Amidst the endless fluff and preening of each year's Oscars ceremony, there's always a moment or two that stands out. This year that moment belonged to Gerda Weissmann Klein, who accepted the Oscar for Kary Antholis's One Survivor Remembers, a film about Weissmann's terrible experiences as a Jew in Hitler's Europe during WWII. Co-produced by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and HBO, this outstanding (and powerfully filmed) montage of stills, archival film, and on-location footage, combined with the compelling testimony of Weissmann, recounts the story of how a 15-year-old Polish girl's life was irrevocably scarred when first her brother, then her father, and finally her mother were taken away from her, and Gerda herself began an exodus through hell, the lone survivor of her family. Deported to a labor camp in 1942, Weissmann spent 3 years in work camps, before she began the "death march" on January 29, 1945--out of the 2,000 women who began the march, some 150 would survive. Weissmann's painful account of the loss of her family and friends is an extraordinarily moving story of personal tragedy and unspeakable inhumanity, balanced only by the incredible grace of her liberation by Kurt Klein, a German-speaking soldier who found a young woman weighing some 68 lbs. with white hair who broke (and won) his heart with her ironic quotation from Goethe: "Noble be man, merciful and good." An emotional powerhouse, One Survivor Remembers is highly recommended and an Editor's Choice. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)
One Survivor Remembers
(1995) 39 min. $95. Direct Cinema, Ltd. PPR. Color cover. ISBN: 1-55974-587-8. Vol. 11, Issue 4
One Survivor Remembers
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