Treasure (2024), by Julia Von Heinz
The moments we treasure the most are usually those spent with loved ones. That’s why some trips are so precious: with our loved ones, sometimes reticent at first with the whole endeavour, we learn more about them and their past, something that could have remained hidden for so many years. Travelling together is a mean we find to connect and often reconnect with the people we love the most. Such a trip is the subject of the movie “Treasure”.
Ruth (Lena Dunham) is meeting her father Edek Rothwax (Stephen Fry) at the airport in Warsaw in order to start their father-daughter trip all over Poland, where he and her mother grew up. Right after his arrival, he hires a cab driver named Stefan (Zbigniew Zamachowski) to drive them around and choose what attractions they are going to visit — the exact opposite of the trip Ruth had already planned.
Many people on the way are afraid that Edek and Ruth came to reclaim the apartment Edek used to live in when he was a child, until 1940, when he and his family were evacuated. He doesn’t want to reclaim the place as he has a better one in the USA, while Ruth tries to reclaim some of his childhood belongings that were left behind but are being used by the new family that lives in the apartment. This is a common fear among Europeans who see foreigners with European roots arriving in Europe — they think we’re there not as tourists, but as descendants wanting to reclaim something.
The reclaiming of the belongings is front and center in the plot. Edek isn’t comfortable the whole trip because he remembers the Jews who were murdered when they went back from the concentration camps to their old houses. The climax of the movie is their visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, that starts with Edek saying that he thought that the place’s smell would never go away. He remembers and is affected by the tour in a deep and personal way. After it, while looking at the souvenirs Ruth bought, Edek comments that she “can’t get enough of this disaster” — and neither should we, who are reminded by Ruth that she wasn’t visiting a simple museum, but a death camp.
Ruth’s mother passed away one year before the trip — and Edek guarantees that she wouldn’t come along if she was alive. A conversation further along reveals that Edek and his wife have been in concentration camps, a trauma they didn’t talk about but carried with them forever, in their memory and in black and white photos of loved ones who perished.
The story is set in 1991 and some things have changed since then. Ruth is a vegetarian and has to bring her own food to restaurants and hotels — today there are lots of options for people who, as Edek says, “eat only seeds”. She gets lost trying to follow a foldable map — today she’d use Waze or Google Maps instead. She brings along loads of books about the Jewish experience and the Holocaust, that she reads every night — today all the e-books would be in her Kindle. She takes dozens of photos with a professional camera pending from her neck. When asked for whom those photos are, she says she’ll look at them in the future — today, with a smartphone, she could have shared the pictures with the world and make sure we never forget the horrors of the Holocaust.
Two Polish interpreters father and daughter meet during the trip weigh in about Ruth’s love life, saying that she can’t accept true love because she isn’t used to being loved. Ruth is 36 and divorced, and it saddens her father the fact that she is “lonely” — a condition more common today, even though she says, in a very modern fashion, that she is alone, but not lonely.
The movie was based on the best-selling book “Too Many Men”, written by Australian author Lily Brett. It’s an autobiographical book, as Lily was born in 1946 in a displaced persons camp in Germany, with a twist that wasn’t kept in the film: accompanying father and daughter in their journey there is the ghost of the Nazi Rudolf Höss. The screenplay was written by director Julia von Heinz and John Quester, a German screenwriter and Julia’s husband. Von Heinz is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and made “Treasure” as the closing film of her Aftermath trilogy, about the effects of Holocaust on subsequent generations.
Throughout the trip Ruth is seen in her hotel bedroom tattooing a number in her skin, a mark similar to the numbers tattooed on concentration camp prisoners. She clearly is moved when visiting the camp, while her father needs to hold an old coat that belonged to his father to start — or rather re-start — grieving. The healing process only begins when the characters start a dialogue between them. Like what Freud said decades ago, it’s by talking that we can re-signify the trauma and heal. This is the truth for Holocaust survivors… and their descendants.
