I Am Here (2021), by Jordy Sank: we must keep telling the stories of Holocaust survivors
It sounds astonishing, but it is the hard truth: Nazism is once again on the rise. In the US, between 2017 and 2018, there was a 22 percent increase of neo-Nazi groups. In Brazil, the growth was 270% in three years. At the same time, we’re losing the last eyewitnesses of the original Nazi horror: as the Holocaust was ended over 75 years ago, most Holocaust survivors are now in their 80s and 90s — and their stories must be told, if we don’t want to relive that horror. “I Am Here” is a documentary about one of these survivors, spunky Ella Blumenthal.
The documentary opens with footage of TV news talking about the rise of hate crimes, especially against Jews. Then a radio announcer highlights a fantastic case: a 98-year-old woman from South Africa decided to fight hate with kindness. Ella Blumenthal wrote a letter to a Hitler sympathizer and offered to meet him and share her story — a story that is hard for most of us just to listen to, so imagine living through it.
And Ella tells it all during the weekend of celebrations for her 98th birthday. She talks about things we know happened, but that sound more real and painful in her voice: she talks about the armbands the Jews had to wear, the curfew, the rationing of food, the closing of synagogues and Jewish schools, the horrors already present in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her voice is first accompanied by an animation of her, 18 years old when the war started, living happily until the Nazis came. Then her voice is accompanied by historical footage, as well as footage of Ella today, at the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre.
When the Warsaw Ghetto is burned down, Ella had already lost dozens of relatives who were sent to concentration camps. At 21 years old, Ella was sent to the Majdanek concentration camp, but for a short time: after narrowly escaping being gassed, Ella was sent to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen (the same concentration camp where Anne Frank was). Always accompanying her was her niece, Raquel aka Roma.
Ella lived with trauma for decades. For many years, she’d say her tattooed number was actually a scar from an accident, and she didn’t feel comfortable around her husband’s family to share her story, as his relatives told her to forget what she’d been through. But how can one forget? But…why should one forget? It’s said that the suffering in the Holocaust left marks in the survivors’ DNA, so forgetting isn’t so simple.
IMDb currently lists 1136 films under the label “Holocaust”, 587 under “concentration camp” and 315 under “Holocaust survivor”. The most popular movies in each category are all fiction films, and “I Am Here” is currently the most popular documentary in two of the three categories. There have been many other documentaries about the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors, and it’s more important than ever that they keep being made and realeased. We can’t lose any opportunity to tell the stories of those eyewitnesses of horror.
Director Jordy Sank met Ella when he was only a teenager, but the feistiness of that elderly woman was something that stuck with him for years. More than that: Jordy was mesmerized that someone who lived through such dark times could be so happy and have such an appetite for life. Jordy Sank then amassed a young crew to make the documentary “I Am Here”, a work that would give, in the director’s words, “a fresh perspective to Holocaust documentaries, which are typically stock driven with talking heads. […] The animation [used to tell Ella’s memories] does something that stock footage cannot, it paints a clear picture for the audience of moments that only Ella could see and allows one to fathom and resonate with the Holocaust.”
Out of 25 family members in Ella’s family, only two survived the Holocaust: Ella and Roma. Today, she lives in South Africa and uses Facebook to connect with her family and many friends, and her iPhone to talk to her loved ones who live far away, including Roma. She has her own documentary, a film that may be only 73 minutes long but should be mandatory viewing to all, now more than ever, as it can touch many more hearts and be more impactant than the conversation with the Neo-nazi could ever have been. We can’t forget Holocaust survivors — and we must keep telling their stories.
