To Live and Survive

Nov 27, 2025

1h 32m

★ 0.0

The Story of Erich Finsches

Overview

The documentary portrays Erich Finsches, a true Viennese original and Holocaust survivor. Based on over six years of collected material by director Matthias Jaklitsch, who supported Erich on his travels, the film shows him as a positive, humorous, but also argumentative and unique personality in all his humanity. At 97, Erich continues to tirelessly advocate for remembrance of the past, attending memorial ceremonies and schools to spread his message of "Never Again." Instead of a traditional "eyewitness narrative," the film not only documents Erich's life, his youth during Nazi persecution, and his rebuilding of a new life after the war, but also the relationship between the director and the protagonist.

Genres

Documentary

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Cast

Matthias Ramon Jaklitsch

Erich Finsches

A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".

0.0

Łódź Ghetto

Mar 22, 1989

The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.

7.0

St. Louis

Oct 21, 2019

Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.

0.0

Elie Wiesel Goes Home

Feb 12, 1997

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

7.2

Stanisław Lem: Autor Solaris

Nov 2, 2016

An account of the life and work of the Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a key figure in science fiction literature involved in mysteries and paradoxes that need to be enlightened.

0.0

Requiem for Auschwitz - the film

Aug 2, 2022

13 years ago, director Bob Entrop made the film A piece of blue in the sky, the first film in the Netherlands that depicted the murder of almost 1 million Sinti and Roma during the Second World War. There is a taboo on what happened during the war, you don't talk about it with anyone and certainly not in front of a camera. Requiem for Auschwitz is a sequel, with the most valuable moments from the first film, supplemented with the grandchildren and the creation and performance of the 'Requiem for Auschwitz' by Sinti composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb by the Sinti and Roma Philharmonic from Frankfurt and a Jewish choir in the Berliner Dom in Berlin, during Holocaust Memorial Day. During his visit to Auschwitz in 2020 with four musicians from the Dutch Accompaniment Orchestra, Roger shows them the places that inspired him.

0.0

Peter Eisenman: Building Germany's Holocaust Memorial

Feb 20, 2009

This documentary explores the creation of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Reaction of the German public to the completed memorial is also shown.

8.0

Regina

Apr 25, 2013

The first woman rabbi in the world, Regina Jonas, comes to light, courtesy of Rachel Weisz – who plays her – and her father George Weisz, who was the executive producer for this poetic and beautiful documentary. The daughter of an Orthodox Jewish peddler, Jonas was ordained in Berlin in 1935. During the Nazi era and the war, her sermons and her unparalleled devotion brought encouragement to the persecuted German Jews. Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The only surviving photo of Jonas serves as a leitmotif for the film, showing a determined young woman gazing at the camera with self-confidence.

7.3

We Feed the World

Sep 10, 2005

A documentary that exposes the shocking truths behind industrial food production and food wastage, focusing on fishing, livestock and crop farming. A must-see for anyone interested in the true cost of the food on their plate.

0.0

War in Vienna

Jan 1, 1989

A film about news, life and death. Before the media became so prevalent, we were concerned about our immediate neighborhood. At the end of the day, news was the subject of our conversations, but now it's possible to converse with someone at the other end of the globe. We do it all the time. It's simple. The world has become one big neighborhood. Now Headline News has replaced the back fence. That's the news service of the eigthies. It's a new idea and a new approach.

0.0

America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference

Apr 6, 1994

As the campaign to force Jews out of Germany ramps up, the American government blocks efforts to help rescue many of these displaced persons, and Americans' antisemitism only seems to get worse.

9.0

Never Again Is Now Global

Invalid Date

Holocaust survivors, children of survivors, and grandchildren - as well as German freedom fighters - express their shock at the Covid era's fear-mongering and divisive dictates that are reminiscent of the prelude to the Holocaust. This ambitious five-part docu-series is the brainchild of Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Vera Sharav.

8.0

Poland 1939: When German Soldiers Became War Criminals

Aug 31, 2019

September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland. The campaign is fast, cruel and ruthless. In these circumstances, how is it that ordinary German soldiers suddenly became vicious killers, terrorizing the local population? Did everyone turn into something worse than wild animals? The true story of the first World War II offensive that marks in the history of infamy the beginning of a carnage and a historical tragedy.

5.7

Butterflies Do Not Live Here

Feb 25, 1958

A documentary about the life of Jewish children forced to live in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

6.5

The Dead Nation

Aug 25, 2017

A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.

7.3

The Smuggler and Her Charges

Nov 14, 2016

A captivating and personal detective story that uncovers the truth behind the childhood of Michaël Prazan's father, who escaped from Nazi-occupied France in 1942 thanks to the efforts of a female smuggler with mysterious motivations.

5.0

Francisco Boix: A Photographer in Hell

Jan 1, 2000

In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.

0.0

Caring Corrupted: The Killing Nurses of the Third Reich

Jan 13, 2017

About the nurses who used their professional skills to murder the handicapped, mentally ill and infirm at the behest of the Third Reich and directly participated in genocide.

7.5

Maria Theresa’s Dark Side

Jan 13, 2024

Shortly before Christmas 1744, Vienna, the center of power in the Habsburg Empire, is the scene of a disastrous drama with repercussions for the whole of Europe. Against the spirit of enlightenment and tolerance, the very young Maria Theresa orders the expulsion of the allegedly disloyal Jews from Prague.

To Live and Survive

Overview

Genres

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