26 The Jewish Herald • Friday, March 22, 2013 29 F I L M
Filmmaker Turns Camera On his Own Holocaust Experience B
Penny Schwartz
OSTON — When he was f ive years old, Marian
Marzynski’s parents hatched a plan to smuggle him out of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was 1942, and Marzynski and his family were among the 400,00 Jews rounded up two years earlier by the Nazis, confined to the 1.3-square-mile ghetto in the heart of the city. To stay alive, Marzynski’s parents warned him, you must forget who you are. That lesson in survival shep-
herded the young boy over the next three years as he hid from his tormentors, separated from his parents. He eventually be- came one of the few child survi- vors of the Warsaw Ghetto. Marzynski (born Marian
Kuszner) would go on to be- come an Emmy Award-win- ning documentary filmmak- er in the United States. Now, 70 years later, after a career in which he made acclaimed films about Polish Jewry and the Ho- locaust, Marzynski has trained the camera on himself, telling his own story and those of oth- er survivors in “Never Forget to Lie,” a film scheduled for nation- wide broadcast on April 30 on the PBS series “Frontline.”
Kathmandu pg. 45 “Do you have wine for the Sed-
er?” asked one of the newcom- ers. “We found some California
wine,” I said. He reached into his back-
pack and pulled out a bottle of Manischewitz kosher-for-Pass- over red wine. I don’t know his name. I like
to think of him as Eliyahu. He had just arrived in Kathman- du after a trek in the Himala- yas and had brought the wine,
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To stay alive, Marian Kuszner’s parents warned him, you must forget who you are In the hour-long film co-
produced with Jason Longo, Marzynski retraces his early years, chronicling his parents’ secular lives in prewar Warsaw, their confinement in the ghetto, his escape to the Aryan side of the wall, and his journey to the Catholic orphanage where he em- braced life as a dutiful altar boy. With an artful, empathic hand,
he tells the stories of other sur- vivors as well, capturing their childhood memories as they grapple with the trauma and loss of their early lives. There are uplifting scenes, too, of Jewish culture and heritage being cele- brated in the streets of Krakow. “If there is news in this film,
it’s about a new perception of the Holocaust,” Marzynski said in an interview in his suburban Bos- ton home. “It’s basically a ques- tion of unfinished business. We are coming back to our childhood — a story of stolen childhood.” Most Holocaust films have fo-
cused on the harsh realities of life in the concentration camps, not child survivors, so Marzyns- ki views his film as a corrective of sorts, and a timely one. Child survivors are the last witnesses, and Marzynski says they have
a box of matzoh and one Hag- gadah thinking he would hold a Seder alone. By the time we sat down an
hour later, there were 29 of us, Americans, Israelis and Can- adians, all Jews tied together by an ancient bond. Outside as the sun set, the laughter and revelry of Holi was dying down. We read and sang the entire Haggadah. We asked questions, we discussed. As it is written: “The more one tells about the Exodus the more he is praise- worthy.” Nepalese children attracted
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ated director can hardly speak. “It’s a quiet moment,” Rivo
Warsaw. Unlike most survivors, Marzynski remained in Poland with his mother, who remarried another survivor, and took his stepfather’s name. Growing up under Commu-
nist rule, Marzynski said he understood the political reali- ties. The message was, “We all suffered from the Nazis. Every- one’s equal. Don’t brag about be- ing Jewish, that you suffered more than other people.” Marzynski became a jour-
Marian Marzynski returns to Poland to tell his story and that of other children
reached a point in their lives where they are ready to share their stories with the world. “Other directors come in and
tell the stories of other people,” said Sharon Pucker Rivo, an ad- junct associate professor of Jew- ish film at Brandeis University. “Marian is a native insider. He knows the language, the territory. He didn’t need intermediaries.” After the war, Marzynski re-
united with his mother. His fa- ther, who escaped a transport train to a death camp, was mur- dered in the forest outside of
by our singing stood outside the restaurant, faces pressed into the window. They had seen West- erners and the hippies that had inundated Kathmandu since the 1960s do all kinds of strange things, but never something like this. The king and queen of Ne- pal looked at us from their por- trait on the restaurant wall. We opened the door for Elijah. Surely he would come, even to Kathmandu. Does Elijah still come to Kath-
