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Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust

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The powerful and moving documentary "Hiding and Seeking" gets to the heart of what religion and faith are really all about.

Menachem Daum, although himself an orthodox Jew, is concerned that his two even more conservative sons - yeshiva students living in Israel - are becoming isolationist in their attitudes towards the gentile world. To prove to them that there are good gentiles in the world, he takes them and his wife on a trip to Poland to have them meet the people who risked their lives by hiding the boys' maternal grandfather and two uncles from the Nazis during World War II. In fact, the boys and their mother owe their very existence to the extraordinary compassion and heroism of this "goyim" family. Although Daum was raised to see virtually all non-Jews as enemies, his life experience has taught him that people are people and that good and evil do not break down along sectarian lines. It is this humanistic philosophy that Daum hopes to impart to his sons.

The "hiding" of the title - beyond the obvious reference to the secretion of Jews during the holocaust - denotes what the practitioners of all religions do when they see themselves as somehow separate from and superior to those around them, and, as a result, build up barriers between their own kind and the outside world. This attitude creates divisions that, paradoxically, end up destroying the very people they are designed to protect. The "seeking" comes in Daum's epic quest to prove to his children that all people have the potential for goodness if only they choose to act upon it. Daum's egalitarian spirit and implicit faith in human goodness - despite having himself grown up in the shadow of the holocaust - provide the inspirational beacon than shines forth from the film.

Near the end of the movie, the Daums finally get to meet two of the people who risked their lives to save the family`s relatives. The encounter is profoundly moving and compelling, and even Daum's sons seem transformed by the experience. But are they? "Hiding and Seeking" may be a "feel good" experience, but it isn't a fairy tale, and directors Baum and Oren Rudavsky are not afraid to end on an ambiguous note. Life, we are led to believe, asks a heck of a lot more complicated questions than an 84-minute movie - even a very good 84-minute movie - can answer. Not bad for a film in what is usually a know-it-all genre.

Filled with laughter and tears as well as a profound insight into the human condition, "Hiding and Seeking" is a rewarding and enlightening film.

This documentary of family members from New York meeting up in Warsaw with their sons living in Israel hoping to find the now elderly couple who saved a grandfather was extremely powerful.

The father's hope that the couple was still alive was to teach his skeptical sons that there indeed were righteous gentiles to whom they owed their very existence, because the couple successfully hid their grandfather and his two brothers for 28 months.

I do not want to give away the rest. All I wish to say however, is that I have seen it twice, and wept profusely both times--tears of pure joy. This documentary is for everyone, and raises many moral and humanistic issues. This is a must for everyone's collection, no matter what your faith may be.

I dreaded watching yet another film that would, predictably, open with a pan of rolling Polish countryside, show an elderly peasant, clueless about why he is being filmed, shot in such a way as to make him appear threatening or simply primitive, and hear a indignant voiceover about Poland's "Dark, shameful secrets." Then I would squirm as genuine facts were presented in twisted contexts in order to distort history.

"Hiding and Seeking" is not that anti-Polonist film; it is not Marian Marzynski's "Shtetl," it is not Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah."

The film opens with Menachem Daum, a Jewish American father, playing, for his devout Jewish sons now living in Israel, a recording of a Jewish sermon in which the speaker encourages his hearers to cultivate hostility toward non-Jews.

His sons do not take an unambiguous stance against hatred. Rather, one, especially, struggles to justify prejudice.

Moments like this are always darkly amusing for me as a woman viewer. Every second of every day, men violate, torture, murder, enslave, and commit even more unspeakable crimes against women, and have done so for thousands of years. I wonder how the younger Mr. Daum would feel if I tried to justify hatred of men to his wife or daughter?

I adduce this absurd example merely to highlight: hatred is NEVER moral. Hatred is NEVER justified. Hatred is always a sin and an intellectual failure.

Menachem Daum reports that he grew up with the idea of Poles as the ultimate other, utterly beyond redemption.

The older Mr. Daum takes his sons to Poland. There he insists on leaving prayers at the site of a lost synagogue. One of his sons, especially, speaks openly of how foolish he finds such behavior. He sees no important Jewish heritage in Poland, the land of the evil other.

Mr. Daum points out to his sons that, were it not for Polish Catholics, they would never have come to be. Their grandfather was saved by Polish Catholics during WW II, who hid three Jewish brothers in their barn.

