Moving pictures

Stories of Holocaust survivors told in animated shorts

Visual art students from Holon Institute of Technology keep Shoah history alive through short-form videos

Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center

A still from 'Bialystok/Givatayim' a Holocaust short made by Noa Itan (Courtesy Holon Institute of Technology)
A still from 'Bialystok/Givatayim' a Holocaust short made by Noa Itan (Courtesy Holon Institute of Technology)

There are many ways to remember the Holocaust, whose official day of remembrance is marked in Israel on Monday night, April 20, and Tuesday, April 21.

Students at the Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), an arts college that focuses on technology, design and visual art, continued this year to make animated shorts about the Holocaust, as they have done for several of the past years, using the creative arts at their fingertips to relay haunting vignettes of Jewish victims of World War II.

Some told stories from their own families, while others took tales from families they don’t know whose histories are kept by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, as part of the Gathering the Fragments project.

“We’ve very proud of this project,” said Professor Eduard Yakubov, president of HIT. “We see the importance of remembering the Holocaust in creative ways, and passing that on to the younger generation.”

“Bialystok//Givatayim” is graduate Noa Itan’s title for her project, telling the story of her grandfather, Michael, who died eight years ago.

It was only after he died that her family found a bundle of letters written in Polish, revealing details of her grandfather’s past that they hadn’t known. He had been married previously to a woman named Eva, a person they had never heard of and whose fate was not clear.

Over a period of four years, Itan returned to Eva’s letters, trying to understand her history and what had happened to her. The animated short is her commemoration of this woman, of whom they would have never known if not for the love letters Michael saved.

“Children of Tehran” is how Johanna Asraf titled her animated short, telling the story of two young siblings, Ilana and Emmanuel Landau, who were among the Tehran Children, a group of kids, mainly orphans, who found temporary refuge in orphanages and shelters in the Soviet Union, and were later evacuated with several hundred adults to Tehran, Iran, before finally reaching Palestine in 1943.

The story, told in Hebrew, includes the fact that the Landau children and their mother initially stayed in Siberia after their father was drafted into the Red Army. It was cold, and surrounded by woods. They fled to Uzbekistan, but their mother couldn’t care for them any longer and left them at a church, where they were collected as part of the Tehran Children.

Emmanuel Landau was killed five years after reaching Palestine, as a fighter in Israel’s Independence War. His sister, Ilana Karniel, kept the map of their wanderings, eventually giving it to Yad Vashem.

It was the testimony of Holocaust survivor Dov Kolka, kept by Yad Vashem, that inspired the poignant, evocative work created by students Kobi Hasson and Itay Hershkovitch.

Kolka was 11.5 when he was separated from his mother at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He told his story in images recreated by Hasson and Hershkovitch, of his mother preparing food in their kitchen, and then his mother at the concentration camp, and later how she never turned around once when they were separated at the death camp.

“If she had turned her head, she wouldn’t have been able to withstand the enormity of what was happening,” Kolka told them.

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