Films that asked questions about life and history

Over the last week I saw two films, Tito's Glasses (Titos Brille) made by Regina Schilling, and Farewell Herr Schwarz, made by Yael Reuveny.These were part of the Since 1945; Image, Memory, Testimony, series of films put on by the Goethe Institute in association with the Holocaust Centre of NZ, with the German and the Israeli Embassies. Both of these films were autobiographical. Neither of these lives were remarkable. The only reason for making the films is that they said something about the age, about the world since the Second World War. Tito's Glasses is a charming, delightful road movie. Regina Schilling traces the lives of her family, in particular, her father, an eminent doctor, a radiologist, and at one time Tito's personal physician and fellow partisan. She makes great use of old 8 mm films that her father made about the family. Like many families that survived the years since the war, her family had a colourful story. Her parents were both Yugoslav partisans and devoted communists. He was a doctor, she and architect. Then through the capricious fortune of people living in a totalitarian world, he was thrown into prison, the rest of the family escaped and ended up in Germany. Upon his release, he too made it to Germany, where he had a successful career. But they left communism behind. She, Regina Schilling's mother, took up Jewish causes, while her father enjoyed philandering. Tracing her family story takes Regina Schilling though some spectacular scenery in Croatia. She meets her aunt in Italy, who would never set foot in Croatia again, her uncle, who stayed in Split all his life and never wanted to live anywhere else. If there are profound questions about Jews, partisans, bravery and resistance, communism in Yugoslavia, and the failure of the successors of Tito to hold the disparate parts of Yugoslavia together after Tito's death Regina Schilling doesn't ask them. This is where she came from, she implies, with all its unsolved conundrums remaining unsolved. Incidentally Tito didn't wear glasses, her father's claim to have mended them was typical of his unreliable make-believe claims. Farewell Herr Schwarz tackled the burden of the Holocaust on the second and third generations. Yael Reuveny's grandmother survived the Holocaust, moved to Israel, but always harboured the memory of her suffering, but in particular, the memory of her brother, who survived and was supposed to meet her after the war at the Lodz railway station and didn't turn up. She assumed that he died in a fire, but didn't try to trace him. Her brother ended up marrying a German woman in the small town where he was liberated from the concentration camp in which he was an inmate. We meet the second generation, Yael's mother, and the son of her mother's brother, and ultimately, the grandson of her mother's brother, who developed an interest in his grandfather's Jewish roots. The story is not exceptional, there must be many instances of people surviving the camps and leaving the burden of their Jewish heritage behind. There are also many instances of people who define themselves as survivors of the Holocaust. What the film lacked is empathy, an insight to really understand these survivors. The grandmother didn't bother to trace her brother, because she, a devout orthodox Jew from Vilna, was not prepared to accept that her brother married a German woman who was not Jewish and one of the people who perpetrated the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Her brother didn't bother to trace his sister, because he knew that being married to a woman who was not Jewish, having children by her, would not be acceptable to his sister. But there are unexplored questions about both brother and sister. The sister was never completely adjusted to her life in Israel, a secular world so far from the world of Vilna that she grew up in, her children sabras, unable to comprehend the terrible experiences she had had. The brother married a woman from the small town that was the site of the concentration camp where he was incarcerated. What did he see in her? What did she see in him, a prisoner, a member of a downtrodden race? And how did the children reconcile the irreconcilable worlds of their parents? They coped with these issues in silence. They never talked about the past. The past was a forbidden territory.