Lost Town

A horrific Holocaust episode becomes the subject of an obsessive search by the son of a survivor in this haphazardly structured but moving documentary directed by Jeremy Goldscheider and Richard Goldgewicht. The focus is on Trochenbrod, a Jewish farming town in western Ukraine whose population was almost eradicated by the Nazis in 1942, along with other Jews brought in from neighboring villages. Only 33 residents survived by hiding in makeshift bunkers and fleeing into the surrounding forest—including the father of Avrom Bendavid-Val, an American who sets out to locate the site of the vanished settlement and as many survivors as possible in order to construct a portrait of daily life. Narrated by Bendavid-Val, Lost Town follows his visits to Ukraine, where he engages in conversations with elderly locals—both Ukrainians and Poles—who are not only able to direct him to the field where Trochenbrod once stood, but can also describe what they saw and heard on the day of the massacre. Bendavid-Val also visits with some of those who survived the slaughter and hears the stories of how they escaped, eventually accompanying them and their families back to Ukraine, where they describe the layout of the community, which is then reconstructed in drawings. Both a haunting tale of the brutality of the so-called Final Solution, and an uplifting celebration of the Nazis' inability to efface the memory of a place that was once a vibrant center of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)