STORIES OF JEWISH RESISTANCE, TRAGEDIES & TRIUMPHS – NONFICTION
Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Leslie Gelrubin Benitah‘s documentary The Last Ones of Auschwitz collects the stories of the last remaining Holocaust survivors, with a focus on those who endured the horrors there. Filmed around the globe over the course of seven years, the project documents more than 200 testimonies and includes more than 30 from Auschwitz survivors and Miami-based Holocaust survivors David Schaecter, Saul Blau, Hedy Fladell, and Irene Zisblatt. In Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, Rachel Cockerell unearths the forgotten Galveston Plan – a bold 1907 effort to create a Jewish homeland in Texas. Through letters, diaries, and archival voices, she reconstructs the journey of a group of rebels, following their descendants across wars and continents as they strive to preserve their Jewish identity. Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance uncovers the dark legacy of Joe Dunthorne’s great-grandfather Siegfried – a brilliant but eccentric German Jewish chemist who developed chemical weapons and gas-mask filters for the Nazis. Drawing on Siegfried’s rambling, partially translated deathbed memoir, Dunthorne travels across Europe to confront family secrets, inherited guilt, and the evasive nature of truth. In Pamela D. Toler‘s The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany, she unearths the largely forgotten story of American journalist Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune‘s Berlin bureau chief from 1925 to January 1941. During Hitler’s rise to power, Schultz witnessed how the Nazis misreported the news and attempted to control the foreign press through bribery and threats, a scenario that resonates loudly – and chillingly – today.
JEWISH LIFE & CULTURE PROGRAMS ARE PRESENTED BY
Buy Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land – Cockerell
Buy Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance – Dunthorne
Buy The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany – Toler
