Format:
1 Online-Ressource (video file 1:38:11)
,
Sound, Black and White
Series Statement:
Socialism on Film
Content:
Feature film about the Kaufmans, a Jewish family living in Czechoslovakia during WWII, who are taken to Terezin (Theresienstadt), a transit base on the way to the extermination camps. [WARNING: contains scenes of dead bodies.]
Content:
The film opens with documentary footage of Adolf Hitler and other high ranking Nazis, intercut with marching troops. On the same day that a Jewish optician is forced to resign, her colleague proposes. As Jews are banned first from attending the theatre, and then from holding jobs in the civil service, her family consider migrating to South America. Their attempts fail, and the elderly members of the family are deeply distressed when they are forced to wear a yellow star. The family host a wedding for the young couple and afterwards, a friend commits suicide to avoid his transportation to Terezin. Soon most of the family is transported; in one harrowing scene, the family file forward into the camp, while coffins are carried out. The grandfather dyes his hair to pass as a young man and in one memorable scene, the prisoners march through the rain past a morose band. Tony poses as a Jewish man to visit Terezin and when he returns finds his father and brother were arrested and "killed while escaping". He is arrested, off-screen, and his wife sent to Terezin. In a dramatic scene, the prisoners realise they are constructing a gas chamber when children transported from a different camp flee from the sight of showers. The film ends with jubilant scenes of liberation and the reunion of husband and wife at a cemetery
Note:
Reproduction of Czechoslovakia, 1948
Language:
Czech
URL:
Deutschlandweit zugänglich
