Expert, if too serious, chronicle of a Jewish filmmaker's attempt to solve a 1945 mystery.
Farewell, Herr Schwarz
Grade: B+
Director: Yael Reuveny (Tales of the Defeated)
Screenplay: Reuveny
Cast: Peter Schwartz, Etty Reuveny
Rating: Documentary
Runtime: 96 min.
by John DeSando
“The impact of my grandma's story changed the course of my life. But that force doesn't only affect me.” Yael Reuveny
Indeed, the Holocaust is not the only event that informs this insightful if not staid documentary for three generations of the Schwarz family. Filmmaker Yael Reuveny tries to learn with the help of friends and relatives who know about the fateful 1945 occurrence when her grandmother and her brother, Peter Schwartz aka Fiev’ke, failed to meet at a train station.
He went on to live in his oppressors’ Germany, forgetting the family he left behind and boldly starting a new one. Reuveny tries not to let go of the defining non-meeting by gravely interviewing three generations of successful Jews who have survived the Holocaust and their own family dispersal.
Reuveny mostly interviews in a classic talking head, static way that is informative while leaving the dramatic anticipation in place that we will discover her Uncle’s reason for abandoning them. We don’t find out but do learn about the limitations of memory, the urge for identity, and the strength of family bonds-- a tribute to Reuveny’s ability to let the subjects tell the story.
The old photographs are, like the testimony, blunt witness to the enigma of a time when the world seemed to fall apart, never to be put together again. Yet, the filmmaker puts it together as well. The interviews are often revealing: For instance, in the East German town of Schlieben, an old man tells Yael his neatly appointed home was once a barracks for “the foreign workers.” He changes his words to “prisoners” but not before we catch the irony and in a sense the layers of this insightful documentary.
The filmmaker has elected to live in Germany. By bringing her reluctant parents (a strangely un-dramatic incident) to visit, she integrates the complex elements of a missed meeting long ago into a still unresolved present. But then the reasons for the Holocaust will remain a mystery as well.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