The family visits the Polish saviors, some of whom are still alive. Apparently no warning was given to the Polish family. A van just drives up and a bunch of strangers with a camera pour out. These Polish farmers are gracious and hospitable. They have a pointed question, though. Why, after they risked their lives, and perhaps the life of the village (Nazis often committed retaliatory massacres against entire villages), did the Jews they saved never contact them? "Even just a post card?"

It's an awkward moment. How do you thank people who saved your life under such circumstances? You can't. So, you delay writing the letter, and then you feel ashamed, and then you never write it. Or, perhaps they never wrote because they were afraid of being asked for monetary compensation. Or, as one of the sons points out, perhaps the saved Jews delayed because their experience of being hidden was so traumatic for them that they were no longer "normal." Or, perhaps they delayed because their saviors were, after all, Poles. The ultimate other.

Time passes, and there are new, and deeply moving, developments, which you will see when you watch the film.

The scenes in Poland communicate much: the looks of contempt, hostility, and fear on some of the faces of the Daums, and, then, as the story progresses, looks of thoughtful reflection, and then affection and ease.

Menachim Daum emerges as a towering figure. He is saintlike in his insistence on the full humanity of all persons, regardless of their religion.

In short, I really loved this movie.

And ... yet.

And yet.

Though the film superficially rejects the idea of Poles as others, the film itself treats Poles as others.

The Polish, non-Jewish experience during WW II is not mentioned. The millions of non-Jewish Poles killed in random mass executions, deported, tortured, gassed, experimented on, enslaved.

The Polish churches, museums, and other cultural artifacts deliberately and methodically destroyed by the Nazis.

The fact that Poland was just out from under a lengthy and destructive period of colonization when it was attacked by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, simultaneously. That after the war, when many Jews were -- horrifically -- murdered by Polish non-Jews, as this film points out, there was a civil war, in which Jews also did kill non-Jewish Poles, and Poles killed Poles, etc.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

*Nothing* excuses any act of anti-Semitism any Pole has committed against any Jew. All decent Poles are ashamed of, and work to eliminate, such acts, and they do so as part of a proud tradition stretching back centuries. But we can't understand atrocities until we see them in context, and "Hiding and Seeking" doesn't even hint at that context.

One guesses that the filmmakers, who don't speak Polish, are not even aware of the context.

"Hiding and Seeking" shows Jews as the sole initiators of Polish-Jewish dialogue and reconciliation. This is simply inaccurate. Poles like Wladyslaw Bartoszewski faced prison terms under the Communists for working on better Polish-Jewish relations.

Too, Poles are others in this film. The camera never rests on them exclusively.

Just one example. One of the rescuers, an elderly woman, now lives her entire life bent double. Why? The movie never asks this terribly simple question, that, if you were curious, at all, about this woman's full humanity, you'd want answered.

As the film says, there are some "good goyim." But that schema, that insistence on seeing non-Jews as either "good goyim" or "bad goyim," that is, as seeing non-Jews exclusively as entities in relation to Jews, and missing something so obvious as a disease that turned a woman's body into a walking pretzel, misses the full humanity of anyone who is not Jewish.

Documentaries usually are designed to make you think. This one makes you think AND feel. It starts with the protagonist, Menachem Daum lamenting that religion in general is in danger of being taken over by hate-filled extremists. We find that Daum's two sons are Yeshiva students who have no particular desire to associate with those who aren't Jewish.`Perhaps, through their grandfather, perhaps, through their studies, they've developed the mindset that non-Jews are basically dangerous and that it's best to erect a barrier between them. This is a journey as father reunites his children with the Polish couple who risked their lives to save the children's grandfather and uncles.

The story drags in part, but press on. The end more than accommodates the lack of professional editing, and it has a few life lessons.

Days after watching this film, I still think about it. It is a pleasant little story that takes us someplace unexpected. It isn't about a Jewish family that was wronged by others during WW2 (although they certainly were). It is about a Jewish family that wronged others after the war. The wrong that they perpetrated was simply one of isolating themselves, of setting themselves apart, of closing the door on others, of not saying "Thank You".

Well, that door is opened 50 years later. And the world is a better place because of it. It was such an honor to see this warm, gentle film.

