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`A' Is For Awesome

Seventeen-year-old Zach Smilovitz shows film at third annual Detroit Docs International Film Festival.

Zach Smilovitz, center, with his grandparents Rita and Izidor Smilovitz

LYNNE KONSTANTIN

Special to the Jewish News

I

n the opening scene of Zach Smilovitz's film,

"A Is For Auschwitz: A Weekend With My
Grandparents, a Czech immigrant bustles
around the kitchen of her Silver Springs, Md.,
home, hurriedly putting together a sandwich "to
go" for her grown son's childhood friend.
As her son and grandchildren giggle at her
happy work, she repeatedly snaps, "Shush," in her
heavy accent, a smile on her face, and slaps a
mountain of mayonnaise and a thick slab of
tomato on a Kaiser roll.
As the woman's knife thumps through the
tomato, the camera slowly focuses in on her arm,
where a tattoo of numbers peeks out from her
pushed-up sleeves. Quickly, the woman wraps up
the sandwich and thrusts it at the friend, unwill-
ing to let a guest leave her home hungry.

The film is Zach Smilovitz's tribute to his
grandparents, Rita and Izidor Smilovitz, their
wartime experience and the personal strength that
saw them — and so many millions of others —
through the horrors of the Holocaust.
A 17-year-old senior at Detroit Country Day
School, Zach's effort began as a project for the
school's film club. After winning Country Day's
first-ever Best Film Award, the Franklin resident
submitted his work to the Detroit Docs
International Film Festival. And on Sunday, Nov.
14, 7A" Is for Auschwitz will be among seven other
films screened at the Uptown Birmingham 8 dur-
ing a full day of Jewish programming at the third
annual three-day all-documentary event.
Filmed on a digital camera over one weekend
and edited down from over 10 hours of footage to
a spare 27 minutes, the film breaks no new
ground in style, cinematography or even story;
instead, Zach, the son of Bernie and Donna

Smilovitz, encourages each elder to simply talk.
It is their honesty, the matter-of-fact telling of
the horrors they encountered, that is so moving:
The way Rita Smilovitz was able to live through
her experience and still find the ability to wink
mischievously at the camera on her wedding day;
the way she can sit down and tell her gruesome
tale, then make a sandwich for her son's friend.
"Their strength is their redemption, how they
prevailed and succeeded in America," says Zach
Smilovitz. "That's my favorite part of the film.
I've always been interested in film — I'm a big
fan of Spielberg, the Coen Brothers."
And this is not his first venture into filmmak-
ing. "In the fifth grade, a friend had a dummy, so
we made a horror film, Dummy of Death," says
Zach. "It's a classy bit of filmmaking," he adds.

`A' is

FOR AWESOME

on page 48

J

11/ 5
2004

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