Toman Brod

He became a beacon of hope for thousands of children and a lifesaver for hundreds: the Jewish German Fredy Hirsch. Director Winfried Laasch takes a look at one of the last mysteries of the Holocaust. As a boy scout, Fredy Hirsch took care of those who were most helpless in the face of Nazi reprisals from an early age: Jewish children and young people. First in Düsseldorf, later in Prague, then in the Theresienstadt ghetto and finally in Auschwitz.

Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein (1905-1989) was head of the Jewish Council of the artificial ghetto of Terezín (Theresienstadt in German). The Nazis made him representative of the community destined for extermination. Victim of a tragic contradiction, after the Liberation he was tried and absolved from the accusation of collaborating with the Nazis; he moved to Rome, where he was ostracized by the Jewish community until he died. His son Wolf devoted his life to redeem his image, trying to paint a more complex picture of the role his father played in Terezín. The film reconstructs through the conversation between Wolf and the psychoanalyst David Meghnagi a son's relationship with the memory of his father, between the acceptance, the denial, and the thematization of a common and familiar tragedy.