Farewell Herr Schwarz (2013)

Original title

Schnee von gestern

Directed by

Yael Reuveny

Genre

documentary film

Country

Germany

Runtime

1h 36m

Rated

0

Rating

8.5 of 10 from 2 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A filmmaker investigates why her great-uncle, a Holocaust survivor, chose to live in East Germany after the war instead of going to Israel. She speaks with both his German family and her Israeli relatives, and visits the town where her family lived before the war.

reflectivecontemplativepersonalpoignantslow-pacedmelancholicintimateinquisitive

What happens

Farewell Herr Schwarz (German: Schnee von gestern (lit. 'snow from yesterday'), Hebrew: היה שלום פטר שווארץ (Farewell Peter Schwarz)) is a 2014 German–Israeli documentary film by Yael Reuveny, in her directorial debut. In it she attempts to answer for herself and her family why her great-uncle, a Holocaust survivor, chose to resettle in East Germany afterwards and start a family there, a life her family in Israel only learned about after his death in the late 1980s. In the process of talking to his family, her family, and visiting the home in Vilnius where her great-uncle and grandmother lived with their family before the war, Reuveny considers issues of forgiveness, reconciliation and the effect of the Holocaust on the third generation of survivors, from her own perspective as an Israeli expatriate in Germany. Separated before the war, Reuveny's great-uncle Feivush "Feiv'ke" Schwarz and his sister Michla, both Lithuanian Jews, had agreed to meet at the train station in Łódź, Poland, if they survived. They were only two members of their family to do so and were in the city in 1945, but the meeting never took place and both assumed the other had died. Michla eventually immigrated to Israel and raised a family there, including Reuveny's mother Etty. Feiv'ke settled near the concentration camp he had been held in, in what later became East Germany, and raised a family as well, but never identified as a Jew, taking the name Peter for himself. The film was released in Germany in April 2014. It has won several awards, including Best Documentary at the Haifa International Film Festival and the DEFA Award at Dok Leipzig. American critics have also responded favorably to the film, after its release there the following year. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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