Stark Look Back at a World of Little Hope

Reports of atrocities still arrive, while greeting viewers daily are displaced survivors.

On the screen is a near monolith of misery, entire valleys of Kosovar refugees huddling and stagnating in muddy, dehumanizing camps and tent ghettos after being ripped at gunpoint from their homes in seismic disruptions that may never be reversed.

Some are separated not only from their families but from everything they have known, cut off from their pasts while facing uncharted futures with no resources. Beyond these media images of their collective plight, what record of their individual histories will remain when they are gone? What glint of their existence?

Surely nothing like Lisa Lewenz encountered in 1981 when discovering some metal boxes in the attic of her parents’ home. Inside them were a precious archive foreshadowing a more famous Holocaust, long-forgotten home movies shot by her Jewish grandmother, Ella Arnhold Lewenz, a nonprofessional filmmaker whose camera documented street life, family gatherings and other sides of the Germany she knew before and after the rise of Hitler.

Much later came the discovery of Ella’s letters and diaries dating to World War I, which along with her footage are the soul of the PBS film “A Letter Without Words,” airing on KCET during a week commemorating the Jewish Holocaust.

“A Letter Without Words” is both a vibrant homage to her grandmother by Lisa and a breathtakingly candid story about her German Jewish family’s religious and cultural identity.

A family member recalls of Ella: “She and her film camera were inseparable.” Many of her pictures are cheerful, a compulsive amateur capturing her prominent family at play and at elegant gatherings before their safe universe began to crumble. There are even grainy pictures of famous members of the family’s social circle, including Albert Einstein. Yet almost immediately he is supplanted by a dark swastika set against a gray sky.

“A Letter Without Words” was a personal odyssey for Lisa Lewenz. Her German father and American mother were married in the U.S., in a church. Raised Episcopal, she did not learn until she was 13 that her father, who converted to Christianity after relocating to the U.S. as a young man in 1937, was born Jewish. And included in her film is a haunting audiotape from him that she heard only after his death. In it he regrets hiding his Jewish origin.

“This has been an extraordinary journey for me,” Lisa said from New York recently about making the film in which her posthumous collaborator is her grandmother, who died nine months before the 44-year-old Lisa was born. Ultimately, the barrier separating Lisa from her past collapsed like the Berlin Wall.

“I followed my grandmother’s path and followed history’s path in a way,” she said. “I feel like I stood in for people [Holocaust victims and their offspring] who weren’t able to do that.”

Although obvious parallels exist between the “cleansing” of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and the fates of millions of German Jews in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the family of Lisa’s grandmother at least had wealth at its disposal when facing displacement from its homeland before it became nearly impossible to escape.

Ella Lewenz was a middle-aged widow living affluently in Berlin when she defied a Nazi ban on independent filmmaking through much of the 1930s. But you can almost sense a gathering of genocidal clouds when in one fleeting sequence she is approached by a man in a black uniform, causing her to stop filming.

“Here was a person who was brave enough to pick up her camera and make films in public,” her granddaughter said. “She’s Jewish, and she’s lost her citizenship, and she’s filming as she’s trying to escape. She had a compulsion and a courage that I admire so much. She understood the power of her camera and what she was doing.”

Although Ella Lewenz shot mostly in black and white, there is also some early 16mm color here that intensifies rows of red banners with swastikas hanging from buildings. How extraordinary that they appear so ordinary.

Lisa narrates the film, but someone else reads excerpts from her grandmother’s letters and diaries, as in this entry from Nov. 14, 1938, when Ella was making plans to leave Germany with her daughters: “Beautiful weather. In room 126, a nice man gave me my passport, which I signed and paid for.” Then this ominous addendum about her daughter, Dorthea: “I was told she could not get a passport. But no explanation was given.” Later, Dorthea did join her family in America.

Another 1938 entry from Ella: “Berlin is beautiful. Will I ever see it again?” She would, shortly after the war. But as her footage shows, it was in ruins.

Lisa is seen in her film traveling to Berlin where she visits the house where her grandmother’s family lived until 1937 and shoots from the precise spots from where Ella aimed her camera. “I loved it,” she said on the phone. “I could time travel. I could stand in the exact spot where my grandmother stood and see . . . the same trees. They were just taller.”

She also interviews several of Ella’s daughters. “I realized each of Ella’s children were like libraries,” she says in the film. “Their memories would go up in smoke the moment they were gone.”

The honesty she encounters is striking. “We are all 50 percent good and 50 percent bad,” her Aunt Gerda says, trying to wear the shoes of Nazi oppressors. “The worst is I don’t know what I would have done during the Holocaust and the Nazi era.”

A disturbing thought.

At this point ethnic cleansings merge, whether Turks slaughtering Armenians early in the century or Hutus annihilating Tutsis in Rwanda. To say nothing of Serbians targeting Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians in a land where only the media are chronicling histories aborted and histories that will never be.

* “A Letter Without Words” airs on Tuesday at 10 p.m. on KCET.