We just started a new facebook group on 1-11-11 called The Way Back - Stories of Poland's Rape, Murder, and Enslavement 70 Years Ago. The purpose of the page is develop a living bibliography of books related to the title of the group. We are also developing a list of related movies. This movie will definitely be going on the list. I highly recommend this movie and I highly recommend the review of Danusha Goska on this page (who is also a member of the group).

I've struggled for years to learn more about and understand my Polish heritage...the journey has led to a place where I can tell you, after all I've read, after all the people I've talked to, and after seeing this film, that there is no ethnic group that should be prouder of where their ancestors came from.

The Irish in America are always so proud to declare their Irishness and love of the old country. But where was Ireland during WWII when they could have been helping save the Jews like the ones of the family that this film portrays? Answer: they declared neutrality and in doing so, failed the Jews, as they failed the Allies.

And the Italians who are so proud of their heritage? Where were they during WWII when the Jews were being slaughtered by the Nazi's?...initially, they were allies of the mass-muderer Hitler. And all of you who are so proud of the sophisticated French culture and cuisine, can you please explain to me why such a big part of that nation (the Vichy and others) directly collaborated with the Nazi's even to the point of forming up a specil unit to fight with, not not a typo, the Nazi's?

And the Germans themselves? So proud of their industrialized might now and the sophisticated and technically superior cars that are purchased and driven by so many Americans...many of you and your mothers and fathers and grandparents gave us Hitler...need I say anymore?

And finally, the Russians, who with their Soviet hats on, got into bed with Hitler and invaded Poland from the east while she was desparetly fighting the Nazi attack in the West. The first thing that the mass-murderer Stalin and his cronies did was to execute over 23,000 Polish officers and leaders in the Polish society who were POWs...they were taken to Russia and on orders diretly from Stalin, individually shot in the back of the head and dumped into mass graves near the Katyn forest. The Soviets then blamed it on the Nazi's and many in Russia still buy into that unforgiveable lie that was kept secret until the 1990's.

Yes that's right, the Poles fought desparetly and courageously unlike many other countries who threw their hands up and surrendered with little to no fight. The Poles had the largest undergound/resistance movement and the free forces of Poland that reconstituted after fleeing occupied Poland, was the third largest fighting force for the Allies.

So what has that possibly got to do with this film? Everything. It puts into context what the Polish nation was going through during WWII and the 45 years after its conclusion. And it leads me to believe that if anyone wants to hold grudges against any nation or group of nations for the slaughter of Jews during WWII, I suggest you start with the ones mentioned above.

And oh by the way, the reward for the Poles fighting against Hitler? Their nation was handed over to the mass-murderer Stalin, a communist government installed, and all freedoms taken away until a movement called Solidarity came along in the 1980's and shook the entire world by non-violently tearing apart the Iron Curtain.

We've invested billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid for the small nation of Israel. I have no problem with this because my country, the USA, could have and should have done more to help save the Jews in Europe from destruction. But this is also true for the USA not helping Poland--American could have and should have done more to aid the resistance inside of Poland and to publicize the Holocaust which it knew about, but decided that other "strategic interests". This is true for our wartime ally--Great Britian.

Most of all, the UK and the USA should have done more to prevent Poland fall into Stalin's hands. This may sound all like ancient and quaint history to you but it all happened 70 years ago, and many are still alive who were born and/or young children druing this era.

The current US administration declared they were re-setting the button with Russia. It is time the reset button was hit with Poland and we started to recognize and develop the special relationship we should have with a people who truly cherish freedom and democracy. This would include, for example, shutting down all the bases in Germany and moving them into Poland where they should have been right from the beginning, 65 years ago.

So to all of you who have every told or laughed at a Polish joke, or mocked any references to Polish culture or contributions to Western civilization, and bought into the Polish stereotypes, including the ones that are portrayed in this films, I propose the joke is in fact on you. But that's the problem with ignorance...it is bliss, so enjoy your bliss. But to those of you who want to learn the truth, come join our facebook page and do a little more reading. Amazon has most of the books you will need only a click away. Pax vobiscum (peace to all of you) and as they sing at the end of this most excellent film: Sto Lat (live a hundred years).

So as the other reviewers have states I don't want to spoil anything in this video. It is about a father who brings his Ultra Orthodox Jewish sons to Poland in the hopes of find the Christian Family who hid their grandfather and brothers from the Nazis during WW2. It is one of the most heart warming and amazingly powerful videos I've ever seen. You are hard pressed to watch something like this and not feel your chest swell with pride for your fellow human beings and your eyers to tear up. There are slow parts and its a documentary not a movie. It is about real people who don't have a magical change of heart when the time is right, but the fact it is real makes it that much more powerful and amazing of a story. I recommend it to everyone, you don't have to be searching for a religious story to in order to enjoy this, from a purely secular view, if such a thing exists, this is still an amazing story and film.

