DOCUMENTARY TELLS STORY OF LAST HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
Logan Film Festival to Screen “REFUGE: Stories
of the Selfhelp Home”--March 23
CHICAGO— Logan Film Festival will present “REFUGE: Stories of the Selfhelp Home,” which tells the stories of
some of the last Holocaust survivors, as an official selection March 23.
The film will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Caine Lyric Theatre,
28 West Center Street, Logan, Utah. Director Ethan Bensinger will present the
film.
Since its premiere at the Illinois
Holocaust Museum in June, REFUGE has
been accepted to 18 film festivals. It won the top award for excellence at the
recent Beloit Film International Festival, as well as "Best
Documentary" and "Best in Fest" awards at the Sycamore Film
Festival in Sycamore, Illinois. The film has been broadcast on PBS, and shown
widely at schools, libraries and synagogues. Recently it was featured in a
project by Germany’s national broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. Upcoming screenings
include Holocaust museums in Milwaukee, Kansas City, Cincinnati, St. Louis and
Miami, as well as at the Chicago History Museum.
REFUGE interweaves deeply personal interviews and expert commentary by
well-known historians to explore the lives of six Chicagoans against the
context of the Nazi cataclysm and how a small group of them came together to
care for their own The film illuminates the lost world of Central European
Jewry prior to World War II--middle class, educated, cultured--and the
remarkable courage, resilience and character of its final generation at
Selfhelp in Chicago.
These refugees and survivors, now in their late 80s and above, speak
vividly of loss of family and of place and of decisions that meant the
difference between life and death. Several of the elderly survivors personally
witnessed Kristallnacht (known as “Night of the Broken Glass”), the coordinated
series of attacks by the Nazis against Jewish communities throughout Germany
and Austria in 1938. Others speak of finding refuge in England through the
Kindertransport, escaping to the United States and Shanghai, hiding on estates
and in castles in France, and deportation to the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz
concentration camps.
“Each one saw his or her
role in history and realized that they were the last eyewitnesses to these
events and their stories had to be told,” REFUGE
Director Ethan Bensinger said. Bensinger, who lives in Chicago and Bonita
Springs, himself comes from a German-Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in the
1930s and eventually settled in Chicago in 1955. The documentary grew out of a
project by Bensinger to interview the last remaining survivors and refugees at
the Selfhelp Home. Many of the stories are heartbreaking. They speak of loss of family, of
place, of separation. But they also tell of renewal, of resilience, of finding
love and creating new families, of starting again in a new land.”
“These eyewitnesses teach us and future generations that strength in the
face of adversity often comes from a sense of community built upon shared
experience,” said Rick Hirschhaut, Executive Director of the Illinois Holocaust
Museum.
Selfhelp was founded in the late 1930s by a handful of young Jewish
refugees who fled Nazi Germany to the safety of Chicago. Through prescience,
pooled resources and a strong spirit of volunteerism, Selfhelp provided
housing, food, English classes and job placement services to other displaced
Jewish émigrés and later, after the war, to Holocaust survivors. They put
people up in their own homes and reached deep in their pockets to give those
who came with nothing the basics of what they needed to start new lives in a
new country.
In 1950, Selfhelp opened up a residential home for the oldest refugees
and survivors, whose atmosphere reproduced some of the home life and cultural
experiences that they had lost. To date, more than 1,000 refugees and survivors
have spent their last years at the Selfhelp homes in Chicago’s Hyde Park and
Edgewater communities.
Three of the original founders, now in their late 80s and 90s, still sit
on the board and participated in the making of the film. In the documentary,
they express their concern for the home’s future, when the last survivors and
refugees, who give Selfhelp its unique mission and meaning, will be gone.
“Our film explores a community that will not exist
for much longer,” Bensinger said. “Within 10 years or so, there will be no
Jewish victims of Nazi persecution living at Selfhelp. Out of the 30 refugees
and survivors I originally interviewed, less than a dozen are still alive
today. As a filmmaker, I feel obligated to give a voice to these last
eyewitnesses to life as it was before, during and after the war, so that future
generations understand the consequences of intolerance, injustice and
unmitigated hatred. “
