arts & entertainment

Hitillen Jewish children at

a Polish convent, 1943

Women Of Valor

Polish wartime heroines get their close-up.

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

gling Jewish babies and adolescents from
the ghetto with their parents' blessing. The
women acclimated the kids to non-Jewish
rena Sendler was a 29-year-old social
homes before hiding them under Catholic
worker when the Nazis walled the
names in dozens of convents and private
Jewish quarter of her beloved Warsaw. residences.
The occupiers ruthlessly exacerbated the
Sendler continued her efforts even after
suffering in the ghetto by forbidding Poles the Warsaw Ghetto was destroyed, ulti-
from helping Jews.
mately saving around 3,000 Jews altogether.
"We couldn't agree with this:' Sendler
She was especially careful about recording
recounted unequivocally in a late-in-life
the original and adopted names and other
interview. "So I organized with the people
details that would allow for the reunion of
I trusted most:'
the children with their parents after the war.
Sendler originally smuggled food and
"I'm sure I have many faults:' Sendler
medicine into the ghetto but changed
said with characteristic self-deprecation,
tactics once she saw that the Nazis' aim
"but there's one thing I can boast about.
wasn't humiliation but annihilation.
I'm a good organizer."
"Very quickly we realized that the only
This mid-2000s interview, with those of
way to save the children was to get them
co-workers Magda Rusinek and Jadwiga
out:' she recalled.
Piotrowska as well as several hidden chil-
Sendler and her cohorts began smug-
dren, provides the moving core of Mary

I

Against All Odds

Israeli documentary reflects compassion
among enemies, cruelty among neighbors.

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

T

he most moving and memorable
documentaries about the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict illuminate
the bigger picture by focusing on everyday
people.
Israeli television journalist Shlomi Eldar
was unwittingly presented with a splendid
example when a surgeon asked him for
help raising $55,000 for a bone marrow
transplant for a Palestinian baby. Eldar's
on-air announcement elicited a call from
an Israeli (who'd lost his son in the army,
incidentally) donating the full amount.
"It was the beginning of light between
all the darkness in the Middle East:' Eldar
recalls. "I wanted to see how a baby from
Gaza could get treatment in an Israeli
hospital."
But Eldar's TV network wasn't interest-
ed in a film, nor was anyone else in Israel.
He proceeded, and persisted, nonetheless.

42

April 28 a 2011

Precious Life, which won the Ophir Award
for Best Israeli Documentary and was
short-listed for the Academy Award for Best
Documentary Feature, premieres May 5 on
HBO after playing several U.S. film festivals.
Eldar was at a crux in his career when
Muhammad Abu Mustaffa and his parents
entered his life. He had covered Gaza as a
television correspondent since 1991 and
was ready for a change. The book he was
writing about Hamas was almost finished.
So he grabbed his camera in the
spring of 2008 and starting chronicling
the Mustaffas' saga. It was complicated,
at first, by the difficulty of transporting
family members to the Sheba Medical
Center at Tel HaShomer for testing as
potential donors. So Eldar became more
than an observer, pulling strings to facili-
tate passage through checkpoints.
"I didn't realize it would be a huge
story:' Eldar recalls. "After they finished
the treatment and I escorted them to
Gaza, I sold my camera. When I saw the

Skinner's one-hour documentary, Irena
Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers. The
film airs May 1 on PBS affiliates around
the country to mark National Holocaust
Remembrance Day, but will not be broad-
cast on Detroit Public Television-Channel
56 until May 15.
Sendler, who died at 98 in 2008, is
an endearingly straight shooter in her
interview. Sharp and witty with a precise
memory and an unwavering sense of jus-
tice, she is an inspiring testament to the
bravery of ordinary people.
In fact, the point is made more than
once in the documentary that non-Jews
caught sheltering Jews were subject to exe-
cution along with their families. This zero-
tolerance policy throws into sharp relief
the courage and commitment of those
Poles who did help, while providing some
justification for the ones who did nothing
for fear of risking their loved ones' lives.
There's no question that the Poles suf-
fered grievously at the hands of the Nazis,
beginning with the September 1939 blitz-
krieg. By spotlighting the work of Irena
Sendler and her cadre, the documentary
can be viewed as an attempt to alter the
long-held perception that the Poles were
uniformly anti-Semitic and eager to help
the Nazis with the deportations and killing.
Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo in
October 1943 and refused to name her
cohorts or divulge details of their system
despite being interrogated and tortured
over several weeks. On the day she was
slated to be executed, the Polish resistance

freed her by bribing a guard. She went into
hiding, took on a fake identity and contin-
ued with her mission.
After the war, the Communists (follow-
ing Stalin's orders, no doubt) made life
more than unpleasant for members of the
Polish resistance. Sendler was questioned
and pressured but revealed nothing. Of
course, her good deeds were not publi-
cized by the regime.
But the survivors she helped — most
of whom lost their parents in the camps
— did not forget, and in 1965 Yad Vashem
recognized Sendler as Righteous Among
the Nations. Characteristically, she deflects
credit in Irena Sendler: In the Name of
Their Mothers.
"I could not have achieved anything
were it not for that group of women I
trusted who were with me in the ghetto
every day and who transformed their
homes into care centers for the children:'
she declared. "These were exceptionally
brave and noble people."
She continued, "As for me, it was simple.
I remembered what my father had taught
me. 'When someone is drowning, give him
your hand. And I simply tried to extend
my hand to the Jewish people." II

Irena Sendler airs May 1 on PBS
affiliates around the country
to mark National Holocaust
Remembrance Day. Detroit Public
Television-Channel 56 will broadcast
the program 3 p.m. Sunday May 15.

story was still going on, I rushed
to buy a new one he says.
The Mustaffas' experience
in Israel had gone far beyond a
simple feel-good episode. Some
of their neighbors spread rumors
that the family received the
transplant in exchange for col-
laborating. Then the Gaza War
broke out, putting the family in a
different kind of danger.
Eldar adamantly defends
Israel's right to defend itself
— in the case of the proximate
cause of that war, from Katyusha A scene from Precious Life
missiles — but he decries the
degree of military force used in Gaza.
Eldar's transition from objective journal-
"I was the only Israeli TV war cor-
ist to participant. It was a role shift that
respondent that was against the war:' he
the Israeli-American producer Ehud
asserts, "and on Israeli television, day and Bleiberg had emphasized from the time
night for 21 days, on every single show, I
he joined the project in its early stages.
said that I'm against this kind of war."
"'You have to understand, he told me,
There are other major, unexpected twists `that you are part of the story:" Eldar
in Precious Love, notably a conversation
recalls. "`You're not only the director,
where the mother, Ra'ida, tells Eldar she'd
you're a character. You have to under-
be quite satisfied if Mohammad grew up to stand, if you had not acted like you acted,
became a suicide bomber.
Mohammad would have died."
You can imagine Eldar's response, given
his extraordinary commitment to the
Precious Life debuts 8:30 p.m.
family. From the filmmaking standpoint,
Thursday, May 5, on HBO.
Ra'ida's shocking comment confirmed