Chris Knipp
10-10-2025, 01:27 PM
NOW IN THEATERS, OCT. 10, 2025 IN NYC, OCT. 17 WEST COAST
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20PTR.jpg
PELAGIA RADECKA
YOAV POTASH: AMONG NEIGHBORS (2024)
[This review was previously published in connection with SF Indiefest]
A detailed documentary using interviews and animations recounts the fate of of Jews in Poland during and after WWII, focusing on a single town
Seven decades after the end of World War II, award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash uncovers the lost Jewish history of a small Polish town by the name of Gniewoszów. For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews peacefully coexisted in this little-known enclave. "It was a Jewish town!" says an oldtimer. Today, Gniewoszów has not a single Jewish resident, and even the Jewish tombstones are gone, having been stolen from the cemetery to be used by locals as grindstones and building materials. . . Jews were murdered in this town six months after the end of the war.
Throughout the country, Jewish tombstones have been used as grindstones, as well as for paving, for foundations of buildings, and many other things - part of an effort to forget about Jews and about the harm that was done to them in Poland under the Nazis, before the Nazis in turn began wiping out the Poles. It's recounted in this film how the Germans came to burn down every single house in Warsaw. Yacov Goldstein saw this happen. He was a boy who tells his story here. Yacov survived from Gniewoszów and wound up living in Israel. Toward the end of the war he was given by his parents to be hidden by a Polish (i.e., Christian) family (why were the Jews in Poland not considered as Polish?). This family fled the rampaging German burning Warsaw and left the boy in a loft where they had made him live for over two years, not seeing sunlight, his legs atrophying, tormented by cockroaches at night. Yacov recounts that he survived this harrowing experience largely through the oldest daughter of the Polish family bringing him books to read from the library every day. He could escape, temporarily, through the world of the imagination found in books.
Eventually after leaving, and waiting a long time in a hospital after being spared by German soldiers from execution by police, Yacov met his mother again, briefly. All this is recounted using flickering hand-drawn black and white animation. A Polish woman named Peligia Radecka, a neighbor of Yacov's family who remained in Gniewoszów after the war, also appears in this tale. Six months after the end of the war she was witness to the murder by Polish people of five Jews, which included the mother and father of Yacov. Eventually, she spoke up to filmmakers, and was reunited to Yacov.
It's a complicated story, but the important part to recognize, which has been depicted in films before, is that the Jews in Poland were still persecuted and murdered after the end of the war. But as Yoav Potash, the filmmaker, reveals, and various historical spokesman explain, there are conflicting forces here. The recently ousted right wing government instituted a law (later reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor) prohibiting blaming the Poles for antisemitism or collaboration with the Nazis. Of course the Poles collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. But there were dissenters, and people can be teased out, like Pelagia Radecka, willing, indeed compelled, to remember the wrongs committed against their Jewish friends and to speak about them all these years later.
Yacov eventually is reunited with Pelagia Radecka, then herself in a wheelchair. And when an event was staged to restore the Jewish cemetery of Gniewoszów, hundreds of people showed up, and the school was closed to attend.
All this goes over ground touched on more indirectly by Jesse Eisenberg's much admired 2024 movie [I]A Real Pain, (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5498-New-York-Film-Festival-2024&p=42037#post42037) which I reviewed at the New York Film Festival, starring Eisenberg himself and an Oscar-nominated Kieran Culkin who play Jewish cousins whose grandmother escaped from Poland and from a concentration camp there and came to America. A Real Pain includes a scene exactly like one shown in Among Neighbors, where Jewish visitors from America,"Holocaust tourists," come to a lady in Poland living in a small house that survived the war and asking, "Is this a Jewish house?" and her answering, "Yes."
It's touched on in Among Neighbors that "Make America great again," is code for erasing the ugly side of American history. Potash states that every country has a dark history it would like to erase. Poland's is the treatment of the Jews. America's is slavery. A final onscreen caption is "Nationalist efforts to whitewash Poland's Jewish history ramain popular and active." This film is a valuable record particularly because the living record is disappearing: most of the elders who were interviewed here have since passed away.
Among Neighbors is a painstaking documentary packed with information. But A Real Pain is the movie that many will go to see, and through it glimpse the Polish branch of the history of World War II and the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.
Yacov Goldstein, like Pelagia Radecka, both died at the age of 91 after being reunited. Yacov, who became a celebrated historian, and wrote his own memoir Against All Odds, searched for his little brother Ezra all his life. What happened to him was never learned.
The story of Yacov Goldstein can be compared with Herbert Heller's flashback memories of surviving the Holocaust in Avenue of the Giants (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5274) (2023), which in turn have something in common with Lajlos Koltai's Fateless (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=536)(2005). There are also several films about Jews who survived in Europe by posing as gentiles such as Agnieszka Holland's 1990 Europa Europa.
