Netflix tells tale of 7 siblings who miraculously survived the Holocaust to restart life in US

The SS Marine Flasher was the first ship to bring Holocaust survivors and displaced persons to the United States after World War II. The seven Weber siblings were among the 867 refugees who sailed on the ship’s first crossing in May 1946 from Bremerhaven, Germany, to New York.

The immigrants’ emotional arrival at New York Harbor was captured on film. However, the children, ages six to 17, drew particular attention from reporters and news photographers. As far as it is known, the German Webers are the only group of seven Jewish siblings to survive the war together and emigrate from Europe.

The gripping story of how Alfons, Senta, Ruth, Gertrude, Renee, Judith, and Bela managed to stay alive without their parents is told in the documentary “Unbroken.” Directed, executive produced, and written by Beth Lane, Bela’s daughter, the film streams on Netflix in Canada and the US from April 23.

Lane had not always known about the Webers’ wartime experiences or the people whose kindness and selflessness enabled them to survive. Her mother, the youngest sibling, Bela (later called Ginger), was deliberately not in touch with her German siblings for 40 years. When Lane was six, her mother told her that she had been adopted (coincidentally also at age six), but did not share any more details and told her she would never meet her biological uncle and aunts.

“Those memories were in there. I didn’t know how I would get them out of her. I didn’t know how many years it would take, or why, when, or how I would do it. But clearly, it had a tremendous influence on me as her daughter,” Lane said in an interview from her home in Los Angeles.

“I wanted to unpack her story. For me, it was important to understand my potential intergenerational transfer of trauma,” she said.

In 1986, Lane’s mother finally reunited with her older siblings. The others had stayed in touch since they arrived in Chicago, but they were separated, each put in a different foster home by the local Jewish Children’s Bureau. Only Bela, the youngest, was formally adopted. Slowly, Lane got to know her biological family, but she never asked any of them — including her mother — about their wartime experiences.

“I just felt it was wildly inappropriate to ask them about it. I barely knew them. My mother didn’t lead the life of a refugee or someone who was persecuted. She never called herself a Holocaust survivor, so asking those kinds of questions was not top of mind whenever I would meet them,” Lane said.

Mind the knowledge gap

In 1996, the siblings gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their immigration to the US. There, Alfons presented everyone in the family with a copy of a 40-page document recording his memories from Germany and the war.

“It took me years and years to absorb it,” Lane said.

“In so many ways, the movie is me filling up years of not walking through doors that I had always wished I had walked through,” she said.

“UnBroken” reveals the unique story by artfully weaving together excerpts from Alfons’s short memoir, interviews with the surviving siblings, archival footage, animation, Lane’s on-the-ground journey in the footsteps of the Weber children, and more.

The seven siblings were the product of the Hungarian-Jewish Lina Banda and the German-Catholic Alexander Weber. Alexander traveled selling umbrellas and walking sticks for his family’s business.

“He had wanderlust. He visited different countries and would reinvent himself professionally whenever he needed to,” Lane said.

On a trip to a Hungarian town, Lina immediately caught Alexander’s eye. Her father, an Orthodox rabbi, agreed to the marriage only if Alexander converted to Judaism, which he did.

The couple moved to Paderborn, Germany, Alexander’s hometown. After only son Alfons and oldest daughter Senta were born in 1927 and 1929, the young family moved to Berlin, where five more girls were born between 1930 and 1939. The family lived in the poorest neighborhood in the city but fit in well with their Jewish and Roma neighbors. The Webers lived an observant Jewish life, with the family enjoying gathering to welcome the Sabbath on Friday evenings.

Things changed drastically for the family when Alexander was arrested in 1933 and incarcerated in Oranienburg concentration camp for opponents of the Nazi regime. He came out a broken man.

As Jews tried to flee Berlin, Lina obtained visas and passports for many of them. She also housed those on the run from the Gestapo in a room attached to their small apartment. Although Lane has not been able to find proof that Lina was part of an organized underground movement, she suspects this was the case.

“Why she didn’t [arrange] for her own family [to escape Germany]? I can’t answer that question. But I am inspired by her fortitude, chutzpah, and wily smarts,” Lane said.

“Understanding that I’m the granddaughter of someone like Lina Banda Weber has helped me understand who I am,” she said.

Eventually, Lina was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. Only Bela, a toddler at the time, was home with her. Lina hid Bela in a closet and told her to keep quiet. Later, the children were arrested, as well. They were housed in the Jewish hospital, which had been turned into a collection point for Jews to be deported to death camps in the East. Such was the fate of Lina, who perished in Auschwitz.

Saved by righteous gentiles

When the siblings were temporarily released to their home, they were quickly snuck into the back of a truck in the middle of the night. They were driven 65 km east to the small town of Worin, where they were secretly housed in a laundry shack on the farm of non-Jews Paula and Arthur Schmidt until the end of the war two years later. The Schmidts were next-door neighbors in Berlin and sold produce grown on their farm and fruit orchards in Worin.

The Schmidts provided what they could for the Weber children and checked on them periodically. Worin’s mayor Rudi Fehrmann was also complicit and furnished ration cards so the children could obtain food beyond what they picked from the fields and trees.

In Berlin and separated from his children for two years, Alexander also sent them food when he could. He had no choice but to renounce his ties to Judaism to find work and stay alive. At one point, he insisted that the children secretly return to Berlin and be baptized for their protection after he learned of Lina’s fate.

The war’s end involved a short-lived reunion between the father and his children, but it was tainted by horrific violence in the form of bombings and rape on the part of the Red Army as they took Berlin in May 1945.

Second-eldest sister Ruth was the driving force behind getting the seven siblings out of Germany to America.  From how she recounts her family’s amazing story, it is evident that she was the one with the moxie and street smarts who figured out how to make things happen. When it became clear that the siblings would be ineligible to emigrate if they had a father in Germany, she declared to the authorities that they were orphans.

Alexander was permitted to immigrate to the US only a decade later with a new wife and family. By the time he arrived in Chicago, his older children had moved on, many of them now parents themselves.

According to director Lane, “Unbroken” is about many things. Among them are recognizing righteousness and highlighting people who do good in the face of evil, especially at their peril. Weber siblings Alfons, Ruth, and Bela (Ginger) led the effort to have the Schmidts named Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem in 2015.

Lane said she is also deeply committed to not allowing the film to be “labeled or pigeonholed as a Jewish movie or even as a Holocaust movie.”

“This is a story about a family who survived the unthinkable and happens to be told through the lens of the Holocaust and by a Jewish family. But I feel that [the Webers’s] story represents so many displaced people and refugees worldwide,” she said.

Most personally, the film has been a means of healing from epigenetic trauma that was likely present but that she could not make sense of.

“I had a beautiful childhood, and I have nothing to complain about, so I never understood why I had this hole in my heart. I think the emotional journey [of making “UnBroken”] has allowed me to understand the hole,” she said.