Near Normal Man

Filmmaker Charlene Y. Stern presents a bracing interview with her father, 95-year-old Holocaust survivor Ben Stern. Framed off-center in a static camera shot, the elderly Stern speaks with simple eloquence about the experience of being rounded up with other Polish Jews after the Nazi invasion of 1939 and then enduring life in the ghetto followed by a succession of concentration camps before emerging as one of the few survivors liberated by American troops in 1945. Stern's wartime recollections, accompanied by archival footage and family photographs, are extraordinarily moving—especially when he remembers the loss of his grandparents, parents, and siblings—but also historically pointed, as in his recounting of an episode involving Josef Mengele. The film continues into the postwar years, when Stern married another camp survivor and moved with her to America, settling in Skokie, IL, a suburb of Chicago with a predominantly Jewish population. In 1977, Stern helped organize a local effort to pass an ordinance preventing a march through the town by a neo-Nazi group, a law that was overturned in the courts. In a particularly wrenching moment, Stern admits to acquiring a gun that he could use in the event the marchers turned violent in the face of a counter-demonstration the townspeople were planning (he destroyed the weapon after the march was cancelled). Daughter Charlene's film celebrates the courage and tenacity of her father, whose first-person narration—like the writings of the late Elie Wiesel—offers searing testimony regarding the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)