Now that I am trying to get back into the habit of seeing movies every weekend, I found myself in a mild dilemma for this past weekend: there didn’t seem to be much that I wanted to see that I hadn’t seen already. But there was one, a documentary that I was sure would only be around for the week, and I had seen the trailer recently, probably before Cyrano, and so at least I knew what it was: the story of a Holocaust survivor as she told her life story to her family and friends.
Sadly, the story of Ella Blumenthal is probably a lot more relevant even today than we might wish it was.
The film opens with news stories of anti-Semitic attacks on Jews around the world, ranging from basic assault to murder, and including lot of footage of Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and yes, the “Unite the Right” rally at Charlottesville. But then, we’re told, of a woman who survived the Holocaust who offered something unexpected: the opportunity for one Holocaust denier to listen to her story and not to be judged. That woman was one Ella Blumenthal, and the film tells us how, for her 98th birthday, she finally opted to tell her full story to her extended friends and family. Now, towards the end of the film, it does come out that her now-adult children seemed to already know her story, so I am not sure how much she was telling them that they didn’t already know, but perhaps the bigger thing to keep in mind is she was here telling her story in front of a camera so others could hear about what happened to her.
Essentially, Ella was a Jewish woman born in Poland that, starting when she was only 18 years old, lived through the German occupation, the Warsaw Ghetto, and was held at three different concentration camps before being liberated five years later. She lost 23 of her 24 extended family members, leaving only a niece that seemed to be her age still alive. Ella came very close to death multiple times and managed to survive due to a strong faith, a will to survive, and a few moments that Ella believes were some sort of divine intervention but could just as easily be seen as dumb luck or bureaucratic errors in her favor.
Now, of course, there isn’t exactly footage of Ella’s experiences in the camps, so the film fills in those stories with basic animated sequences. These sequences aren’t exactly Disney-level quality or anything, but they get the job done and nicely compliment Ella’s narration. And then, every so often, the movie cuts to the present to show Ella interacting with family and friends in and around Cape Town, South Africa where she lives.
If anything, the only objection I found to the film when I looked around online was a review that pointed out that Ella did live in South Africa through the worst of that nation’s own struggles over perceived racial superiority and says nothing about it, but the main point of the movie seems to be that Ella came out of her experiences believing the only real way to make the world a better place is to replace hatred with love, and she does her best to live that way every day, showing honor to her Jewish faith, her family, and her friends while appreciating the beauty of the world. It may seem like a simple message, but I would think the Ellas of the world would claim that if we all knew that, then the world would be a better place than it is.
Grade: A
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