“How Saba Kept Singing” seeks to understand how Polish Jewish teenager David Wisnia survived nearly three years in Auschwitz. The editing and vague timelines make it seem as if this latest doc from multi-hyphenate Sara Taksler (“Tickling Giants”) is revealing something previously unreported, even though a 2019 New York Times article already divulged the touching love story that underlies the “How” of the title. Still, as the more earnest than artful film repeatedly points out, very soon there will be no living witnesses to the hellish experience of the death camps. This incontrovertible fact lends a sense of urgency and poignancy to firsthand accounts of how survivors managed to endure and to move on.
If the title “One Voice, Two Lives” hadn’t already been used for Wisnia’s 2015 memoir, which describes in greater detail his remarkable journey from Auschwitz prisoner to 101st Airborne trooper, it could have served well for Taksler’s film.
If the title “One Voice, Two Lives” hadn’t already been used for Wisnia’s 2015 memoir, which describes in greater detail his remarkable journey from Auschwitz prisoner to 101st Airborne trooper, it could have served well for Taksler’s film.
- 5/2/2022
- by Alissa Simon
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: Greenwich Entertainment has acquired North American distribution rights to well-received Holocaust documentary Love It Was Not, which will play at Hot Docs this month.
Israeli filmmaker Maya Sarfaty’s film charts the remarkable and harrowing true love story between a prisoner and a Nazi. Beautiful and full of life, Helena Citron is taken to Auschwitz as a teenager (one of the first 1000 transported to the concentration camp), and soon finds unlikely solace under the protection of Franz Wunsch, a barely older SS officer who falls in love with her and her magnetic singing voice. Risking execution if caught, they went on with their forbidden romantic relationship for two and a half years until the war ended and the camp was liberated.
Thirty years later, a letter arrives from Wunsch’s wife asking Helena to “return the favor” — testify on Wunsch’s behalf at his war crimes trial. Faced with an impossible decision,...
Israeli filmmaker Maya Sarfaty’s film charts the remarkable and harrowing true love story between a prisoner and a Nazi. Beautiful and full of life, Helena Citron is taken to Auschwitz as a teenager (one of the first 1000 transported to the concentration camp), and soon finds unlikely solace under the protection of Franz Wunsch, a barely older SS officer who falls in love with her and her magnetic singing voice. Risking execution if caught, they went on with their forbidden romantic relationship for two and a half years until the war ended and the camp was liberated.
Thirty years later, a letter arrives from Wunsch’s wife asking Helena to “return the favor” — testify on Wunsch’s behalf at his war crimes trial. Faced with an impossible decision,...
- 4/12/2021
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
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