Documentary digs up story of Polish village that butchered its Jews after Holocaust ended
It took filmmaker Yoav Potash 10 years to describe the events of once peacefully coexisting Gniewoszów, with the help of residents, survivors and a team of animators
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
The documentary “Among Neighbors,” being broadcast on Yes Docu, Sting+ and local theaters for the upcoming Holocaust Remembrance Day, shows that there are still stories to be unveiled even 80 years after World War II — tales of violence and murder, as well as of unlikely miracles and survival.
Director Yoav Potash’s film, 10 years in the making, tells several of those interlaced stories, all connected to Gniewoszów, a small town in Poland where Jews were murdered by their neighbors months after the war had ended.
Potash, an award-winning filmmaker from California’s Bay Area, brings viewers to the rural village through interviews and footage, and uses dreamy, hand-drawn animation that tells the prewar and postwar history of Gniewoszów.
At the outset, Potash shows that no Jews are left in Gniewoszów decades after World War II, although Jews and their neighbors coexisted peacefully before the war.
Even the Jewish tombstones are gone, used as grindstones and paving materials by the residents.
Potash was first brought to Gniewoszów by Anita Friedman, a descendant of the town’s Jews.
Friedman, a Jewish communal leader from San Francisco, asked Potash to join her as she and another family member traveled to Gniewoszów to search out traces of their heritage. They planned to create a short, half-hour film about the town and its Jewish history.
It was that initial visit in 2014 and the chilly reception they received from the townspeople that unlocked a much larger project for Potash.
He began interviewing locals from the town and contacted Jewish institutions in Poland.
By chance, one of those institutions had received a letter from Pelagia Radecka, an aging resident who had grown up in Gniewoszów and was seeking answers about her Jewish neighbors who were killed after the war.
“We all felt it was important,” said Potash, speaking in an interview with The Times of Israel. “She found what she was looking for in me.”
It took time for Potash to translate her narrative, and that eventually became the revised, central story of the film.
Radecka verified the murder of Jews after the war, and provided a heart-wrenching, personal side to the town’s traumatic history that also eventually brought her closure.
“I thought I was completing the film, but it turned out that her story was the center of it all,” said Potash. “The film I thought was done was not quite so done at all.”
Potash also met Yaacov Goldstein, an aging Holocaust survivor from Gniewoszów now living in Israel, who recounted his tale of survival, which included being hidden as a child in a crawl space of a Warsaw apartment, where he couldn’t stretch his legs for two years.
The additional narratives and stories required something more than archival footage and images of the town in the present day, and brought Potash to an animator, and eventually, to an entire animation team of 40 people across four countries.
“The story is incredibly powerful, and we do something really creative and interesting with the craft of film,” said Potash. “And that it has mystery and twists and turns you won’t see coming.”
The magical realism of the animation became a central part of the film, and for Potash, an original contribution to creative thinking about the documentary genre.
“It’s a realistic style of animation because these are real memories,” said Potash. “We wanted imagery that shows what happened and how it felt.”
During the making of the film, the centrist Polish government was swept out and replaced by a far-right government that attempted to take hold of Holocaust history and silence historical accounts, so that Poles would only appear as heroes or victims.
Potash’s key witness from the town was defying that policy, while his other interviewees — a journalist, a historian and Poland’s chief rabbi — corroborated what was unfolding in Poland.
“I’ve learned so much about the Polish-Jewish connection that I didn’t really have much of an understanding of before — now I understand a lot more,” said Potash. “That’s the lifestyle that we Jews led for hundreds of years and we went through a traumatic separation.”
Potash is in Israel for a series of screenings and discussions of “Among Neighbors,” tied to Holocaust Remembrance Day. He will be joined by members of the families portrayed in the film for screenings and conversations at Cinematheque Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Israel Museum and Lev Ra’anana.
“Among Neighbors” will also be screened on Yes Docu and STING+, starting on Wednesday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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