After horrors

The wickedness remains unfathomable: Six million Jewish people murdered by Germany’s Nazi regime. One million lost their lives at the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. Liberation did come for some survivors, including six women who, in the new documentary After Auschwitz, tell how they tried to put their lives back together.

The unrated film combines narration, recorded interviews of the women at advanced ages (some are now deceased), and historical video footage (including images of mass casualties). It begins in the weeks right after the women were freed from Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The women’s newfound freedom, though, could be as uncertain and dangerous as their captivity: As survivor Linda Sherman explained in one recording, Russian troops raped many young women who were left behind.

Returning home posed other problems. “The Polish people wouldn’t let us [back] in our house. They were wearing our clothes,” said Rena Drexler. She and other survivors wandered from city to city across a decimated Europe in search of food, jobs, and missing family members.

The six women eventually all came to America. The documentary becomes like a perusal of photo albums—marriage, children, careers. But the upbeat memories always had a downside. Renee Firestone’s train ride from New York to Los Angeles brought flashbacks of being packed into a cattle car. She started a family, but had to explain one day to her young daughter why she didn’t have grandparents as her school friends did.

Erika Jacoby “couldn’t get over” the abundance she found in her new country, but racial segregation and the Kennedy assassination “destroyed my fantasy about America.” Genocides in Sudan, Rwanda, and Cambodia left Eva Beckmann discouraged.

“You would have thought this overwhelming tragedy would be the last,” Beckmann said. “I don’t think teaching about the Holocaust will make the slightest difference.” (Abortion advocates deny the lesson applies to them.)

Still, most of the six women dedicated years of their lives to telling younger generations about the Shoah. Their voices prove there is life after Auschwitz.