(clockwise from top left) Inside the courtyard; painting by Yehuda Podeswa currently on display in Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Museum: Children pulling a sewage container in the ghetto;


Jeremy Podeswa in his father’s footsteps; Gate to the courtyard where Yehuda Podeswa lived; interior doorway to courtyard; current day graffiti, said to denigrate a local soccer team.


Return to the Lodz Ghetto A filmmaker journeys back to his survivor father’s wartime home by David Bale


Within a year of invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis sealed the more than 230,000 Jews of Lodz into a 4.3-square-kilometer ghetto. Among them was a young artist, Yehuda


Podeswa. When the ghetto was later liq- uidated, he was transferred to Auschwitz. He was the sole survivor in his family and aſter the liberation, he encountered a Ca- nadian soldier, whose help he sought in finding an aunt in Toronto. He didn’t know her name, only that she was living safely – a world away. When the soldier returned to Canada, he


put an ad in a newspaper, which the aunt miraculously spotted. She ended up sponsor- ing her nephew’s immigration, and Yehuda started a new life in Toronto. Fast forward to 2010. Yehuda’s son is film-


30 friday night Winter 2011


maker Jeremy Podeswa, the Emmy Award nominated director of the Steven Spielberg war epicTe Pacific.When HBO sent him to Poland for the Eastern European premier of the acclaimed TV miniseries, Jeremy de- cided the time had come to visit the place where his father lived in the Lodz Ghetto. His father did not have an exact address,


but he did describe the location: across from a large market in a courtyard accessed through a large red brick gate. “We found it quite easily,” recalls Jeremy.


“Te market is still across the road, the en- trance to the courtyard is still there.” His father’s building is no longer there,


but everything else is almost exactly the same as it was six decades ago. “Te other buildings are of the same vintage; they were


still there,” reports Jeremy. “It makes you feel like you’re stepping back in time for the most part.” Tat feeling was eerily punctuated by


“It makes you feel like you’re stepping back in time.”


some graffiti on the courtyard walls depict- ing a Star of David, which Jeremy calls “very disturbing.” Te explanations for the Star, he heard, centered around modern day local soccer lore. “It’s considered a negative way of slurring the rival team.” In the years since the war, his father has


had no interest in returning, but has shared his memories with family. “It was interest- ing having something concrete to look at aſter years of imagining things,” says the younger Podeswa, who made his father’s ordeal come alive in the way he knows best — through the lens of his camera.


fn Photos by Jeremy Podeswa


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