Local support gives documentary an Oscar nomination

Lisa Ferguson

Sunday, March 22, 1998 | 9:32 a.m.

We have seen newsreel footage of the tragedy and horror that was the Holocaust: Images of the emaciated masses and their mass concentration camp graves are not easily forgotten.

But who remembers the thousands of Jews who survived this hell on Earth? What became of them -- many having lost entire families and their homes at the hands of the Nazis -- after Liberation Day on May 8, 1945?

The answer is revolting: By-and-large, they were rejected by the world and met with anti-Semitism and death threats in their home countries.

Also, throngs of survivors were denied passage by the British government to the Jewish homeland in Palestine, which later became Israel.

They were instead sent to "displaced persons camps," organized on former concentration camp sites by American and British authorities, where conditions were not much improved over what they had been under Hitler's regime, and sometimes shared roofs with Nazi sympathizers and collaborators.

The plight of the DPs is the subject of "The Long Way Home," a documentary produced by the Simon Weisenthal Center's Moriah Films' division, which is nominated for an Oscar at Monday night's Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

The two hour-long documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. It is comprised of rare archival footage and interviews with survivors and is narrated by "Amistad" co-star Morgan Freeman.

"The Long Way Home," which cost $750,000 to produce, was partially funded by the L.M. Newman Family Foundation, based in Incline Village, and Las Vegas SUN publisher Barbara Greenspun, who also sits on the Wiesenthal Center's national board of trustees.

Greenspun and her late husband, SUN founder Hank Greenspun, also supported the center's first cinematic endeavor, the 1981 Oscar-winning documentary "Genocide."

"Hank felt very strongly that there has to be a history, there has to be a record" of these Holocaust events, Greenspun says. The historical subject of "The Long Road Home" is one "that has not been dealt with before.

"What happened to these people when they were let out of these camps? They couldn't go back to where they were taken away from. Some of them were murdered ... if they went back to their hometowns," she says. "And the British would not let them go to Israel (so) they were just wandering around trying to find some place, some haven where they could live out the rest of their lives.

"I was surprised by this," Greenspun says, "even though I was very much aware of what went on in the Holocaust. This period of time (afterwards) seemed to be overlooked."

Free at last?

"There's been a tremendous amount of films and books produced about the Holocaust," but little about its aftermath has been documented, explains Richard Trank, who co-produced "The Long Way Home" with Weisenthal Center dean and founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier.

"A lot of people are under the impression that ... the gates of the (concentration) camps were opened and that chapter (of history) ended and people picked up their lives, end of story. That wasn't the case," Trank says. "For many people, the story continued."

One of his favorite stories is that of Auschwitz survivor Livia Shacter, who appears in the film. Her family having perished, she met a man in a DP camp whose wife and son had also died.

"They got married and raised a family together, picked up the pieces of their lives here in the states. It really shows the strength of the human spirit and how it can heal itself," Trank says. (His own father survived the Holocaust, though his grandmother and uncles did not.)

As a result of the infamous "White Paper" issued by Britain in 1939, immigration to Palestine was limited to only 75,000 Jews over a five-year period. Still, refugees were determined to reach the homeland and immigrated -- usually illegally -- by trekking through European mountain ranges and crossing the Mediterranean in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats.

Others headed elsewhere on the map. "When they came to the United States," Trank says that surviving family members, "would say things like, 'You don't need to tell us about this. It's too horrible for you to talk about.' What they were telegraphing was, 'It's too much for me to hear about.'

"So survivors just didn't talk about it until many years later," after films about the Holocaust were produced, Trank says. "It sort of opened up a door for many people to discuss what happened."

Oscar glory

Scheduled to air on the Showtime and Sundance cable channels this spring, "The Long Way Home" was written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, former chair of the film and TV production department at the University of Southern California. He earned an Oscar for his 1968 short documentary, "The Redwoods."

In researching 'The Long Way Home," Harris says he was struck by the blame and rejection that survivors received. "After all the Jews had suffered there was still this strong feeling of antipathy for the Jews," he says.

"I think the most important thing for me in the film is the resilience and the courage of the survivors who were able to start their lives again despite everything that had happened."

Hier, who created the Weisenthal Center in 1977, also founded Moriah Films. Besides "Genocide," he also wrote and co-produced another pair of documentaries for the production company, 1990's "Echos That Remain" and '94s "Liberation."

"The Long Way Home" will face some stiff competition Monday night from the other documentaries nominated for the Oscar, most notably director Spike Lee's civil rights-era documentary, "Four Little Girls," produced by HBO.

"Ours is a film made by a nonprofit organization and it's thrilling when you're nominated because it means that members of the Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) have recognized the work even though it doesn't come from a major film corporation," Hier says.

He considers film a medium for teaching history. "We don't just go to the library and take out a book anymore. Most people want their information today in the video format."

Also, he says, because a large percentage of Jews today are unaffiliated with a synagogue, "you can't assume that they're all going to be at the temple (and) know what's going on. They don't come." However, "our films have a universal appeal," Hier says. "They're not made only for Jews."

"The Long Way Home," Harris says, "is meaningful to anybody who has suffered tragedy in life, to see that the human capacity for recuperation is extraordinary."