Customer Reviews

Tak For Alt - Survival of a Human Spirit [VHS]

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When filmmakers Laura Bialis and Brody Fox along with Judy Meisel herself presented this film in my documentary film course at UCSB, the students were deeply moved. One student told the filmmakers that although he had studied the Holocaust, as a non-Jewish person he had never felt an emotional connection with a Holocaust survivor. This film, he said, changed all that by bringing tears to his eyes.

I too am moved by this beautiful film that is both informative and affecting, horrifying and heartening. What we see and hear in the film is Judy Meisel's life story, as she recollects and narrates it eloquently in interviews shot in the United States and captured on the fly as she visits the European countries where she spent the war and postwar years. We are given archival and present day footage of the village of Jasvene, Lithuana; the Kovno ghetto; Stutthof concentration camp in Poland where Meisel's mother was killed in the gas chamber and where Judy and her sister Rachel were incarcerated; and the cities of Gdansk and Copenhagen, the latter being the place where the sisters found refuge as the war ended. One of the many extraordinary things about the film is the way it begins and ends by documenting the actions of people, including Meisel herself, who were willing to risk their personal safety and even their very lives to help others in the face of racial and religious prejudice.

Another extraordinary thing about the film is that, while it is undoubtedly concerned to document specific historical events of the Holocaust, it also elasticizes the doggedly realist conventions of the Holocaust documentary. The film uses documentary reenactment and other experimental strategies to convey the subjectivity of the child Judy, and, I submit, to raise that possibility that memory can be frail and variable even in the face of events that are all too real. A scholar of history and memory told me she was offended by the film's use of reenactment in the otherwise correct biography. This scholar argued that the brief snippets of black and white footage, in which we see Judy's mother's hands -- or rather, hands that stand for those of Judy's mother -- braiding challah bread and lighting the Sabbath candles, should have no place in a film about tragic history. If filmmakers are allowed to combine genuine and fictive footage, she argued, won't that make us vulnerable to charges that all Holocaust footage is manipulated or at least manipulable? I believe the risk is worth taking and I appreciate the film's particular use of reenaqctment. For one thing, there is no attempt to pass these sequences off as archival footage. In the context of the life being narrated, we realize that even if there had been home movies taken of everyday scenes in Jewish family life, the footage would not be extant. Thus the footage evokes Judy's happy childhood before deportation, while at the same time standing as an obvious substitute for all that has been lost. We know more through reenactment because we know what can no longer be represented except though flights of filmic imagination.

Elsewhere in the film we hear Meisel's account of how the liquidation of Stutthof turned to chaos when the Allied bombs scattered the Nazi guards. What we see, intercut, are hand-held shots -- created by the filmmakers -- of the road leading out Stutthof and archival photos of a forced march, if not *the* forced march out of Stutthof. Over the shots of the present-day road we hear voices shouting commands in German. In reality, these are the voices of actors, cast and directed by the filmmakers and added to the scene. The combination is emotionally affecting, and, at the same time, it invites the spectator to assume a critical distance from the action. Obviously faux, the voices juxtaposed with the present and past images encourage us to reflect on the complicated mise-en-scene of historical representation. How do we remember the past and how do we represent memory through film? The road was and is a real road, but it is presented within a sequence that uses odd angles, purposefully unsteady camerawork, rapid cutting, and reenactment to evoke the teenaged Judy's amazement and the difficulty she experienced, and we now experience, taking cognizance of catastrophic past events. Such shots are simultaneously document and fiction, imagination in memory made animate.

On a subject that has given rise to many well-known films, TAK FOR ALT stands out for its exciting new approach and emotional resonance. A brilliant, affecting, deeply creative work.

This CD at 60 min. in length tells the story of one woman's escape from the NAZIs to Denmark. Although the escape is made at the end of the war and does not dwell on the many acts of courage that occurred during the race to help Jews to safety in Sweden, it amply demonstrates the prevailing attitude in Denmark. Danish Jews were Danes pure and simple. What happened to some Danes concerned them all. A good example that in a world gone mad there was still some sanity to be found in the tiny kingdom of Denmark. This CD is worthwhile hour spent, and an excellent teaching tool.