Waubonsee Community College

Undying love, by Helene Klodawsky

eng

videorecording

For High School; Adult audiences

Undying love

electronic resource

747798646

by Helene Klodawsky

58

One does not usually associate the word "love" with the Holocaust. Yet this tender documentary relates how love did surface, against all odds, in the DP camps after World War II. The film is a testament to the survivors collective desire for a normal life. In their teens and twenties when the war broke out, many had lost all their relatives trauma of imprisonment was behind them, they felt a great need to form new attachments. These tales of love blossoming in such unlikely circumstances is artfully captured on film by Helene Klodawsky, the noted documentarian whose own parents are part of the story. Among the couples we meet are David and Zenia. David fell in love at first sight when he heard Zenia sing in the Lodz Ghetto Theater. Deported to Germany and surviving several concentration camps , he heard the song again in a DP camp of loving, but he persisted and they married --and still are in love all these years later.Other couples tell of chance meetings or of re-found lovers. Now elderly, they recount their love stories with spirit, insight and passion. As one survivor notes ironically, since there were no elders left to guide them, " Hitler was our matchmaker."

general