Reference Type: Audiovisual Material
Author: Walo Deuber
Year: 1998
Title: Fading Traces: Postscripts from a Landscape of Memory
Type: Documentary
Short Title: Fading Traces: Postscripts from a Landscape of Memory
Size/Length: 78
Keywords: Jewish minority, Holocaust, Documentary
Abstract: In the Western Ukraine, now plain for all to see and experience, there lies a slice of European history. Since the opening up of the Soviet Union, this significant part of it - once home to some five million members of the largest Jewish community that ever existed - has been made accessible once more. The film seeks out the traces of this world and mourns its boundlessly tragic demise, in a moment when it is threatened to vanish forever in the future. There, isolated in a wood (Drohobycz), in a clearing (Pechora), and on an old airfield (Berdichev), the mass graves of tens of thousands of victims bear witness to the Holocaust that took place in the Baltic States, White Russia and the Ukraine from June 1941 onwards - as a result of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Survivors have had to stifle their memories in decades of solitude in the Soviet Ukraine. Now, for the first time, Esther and Michail Bartik in Tulchyn, Genija Burmenko and Raissa Tamara Halperina in Berdichev speak openly about it - about what they went through and how they lost their parents, their brothers and sisters, and their neighbours. Forgetting prolongs exile. Memory is the gateway to salvation", is what Baal Schem Tov, founder of the popular Hassidic belief, offers up for consideration. His grave is in Medshibosh, in the heart of the ever fascinating and spell-binding Ukrainian countryside, which was the source of his devoutness in the 18th century. Up until the Second World War this region was densely populated by Jews. The sound of Jewish music resounded here and Yiddish was spoken in many of the villages. The film takes on this atmosphere with authentic Ukrainian Klezemer music (arranged by Joel Rubin) and with protagonists whose "own" language has remained to this day Yiddish. That Jewish cosmos which has left its traces on the seam that binds the European West to the European East, has bequeathed to us a rich culture. The Yiddish writer, Josef Burg in Czernowitz, recollects on this, as well as on the importance of Yiddish, which was once the sixth language of the world, spoken by 12 million people. Fading Traces" fuses the memories, which have been put into literary form by the writers Joseph Roth, Paul Celan, Rose Ausländer, Manès Sperber and others, with the accounts of the experiences of those still alive. In this way, an exchange of memories is created which, in a landscape that is timeless, rekindles images of a world long lost to the survivors - as well as to ourselves. The film was realized in the summer of 1997. One of its protagonists, Rosa Roitman of Tulchyn, passed away two months later. From now on her recollections have become just another part of memory ... fading traces.
URL: http://db.yadvashem.org/films/item.html?language=en&itemId=103215
Access Date: 02.10.2014
Name of Database: The Visual Center - Online Film Database
Database Provider: Yad Vashem
Language: Russian, German, Yiddish, English