Golda Maria

"Golda Maria"

"Golda Maria" is a holocaust survivor and a beloved mother and grandmother whose past is shrouded in mystery. Born in 1910 in a 'Jewish' family in Poland, raised in 1920's Berlin, she has to flee to Paris in 1933 and run again to the free zone during the war, where she's separated from her husband and daughter. In May 1944, just a few days before 'The Normandy' landing, she's arrested and deported with her young son. After 12 months in the horror of the camps, she comes back to Paris, without her son but with a life to resume. And a family to love. The film shapes Golda's story into a portrait which not only uncovers family secrets but which is also a universal testimony from a courageous and spirited woman. She's seated. Blue hues, the sofa, her clothing, her eyes, the reflections in her white hair, attest to the serenity of this dignified and elegant old lady. The camera films her face and hands. On rare occasions, a family photo or an archive image illustrates her story. Maria-Golda, born 'Jewish' in Poland in 1910, is telling a story we've already heard, a story we know. Immigration to Germany, Dantzig, Berlin. Hitler's rise to power. Flight to France. Difficult living conditions for refugees. The start of the persecutions. 'Nomadism' to avoid arrest. Marseille, La Bourboule, Clermont-Ferrand. Arrest and deportation. Drancy, 'Birkenau', 'Bergen- Belsen', 'Raghun'. The liberation of 'Theresienstadt'. The return home. And yet her story is unique, because it relates what we never hear, or only rarely. Maria is talking not to an anonymous journalist but to her grandson Patrick, in the intimacy of a conversation that's also a quest for her truth. Something's opening up. The very mechanisms of memory are on display, in a language always seeking the right words, with perfect diction and an accent bearing traces of 'Yiddish'. An accent we no longer hear in our cities, from a language she claims to despise. Her story is part of history. An immigrant in distress meets a woman she will go on to love very much, who becomes her mother-in-law when she marries her son. The pure and lasting joy of the birth of her daughter Simone, who she entrusts to her husband in 1942 to help him pass into Switzerland while she remains in France, hoping to experience a liberation on par with the celebrations of November 11th, 1918. Secretly pregnant at the time, she aborts on her own, nearly dies and has to be hospitalized. Then she tries in vain to get into Switzerland herself and is arrested. Arriving in 'Birkenau', disoriented, she hands over her three-and-a-half- year-old son Robert to her mother-in-law, who'd been arrested along with her. How does a mother go on living after such a tragedy? It's a question we all ponder, and dare not ponder. Throughout her life, she carried the image of Robert inside her, never forgetting. She saw him in every child she gazed at tenderly, probably even Gérard, her second son, born after the war. And yet, she strongly states and demonstrates that she was happy, that her children and grandchildren brought her happiness. We're far from the stereotype which has immerged in recent years, with so many survivors asserting that they never got out of 'Auschwitz'. The last images of the film show the family on a seaside holiday. The blue hues expand to encompass the immensity of the ocean, and of the future, which will be a future of memory when there are no longer any survivors among us. They illuminate a path of transmission, from Maria to her grandson Patrick and her great-grandson Hugo, to whom we owe this film. And now, to all of us. We're in 1945, you're 35, you just lost your son and a number of other family members, you've come back from absolute hell. How do you find the strength to go on living? This documentary is about our memories of 'The Shoah'. It's about the first convoy of 'French Jews' deported from Drancy to Auschwitz on March 27th, 1942. The film gives Maria plenty of space to express herself, and she navigates freely between anecdotal and universal. Maria covers a lot of subjects. Some of them are purely private, like her relationships with her daughter, her grandchildren and her husband. The audience needs to get acquainted with her, the student she was in Germany, her attachment to France, her indifference to marriage when she met Pierre? It's a gamble! You need to know her to understand her emotions. In the film, we gather that Maria hadn't spoken much about her memories of 'The Shoah'. She says she didn't talk about it after 'The Liberation' because it wasn't audible. She thought no one would believe her. And you've to live. In the film Maria says, "Now, I'm talking' because she knows she will soon die and it's crucial to speak out, for history and humanity. But when you return from hell at the age of 35, you can imagine it's impossible to talk about it. She explains it herself, first through her love of literature, which she discovered in Germany, and then through the freedom France represented after she'd fled Poland and Germany. She was educated in Germany, but her life truly began in France, where she met her husband and had her children. She had another child after 'The Liberation', in 1948. And there's this beautiful moment when she tells us that whenever she would see children, she would give them candy. The film didn't want to illustrate her life. What's happening inside her. It's generally far more interesting to hold her gaze. But when she evokes her feelings about France at the end of 'The First World War', the film illustrates that, because those are images she has in her mind. 'Central European' emigrants idealized France. It's the land of revolution, human rights, universal values. Imagining the film and watching it take shape together has been like an ongoing masterclass. Especially with subject matter that has such a powerful emotional pull for all of us. There's no life without the love of children. If you're talking about the past, you're not living in the present. Life continued, and it continued joyously. What a victory! What sweet revenge on the hell! We're paying tribute to the spirit and the film ends on life, because the film is about life, not death. You can't put a price on a child, which is very moving, but also extremely heavy. If this film has a resonance, it's for those who know nothing of the story. If we raise awareness in even a few of the 34% of young people who say they know nothing about 'The Shoah', then stories like Maria's can make humanity better. A wild hope, no doubt, but a worthy one. Also it's important to know your roots. In African cultures, for example, old people are wise. They sit under a tree and tell their stories. They teach us. When you see the film, you can't help thinking of today's migrants, uprooted and desperately hoping to find a place of welcome where they can feel at home. If that doesn't speak to the today's situation, we don't know what does! (Gregory Mann)