In the wake of International Holocaust Remembrance Day this past Tuesday, families took their seats at West Newton Cinema for the screening of Among Neighbors, followed by an exclusive recorded question-and-answer session featuring the film’s award-winning director, Yoav Potash.
Among Neighbors is an animated documentary of the tragic story behind the little town of Gniewoszów in Poland. For Potash, the story is an effort to emphasize the significance of reporting stories truthfully, whether or not the truth appears pleasant or beneficial to any one perspective.
“The film boldly asserts that true patriotism lies in facing history honestly, no matter how painful the truths may be,” according to the movie’s website.
The poignant film came to life in 2014 when Potash was called on to rededicate a Jewish cemetery in Poland by Dr. Anita Friedman, a leader in Holocaust education and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Friedman had long cherished the stories her father and mother had shared with her of their vivid childhood in Gniewoszów, before the Second World War.
However, when Friedman returned to Gniewoszów, her parents’ rose-tinted reminiscings were overshadowed by the reality of an abandoned graveyard, stripped of its tombstones. After working for a decade to restore her family’s resting place, Friedman brought Potash to document the ceremony and the surrounding community.
When the group arrived in Poland to film, however, they were immediately confronted and forced to leave by two angry Polish men.
“We need to leave now,” their translator warned. “They know you’re Jews.”
Alarmed by the neighborhood’s harsh, secretive nature, Potash and the Friedman family began searching for a resolution to the shockingly apprehensive city, unaware that they would simultaneously unearth a long-buried history. They started interviewing residents to amplify the voices of witnesses who slowly broke the tense silence by sharing their lived experiences.
Around the same time, an 85-year-old Polish woman, Pelagia Radecka, wrote to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, asking to share her unique testimony regarding the murders she witnessed in Gniewoszów when she was only 15 years old. In her testimony, she was seeking help in finding Janek Weinberg, the child of two of the victims, and Potash granted Redecka her request.
“Once we sat her down for an interview, the floodgates of this woman’s soul opened up,” Potash said. “The story came pouring out of her very urgently, not in chronological order, because one memory would trigger another memory.”
Through a smooth combination of archival footage and beautiful hand-drawn animation, Among Neighbors delves into Redecka’s childhood memories from growing up as a young Polish girl in Gniewoszów. The film dives into the horror she had lived through during the Second World War, leading all the way up to her eyewitness account of the murder of a Jewish family, whose son she had grown up with, by her own Polish neighbors.
The heavy weight Redecka had felt as a child had never left her, and she has since longed to reconnect with the son, who had been taken out of the town just days before his family’s murder. Her testimony contributed to an effort to reimagine this abandoned story and to rekindle a light on, rather than resentment against, her Polish roots.
As Potash was completing the film, he noticed a painting on the cover of the graveyard ceremony program: a vivid depiction of the once-vibrant Gniewoszów by artist Harry Liberman. Curious, he contacted Liberman’s family and was introduced to a cousin, a Holocaust survivor named Yaacov Goldstein.
The unexpected connection provided crucial answers and a powerful final perspective through an account of the true, life-threatening horror and inhumane experiences that transcended the walls of Gniewoszów. Little did Potash know that Goldstein’s account would be the key to answering lingering questions and provide the final puzzle piece, the denouement of the intricate dynamics among the Poles and their Jewish neighbors.