Mark Daniel Cohen is the Coordinator of Graduate Studies at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and a freelance author who writes regularly on art in New York City, with over 400 articles, art reviews, and essays on contemporary art and aesthetics in publication in a variety of art exhibition catalogues and commercial, university, and art school journals. He has recently completed two books, The Art of Kenneth Snelson and The Judenporzellan of Izhar Patkin, as well as contributing chapters to Chawky Frenn: Art for Life’s Sake, Abstraction in the Elements, the second edition of Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes by Richard Kostelanetz, The Teutloff Collection at Brock University, Canada, and Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition. He is currently working on several volumes: The Prosthetic Soul, a book concerning the Florentine art of the Italian Renaissance, and two philosophical works, The Power of the Right and Treatise on Poetic Reason. e-mail : cohenmd@aol.com Web: http://homepage.mac.com/cohenmd1/Art_Writing/
At the Altar of Her Memories
Produced and directed by
Tova Beck-Friedman ©2005
Running Time: 27 minutes
In Hebrew with English subtitles
www. http://tbfstudio.com/altar.html
Synopsis:
At age seventeen, following her liberation from Bergen-Belsen Bracha Ghilai
came to Israel to start her life over. As part of her healing process she
established a puppet theater. Sixty years later, surrounded by her puppets Bracha
recalls the dire events of her youth. Through a mix of storytelling, puppetry and
archival photographs we experience the anguish of her narrative while she
unlocks chapters from her painful past. Her stories range from the heartwrenching
description of her separation from her nephew, Nisan, to the powerful
and poignant account of incredible power of endurance, survival and the guilt that
accompanies it.
There are numerous worthy reasons for making films concerning the
Holocaust, and none of them are obvious. By now, the essential facts of the greatest
atrocity in history are well known, and the very horror of it is in the unchanging
repetitiveness of those facts—a hellish nightmare repeated millions of times over.
The specifics of the individual stories cannot be reported often enough, but our sense of the
Holocaust as being ultimately “unimaginable” indicates how little we understand, and
how much more there is to be conveyed. We know much of the details, but we feel we
may never comprehend them. What we need is something more than facts, statistics, and
even narratives—what we need is testimony, not merely of the circumstances the
survivors who make their testimony had to suffer, but of the weight and import of those
events. We need to understand the felt reality of those facts and the intimacies of their
experience, in order finally to know the value of them, the meaning of them—to know
the true darkness of the horror. Words like “evil” and “atrocity” are too easy—they are
mere words. We need to be made to see into the heart of the evil, to feel it, if we are ever
to feel a constant need for vigilance against its return.
In her wonderful film “At the Altar of Her Memories,” producer and
director Tova Beck-Friedman achieves the distinction of taking a step further into the
heart of the evil by taking us into the heart of one of its survivors. Beyond reporting the
story of one victim—Bracha Ghilai, Beck-Friedman’s aunt who suffered the torments of
both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen—the director shows us her response after the hideous
facts: the inner workings of her soul after the terror, and the slow re-surfacing of her own
heart. What we learn is that there can be a theme running through the life of a survivor,
that a survivor needs to and can redeem herself from her experience, and that she can,
almost through a necessary impulse, restore the very thing that the Nazis, or any bringer
of the nightmare, wishes to destroy. In “At the Altar of Her Memories,” Beck-Friedman
reveals to us more than a story—she opens a life in which innocence calls to be protected,
and in which art serves as a restorative force, a force restorative of innocence itself.
The story told by Ghilai is simple to recount. Having grown up in
Beregszasz, Czechoslovakia, at the age of fifteen, she and much of her family were sent
to Auschwitz. For a brief period prior to that, Ghilai along with all the Jews of
Beregszasz were forced to live in a ghetto, where she played constantly with her young
nephew Nisan. When placed on the transport train for Auschwitz, she protected Nisan,
only to suffer the shock upon arriving at the camp of being forced to separate from him,
never to see him again. When eventually the Russian army pushed close to the camp, the
prisoners were evacuated, in Ghilai’s case to Bergen-Belsen, where she met an older
sister she had not seen since her internment. Her sister died only one month before the
camp was liberated. Ghilai emigrated to Israel, where she and her husband began a
puppet theater. She did not speak of her experiences for years, until only a few years ago,
when she saw a painting by Samuel Bak in Yad Vashem, a painting of a young girl
standing at the feet of the corpse of her mother, holding a pair of shoes. It reminded
Ghilai of her sister’s death and her first impulse to take her sister’s shoes, better than
hers, off the corpse, in order to survive. From the moment she saw the painting, Ghilai
has used the puppets of her theater to present her story, the story of her nephew, and the
story of her sister.
In the film, Beck-Friedman presents the stories through the words of
Ghilai, not only through direct testimony to the camera, but also, when telling the stories
of her nephew and sister, in the form of a puppet-theater performance. The presentation
conveys unmistakably, in a feeling so intimate it is like a heat in the blood, the continuing
horror of the memories, memories that can be approached only by being displaced into
the mouths of puppets. But there is more, there is an appropriateness to the use of
puppets, as items from children’s theater. They heighten the implication of what is being
recounted—the assault on innocence, the destruction of the world of a child, and the
demolishing of the purity of heart that only a child can have. The implication is in all the
details of this survivor’s stories: the need to protect her young nephew; the first shock of
horror at losing him forever, a child losing an even younger child; the discovery of her
sister with whom Ghilai spent her childhood only then to lose her sister again. From the
performance by puppets, we can feel the aura, the very mind, imagination, and soul of a
child, and the quality of the feeling begins to enter what would otherwise be to us just
facts. We feel something of the simple purity of nature, the easy and direct goodness of
the soul of a child, and we begin to feel the weight of the nightmare by entering the
child’s world.
