Tuesday, July 23
Who Will Write Our History
Documentary (USA, 2018) 1 hr 35 mins
Written and Directed by Roberta Grossman (Above and Beyond, producer of Blessed is the Match and Hava Nagila)
New York Times Critic’s Pick – “Immensely important… heartbreaking”
Winner - Audience Award
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper. Grossman’s powerful film tells their story, mixing the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage and dramatizations that transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon – the truth – and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not. The film honors the Oyneg Shabes members’ determination in creating the most important cache of eyewitness accounts to survive the war. It follows their moments of hope, as well as their despair, desperation and anger, sometimes at their fellow Jews as much as at their Nazi captors. It captures their humor, longing, hunger, and determination to retain their humanity in the face of unspeakable hardships. Ultimately, through their voices, actions, and real-time experiences, Who Will Write Our History vanquishes those who distort and dehumanize the “Other” in favor of those who stand up, fight back and, as one Oyneg Shabes member writes, “scream the truth to the world.”