Product Description: This award-winning documentary tells the dramatic and emotional story of a Jewish father who journeys with his two ultra-orthodox adult sons back to Poland to try to find the Christian farmers who hid their family from the Nazis. To his sons, like many offspring of Polish Holocaust survivors, this is a country whose people are incurably anti-Semitic and beyond redemption. His hope is to instill in his insulated and narrow-minded sons the power of interfaith tolerance and trust.
Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky's provocative and moving documentary HIDING AND SEEKING was featured at the Barcelona Conference of World Religions and the winner of the North American Interfaith Film Festival Best Film Award for 2004, and Grand Prix in the Warsaw International Jewish Film Festival.
In the course of telling its compelling and dramatic story, HIDING AND SEEKING explores the Holocaust's effect on faith in God as well as its impact on faith in our fellow human beings. It embeds these issues in a deeply personal inter-generational saga of survivors, their children, and their children's children. Filmed in Jerusalem, Brooklyn and Poland, the film focuses on the filmmaker's attempt to heal the wounds of the past by stopping the transmission of hatred from generation to generation.
Closing Doors Hurts Others Days after watching this film, I still think about it. It is a pleasant little story that takes us someplace unexpected. It isn't about a Jewish family that was wronged by others during WW2 (although they certainly were). It is about a Jewish family that wronged others after the war. The wrong that they perpetrated was simply one of isolating themselves, of setting themselves apart, of closing the door on others, of not saying "Thank You".
Well, that door is opened 50 years later. And the world is a better place because of it. It was such an honor to see this warm, gentle film.
Jewish Faith and Jewish Tolerance examined This is a documentary about an Orthodox Jewish father (the director), who is disturbed by anti non-Semitic views held by his sons and many people of his religion. To impart tolerance, the director brings his wife and sons to Poland to find the people who saved his father's life during the holocaust. The director and his family find an elderly woman and man who hid their father and two other Jewish men during the holocaust. The Polish farmers said they did it because they pitied the men. The old woman and man were happy to meet their Jewish guests, but wondered why none of the men who's lives they saved, sent a post card to say thank you.
There are scenes in the documentary showing a synagogue that was destroyed during the war and the disrepair of a cemetery where many Jewish people are buried. Yet as other reviewers of this documentary have pointed out, none of these images are placed in any kind of context concerning what the nation of Poland and allof its people went through during the war. Not only were synagogues destroyed but entire cities in Poland, including Warsaw, were completely burned to the ground.
As I had hoped, during the film, I saw a natural progression of tolerance by the director's sons toward non-Jews. Unfortunately one of the last statements made by one of the director's sons, is that the experience taught him that a "few" gentiles can be good although most are not. I found this comment very disturbing given most Poles, Americans, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims would not need such a profound experience to gain an understanding that other people besides themselves can be good. These grown men even asked their grandfather if he would have saves a Pole's life if the situation had been reversed. He responded by saying no, since the act of hiding Jews was punishable by death. Are the young men in this film saying that to be a good Gentile you need to follow a moral standard which they themselves are not expected to follow?
I also wondered what Orthodox Jews are doing today to help others who find themselves in the same predicament that they were in during the holocaust. Do they rise to arms and place adequate political, financial, and military pressure on African dictatorships in Darfur or Rwanda? Have they ever stretched beyond their own persecution to protect people who are experiencing discrimination or genocide?
I know that despite a person's religion or race the answer is that most people care about the welfare of others. It is disappointing that the Director's sons do not seem to have drawn the same conclusion.
Deeply Moving Part of an Ongoing Dialogue I dreaded watching yet another film that would, predictably, open with a pan of rolling Polish countryside, show an elderly peasant, clueless about why he is being filmed, shot in such a way as to make him appear threatening or simply primitive, and hear a indignant voiceover about Poland's "Dark, shameful secrets." Then I would squirm as genuine facts were presented in twisted contexts in order to distort history.
"Hiding and Seeking" is not that anti-Polonist film; it is not Marian Marzynski's "Shtetl," it is not Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah."
The film opens with Menachem Daum, a Jewish American father, playing, for his devout Jewish sons now living in Israel, a recording of a Jewish sermon in which the speaker encourages his hearers to cultivate hostility toward non-Jews.