We feel, as well, the restorative potential of art in the theatrical
presentation, fused with the imagination of childhood in the use of a child’s art, and
something of that purity seems indestructible. It survives—childhood innocence, the very
innocence Ghilai tried to protect in her nephew—it remains in the form of art, it stays to
tell its story, it outlasts the evil that threatened it.
It is to Back-Friedman’s enormous credit that every aspect of the film
serves to achieve this effect, to instill this felt understanding. The stories are pared down
to the details that matter, the portions that show us children in the center of the
maelstrom, without the recounting of the facts of the larger situation. We are focused in
tightly on the world of children. When Ghilai’s direct testimony is replaced by the
performance of the puppets, the puppets are treated by the camera just as Ghilai has
been—they are shown in close-up, enacting the story-telling, as if they were truly
speaking. We see them as a child would, as if there were nothing in the world but them
and us. In particular, there is the framing of the film with recitations of two letters Ghilai
has written to her dead sister, who she repeatedly dreams is still alive. Those two
moments—presented at the beginning and the end of the film, bracketing it—are
moments in which Ghilai returns to the time of her own childhood, the time in which her
sister was still alive, and she takes us with her. It is heart-breaking.
The breaking of the heart is something more meaningful, something more
urgent, than the mere knowledge that there is evil in the world. It is the knowledge of
why it matters that evil exists, and it is the intimate awareness of what evil is through
feeling what it does. Evil is the threat of utter destruction of something that is precious
and indispensable—the simple, transparent, warm and glowing goodness that we all once
knew how to feel. It is only by being brought to feel it again that we can understand not
merely that evil lives but why evil is evil, that we can understand what threat it makes by
being brought to feel what precious thing it attempts to eradicate. We can know the
nature of the darkness, know the reason that it is darkness, by being made to know again
how pure a thing goodness is—by knowing it as we all have once known it, as known
with the open heart of a child, by remembering how uncorrupted a thing it is to recognize
the difference between right and wrong, by understanding goodness as a fact, by recalling
that it is as clear as vision, as loud as song, as fresh as joy. It is the achievement of “At
the Altar of Her Memories” that the film does not merely show the shocking truth of evil
but also the tenderness in the center of all our souls that cries to be protected.
Director’s statement:
Al Mizbah Ha’zichronot (At the Altar of Her Memories), is the story of my aunt's
Holocaust experience told through her own voice and through her puppets.
Interweaving puppetry and story telling my aunt, Bracha Ghilai, who spent her
adolescent years in concentration camps, unlocks chapters from her painful past.
I have known Bracha for almost all of my life. Following liberation from Bergen-
Belsen she came to Israel to be with her older brother (my father) who escaped
the war. She was seventeen at the time and assumed the role of an older sister -
- we were quite close, but not a word was uttered about her life during the war.
It was only a couple of years ago that I began to hear of her experiences during
the Holocaust. A museum painting of a barefoot girl holding a pair of shoes in
front of a dead woman had jolted Bracha’s memory and led her to break a half a
century of silence, lifting the protective lid that suppressed her all those years.
As part of her healing process she established a puppet theater. Sixty years later,
surrounded by her puppets Bracha recalls the dire events of her youth. Through a
mix of storytelling, puppetry and archival photographs we experience the anguish
of her narrative while she unlocks chapters from her painful past. Her stories
range from the heart-wrenching description of her separation from her nephew,
Nisan, to the powerful and poignant account of incredible power of endurance,
survival and the guilt that accompanies it.
Tova Beck-Friedman
CREDITS:
Produced & Directed by
Tova Beck-Friedman ©2005
TBF Studio production
Cinematography: Tova Beck-Friedman
Music:
Hebrew Lullaby by Joseph Acharon
Hagai Shaham, violin
Arnon Erez, piano
Biddulph Recordings
Featuring:
Bracha Ghilai
Dancers in The Dream:
Nathalie Croix
LaDazha Moll
Editing:
Tova Beck-Friedman
Audio mixing:
Keith Strand
Archival photographs courtesy:
Josef Rosensaft Bergen-Belsen Archive at Yad Vashem.
Auschwitz Album, Yad Vashem Archive.
Bracha and Bezalel Ghilai
Painting:
Mother is No More, 1946, by Samuel Bak (b.1933)
Gouche on paper, Gift of the artist, collection of Yad Vashem Art Museum,
Jerusalem.
Special thanks to:
Bracha Ghilai; Bezalel Ghilai; Zak Friedman; Sara Muller; Miri Ben-Shalom;
Barak Friedman; Dana Friedman; Rami Beck; Gabriela Moraru; Shosh Dagan;
Lynn Reiser; Nava Schrieber; Tzipi kichler
Contact:
Tova Beck-Friedman
212 – 686 – 9031
tova@tbfstudio.com
(2110)
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