Among Neighbors, 100 mins., debuted Nov. 10, 2024 at Warsaw Jewish Film Festival. It was screened for this review as part of SF Indiefest, where it shows at the Roxie Theater Feb. 18, 2025.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20PTR.jpg
PELAGIA RADECKA
YOAV POTASH: AMONG NEIGHBORS (2024)
[This review was previously published in connection with SF Indiefest]
A detailed documentary using interviews and animations recounts the fate of of Jews in Poland during and after WWII, focusing on a single town
Seven decades after the end of World War II, award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash uncovers the lost Jewish history of a small Polish town by the name of Gniewoszów. For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews peacefully coexisted in this little-known enclave. "It was a Jewish town!" says an oldtimer. Today, Gniewoszów has not a single Jewish resident, and even the Jewish tombstones are gone, having been stolen from the cemetery to be used by locals as grindstones and building materials. . . Jews were murdered in this town six months after the end of the war.
Throughout the country, Jewish tombstones have been used as grindstones, as well as for paving, for foundations of buildings, and many other things - part of an effort to forget about Jews and about the harm that was done to them in Poland under the Nazis, before the Nazis in turn began wiping out the Poles. It's recounted in this film how the Germans came to burn down every single house in Warsaw. Yacov Goldstein saw this happen. He was a boy who tells his story here. Yacov survived from Gniewoszów and wound up living in Israel. Toward the end of the war he was given by his parents to be hidden by a Polish (i.e., Christian) family (why were the Jews in Poland not considered as Polish?). This family fled the rampaging German burning Warsaw and left the boy in a loft where they had made him live for over two years, not seeing sunlight, his legs atrophying, tormented by cockroaches at night. Yacov recounts that he survived this harrowing experience largely through the oldest daughter of the Polish family bringing him books to read from the library every day. He could escape, temporarily, through the world of the imagination found in books.
Eventually after leaving, and waiting a long time in a hospital after being spared by German soldiers from execution by police, Yacov met his mother again, briefly. All this is recounted using flickering hand-drawn black and white animation. A Polish woman named Peligia Radecka, a neighbor of Yacov's family who remained in Gniewoszów after the war, also appears in this tale. Six months after the end of the war she was witness to the murder by Polish people of five Jews, which included the mother and father of Yacov. Eventually, she spoke up to filmmakers, and was reunited to Yacov.
It's a complicated story, but the important part to recognize, which has been depicted in films before, is that the Jews in Poland were still persecuted and murdered after the end of the war. But as Yoav Potash, the filmmaker, reveals, and various historical spokesman explain, there are conflicting forces here. The recently ousted right wing government instituted a law (later reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor) prohibiting blaming the Poles for antisemitism or collaboration with the Nazis. Of course the Poles collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. But there were dissenters, and people can be teased out, like Pelagia Radecka, willing, indeed compelled, to remember the wrongs committed against their Jewish friends and to speak about them all these years later.
Yacov eventually is reunited with Pelagia Radecka, then herself in a wheelchair. And when an event was staged to restore the Jewish cemetery of Gniewoszów, hundreds of people showed up, and the school was closed to attend.
All this goes over ground touched on more indirectly by Jesse Eisenberg's much admired 2024 movie [I]A Real Pain, (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5498-New-York-Film-Festival-2024&p=42037#post42037) which I reviewed at the New York Film Festival, starring Eisenberg himself and an Oscar-nominated Kieran Culkin who play Jewish cousins whose grandmother escaped from Poland and from a concentration camp there and came to America. A Real Pain includes a scene exactly like one shown in Among Neighbors, where Jewish visitors from America,"Holocaust tourists," come to a lady in Poland living in a small house that survived the war and asking, "Is this a Jewish house?" and her answering, "Yes."
It's touched on in Among Neighbors that "Make America great again," is code for erasing the ugly side of American history. Potash states that every country has a dark history it would like to erase. Poland's is the treatment of the Jews. America's is slavery. A final onscreen caption is "Nationalist efforts to whitewash Poland's Jewish history ramain popular and active." This film is a valuable record particularly because the living record is disappearing: most of the elders who were interviewed here have since passed away.
Among Neighbors is a painstaking documentary packed with information. But A Real Pain is the movie that many will go to see, and through it glimpse the Polish branch of the history of World War II and the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.
Yacov Goldstein, like Pelagia Radecka, both died at the age of 91 after being reunited. Yacov, who became a celebrated historian, and wrote his own memoir Against All Odds, searched for his little brother Ezra all his life. What happened to him was never learned.
The story of Yacov Goldstein can be compared with Herbert Heller's flashback memories of surviving the Holocaust in Avenue of the Giants (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5274) (2023), which in turn have something in common with Lajlos Koltai's Fateless (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=536)(2005). There are also several films about Jews who survived in Europe by posing as gentiles such as Agnieszka Holland's 1990 Europa Europa.
Among Neighbors, 100 mins., debuted Nov. 10, 2024 at Warsaw Jewish Film Festival. It was screened for this review as part of SF Indiefest, where it shows at the Roxie Theater Feb. 18, 2025.