THE TWO LIVES OF EVA A Film by

Esther Hoffenberg

85 minutes / color / 2005

“Dreamlike… Compelling! A promising debut.” —The Jewish Week

“Shattering! Engrossing! A complex testament to a woman of extraordinary strength and fragility, and a life wrecked and rebuilt by the tides of history.” —The Village Voice

FIRST RUN / ICARUS FILMS 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201 718.488.8900 / 800.876.1710 / F 718.488.8642 www.frif.com / [email protected]

Synopsis In this emotionally moving and revelatory documentary, Esther Hoffenberg investigates the early life of her mother, Eva (née Lamprecht), interviewing her friends, relatives and acquaintances, and scrutinizing her mother’s tape-recorded reminiscences, family photos, home movies, letters and other documents, to reveal how emotional traumas rooted in Eva’s experiences during WWII eventually tragically affected not only her, but also her entire family. Born in Poland to parents of Germany nationality, Eva was a young woman during the German invasion and occupation of Poland. As a member of a wealthy Lutheran family, whose industrialist father collaborated with the Nazis to keep his paper mill operating, Eva lived a protected life, although she was aware of the deportation of Poland’s Jews, including one of her closest friends, to Nazi concentration camps. When the Soviet Army arrived in 1945, Eva left for Germany where she met Stas Hoffenberg, a Warsaw ghetto survivor. Together they left for Paris, where they married and began a new life. Eva converted to Judaism and, having learned more about the horrors of the Holocaust from her husband, passionately devoted herself to Jewish issues. Her lifelong effort to reconcile the emotional conflicts of her two lives—fueled by a sense of shame about her Germany identity and feelings of cowardice about her inaction during the war, an inner turmoil she always kept hidden from her children—manifested itself during the Seventies in a series of mental breakdowns and hospitalizations. As a compelling biographical story of a woman whose formative years were lived during the rise of Nazism, WWII and the Holocaust, THE TWO LIVES OF EVA gradually becomes a revealing account of how her personal tragedy was inextricably linked to the historical violence of the era.

Synopsis 2 Eva, my mother, a Polish woman of GermanProtestant culture, was brought up in the high industrialist bourgeoisie of Sosnowiec. She left Poland when the Soviets arrived in 1945. It was in the post-war Germany that she met Sam, a survivor from the Warsaw ghetto. She left with him for Paris. In marrying Sam, Eva also married his story and identity and set her own aside. In their couple, my parents grew increasingly happier until 1970, when Eva had her first fit of delirium. In 1978, she lived through a second attack and began to tell me about the young girl she was before she met my father. She revealed her tortured conscience regarding her German identity during the war. The film is built around this recording and my mother’s autobiographical thoughts. Close friends and cousins also help to enrich this story of a tragic destiny. (Esther Hoffenberg )

Awards and Review Excerpts PATRIMONY PRIZE 2005 Cinéma du Réel Festival

PRIX DES ESCALES DOCUMENTAIRES 2005 La Rochelle Film Festival OFFICIAL SELECTION 2005 New York Jewish Film Festival

2005 Jerusalem Film Festival 2005 Viennale 2005 Tbilissi International Film Festival 2006 Buenos Aires International Film Festival

