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This intelligently conceived documentary is a meditation on a shtetl (a Jewish ghetto), looking at the small Jewish enclave in the town of Bransk, in Poland. The Bransk shtetl disappeared entirely when the Nazis rounded up all the Jews who hadn't somehow managed to escape and murdered them in Treblinka. But decades later the vanquished community lives on in the memories and thoughts of people on the other side of the Atlantic. The film focuses first on an elderly American whose forebears lived in the shtetl and whose interest in the past led him to having an unlikely pen pal, a young gentile Pole who had developed an interest in Bransk's Jewish history. Traveling to Bransk, the elderly Chicagoan visited where the Jews had lived, and conversations he has with elderly residents are sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes horrifying. Troubling questions over whether someone helped Jews or joined in the persecution come up, and seeing these moral issues develop in the course of the film is fascinating. Indeed, the film isn't so much about the past as about how people look back at it, and how the past has created the present. The young Pole, with an unlikely interest in local Jewish history, visits America and meets with those who managed to escape from Bransk, and later visits Israel. And an elderly clothing store owner from Baltimore who survived the Holocaust in Poland returns to where he hid on the outskirts of Bransk, and his confrontations with the past are both heartening and deeply disturbing. This is a brilliant film that quietly builds momentum and makes a powerful statement about history and how we see it.
-- Robert J. McNamara
Video Description
The true story of Bransk, a small Polish shtetl that died overnight when all its Jewish residents were transported to Treblinka's gas chambers. A haunting story with tragic consequences emerges through interviews, photographs and personal stories.