#The Story

Synopsis & Director's Note

Sometimes I am asked, “Well, another documentary about the Holocaust?” Spontaneously the image of Europe and the USA come to my mind. A number of leaders win the elections with far-right politics that targets directly on human rights and democratic values. What is worse, is that these politics enchant a large part of societies; exactly what happened with Hitler and Mussolini. I, therefore, conclude that much more needs to be said about Auschwitz as a constant reminder to societies of what the ending of far-right ideology is.

Another question I asked is how different this documentary will be from the already existing ones. My goal, and that of Renée Revah’s, is not to show archival footage and repeat what we have by this time seen in previous documentaries and films. The narrative of this documentary is the personal story of Grandfather Mr. Revah and Renée ancestors. A human dot in the long history of the Holocaust at Auschwitz and Birkenau with the 1,600,000 dead.

The documentary focuses on Renée living with the genealogical trauma of the Holocaust and her decision, through the art of photography, to face it exactly where it was created. Through mental correspondence with her grandfather, it is as if she takes him by the hand, and with him and us, shows him where his own people were murdered in the most inhuman way.

Via the documentary and Renée by using her camera as a tool, we together capture Auschwitz as it is today. However, the image does not only capture the present, but also brings to the surface of memory images, sounds and thoughts, while at the same time acting as wake-up call for the future. It puts us in a time capsule where we see the past but, if we are complacent, the future as well.

Last but not least, what I found fascinating and inspiring is Renée’s courage and strength to look the monster in the eye, plunge into the abyss of the soul and overcome the fears and suffering it creates even for future generations. And this is one of the key messages of the documentary.

Renée Revah is a successful photographer in Greece, feeling tormented though by a trauma; what scientists call as “genealogical”. All her Jewish ancestors, except her grandfather, who hid in Athens during the German invasion, were loaded on death trains in March 1943, in Thessaloniki, and taken to the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, where they were exterminated by the Nazis.

When Renée was a child, she used to stare for hours at a family photo from a time when all her ancestors posed happily and unaware of the horrible end that awaited them. She would hear the stories from her father, who in turn had heard them from his.

Renée makes the decision to deal with this genealogical trauma and visit the place of its creation; the two death camps, where one million 2 hundred thousand people died. The majority of the victims were coreligionist Jews.

Taking black and white photographs, Renée follows the path of her ancestors from the trains of Thessaloniki to Auschwitz and Birkenau. She mentally converses with her grandfather who is no longer alive and died before she was born.

In her mind swirls a phrase of Eva Mozes Kor who survived while being a guinea pig at the hands of Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz camp: “I believe with every fiber of my being that every human being has the right to live without the pain of the past.”

The documentary follows Renée as she tries to heal her genealogical trauma and focuses narratively on four points.

The first narrative element
The first narrative element is Renée’s mental correspondence with her grandfather, who never wanted to visit the places where all his loved ones perished. As Renée crosses the camps alone, she conveys images, feelings, and thoughts to him, and asks questions that sometimes are answered and other times are not. “Tell me,” Renée wonders as she walks through the beautiful nature surrounding the two camps, “how can beauty and death have the same face?”
The second element
The second element is Renée’s powerful photographs of the outer landscape and interior buildings of the camps. Her lens – and the lens of the documentary – depict the beauty and serenity of nature that coexist with the horrific incidences that took place in the camps.
The third narrative element
The third narrative element is her great-grandmother’s knitted transparent fabric, found in a trunk. This fabric becomes the connection between the past and the present. Renée carries it inside the wagon that left from Thessaloniki, then takes it to the camps, where we finally watch it swirl in the depths of the Vistula River, where the Nazis scattered the ashes of their victims.
The fourth narrative element
Finally, the fourth narrative element symbolizes man’s perpetual struggle to find his freedom: the colorful bird trapped in one of the women’s chambers, persistently tries to free itself... It flies, hits the window glass and retreats. The bird recovers its strength and repeats the effort, which looks like it is going to last forever. It makes many attempts, until at some point it finds an escape route and flies to freedom.