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  • 2 days ago
Jewish family history is reconstructed in this documentary about the traces of German terror in Eastern Europe during World War II where in which is about the attic of a peasant's home where her family's parents and relatives hid in squalor during the war for two frightening years hid, and then spent most of their lives afterwards trying to forget what happened. Yet their children somehow knew what their parents went through. Deciding to confront her personal demons, Goodstein went back to Poland with her aunt and a group of cousins to meet the woman who sheltered her family.
Transcript
00:14I try to imagine sitting in a 10 by 15 foot space with 15 other people.
00:20The room is hot, about 100 degrees.
00:23There's no electricity.
00:25Also no plumbing, no lighting of any kind.
00:27We can't bathe or brush our teeth.
00:30We sleep on straw and go to the bathroom in pots.
00:34Even if I could stand up under the four and a half foot ceiling, I wouldn't be allowed to.
00:39Because standing and walking make noise, and that might give us away.
00:45In the year 1942, my mother and 15 members of her family went into hiding from the Nazis in an
00:52attic of a peasant's home in Poland.
00:55My mother would never talk about this experience, but I always knew that it must have shaped her life.
01:01I also felt it shaping mine.
01:09For as long as I can remember, I've had nightmares and relived things that happened before I was born, in
01:15a place I'd never seen.
01:17I was haunted by stories I'd never heard.
01:29We were in total darkness, and he took us upstairs to his attic.
01:35He closed the trap door, removed the ladder to prevent his children from coming up there to play, as used
01:42to be their habit.
01:43And this became our home.
01:46We hoped for a few days, a week or two, maybe a month, but it lasted for two years.
01:53We hope for a few days.
01:55We hope for a few days, a week or two, maybe a night.
02:01We hope for a few days.
02:01They dei truke.
02:01We hope for a few days.
02:01We hope for a few days.
02:02We hope for a few days.
02:02Peace.
02:02You're cuántico.
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