His sons do not take an unambiguous stance against hatred. Rather, one, especially, struggles to justify prejudice.
Moments like this are always darkly amusing for me as a woman viewer. Every second of every day, men violate, torture, murder, enslave, and commit even more unspeakable crimes against women, and have done so for thousands of years. I wonder how the younger Mr. Daum would feel if I tried to justify hatred of men to his wife or daughter?
I adduce this absurd example merely to highlight: hatred is NEVER moral. Hatred is NEVER justified. Hatred is always a sin and an intellectual failure.
Menachem Daum reports that he grew up with the idea of Poles as the ultimate other, utterly beyond redemption.
The older Mr. Daum takes his sons to Poland. There he insists on leaving prayers at the site of a lost synagogue. One of his sons, especially, speaks openly of how foolish he finds such behavior. He sees no important Jewish heritage in Poland, the land of the evil other.
Mr. Daum points out to his sons that, were it not for Polish Catholics, they would never have come to be. Their grandfather was saved by Polish Catholics during WW II, who hid three Jewish brothers in their barn.
The family visits the Polish saviors, some of whom are still alive. Apparently no warning was given to the Polish family. A van just drives up and a bunch of strangers with a camera pour out. These Polish farmers are gracious and hospitable. They have a pointed question, though. Why, after they risked their lives, and perhaps the life of the village (Nazis often committed retaliatory massacres against entire villages), did the Jews they saved never contact them? "Even just a post card?"
It's an awkward moment. How do you thank people who saved your life under such circumstances? You can't. So, you delay writing the letter, and then you feel ashamed, and then you never write it. Or, perhaps they never wrote because they were afraid of being asked for monetary compensation. Or, as one of the sons points out, perhaps the saved Jews delayed because their experience of being hidden was so traumatic for them that they were no longer "normal." Or, perhaps they delayed because their saviors were, after all, Poles. The ultimate other.
Time passes, and there are new, and deeply moving, developments, which you will see when you watch the film.
The scenes in Poland communicate much: the looks of contempt, hostility, and fear on some of the faces of the Daums, and, then, as the story progresses, looks of thoughtful reflection, and then affection and ease.
Menachim Daum emerges as a towering figure. He is saintlike in his insistence on the full humanity of all persons, regardless of their religion.
In short, I really loved this movie.
And ... yet.
And yet.
Though the film superficially rejects the idea of Poles as others, the film itself treats Poles as others.
The Polish, non-Jewish experience during WW II is not mentioned. The millions of non-Jewish Poles killed in random mass executions, deported, tortured, gassed, experimented on, enslaved.
The Polish churches, museums, and other cultural artifacts deliberately and methodically destroyed by the Nazis.
The fact that Poland was just out from under a lengthy and destructive period of colonization when it was attacked by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, simultaneously. That after the war, when many Jews were -- horrifically -- murdered by Polish non-Jews, as this film points out, there was a civil war, in which Jews also did kill non-Jewish Poles, and Poles killed Poles, etc.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
*Nothing* excuses any act of anti-Semitism any Pole has committed against any Jew. All decent Poles are ashamed of, and work to eliminate, such acts, and they do so as part of a proud tradition stretching back centuries. But we can't understand atrocities until we see them in context, and "Hiding and Seeking" doesn't even hint at that context.
One guesses that the filmmakers, who don't speak Polish, are not even aware of the context.
"Hiding and Seeking" shows Jews as the sole initiators of Polish-Jewish dialogue and reconciliation. This is simply inaccurate. Poles like Wladyslaw Bartoszewski faced prison terms under the Communists for working on better Polish-Jewish relations.
Too, Poles are others in this film. The camera never rests on them exclusively.
Just one example. One of the rescuers, an elderly woman, now lives her entire life bent double. Why? The movie never asks this terribly simple question, that, if you were curious, at all, about this woman's full humanity, you'd want answered.
As the film says, there are some "good goyim." But that schema, that insistence on seeing non-Jews as either "good goyim" or "bad goyim," that is, as seeing non-Jews exclusively as entities in relation to Jews, and missing something so obvious as a disease that turned a woman's body into a walking pretzel, misses the full humanity of anyone who is not Jewish.
