User Reviews

Fascinating documentary about Moshe Knebel whose entire family was murdered in Poland during the Holocaust. The perpetrators were his Christian Polish childhood friends and neighbours and not the Germans. Moshe, a young teenager, hides in the forests, joins the partisans and eventually fights his way to Berlin with the victorious Red Army. After the war he returns to Poland and has an opportunity to avenge his murdered relatives. An exceptionally brave man who somehow endured the unendurable and the unimaginable. As I see it, he took justifiable revenge on behalf of the murdered millions who could not and those of us born later who would have liked to.

Documentaries in which holocaust survivors return to the place they grew up in and meet locals who are still there became common enough in the 1990s. With almost all survivors now gone, this film will prove one of the last. It is also one of the best. Or better, the most startling since the writer Henryk Grynberg returned to Poland and with the reluctantly offered help of villagers dug up and held his own father's skull.

In this case we follow 85 year old Moshe who takes his son and daughters to his village near Zamosc and tells them how he escaped to the forest for 18 months, how the local Polish police willingly assisted the Germans in the murder of his brother and father, and how he ended up fighting with Russian Partisans and the red army, and then how in 1945 he returned to his village aged 18 where his schoolmates promptly tried to kill him, and how he took his revenge. Etc etc.

One very interesting feature is how Moshe and his children keep switching from Hebrew to Polish even among themselves.