A collection of five videos, produced by the AJR in 2016 under the project name ‘Generation2Generation’ are now available to watch on AJR’s YouTube Channel.
This was a dynamic interactive project linking the generations, telling the story of first generation survivors in their own words through interviews with their grandchildren.
This educational project connected generations through first hand testimonies. Writer and researcher, Ann Rosen and independent film producer Sharon Portner of The Film People collaborated to put together these five films.
The five pairs of interviews represent a diverse range of survivor experience and included survivors from Germany, Poland and Hungary. They describe in detail their experiences in ghettos, labour camps, as individual child slave workers, and on prison barges and death marches.
For each survivor, background research was carried out prior to the interview and a list of around 100 questions was prepared. These covered life prior to the war, deportation and imprisonment and post-war experiences. In all cases, several research gathering meetings took place prior to the filming.
Researchers met and chose grandparents and grandchildren who had a strong rapport and were comfortable with each other, so that they were able to have a dialogue for several hours about painful and troubling life events. In some cases, several grandchildren interviewed their grandparents in turn.
Each recording took around half a day and editing was kept to a minimum, in order to give an authentic representation of the encounter between grandparents and their grandchildren.
Genia Schwartzann was born in 1934 in Radom, Poland. She was smuggled out of the Radom ghetto in July 1942 and taken into hiding, first in the countryside and then moved back to Warsaw where she remained hidden till March 1945. After the war she went to Israel and then settled in England.
George Klein was born in Hungary in 1930. He tells his story to his granddaughter Batsheva.
Helen Aronson was only 12 years old when the German army arrived at her home. She was one of around only 750 people to be liberated from the Łódź Ghetto, out of 250,000 people sent there. Her mother and brother survived with her, but her father was murdered at Chełmno.
Yisrael Abelesz was born in Hungary in 1930. He was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 14. Yisrael survived the camp but his parents and young brother were murdered in the gas chambers.
Manfred Goldberg was born in Kassel, Germany in 1930. Following Kristallnacht, his father was able to get to the UK but Manfred, his mother and younger brother, were not so lucky. They managed to survive in Kassel until 1941 after which followed an incredible odyssey lasting several years, and one which his brother would not survive. The Riga ghetto, Precu labour camp, Stutthof concentration camp, Stolp labour camp, Burggraben, and many other terrible experiences befell them. Eventually Manfred and his mother were liberated and after an extended period of convalescence, they arrived in the UK in September 1946. Manfred was awarded a BEM for services to Holocaust education. Click here to also read Manfred’s My Story book.
Note: this video testimony project is not connected to the organisation ‘Generation 2 Generation’
