Oscar-qualifying short film strikes chord with story of heroic young WWII partisan
Made as a film school thesis project, ‘NAKAM’ is inspired by Motele Schlein, who was killed in a Nazi ambush, but whose violin survived as symbol of resistance and is still played
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
In June 1941, the Nazis arrived in the small Belarussian village of Karmanovka searching for the two Jewish families who lived there. The Nazis arrested the Schleins and deported them to Auschwitz. Then they murdered the members of the Gernstein family on the spot.
The only survivor was 11-year-old Motele Schlein (also spelled Motale Shlain), who hid in an attic. A talented young musician, he escaped with his violin into the forest, eventually meeting up with a band of Jewish partisans led by Moshe (“Uncle Misha”) Gildenman from Korets, Ukraine. Gildenman had escaped the Korets ghetto with his son Simcha (of similar age as Schlein) and some others.
Schlein’s story is the inspiration for “NAKAM” a 2023 Academy Award-qualifying half hour short film by recent German film school graduate Andreas Kessler. “NAKAM” had its world premiere at the 46th Cleveland International Film Festival and won the award for best live-action short. It will be revealed on December 21 whether the film has made the shortlist for the Oscar nomination.
“Nakam” means revenge in Hebrew, and the film is indeed about Schlein seeking vengeance for the murder of his parents and younger sister. But this story should not be confused with the group of 50 young Holocaust survivors called Nakam. Led by poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner, they sought to exact retribution by planning — but ultimately failing — to poison six million Germans.
“NAKAM” is Kessler’s thesis film for his master’s degree at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. In an interview from his home in Stuttgart, Kessler, 32, told The Times of Israel that he started thinking about the idea for the film around eight years ago when he read a newspaper article about the restoration of Schlein’s violin by the Violins of Hope program.
Led by Israeli violin makers Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein, the program restores and exhibits violins, violas, and cellos dating from before World War II, most of which were owned by Jews who perished in or survived the Holocaust. The instruments are also played internationally in concerts and at Holocaust remembrance events. (A companion book by James A. Grymes about some of the violins’ histories and restoration was published in 2014.)
“I remember reading about [Berlin-based Israeli musician] Ohad Ben-Ari’s ‘Violins of Hope’ strings piece being commissioned and played by the Berliner Philharmoniker [in 2015],” Kessler said.
Schlein’s violin survived the war and is on display in the permanent museum exhibition at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Tragically, Schlein died at age 14 as his partisan group came under heavy fire from Nazi forces.
While researching Schlein’s short, yet heroic life, Kessler came across an account of his blowing up a restaurant in Ovruch, Ukraine, filled with some 200 Nazi officers. Schlein, who had been sent by Moshe Gildenman to do reconnaissance by keeping his eyes and ears open while playing his violin in the village square, was invited by a Nazi officer to play in a local restaurant.
“At the restaurant, Motele faced an interview; the restaurant already had a musician, an elderly pianist. This pianist took out a particularly difficult piece of music, Paderewski’s Minuet, by the popular 1930s Polish composer Ignac Jan Paderewski, and demanded that Motele play,” Yvette Alt Miller wrote in an article about Schlein.
“Motele performed the piece beautifully and on the spot, he was offered a regular job playing in the restaurant. It was a wonderful stroke of luck for the Jewish partisans, who now had a young spy able to listen to Nazis talking and relaxing with one another. But it was incredibly dangerous for Motele. If his Jewish identity was uncovered, he faced certain torture and death, and the entire partisan community hiding in the nearby woods could be hunted down and liquidated,” she wrote.
Schlein gradually smuggled explosives into the restaurant and hid them in the building’s foundations. When the time came, he lit a fuse and blew the crowded place up. Schlein escaped without harm and rejoined his partisan group.
This account is the basic plot of Kessler’s 30-minute multilingual film featuring dialogue in Russian, German, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. “NAKAM,” made on a budget of €60,000 (About $64,000), was shot over 10 days in a rural outside Berlin (original plans to shoot in Ukraine were stymied by the Covid pandemic). The cast of German and Ukrainian actors includes the impressive teenage Anton Krymskiy as the character based on Schlein, “Mitke,” who had to learn violin for the role.
In approaching the story, Kessler saw an opportunity to add a moral dilemma for dramatic purposes.
“It’s a story of revenge, but when I started to explore it, I realized I could also make it about Mitke sacrificing the life of his innocent friend, the piano player Yegor, to kill Nazis. There could be more complexity and multiple perspectives to it,” Kessler said.
In the film, Mitke tries his best to save Yegor by creating an excuse for him to leave the restaurant when the explosion was set to happen Unfortunately, things don’t turn out as Mitke intends, and the pianist is blown up along with a group of Nazi officers, the restaurant owner, and his daughter.
“The film says what I believe, which is that there are no winners in war. Violence just creates more violence and brutality. It’s the universal story of conflict,” Kessler said.
The film is compelling, as is the story of Schlein blowing up the Nazi-filled restaurant. However, there is no historical evidence that this actually happened.
“There was a Motele Schlein, he played violin, he spied for the partisans, and he was killed. That is all we definitely know,” said Michael Tal, director of the artifacts department of the museum division at Yad Vashem.
According to Tal, there is no documentary evidence to substantiate the restaurant account. There is only mention of it in reminiscences written in Yiddish by partisan leader Moshe Gildenman that were given by his grandson Sefi Hanegbi (Simcha Gildenman’s son) to Yad Vashem along with the Schlein’s violin.
“If the Jewish partisans had blown up a large group of Nazis, as this story goes, there would have been severe retribution by the Nazis, but there is no documentation of this. And from the Soviet perspective, the partisan’s attack would have been a point of pride — but there are no Russian records of this either,” Tal said.
Whether or not Schlein blew up a Nazi-filled restaurant, his legacy as a child resistance fighter remains powerful and is perpetuated through the sight and sound of his violin.
The Gildermans kept Schlein’s violin with them for the rest of the war, even as they continued to fight alongside Ukrainian volunteers and later as part of the Soviet Army. They brought it with them to their new home in Israel in the early 1950s, and decades later Moshe Gildenman’s grandson Hanegbi showed it to Violins of Hope’s Amnon Weinstein, who found it to be in good condition.
Twenty-five years ago, Hanegbi donated the violin to Yad Vashem in memory of all the talented children murdered in the Holocaust, and on the condition that it continue to be played.
According to Tal, the violin is removed from display at the museum at least twice a year to be played publicly. It will be played next in Slovenia on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2023.
A special book given to Yad Vashem by Hanegbi travels with the violin and is inscribed with messages by whoever plays the instrument, be it a teenager at a local Israeli Yom Hashoah service or famous musicians such as Hagai Shaham, Shlomo Mintz, and David Strongin.
“The story of Motele Schlein still touches people. They still ask to play or hear his violin,” Tal said.
