An American filmmaker travels to Poland to make a film about Gombin, the town her father was born in, as a memorial to him and to the Holocaust. Poland 2008 is a country of contradictions where the invisible torture of the past meets the hope of the future.
On location she befriends Marya, a local resident. They discover that Marya is the grand daughter of Esther Lonsky who married a non-Jew and converted to Christianity. While a shock to her mother Lucja, the pregnant Marya presses the filmmaker for more of her family’s history exposing difficult memories and reminding us that we cannot escape our past.
The film, a parallel narrative, cuts between the present and the past as the stories of the Gombiner Jews are told intertwined with the filmmaker’s quest to reconnect with her history. Esther Lonsky is ostracized by her family – her only friend is Abraham Kerber, a Jewish dwarf with whom she takes refuge after her husband leaves for the front. When the Nazi’s march into Poland rounding up its Jews, Abraham escapes into the woods and survives hiding in garbage cans at train stations from where he witnesses SS atrocities. His friends from Gombin meet their own fates; denounced, shot or sent to concentration camps. Esther has a child and remains in Gombin with her husband after he returns from war.
In the final scene, a little girl makes a presentation to her elementary school class telling stories of her great-grandparents and their friend Abraham, the dwarf. The mysterious similarity between her dwarfism and Abraham’s poses unanswered questions. While her mother Marya sits in the back of the room, we are left to wonder about this child’s lineage and her own future in Poland. And we are left asking what future generations can do to stop such atrocities and how to strive for reconciliation while vigilant to signs that old hatreds still lurk. In the words of a survivor’s grandchild, “We’ve already seen what hatred can do. We need to do something better than that”.
