The Israel Film Service Collection

Letters from There

40 Minutes, 1995
Genre:
Documentary

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Production:Shaul Mayzlish
Production Company:Israel Film Service
Language: Hebrew
| Subtitles not available

This short documentary film, directed by Izchak Sonnenschein and produced in collaboration with the Nehora Institute for Jewish Film, accompanies several groups of high school students, some religious and some secular, on their youth delegation trip to Poland, where they tour the country’s many monuments of the Holocaust. Orit, a student from on all girls’ school who went on the trip, provides narration and reflects on the letters she has sent to herself from Poland and the memories that wash over her as she reads them. The trip’s first stop is Warsaw, where the teenagers visit the Warsaw Ghetto, the Umschlagplatz monument, Nożik Synagogue, and the city’s Jewish cemetery. Later, the students are presented with the horrors of extermination camps such as Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as the mass grave at the Łopuchowo forest and the true story of Holocaust survivor David Leitner. Throughout the trip, the students engage in debates, moderated by their tour guides, and share their feelings and personal stories. Faced with such harrowing sights, some describe a sense of disillusionment with regard to their faith; meanwhile, others become more deeply invested in it, favorably pointing out the united front presented by different Jewish denominations when it comes to the legacy of the Holocaust.

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