by Tali Feinberg

When thinking about the Holocaust in Lithuania, some of us can only think about the horror from a distance or in small doses. But filmmaker Michael Kretzmer has made it his duty to look up close in a new documentary that exposes the depravity of the killing, and questions Lithuania’s Holocaust denial.

The documentary, to be released in Australia in November, looks at the “murder of children in front of parents; the smashing of babies’ skulls against trees; girls being loaded onto trucks for deadly rape parties by Lithuanian gangs; the imprisonment of thousands of Jews in their own synagogues and their murder either by fire or starvation and thirst amidst human filth and the stench of their loved ones’ rotting bodies; the beheadings; the immolations; and the thousands of lethal humiliations.”

This is what Kretzmer found over the past three years, during which his life was “entirely absorbed” in the making of the documentary that “attempts to tell the truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust.”

Kretzmer was born in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, in 1954 to South African Litvak parents. “My dad was from Heilbron – I still take special pride in the ‘Vrystaat Yidden’ – and my mom from Krugersdorp. My grandparents were Yiddish-speaking shopkeepers. My parents immigrated for political reasons, and although we always had the proverbial bag packed, they stayed.

“This community sparkled with Litvak energy and created a generation of young Jews who have left their mark across the globe,” he says. “I was active in Habonim South Africa and a graduate of the University of Witwatersand in law. I left in 1975 and became a journalist in the United Kingdom writing for the Sunday Times and making documentary films. I retired about 12 years ago and built a little farm.”

Three of his grandparents came from Lithuania, the fourth from Riga. “My father’s family lived in BirŽai, in northern Lithuania, for centuries. Very few of my family managed to immigrate to South Africa. The rest, hundreds of them, were murdered.”

Full article in the South African Jewish Report here.