When my father died suddenly in the summer of 2022, I found myself watching the four-hour testimony of his experiences as a Jewish child hidden in the Dutch countryside during World War Two. What struck me above all was his faith in humanity in spite of the horrors and trauma he endured. In order for my father to survive, dozens of strangers had risked their lives.
Seeking connection as much as understanding, I reached out to my dad’s closest childhood friend, Betty, who had also survived the war in hiding. The story she told me about the family responsible for her own survival has haunted me ever since, and is the inspiration for this documentary.
Like my father, Betty grew up in Amsterdam, which fell under Nazi control in 1940. When her parents were deported to Auschwitz in 1943, she was taken in by her Christian neighbors Albert Wittenberg, a black émigré from the Dutch Colony of Suriname and his white, Dutch-born wife, Janna. Betty was hidden in plain sight by two individuals who, as a mixed-race couple, were themselves highly visible in 1940s Amsterdam.
Albert had come to Amsterdam in 1930 in search of a better life. He worked as a firefighter and played soccer for a legendary Dutch-Surinamese squad. As a member of the Communist Party, he participated in the first wave of resistance against the Nazi Occupation.
In 1944, Albert was betrayed and deported to a labor camp. In the final days of the war, he was among more than a thousand prisoners, including Jews and dissidents from across Europe, who perished in one of the most horrific massacres committed by Germans during the war.
As the Allied army advanced on Germany, Nazi officers marched a starving and exhausted group of prisoners across the country, eventually arriving in the small town of Gardelegen. There, SS officials called upon the local Hitler youth and townspeople to herd the prisoners into a large granary, which was subsequently torched. Nearly everyone inside was burned alive. Those who tried to escape by frantically digging under the walls were shot.
Just one day later the allies arrived at Gardelegen. Eyewitness reports document an unimaginable scene of horror. In response to the atrocity, the commanding American officer rounded up the townspeople of Gardelegen to bury the bodies of those they had helped murder.
The depravity to which the events at Gardelegen testify, make it difficult to draw optimistic conclusions about humankind. At the same time the heroism of figures like Albert make it possible to understand the sense of hope that I was so struck by in my father’s testimony. It is within this space of ambivalence, and with an eye toward present-day calamities, that the narrative of this film unfolds.
As a descendent of enslaved people and an émigré of a colonized land, Albert already bore within him the intergenerational traces of European violence and oppression. He became a victim of Nazi persecution not because of his race or creed but because of the choices he made: to care for the vulnerable, to exhibit courage in the face of horror, to stand against the flames of history. This is his story.