Samuel Goldwasser

Filmmakers Renee Sotile and Mary Jo Godges offer up a short profile of Holocaust survivor Samuel Goldwasser, who speaks about his experience during the war years as newsreel footage and family photographs bring the period between 1939 and 1945 to life. While he was preparing for his bar mitzvah in Radom (a city south of Warsaw), the Polish army drafted Samuel's father, who later lost a leg in combat and returned home. Shortly thereafter, the German occupiers barricaded the neighborhood, which fell geographically within the confines of what would later become the Jewish Ghetto. Already perilous, life became much worse in 1942 when the Germans began relocating remaining citizens to concentration camps, with Samuel and his sister winding up in Treblinka. Samuel was eventually sent back to Radom—now a prison labor camp—but he wouldn't see either his sister or his parents again. After an unsuccessful escape attempt, the Germans sent Samuel to a total of four other detention facilities in Poland and Austria, where he lived among other Poles, Russian POWs, and Germans thought to be undesirable (Samuel notes that “they killed their own people”). Goldwasser offers an unsentimental recollection of the many stops along his journey to hell and back in a conversation that recognizes the complexity of human experience: he recalls a German soldier, for instance, who took a shine to him, as well as a fellow Jew who snatched an apple from his hand. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (K. Fennessy)