Arquivo

All the family of famous Jewish composer Hermann Gebirtig was killed in a concentration camp. The same occurred in the case of Danny Demant’s father. Susanne Ressell’s father, who managed to escape alive from World War II, joined the Communist Party as a form of protest against Nazism. Konrad Sach’s father was a partisan of national socialism by conviction, a doctor accused of war atrocities who was on trial at Nuremberg. In common, all bear the mark of fear and of humiliation imposed by Germany under Hitler. Today, almost 50 years later, the lives of the last survivors and of their direct descendants of the post-war generation will face each other in a traumatic form when Susanne goes to New York with intent to convince Gebirtig to return to Vienna and to stand witness. “To us, Gebirtig is not a film about the holocaust, nor on how to overcome trauma from the past: the theme is overcoming the issues of the present”, say directors Robert Schindel and Lukas Stepanik.