The Story
The first time I saw the box it was by accident. For the next few hours, I found myself on the floor of my parents’ closet with hundreds of black-and-white photos spread out in piles around me. I saw faces I didn't know. I saw words scrawled in Yiddish and Polish. I saw the dates 1926, 1931, 1936, 1937, 1938 – nothing later than that. My father walked in and said, "Oh, you found it." He had not touched the box since he took it from Israel after my grandmother died in 1989. She smuggled it out of Poland when she and my grandfather fled in 1938. Finding the box was the first time, I realized that I didn't know my family. I didn’t know that I'd never seen the faces of the dozens of my relatives that were murdered in the Holocaust. I didn't know that I had grown up in silence.
Using the photos as a jumping off point, Within the Box shows an intimate portrait of a family forced to confront the pain and suffering of the past and reckon with the consequences that the Holocaust continues to have on our future. Both of my grandparents passed away before I was born, leaving me to try to get the stories of the people in the box from my father and his siblings; however, my grandparents never spoke of their Polish lives and my father and his siblings never asked. The silence I felt when I found the box was not an anomaly. As I pushed and prodded them to remember what they could, all they could give me were vague recollections and uncertain names and dates.
Burying the past does not heal wounds and a trauma as devastating as the Holocaust sends shockwaves to all future generations which hit me as long-repressed family secrets began to come to the surface. To get to the source of all of this trauma and to see what, if anything, remains of the lives I see in the photos of the box, in Winter 2019, I will be going to the two small towns my grandparent’s families lived for generations, Parysów and Żelechów, and the place where the majority of them perished, Treblinka. It is there that our past was shattered, but not erased. We survived and continued on to have an ever multiplying family filled to the brim with life in backyard soccer games, 77th birthday parties, improv comedy troupe performances, family reunions, and impromptu dance recitals to the White Stripes.
From a box of photos that were rarely seen and never talked about, to the stories that were repressed and lost, to the places that were erased and forgotten, to the vibrant life that exists resiliently in the present, Within the Box tells the story of what happens when a trauma is so great that it makes closure impossible. There is no accurately detailed family tree, translation of just the right essay, or miracle photo that can explain and account for my family’s past. Instead of looking at this lack of closure as a barrier, Within the Box treats these permanent holes in our history as an opportunity to come together in discussion about what we remember and what we want the generations that come after us to remember so that “Never Forget” and “Never Again” can be transformed from vague mantras into specific and powerful calls to action.
Why now?
There will soon be entire generations who will never hear the horrors of the Holocaust directly from survivors. The youngest survivor is now 75 years old and any survivors who were old enough to have distinct memories of the camps are well into their 90s at this point. According to the Claims Conference, there are now less than 100,000 survivors living in the U.S. and by 2030, that number will dip below 10,000.
As survivors are growing older and passing away, the knowledge and memory of the Holocaust is fading from our collective memories. Another study by the Claims Conference found that 31% of Americans and 41% of millenials believe that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust. That same study found that 41% of Americans and 66% of millenials do not know what Auschwitz was; it is likely that even more have never heard of Treblinka, where my family was murdered.
However, at the same time, that study found that 58% of Americans fear that something like the Holocaust could happen again and 80% believe it is critical to keep teaching about the Holocaust to ensure that history does not repeat itself. It is imperative for us to develop new ways to tell stories about the Holocaust and its lasting effects that do not solely rely on recounting the atrocities themselves. For the education to continue to be potent long into the future, it is critical to tell stories of how the trauma continues to affect the descendants of survivors, generations removed from the concentration camps. An apocalyptic event like the Holocaust forever rattled the mental health of the survivors themselves and continues to literally imprint on the minds of the descendants of survivors through epigenetic inheritance that changes our DNA, making us more predisposed to depression and suicide. Yet there still remains a massive cultural taboo around seeking out mental health services.
The specter of intergenerational trauma is also not unique to the Holocaust. Survivors of mass, cultural injustices across the world will deal with and are currently dealing with the same, generations-long fallout. While many films have detailed the direct effects of the Holocaust, Within the Box gets at the heart of the Holocaust’s lasting consequences by painting a personal portrait of how survivors’ descendants can cut through overwhelming numbers. It then pushes beyond its personal story to provide a broader picture of trauma, identity, loss, and family, giving audiences an understanding of the importance of confronting impossible-to-talk-about topics so that lives will never be forgotten and so that our engagement with our own painful pasts will open us up to empathize with the present-day suffering of others.
Support
Within the Box is fiscally sponsored by the International Documentary Association. You can make a 100% tax-deductible donation to support the production of the film here. Within the Box has been the recipient of a City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Individual Artist Program grant in 2018, 2019, and 2020. An early, short version of the film screened at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival Short Films Corner as well as at the 2016 Kartemquin Films Fall Festival.