It was the title of this documentary that caught my attention - "Hiding and Seeking:Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust", which made me wonder what the deeper meanings of the words "hiding" and "seeking" were. Menachem Daum (who made this documentary) is a child of Polish Holocaust survivors, and a devout Orthodox Jew residing in Brooklyn, N.Y. His two sons have moved to Israel where they are full-time Yeshiva students. When Daum's wife Rifka comes home one night after attending a lecture where the rabbi preaches hatred of the Goyims (or Gentiles) because of the thousands of years of suffering endured by the Jews at Gentile hands, Daum decides to get a tape of the lecture and goes to Israel. He plays the tape and asks his two sons what they think of the lecture - their response troubles him because although they decry the lecture as being rather extreme, they don't really completely disagree with it either. They both feel comfortable not being in touch with Gentiles as they feel their way of life, completely surrounded by the Jewish way of life, best meets their spiritual and other needs. Daum does not feel comfortable with this, as his own philosophy is quite different - as he says, "The goal of all religion is to bring us to a level where we can see the divinity that's all around us."

Though Daum is glad that his children and grandchildren are being raised in his father's traditions, he is also worried that they inherit his father's beliefs, that "the only good goy (gentile) is a dead one." In his attempts to widen his children's worldview, Daum undertakes a family trip to Poland, where he undertakes to find the Gentile family that was responsible for saving his wife's father and two brothers, a trip fraught with bittersweet memories and some insightful revelations.

The documentary is quite well-filmed and I liked how everything falls into place even though it moves between Brooklyn, Israel and Poland. The actual interviews with Daum's family members (his father-in-law, sons, wife, etc.) as well as interviews with the Polish people are interspersed with actual archival footage of historical events during the Holocaust. There are some truly sad moments in this documentary - as when the Daum family visit an abandoned and destroyed synagogue in the the little Polish town where Rivka's family used to live (though it's not mentioned whether it was the result of the Nazis destroying it or the communists). There are no longer any Jews living in this Polish town, but interestingly, a Polish Gentile graduate student (researching the history of the Jews in the town) helps them find the old Jewish cemetery (which has been almost obliterated), and they finally find the Polish couple who sheltered Rivka's father and his two brothers for two years (1943-1945) during the Holocaust.

It was interesting to see how Daum's two sons come to appreciate that there are good Gentiles in the world, though the ending of the documentary gives one the impression that they aren't totally convinced (there's an element of ambiguity). I wished there had been more discussion about the Polish couple and their family - the penalty for sheltering Jews during the war was almost certain death, and this couple, just simple farmers in the countryside, took great risks to hide these Jews and never heard from them after the war. I wished there was more dialogue on that aspect - and a more in-depth exploration as to their motives, and how the Polish family got through the war and rebuilt their lives after the war. This would have made it more balanced in my opinion. On the whole though - this is an insightful documentary on rapprochement between people of different faiths and cultures and quite well-done.

Without a doubt, this film is much better than the usual anti-Polish films (e. g., Lanzmann's SHOAH, Marzynski's SHTETL) aired previously by PBS (the Public Broadcasting System). While it is gratifying to see, as the film unfolds, a moving away from the demonization of Poles and an appreciation of Polish efforts to rescue Jews, one is nevertheless struck by the depth of Polonophobic sentiment held by some sectors of the Jewish population. It is actually suggested that, if any people are beyond redemption, it is the Poles. Really? I thought that it was the Germans, as embodied by the Nazis, who planned and implemented the Holocaust. Polish contributions to the Holocaust, Jedwabne and the like notwithstanding, were negligible. Whatever wrong Poles did to Jews was trivial compared to what the Germans did to the Jews. One is therefore mystified as to why Jewish anger towards past wrongs continues to be strongly displaced from Germans unto Poles. Is it political?

There is also a veiled anti-Christian reference in the film when it is mentioned that Jews had been persecuted by "others" for 1,900 years. In actuality, Jews had been persecuted long before that. Remember the attempted genocide of Jews at the time of Queen Esther, centuries before Christianity?

