Aviva Kempner collaborated with Josh Waletzky on the -film.

Partisans of Vilna

HEIDI PRESS

Local News Editor

A

viva Kempner had a
mission. In the midst of
.all of the Holocaust lit-
erature and films
available, Kempner
wanted to make sure that the story of
the partisans was told.
- So strongly did she feel about
this mission, that she left a promis-
ing legal career to devote herself to
creating a documentary film on the
topic, Partisans of Vilna.
The two-hour-plus film, which
will be shown Feb. 13 and 14 at the
Detroit Film Theater at the Detroit
Institute of Arts Auditorium, details
in interviews and film clips the battle
waged by Jews of the Jerusalem of
Lithuania —Vilna— against their
Nazi oppressors.
A former Detroiter now living in
Washington, D.C., the 40-year-old
Kempner got her inspiration from
her mother, a Holocaust survivor,
who posed as a Polish Catholic to es-
cape from the Nazi terror, and from
her late father, a journalist, whose
mother perished in the Holocaust.
"I grew up with the image of
fighting Nazis, the same way other

kids played cops and robbers and
cowboys and Indians," Kempner said.
"I didn't get anything in high school"
about the Holocaust, Kempner ad-
mitted, adding that making the film
was like compiling her own version of
Roots.
The documentary is a tribute to
her mother, Kempner readily ad-
mits, but adds the tribute is directed
elsewhere as well. It is a tribute to
the topic." To keep her mother's
name alive, she dubbed her produc-
tion company the Ciesla Foundation,
bearing her mother's maiden name.
"My mother is my role model,"
Kempner said of Helen Kempner
Covensky, an abstract expressionist
painter. "Her paintings are an expes-
sion of life. So is my film."
Although there were other
Jewish population_ centers where
Jews battled the Nazis, particularly
the Warsaw Ghetto, Kempner said
she had, two reasons for focusing on
Vilna. First, she said, it was the scene
of the first call of resistance in
Europe. Secondly, she and her
collaborator/director Josh Waletzky,

Former
Detroit
film producer
Aviva Kempner
wanted to
show that
some Jews
resisted
the Nazis

.

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