“They put me in the Toloncház prison. For the third time. An officer asked me whether I had been there before… Naturally I said no, because I hadn’t yet as Kurt Hübner…” Breaking down our notions about “Holocaust documentaries,” the fourth film in Lukas Pribyl’s Forgotten Transports series focuses on human identity and its changes. It deals with the difficult choices people escaping the Nazi ghettos and labor and death camps in the Lublin region of Poland had to make in order to adapt and survive in utter extremity, on the run, in hiding – and does so with a great deal of ingenuity, much humor and tremendous optimism. This documentary tribute to the human spirit is completely devoid of commentary, contemporary or make-believe footage, and employs only impeccably researched geographically and temporally accurate materials and the fascinating words of the eye-witnesses. Out of 14,000 Czech Jews deported to forgotten places such as Sawin, Luta, Krychow or Zamosc in the Lublin district of Poland, 50 survived the war. From playing a deaf-mute fool, armed resistance to a touching tale of forbidden love, a handful of witnesses share their past for the first time. We have come to associate the “survival story” with striped uniforms and numbers tattooed on arms. This documentary offers none of that, only a surprising picture of survival “as we don’t know it.”

Writer / Lukáš Přibyl    DoP / Jakub Šimůnek    Editor / Vladimír Barák    Sound / Jan Čeněk

Photogallery