Ever since I was a little girl, I have heard about “the camp,” “Auschwitz,” “Lager,” “Belsen” – words mysteriously connected with the number tattooed on my mother's arm. Throughout my adolescence, I never tried to know more: it embarrassed me when my mother got visibly emotional about painful memories of her experiences. When I was a graduate student at Yale, however, I saw the film Night and Fog, and, for the first time, I had an inkling of what my parents – among others – had endured. The film provided a shape for, and a handle on, abstract fears. It occurred to me that if I, the only child of Holocaust survivors, needed a film to frame the horror and thus give it meaning, what about others? How great a role are films playing in determining contemporary awareness of the Final Solution?

As my involvement with the cinema grew, I began writing a screenplay in 1979, based on my father's escape from a labor camp, and his hiding in the woods with Polish peasants. The more I struggled to reshape the true stories, the more I realized how difficult it is to make a film about this era. How do you show people being butchered? How much emotion is too much? How will viewers respond to lighthearted moments in the midst of suffering? I was caught between the conflicting demands of historical accuracy and artistic quality. As I sat in Paris movie houses and observed how other filmmakers had yielded to or had overcome such obstacles, I put the screenplay away, and decided to wait until I had more distance from the stories of my father and his heroic cousin – and until I had learned from what others had done on screen.