Goodbye Theresienstadt

Film Info

Film Year: 2016

Film Duration: 60 min

Country: Denmark

Language: Danish

Director

Carl Otto Dethlefsen , Jonatan Jerichow

Film Category

Best Feature Documentary

Synopsis

Poignant, compelling, dramatic Danish documentary from 2015. Over 7,000 Jews escaped from Denmark to Sweden when the occupying Germans tried to round up Danish Jews in October 1943. Yet regrettably, 470 Jewish men, women and children were captured and put into cattle cars bound for the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Seventy years after they were miraculously rescued from Theresienstadt, six Danish Jews who were young at the time return to the concentration camp where they suffered for a year and a half, consumed by hunger, anxiety and fear of what tomorrow might bring. The six individual stories are intertwined, as the survivors tell of their failed escape to Sweden, the horrible journey to Theresienstadt, the appalling conditions in the concentration camp, and finally of their rescue from Theresienstadt in the final weeks of the war. The survival of these six people illustrates what Denmark did to save the Danish Jewish population, getting most of them to safety, and trying to protect those who were captured and interned.