mandu? I pose the question to Rabbi Chezki Lifshitz who runs the Chabad House in Kath-
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nalist and a successful radio and television personality. But in 1969, during a wave of politi- cally motivated antiSemitism in Poland, Marzynski fled to Den- mark with his family — his wife, their young son and his mother and stepfather. Later, they reset- tled in the United States. “We did not want our son to
have to live the lie that I had to live,” he says. In “Never Forget to Lie,”
Marzynski ventures for the first time into the forest where his fa- ther was murdered. The camera lingers on the filmmaker as he holds his father’s watch, telling viewers that it is the first time he is wearing it. For a few moments, the otherwise voluble, opinion-
mandu for the past 14 years with his wife Chani. “Eliyahu comes every year
because every year we need a miracle to put together a Seder for more than a thousand peo- ple,” says the affable 39-year- old rabbi. “One year the con- tainer overturned and I had to send a Russian M-17 helicop- ter and a small plane to fly ev- erything to Kathmandu. An- other year there was a military emergency and curfew restric- tions. We sent a fax to Brooklyn, using the only fax machine in town, to ask whether to cancel the Seder. “The rabbi said everything
would be alright. “The next day the curfew
was lifted. “Sometimes there is no gas
so we have to cook by burning wood. There are only six hours of electricity a day and one year the five-star hotel in whose refrigerators we had stored all the cooked food did not turn on the generator and everything spoiled. We called in dozens of Israeli volunteers and cooked everything from scratch mak- ing it just in time. Every year there is another story.” The interview with Lifshitz
takes place in Israel where he is visiting a few weeks be- fore Passover. With a beard- ed, cherubic face, he is artic- ulate and surprisingly mel- low, perhaps induced into shan- ti, tranquility, after so many years in the East. It doesn’t faze him that the truck can get held
said. “There’s no swelling mu- sic, no gimmicks. You can see he is moved.” Marzynski hopes the film
reaches a wide audience, espe- cially non-Jews. The survivor stories reflect the universal hu- man experience, he says. Marzynski got a taste of that
broader resonance in January, when he and his wife were invit- ed to join a group of 560 Europe- an high-school students and 85 teachers on a trip from Tusca- ny to Poland on the Treno della Memoria (“train of memory”), an Italian Holocaust education project. After visiting Auschwitz- Birkenau and seeing his film, many students approached him, fascinated to meet a survivor. He says he was impressed by how eager they were to learn about this history, and their perspec- tives were completely changed. “I want non-Jews to know the
Holocaust in such a way that they can apply it to their own lives,” Marzynski said. “This is the job I am doing, transfer- ring the Holocaust experience to a new audience.”
“Never Forget to Lie” airs on Tues- day, April 30, at 10 p.m. on PBS.
up at the border, or that Kath- mandu can plunge into dark- ness via one of the frequent power outages. He is confident that in a country with no basic infrastructure and frequent political upheavals, it will al- ways work out. “It always does by some mir-
acle,” he says. The first Chabad-led Kath-
mandu Seder took place in 1987 with 300 participants. The number grew to a high
of 1,800 in 2002 and stabilized at more than 1,000 each year. Chabad organizes two other Sed- ers in Nepal, one in Pokhara, a city at the base of the Annapur- na Circuit. The second Seder, in Manang, is billed as the highest Seder in the world, 3,590 meters up in the Himalayas. Two young volunteer rab-
bis, from among the 10 or so that come each year to help, are flown in by helicopter along with provisions. After all these years of ex-
perience, Lifshitz has it down. The first two of the four tradi- tional cups of wine are grape juice to keep things calm. To- wards the second half of the Seder, after two cups of wine, more than 1000 Israelis pound on the tables and stand on chairs bringing the house down with a giddy, boisterous, full- throated rendition of “Echad Mi Yode’a.” At the appropriate time, Lif-
shitz opens the door for Elijah. Surely he will come — especial- ly to Kathmandu.
o
Photo WGBH
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