750 people came together last week as The Moriah School community presented their annual eighth grade film production of “Names, Not Numbers© (NNN©) at The Frisch School. The student-made documentary, which tells the compelling story of the students themselves filming survivors’ accounts of the Holocaust, included emotional and wrenching stories of strength, bravery and determination. After weaving together each survivor’s unique story and experiences before, during and after the Holocaust, students highlighted the immensity of loss that the survivors felt, as well as the complexity and range of feelings the survivors had regarding their faith in God.
From a boy sent away from Germany on the Kindertransport who never saw his parents again, to a young girl who worked in a concentration camp office, to a boy who watched his parents go into the Auschwitz gas chambers, to a girl whose last words from her parents were to hide with a neighbor in Budapest, the stories were as unique as they were compelling and powerful.
Survivor Renee Stern’s description possibly offered the most dramatic moment of the movie, when she recounted the moment she stood with her mother under what they thought were gas chamber sprinklers at Auschwitz. Stern told her mother she feared dying. “It will only take a minute and then it will be over,” her mother told her. In a shocking turn of events to those who thought their deaths were imminent, that time the sprinklers sprayed water instead of poisoned gas, and Stern and her mother survived. To the audience’s relief, it was later learned that Stern’s father also survived to be joyfully reunited with his family.
The Moriah students succeeded in sharing a great variety of experiences that Jews had during the Holocaust and the lack of mercy and extreme cruelty that the Nazis showed to the Jews.
NNN founder Tova Fish-Rosenberg, who serves as a producer on many of the films, shared that Moriah’s program, in which most of Moriah’s eighth grade participates as an elective, is one of the bigger NNN program’s she sees participating annually. “Of course we want as many students to have the chance to interact with a survivor. To hear it from an eyewitness makes the students ‘the witnesses to the witnesses,’” she told The Jewish Link.
Rosenberg explained that NNN, the full name of which is Names, Not Numbers Intergenerational Holocaust Oral History Film Documentary Project, is currently completing its fifteenth year of operation. To date, over 6,000 students have interviewed and filmed 2,000 survivors and World War II veterans throughout the United States, Canada and Israel as part of the project. The 250 documentary films produced have been accepted into the archives of the Jewish National and University Library of Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition, they are being archived at Yad Vashem and the Mendel Gottesman Library at Yeshiva University.
What is special about the NNN process, which any individual who has ever seen one of the film’s will attest, is that the students’ participation in the documentary essentially creates a “documentary within a documentary,” or a filmed version of survivors passing their stories to a generation that did not experience the Holocaust first-hand. But NNN is more than just listening to a survivor speak.
Rosenberg shared that the students’ active participation in the creation of the documentary is key to NNN’s unique impact. “The editing process is what guarantees that the students never forget the story. They have spent many hours watching this one-and-a-half hour interview, over and over,” she explained. Rosenberg added that she has run into former students who completed the program 12, 13 or more years ago, and they often tell her the story of “their survivor” in complete, compelling detail.
Rosenberg shared that the experience is compounded and marked on each student’s memory by their individual research of the places; towns, ghettos, geographical regions and concentration camps included in each survivor’s biography before meeting him or her. They prepare the questions that they want to ask and spend a lot of time learning the timeline and personal history of their survivor. They then film and edit their own one-on-one interviews with broadcast quality equipment.
Finally, “choosing the very best sound bites to portray the story,” is the last step in the editing process, said Rosenberg, though the premiere itself also adds to the students’ collective experience. “To see the film come out in such a professional way, especially with Moriah’s entire community coming out to support it, makes the project much bigger. The whole community wants to participate in the witnessing of history,” said Rosenberg.
“The production was an amazing success with the students learning interviewing and filming techniques and also gaining an appreciation for their own religious freedoms and the State of Israel,” said Rachel Schwartz, Moriah’s NNN director, who works with parent coordinator, mentor and sponsor Abby Herschmann, who initiated NNN at Moriah, and works hard to provide eighth grade parent mentors to all the students as they complete the project.
Schwartz added at the conclusion of the screening, “In the room tonight there are nine people who lived through one of the most tumultuous time periods in history. I sat along with many people in the room through every single interview. It was very emotional but at the same time satisfying. As a community, we would like to thank them.” The survivors then stood up while the Moriah community gave them an extended standing ovation. They were Leo Frydman, Sharoltta Gollender, Aviva Graf, David Hertz, Rosa Plawner, Leon Sherman, Hyman Steinmetz, Renee Stern, and Sally Wimmer.
At the premiere, Rabbi Daniel Alter, Moriah’s head of school, thanked the survivors who attended the screening. “We can’t even imagine the horrible nightmare that you went through during the Holocaust. For you to find the inner strength to open up so many years later and share your stories with our students is heroic. Our students will forever be inspired by your story, and they will now carry and educate future generations about the important lessons we all need to learn from the Holocaust.”
Rabbi Alter thanked Rachel Schwartz, Tova Fish-Rosenberg, Abby Herschmann and the survivors who bravely shared their stories. The program is funded in part by parent and family sponsorships. For more information or to bring NNN to a new school, visit https://www.namesnotnumbers.org.
By Elizabeth Kratz