While an elderly hunch-backed Polish woman is shown as a rescuer of Jews, it is not mentioned that more Poles are honored at Yad Vashem for the rescue of Jews than members of any other nationality. And no attempt is made by the film to gauge the numbers of Poles who aided Jews but who were never honored at Yad Vashem. The film correctly notes that there was a death penalty imposed on Poles by the Germans for any aid given to Jews. But no mention is made of the fact that sometimes entire Polish villages were destroyed by the Germans in reprisal for a single family's assistance to Jews. The suspicion shown by the Polish neighbor towards the Polish woman who was in the act of aiding the Jews thus finds ready explanation. He probably was not thrilled at the prospect of losing his life along with the rescuers of Jews if the Germans found them, which they almost did.

The film shows the desecration of the old Jewish cemetery without any contextualization, and the uninformed viewer is led to believe that it was an anti-Jewish act. But was it? In fact, it was common for the Communist authorities (which, BTW, the Poles had never chosen in legitimate elections) to convert unused cemeteries into such things as garbage dumps, and to allow neglect and vandalism to take its toll. That happened to not only the Jewish cemetery shown in the film, but also to Polish ones found on the territories seized by the Soviet Union, notably the Lyczakow Cemetery in Lwow (Lviv, Lvov). The film also has a scene of human bones sticking out of walls of what had once been the Jewish cemetery. The obvious implication is that the local Poles had dug out parts of the Jewish cemetery. Did they? It is more likely that the Communist mismanagement of the lands, common throughout the Soviet empire, had caused an acceleration of natural erosion, thus unearthing the cemetery.

For all its advances over previous treatments of Poles and Jews, the film remains firmly within the Judeocentric (Judaeocentric) paradigm of Holocaust materials. There is not so much as a hint of the privations suffered by the Poles in the hands of the Germans: The hundreds of burned Polish villages, the 2-3 million murdered Poles (including roughly half of the entire Polish intelligentsia), the systematic destruction of objects of Polish culture, the planned eventual extermination of much of the Slavic peoples, etc. The growing interest in Polish Jews by increasing segments of the Polish society, as shown by this film, calls for some reciprocity from the Jewish side. Perhaps one day educational materials used in the US will portray the deaths of millions of Jews, Poles, Belorussians, and Ukrainians with equal attention to all the victimized nationalities that had lost millions of citizens to the murderous Nazi German death machine. THAT would be the real breakthrough in Polish-Jewish relations.

This is a documentary about an Orthodox Jewish father (the director), who is disturbed by anti non-Semitic views held by his sons and many people of his religion. To impart tolerance, the director brings his wife and sons to Poland to find the people who saved his father's life during the holocaust. The director and his family find an elderly woman and man who hid their father and two other Jewish men during the holocaust. The Polish farmers said they did it because they pitied the men. The old woman and man were happy to meet their Jewish guests, but wondered why none of the men who's lives they saved, sent a post card to say thank you.

There are scenes in the documentary showing a synagogue that was destroyed during the war and the disrepair of a cemetery where many Jewish people are buried. Yet as other reviewers of this documentary have pointed out, none of these images are placed in any kind of context concerning what the nation of Poland and allof its people went through during the war. Not only were synagogues destroyed but entire cities in Poland, including Warsaw, were completely burned to the ground.

As I had hoped, during the film, I saw a natural progression of tolerance by the director's sons toward non-Jews. Unfortunately one of the last statements made by one of the director's sons, is that the experience taught him that a "few" gentiles can be good although most are not. I found this comment very disturbing given most Poles, Americans, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims would not need such a profound experience to gain an understanding that other people besides themselves can be good. These grown men even asked their grandfather if he would have
saves a Pole's life if the situation had been reversed. He responded by saying no, since the act of hiding Jews was punishable by death. Are the young men in this film saying that to be a good Gentile you need to follow a moral standard which they themselves are not expected to follow?

I also wondered what Orthodox Jews are doing today to help others who find themselves in the same predicament that they were in during the holocaust. Do they rise to arms and place adequate political, financial, and military pressure on African dictatorships in Darfur or Rwanda? Have they ever stretched beyond their own persecution to protect people who are experiencing discrimination or genocide?

I know that despite a person's religion or race the answer is that most people care about the welfare of others. It is disappointing that the Director's sons do not seem to have drawn the same conclusion.