Vancouver filmmaker's Martha marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day with ode to his Auschwitz-survivor grandmother
Daniel Schubert’s intimate NFB short shows the resilience of one woman
Local filmmaker Daniel Schubert gets some wardrobe advice from his grandma Martha Katz.
A VANCOUVER filmmaker’s personal ode to his grandmother’s resilience premieres today, to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In the short National Film Board documentary Martha, Daniel Schubert spends time with his colourful grandmother Martha Katz at her home in Los Angeles.
The pair have a close bond, and when the feisty 90-year-old isn’t critiquing Schubert’s T-shirts, she’s schooling him on warming up her knish to just the right temperature. But slowly, Schubert draws out the still-painful memories behind her sense of humour, including her traumatic experiences at the Auschwitz concentration camp and her hard work building a new life as a grocer with her husband in Winnipeg.
Her stories, shown through dreamlike, expressionistic re-enactments, include a terrifying brush with infamous Nazi sadist Josef Mengele and a desperate search for her mother at Auschwitz. The latter is a loss she’s never gotten over—at one point, cooking with her own daughter, she longs for the recipes that weren’t handed down to her. Moments like these offer a small, intimate view into the more colossal trauma of the Holocaust.
What comes through is a woman of mindblowing tenacity—not to mention impeccable style and sass.
“We had to forget what happened,” she says matter-of-factly at one point. “I had luck, that’s all,” she says at another. And don’t even think about helping her with her walker, as Schubert himself finds out.
You can view the 21-minute documentary for free here, via the NFB.
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