Some Progress in Polish-Jewish Relations, But... Without a doubt, this film is much better than the usual anti-Polish films (e. g., Lanzmann's SHOAH, Marzynski's SHTETL) aired previously by PBS (the Public Broadcasting System). While it is gratifying to see, as the film unfolds, a moving away from the demonization of Poles and an appreciation of Polish efforts to rescue Jews, one is nevertheless struck by the depth of Polonophobic sentiment held by some sectors of the Jewish population. It is actually suggested that, if any people are beyond redemption, it is the Poles. Really? I thought that it was the Germans, as embodied by the Nazis, who planned and implemented the Holocaust. Polish contributions to the Holocaust, Jedwabne and the like notwithstanding, were negligible. Whatever wrong Poles did to Jews was trivial compared to what the Germans did to the Jews. One is therefore mystified as to why Jewish anger towards past wrongs continues to be strongly displaced from Germans unto Poles. Is it political?
There is also a veiled anti-Christian reference in the film when it is mentioned that Jews had been persecuted by "others" for 1,900 years. In actuality, Jews had been persecuted long before that. Remember the attempted genocide of Jews at the time of Queen Esther, centuries before Christianity?
While an elderly hunch-backed Polish woman is shown as a rescuer of Jews, it is not mentioned that more Poles are honored at Yad Vashem for the rescue of Jews than members of any other nationality. And no attempt is made by the film to gauge the numbers of Poles who aided Jews but who were never honored at Yad Vashem. The film correctly notes that there was a death penalty imposed on Poles by the Germans for any aid given to Jews. But no mention is made of the fact that sometimes entire Polish villages were destroyed by the Germans in reprisal for a single family's assistance to Jews. The suspicion shown by the Polish neighbor towards the Polish woman who was in the act of aiding the Jews thus finds ready explanation. He probably was not thrilled at the prospect of losing his life along with the rescuers of Jews if the Germans found them, which they almost did.
The film shows the desecration of the old Jewish cemetery without any contextualization, and the uninformed viewer is led to believe that it was an anti-Jewish act. But was it? In fact, it was common for the Communist authorities (which, BTW, the Poles had never chosen in legitimate elections) to convert unused cemeteries into such things as garbage dumps, and to allow neglect and vandalism to take its toll. That happened to not only the Jewish cemetery shown in the film, but also to Polish ones found on the territories seized by the Soviet Union, notably the Lyczakow Cemetery in Lwow (Lviv, Lvov). The film also has a scene of human bones sticking out of walls of what had once been the Jewish cemetery. The obvious implication is that the local Poles had dug out parts of the Jewish cemetery. Did they? It is more likely that the Communist mismanagement of the lands, common throughout the Soviet empire, had caused an acceleration of natural erosion, thus unearthing the cemetery.
For all its advances over previous treatments of Poles and Jews, the film remains firmly within the Judeocentric (Judaeocentric) paradigm of Holocaust materials. There is not so much as a hint of the privations suffered by the Poles in the hands of the Germans: The hundreds of burned Polish villages, the 2-3 million murdered Poles (including roughly half of the entire Polish intelligentsia), the systematic destruction of objects of Polish culture, the planned eventual extermination of much of the Slavic peoples, etc. The growing interest in Polish Jews by increasing segments of the Polish society, as shown by this film, calls for some reciprocity from the Jewish side. Perhaps one day educational materials used in the US will portray the deaths of millions of Jews, Poles, Belorussians, and Ukrainians with equal attention to all the victimized nationalities that had lost millions of citizens to the murderous Nazi German death machine. THAT would be the real breakthrough in Polish-Jewish relations.
Documentaries don't usually make you cry! Documentaries usually are designed to make you think. This one makes you think AND feel. It starts with the protagonist, Menachem Daum lamenting that religion in general is in danger of being taken over by hate-filled extremists. We find that Daum's two sons are Yeshiva students who have no particular desire to associate with those who aren't Jewish.`Perhaps, through their grandfather, perhaps, through their studies, they've developed the mindset that non-Jews are basically dangerous and that it's best to erect a barrier between them. This is a journey as father reunites his children with the Polish couple who risked their lives to save the children's grandfather and uncles.
The story drags in part, but press on. The end more than accommodates the lack of professional editing, and it has a few life lessons.
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