The Lloyd M. Burstein Memorial Holocaust Film Series 2022 starts this Sunday, March 13 at 4 p.m. in the Figge Art Museum Auditorium, 225 W. 2nd St., Davenport.
The first is the 2021 film “Love It was Not,” a tragic love story between a prisoner and her captor. Flamboyant and full of life, Helena Citron is taken to Auschwitz as a young woman, and soon finds unlikely solace under the tutelage of Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer who falls in love with her and her magnetic singing voice, according to a synopsis.
Risking a certain execution if caught, their forbidden relationship went on until her miraculous liberation. But when a letter arrives from Wunsch’s wife, 30 years later, begging Helena to testify on Wunsch’s behalf, she’s faced with an impossible decision: will she help the man who brutalized so many lives, but saved hers, along with some of the people closest to her?
The 86-minute documentary is in Hebrew/German with English subtitles.
On Sunday, March 27 at 4 p.m. will be “Sobibor,” based on the history of the Sobibór extermination camp uprising during World War II and Soviet officer Alexander Pechersky.
When he was a POW in Sobibor, he managed to do the impossible — to organize a revolt and mass escape of the prisoners. Many of the escapees were later caught and died – the rest led by Pechersky managed to join the partisans. The script is based on the book by Ilya Vasiliev: “Alexander Pechersky: Breakthrough to Immortality.”
The 110-minute film from 2018 is in Dutch/Russian/German/Polish with English subtitles.
On April 3, will be “Three Minutes – A Lengthening,” inspired by a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in a Jewish town in Poland and tries to postpone its ending. The film is a haunting essay about history and memory. As long as we are watching, history is not over yet.
The three minutes of footage, mostly in color, are the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. Those precious minutes are examined moment by moment to unravel the human stories hidden in the celluloid. Different voices enhance the images: Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz, and Maurice Chandler, who appears in the footage as a young boy. Actress Helena Bonham Carter narrates the 67-minute documentary, made in 2021,
Tickets for the film series are $7 each for adults, $6 for seniors (60+) and military, and free for students. For more information, call 309-793-1300.
The presenting sponsor for this film series is The Joyce and Tony Singh Family Foundation (Lloyd Burstein was Tony Singh’s mentor).
