in the Lodz ghetto in Poland, recalls the horrors of the Nazi raids for "healthy" workers: elderly women wore heavy make-up to look young (and therefore able to work), men threw away their canes and ran to convince their oppressors they were of sound body; most unthinkable of all, the Nazis threw innocent babies packs of dogs for sport on these occasions. Katz, who went to Auschwitz, was miraculously saved because of a bureaucratic blunder (she was accidentally sent to Berlin). We Must Never Forget does an excellent job of conveying both the personal horror and the impersonal killing, the individual pain and the numbing numbers, as well as offering a solid understanding of the basic history of the Holocaust. That it manages to accomplish this in just over 30 minutes is a notable achievement . Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)