Wow. I can't even get my mind around the breadth of this project! Almost all of the interviewees had never talked to anyone before. If you hadn't come along, their stories would have gone to the grave with them. After they opened their hearts to you, were any of them sorry they did? How did their families react? Many of them had never known any details about this aspect of their parents' lives.
Indeed, sometimes children learned the fate of their parents through me. I think there were a number of reasons why so many of these survivors refused to talk for so long. First, they were dispersed all over the world and in a number of cases were not located even by the large interviewing schemes like Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, etc. And even when they were contacted, they often declined to speak because it is difficult to talk about the most difficult time in your life to people who just come with a camera, film for two hours, then say "thank you" and leave for good. It is understandable when you have a project of such tremendous scope but I could have a more focused approach.
In many cases I had
to gain the trust of the interviewees over a period of time. But I think the
main reason for their keeping silent was this sense of isolation they had. The
places they survived were often completely "forgotten"; their survival
experience quite different from the "usual" large camp survival story we are
most familiar with and there were so few survivors from these places" They could
not exchange their memories with others they simply had no other people to
share their experience with. They felt isolated from the general society and
other survivors as well. One man who survived a transport to Belarus told me he
had tried to talk but that no one wanted to listen, so he withdrew into
himself.
The general notion is that if something is really horrible, we hear
about it. Auschwitz was an absolutely horrific place of death, that's why we
know about it. But we haven't heard of Maly Trostenets, which means it could
not have been as bad there, otherwise we would have heard about it. It seems
logical, but for someone who survived Maly Trostenets it was just as bad of a
camp as Auschwitz and the reason why no one knows about Maly Trostinets is that
there are basically no survivors. Nonetheless, even some survivors share this
notion that a place they haven't heard about could not have been as bad as
Auschwitz, for example. So the people from the "forgotten" locations were
sometimes intimidated into silence.
Once they did start to speak, however, though it often took a long time for me to persuade them, it was like opening up floodgates. None of the people who spoke to me expressed any regret, at least to me but I believe speaking was therapeutic for them. Naturally, I was awaiting the reaction of people who speak in my films with great anticipation, as it must be quite difficult to see oneself on the screen talking about your traumas. Yet all that lived to see the films reacted overwhelmingly positively and that's really the greatest reward I could hope for. Since every word of theirs is documented by authentic pictures and footage, they recognize themselves and their friends on photos from those times photos they of course have never seen before and tell me that this is how it really was.
credit: Forgotten Transports website
You had a strong personal connection to this project because of your grandfather's experience. It must have been incredibly difficult to handle the accumulated weight of these stories without getting overwhelmed by it all. Even when you weren't actually listening to survivors tell their tales, you were deeply involved: gathering documentation, or editing the hundreds of hours of material. And this went on for ten years. How did you keep yourself emotionally intact over the long haul?
I actually did
not know much about my Grandfather's experience, or generally, my family's
experience during the war. Most of my mother's family perished, my Grandmother
died when I was a baby and my Grandfather died when I was ten years old. He
never spoke about his years in camps to me. Of course, growing up I was
surrounded by survivors but I started researching the camp my Grandfather was
deported to more out of curiosity - since I could not find anything written on
it rather than because I would actually know what he went through. Regarding
the emotional impact of this work on me, it might be better to ask those around
me.
But I think, I hope, am still pretty sane. Of course, some of the stories
you hear are pretty heavy but people survive, except for luck which is most
important - because of optimism, laughter, humor, love. And when you talk to
these survivors, most of them are so full of joie de vivre that they actually
give you energy instead of sapping it. But maybe I have changed a bit. The
difference is that I now try to get less upset about minor problems because the
only thing that really matters is life itself. So I have heard. However, it is
much easier said than done, so I am not that good at it but at least I try to
remind myself from time to time.
As far as working with the visual material is
concerned, that can indeed be taxing. Some of the images one comes across are
difficult to look at but such images actually do not appear in my films that
much because my films are much more about life and surviving than about death.
Death is the background but I would not know how to make a film about dead
people. I guess the only way to deal with the gruesome images is the way
physicians must deal with all the horror they encounter at, let's say, oncology
ward. You do your very best and of course you invest your emotions, but in a
way you also have to keep your distance otherwise your work would eat you up,
destroy you and then you would not be able to do anything.
How has Forgotten Transports been
received so far? Has it received much publicity in Europe? How about over here?
As I mentioned,
these films took ten years to make and like everything else with these
documentaries, getting them noticed was also long process. If you are a first
time filmmaker without any connections in the film world whatsoever, you don't
have the backing of a powerful producer who would care to promote the film, no
agent and no money to compete with the big-budget PR machines, you simply have
to rely on luck and the word of mouth. When the first film in the series was
released in the Czech Republic, hardly anyone noticed. The fourth film of the Forgotten Transpo r ts series already got the two Czech Academy Awards it was eligible
for, in the Best Documentary and in the Critics' choice categories and the
films collected quite a few other awards. All the major Czech newspapers wrote
about them extensively, there was TV coverage" But it was mostly through word
of mouth that the films eventually "made it".
This all happened thanks to the
response of audiences that has simply been fantastic. While most films
"decline" over time, i.e. have the greatest number of people in the first weeks
of screenings and then slowly disappear, for Forgotten Transports it has been
the opposite. I am really happy because the interest in them is steadily
growing. I had a fantastic team cameraman, editor, composer and soundman and
last but not least, my sister who was the production manager of dreams. Had I
had such a team for PR, festival management, etc. the moment they were
released, the films could have reached the world faster and with a bigger
splash.
But we are slowly getting there. You know, with festivals it is a business like with anything else. Many festivals vie for films from certain authors already before they are completed. If you are a no name and have no one to recommend you, it is quite understandable that you are not going to be picked by the big film festivals among the thousands of applications, particularly if your work is on the Holocaust. Let's face it, there is a certain amount of "Holocaust fatigue" with so many films on the topic out there. And it is hard to tell from a synopsis that yours might be a different one. So, for example, a director of one of the largest documentary film festivals actually apologized to me for not selecting it. He saw Forgotten Transports by chance and was shocked to learn his festival did not accept it but the big festivals only want premieres and by then I screened Forgotten Transports elsewhere. Anyway, I don't want to sound like I am complaining because I am not. We had a wonderful response in Gothenburg at the largest film festival in Northern Europe, the first page of the cultural section of the New York Times carried a long and very favorable review of the films, soon all four will screen at the Denver festival as well as a number of other festivals around the world and Forgotten Transport s are getting better and better known, so I am quite satisfied.
That sounds great, Lukas. Tell us more about the upcoming Denver film festival. I understand that you will be coming over for it.
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