Überleben – About Life/Survive

The Holocaust has been processed in many different ways and for many years in Germany. From an academic and an artistic point of view, through films, books and exhibitions. All these ways have had an impact on our perspective on the history, on our image of it. The memories of survivors of the Holocaust play an important role. But our possibilities to resort to stories of the generation of survivors are becoming all the rarer.
In the future, their children and grandchildren will have to tell the history and their live stories in order to keep our historical memories alive and to avoid that our understanding of history becomes distorted. Considering that, Holocaust survivors in Israel get the chance to speak in the film. The film offers those contemporary witnesses from Israel a lot of space for their life stories. It contrasts them with the lives of the two following generations, which are often influenced by gaps in the memories. Many survivors of the Holocaust have told their children very little about their experiences in Germany and in the camps during the Nazi era. But this generation isn’t satisfied with the gaps anymore. They travel to Germany, to the country of their parents and grandparents, trace the Holocaust and look for reconciliation with the country and their history. The documentary wants to make an attempt together with the survivors, their children and grandchildren, to fill the gaps of the memories and to dare to take a conscious look at the past in order to deal with the present and future.