From Here To Kovno
For Upper West Side Documentary Filmmaker, Search for Grandfather's
House Leads to Family Revelations.
Susan Josephs susan@jewishweek.org
Staff Writer, The Jewish Week
{This article was first published
December 12, 2000, in THE JEWISH WEEK
Some 25 years after her grandfather
died, Douglas paid a visit to her childhood home and stumbled upon a
series of forgotten family photographs. "These were people I'd
never seen before. They dressed well, like they were from a city,"
recalls Douglas, who imagined her ancestors as "shtetl peasants.
I was shocked. They shattered my identity. How could it be that I did
not know my own story?"
It would be another 15 years
before Douglas found herself knee-deep in passenger ship records, census
counts and "The Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto" as she
searched for family roots. Finally, as a woman in her 50s, Douglas learned
how her grandfather escaped conscription into the czar's army by fleeing
to America. Two years later, his brother Max followed. She discovered
how other relatives got herded into the Kovno Ghetto and how her great-grandmother
Chaya had the good fortune to die of natural causes.
A broadcast journalist who
spent her life telling the stories of other people, Douglas decided
to apply years of professional expertise to her own personal history.
The resulting documentary, My Grandfather's House, Â records
a family saga that many Jews will find familiar yet manages to remain
fresh and poignant.
"It's a compellingly
made, tightly woven story," says Ken Sherman, the director of film
and media at Makor, who has viewed the documentary. "It's not an
unfamiliar story but it has an emotional kick."
Currently under consideration
at PBS, My Grandfather's House had been initially screened as part of
the prestigious "No Borders" section of the Independent Feature
Film Market. Still a work-in-progress, the film, written and narrated
by Douglas, unfolds like a personal diary as it chronicles the events
that lead to the filmmaker's trip to Kovno, where accompanied by her
adult daughter, she searches for the home where her grandfather lived.
"I leave New York, not even sure I have the right address. I don't
know what possesses me," her voice narrates as the viewer watches
her first cry in a taxi on the way to the airport and later, at the
grave of her great-grandmother in Kovno.
Kneeling in a lush, green
cemetery, bearing stones that relatives gave her to place on this ancestral
grave, Douglas finally knows where her grandfather comes from and "where
I come from. More importantly, I know who you loved I'm not in the dark
anymore."
For the entire article go to http://www.jewishgen.org/litvak/here2kovno.htm
or http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=3883
In 1998, filmmaker Eileen
Douglas discovered the book Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto, which
accompanied the Museum's special exhibition of the same name. The book
tells the story of the Lithuanian Jews whom the Nazis forced into the
Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto when they occupied the Baltic states in 1941.
Since Douglas's grandfather was from Kovno, she was inspired to visit
the Museum. That visit began a remarkable search for details of her
family's experience in Kovno during the Holocaust, portrayed in this
short film she made.
A conversation with the filmmakers,
Museum experts, and a representative from the Jewish Genealogy Society
of Greater Washington follows the screening.
Public Programs | Spring 2002 film series | My Grandfather's House
(20 minutes, 2000; preceded by 20-minute slide presentation)
http://216.239.41.104/custom?q=cache:45ZZI_R0dt0J:www.ushmm.org/museum/publicprograms/programs/films02/