B Heller
This movie is about the emotional and historical journey taken by Arnon Goldfinger, a filmmaker, as he explores his grandmother's life based on artifacts he finds among her possessions after her death and interviews with people outside the family. Goldfinger's grandparents left Germany in 1936 for Palestine.As the daughter of someone who was similarly expelled from Germany by the Nazis, this movie resonated deeply. The silences, secrets and omissions in the family's communications about themselves and their history are very familiar. Goldfinger does an excellent job of revealing the sadness and confusion created when painful truths are revealed.The movie centers on Goldfinger's great-grandmother Susi, his grandmother Gerda, and his mother Hannah. Matralineality is recognized by the Jewish faith as the means by which Judiasm is conferred on offspring. In this sense, the women are the keepers of the faith. For Goldfinger's family, Gerda did not, or could not, sustain the powerful emotional family life that she knew in Germany. Her daughter Hannah was almost completely ignorant of her grandmother Susi's existence and had a relationship with Gerda that was not particularly close. When Hannah discovers Susi's letters among Gerda's effects, letters that proclaim love for Hannah and fervent hopes for Hannah's safe future, Hannah shrugs and claims she knew nothing about it. This is a profound emotional loss for Hannah, even though she fails to recognize it. Arnon's relationship with his mother Hannah is similarly not particularly close. In the end, this is the movie's most powerful message: how the Holocaust destroyed much more than the millions of lives terminated. Through the thread of the plot that traces the history of a highly ranked Nazi whom Goldfinger's grandparents befriended, it is also clear that the Germans were never held fully accountable for their crimes.Congratulations to Arnon Goldfinger for having the courage to explore the past, no matter where it led.
ematerso
I had never heard of this film as we don't get many documentaries in our area and if it was shown at a Jewish film festival, it would have eluded me. Although this is a documentary focused on the holocaust, primarily whet I took away; is that there are people who want to be realists and deal with the truths of their own and the lives of others and there are those who live lives of denial. It is my opinion that the second type of people actually endanger not only themselves but those they may love very much.I knew people who themselves had been in camps or were the children of those who had been, but I had never stopped to consider the "lapping" over of lives of those who had been persecutors and persecuted. And of course there must be many such instances of this.Many people on the message boards have criticized Aron Goldfinger for confronting the daughter, Edda, of the Von Mildensteins. But why should he not have done so? She said her father was traveling in Japan during the war, but did his grandparents receive any letters from his travels then? I was sort of disgusted with both husband and wife in that situation. that the camps had been Russian and American propaganda, I am roughly the same age as Hannah and Edda and believe me I would have known if all the Jewish children in my school had disappeared. What do they think happened to those people. Where are all the other Arons that should have populated Germany? They never got born because there parents died in the camps.Through one of those odd twists of fate I became involved in a correspondence with a woman whose parents had been very prominent in Hitlar's Nazi Germany. When it was found that one of the couple were not completely Aryan they had to leave Germany and settled with their large family in the town I now live in. When I first heard from one of these children I did research in the newspaper archives here, and like Edda my correspondent was very desirous of explaining away her parents involvement in events that took place in Germany.We here in the United States are supposed to continue to feel guilty about the fact that this country once allowed slavery. No one alive today owned a slave here, and many are descended from people who did not even live in America during slave owning years. But there are many in Germany who lived though those years of 1930 and 1940 and who claim to have no knowledge of anything unpleasant that happened, except to themselves. As we learn Edda and her husband had spent many years living in England.My husband and I are both very pleased that we saw this wonderful documentary and we both liked Aron very much.
Howard Schumann
The death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II is a well known fact. What is less known and generally not talked about is that there were Jews who, for whatever reason, collaborated with the Nazis. Though Jews were forbidden to join the Nazi Party, some were members of the ghetto police that helped round up Jews for deportation, some were known as Judenrats who, under Nazi orders, compiled a list of other Jews to be deported. Others edited pro-Nazi anti-Semitic magazines, turned in fugitive Jews hiding under false identities, or were informers and Kapos who served as Nazi enforcers in the concentration camps.The issue of possible Jewish collaboration comes up in Amon Goldfinger's award-winning documentary The Flat, a story of three generations of Jews seeking to come to terms with uncomfortable events in their family history. A short time after their 98-year-old grandmother dies in Tel Aviv, the son Amon, who is also the writer and director of the film, together with his mother Hannah begin the process of going through mountains of the grandmother's accumulated belongings including books, clothes, antiques, letters, and photos. It is readily apparent that the grandparents, Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, who came to Palestine from Germany at the beginning of the war, retained a strong identity with the old country."They never leave their homeland behind," Amon remarks, noticing that Gerda's books are all in German and that neither of his grandparents ever learned Hebrew. He also discovers a strange two-sided coin that has a Star of David on one side, and a Nazi swastika on the other side. In looking through piles of letters, Amon is baffled by finding a Nazi propaganda newspaper, Der Angriff, containing an article titled "A Nazi in Palestine," showing pictures of his grandparents accompanied by SS member Baron von Mildenstein, and his wife during a trip to Palestine in 1934. After more searching, Amon finds that other letters and photos reveal that the Tuchlers maintained a friendship with the Mildensteins during and even after the war, even though Gerda's mother had been killed at Theresienstadt.Mother and son travel to Berlin to meet with their remaining relatives and try to make some sense of the relationship their grandparents had with the von Mildensteins. They also travel to Wuppertal, Germany to engage in conversation with the Mildenstein's daughter Edda. In the beginning, the discussion is friendly but becomes more and more uncomfortable as Edda repeatedly denies that her father was ever a Nazi official. Unwilling or unable to confront deeply unpleasant truths, Hannah insists that she knows nothing about her parent's friendship with the Mildensteins, had never asked about it, and that children in her day were brought up to not ask any questions.Though the truth is incomplete and still uncertain in its scope and detail, both Edda and Hannah remain in denial that anything out of the ordinary took place, unwilling to confront troubling aspects of the Jewish past. The Flat is short on dramatics but it serves as a potent reminder that, as author Andrew Sullivan has said, "When there's a challenge to our established world-view, whether from the absurd, the unexpected, the unpalatable, the confusing or the unknown, we experience a psychological force pushing back, trying to re-assert the things we feel are safe, comfortable, and familiar," or as Matthew Henry put it, "None are so blind as those who will not see."
