Surviving History (2011)
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SURVIVING HISTORY presents the life stories of seven individuals who survived the Holocaust in Lithuania, where ninety-five percent of the 240,000-strong pre-war Jewish population was annihilated, many at the hands of Lithuanian shooters. The narrators represent a rapidly diminishing community. Today, approximately 2,800 Jews live in what was once known as the "Jerusalem of the North." Of this number, there are only one hundred and six ghetto and camp survivors and less than one hundred former partisans and soldiers. In most cases, they are the lone survivors among extended families of over one hundred people to have come through alive. Even today, more than sixty years on from the atrocities, as Vilnius takes on the role of European capitol of culture, these individuals face horrific echoes of the past: a recent Neo-Nazi march through the city, the Jewish community center defaced, last August, by images of Swastikas, smokestacks and gallows, a palpable surge in Anti-Semitic rhetoric. The film explores their stories, taking us into the heart of their memories, but it also looks at the specific time and place in which we encounter them and discovers that which is meaningful to them today. Juxtaposing the historical and the contemporary, the private and the personal, it offers a lyrical, poetic, and, at once, harrowing journey through the core of Lithuanian Jewish life.
(28 min.)
(28 min.)