INTERVIEW WITH ESTHER HOFFENBERG RAISING THE VEIL An Interview with Esther Hoffenberg by Cécile Wajsbrot Can you tell us how the film came to be made? Back in 1978, when I was gathering material for my first film, "As If It were Yesterday", my mother underwent a prolonged period of psychological turmoil. She started telling me her life-story and her experience of the war. I recorded this material on a small tape-recorder, because we were both keen for some kind of record to remain. Then we travelled to Germany together: I took photographs of her there and recorded more stories. That summer, the summer of 1978, she was locked up. I started taking notes so as not to forget the scenes I was experiencing and also to help combat a sense of impotence. All this material was preserved to no particular end, although I did realize – in some vague way – that I should want to come back to it at a later date. When my mother died, in March 2001, unanswered questions came to the surface. I decided to travel to Poland for the first time, and this journey had to be part of a film project. Before leaving, I studied my mother's archives, in particular the German-language letters she had received during the war, which provided evidence of what her early life had been like. Then, when I got to Krakow, I found myself hugely moved. It was as if I had come to a familiar place, because the language and the expressions on people's faces seemed utterly familiar. But Krakow was not significant in terms of our family history: it was an undestroyed city. Furthermore, the emotion I was experiencing was connected not to her story but to my father's: it was in Krakow that I realized just how Polish he had been. Before making my way to Sosnowiec, my mother's home town, I could not help going to Auschwitz first. The physical proximity between these two places – Auschwitz where my father's father died and Sosnowiec where my mother's father had run his paper-mill – brought the antagonism between the two sides of my family back to the surface. It taught me I had to come to terms with both sides of my inheritance. When I got to Sosnowiec, I was surprised to discover that the municipal museum contained my grandfather's archives, including his will, because, since the fall of communism, the town has started taking an interest in the industrial dynasties that established it. In the museum, I was like a ghost returned from the past. Returned, in fact, from two separate pasts: on my mother's side, I was descended from a German, Protestant family; and on my father's side, I was Jewish. I embodied the two dark strands of the town's history. After this trip, I felt that I needed to find witnesses who could tell me about my mother's life, because the trip to Poland had yielded nothing of relevance to her story. I needed to find out about my mother's relationship with her father and about the will I'd found, which she had never discussed with me. My mother seems to have minimized her father's violent rejection of her, probably in order to be able to go on loving him and also in order to avoid having to confront her own children's incomprehension of what had happened. Now, I wanted to dig all this past up. I wanted to unravel the chronology. I wanted to raise the veil. Which meant finding my mother's friends and relations and talking to them about issues which politeness would, in normal circumstances, have prevented me raising. Things like the war and what people thought of Jews. I rebuilt the web of connections that had surrounded my mother, connections her illness had destroyed because it had driven people away. Eva's cousins and her close friends had never met, they were each able to provide me with a distinct part of her history. In telling me the different parts of her story, they were able to relive a fragment of their own childhoods, that the general sweep of History had swept away. One other element seemed vital. This was the question of my sister and her cancer. I possessed her notes that provided me with her interpretation of what she had gone through. Initially, the film was to be dedicated to my sister, because it was she who had started me on the whole process of going back in time. But as I delved deeper, I realized that she must be a part of the film in her own right, because her conflict with my mother raised the issue of illness as a whole. I then used the various witness accounts as the components of a screenplay. The screenplay won the support of, first, Yaël Fogiel, my producer, and then of Arte-France. Strangely enough, though Eva spent part of her life in Germany, Germany is not much shown in the film. The various witness-accounts of Eva's life prior to her arrival in France are not rooted in specific places. They are narrative-driven. The people involved have scattered around the world. They live in Germany, in Switzerland and in Australia. I didn't have the space to tell each of their stories. In particular, Germany is depicted in the film through archive footage of post-war devastation, abstract images of roads, and a song by Barbara, the French songwriter, called Göttingen. I wanted to show the climate of devastation, in order that the audience should have something to hold on to – both in terms of how collective memory has preserved an image of those times and in terms of the impact those images has had on our imaginations. It seemed better to show the extent of the disaster that befell Germany than to outline the detail of my mother's trajectory. Her mental journey was

more important. When the film shows physical movement, this movement relates to my own journeys across Poland, my visit to Palmiry Forest where the Nazis used to shoot their hostages, my trips to Sosnowiec and to Warsaw. The issue of what is transmitted is central. My generation is burdened with a sense of what its parents went through. We identified with the victims. Telling my mother's story was hard because of my father's distress, which my sister felt even more strongly than I did, because she was the elder and because her first name is our father's mother's name. My sister made me aware of the burden of what happened during the war and the burden became even heavier when she died. I represent a collective memory that could not, at one time, be expressed in schools, because great misfortune entails a sense of shame which prevents people from telling their stories. But the burden of history is not all burden. In my father's case, the fact of being a survivor, meant that he also transmitted to his children the strength and energy of survival. Be this at it may, one must choose one's camp. However much compassion I may have felt for my mother, I was Jewish. Her German past aroused mixed feelings. I could not but identify with her Germanness, of which she was ashamed. But I identified with the Holocaust, which pervaded our everyday lives – all the more so because my mother had so thoroughly assimilated a sense of Jewishness. Our family was constructed around my mother's silence about her German past. I learnt very early on what it was best not to discuss within the Jewish community, within a school environment. In some sense your mother's life-story was eclipsed by your father's. Perhaps the process of making this film has been about retrieving her story and giving her her due? Yes. I felt it was hard for my mother to exist in her own right, to have her own thoughts and to express them in her own words. It was my job to do her justice: I wanted to provide some sort of artistic representation of her development. She had lived in her husband's shadow: I wanted to depict that part of her life which had never taken place. And also, of course, to restore the beauty and strength her illness had sapped. Feminism hit the mothers of the baby-boom generation full-on. It deprived them of the sacrifices they had made, because it denied the meaning of those sacrifices. Much depression is about that dispossession. There is on the one hand a psychological complexity, a meshing of general and personal histories, and on the other a complexity of material, since the material includes sound recordings, photographs, archive, home movies not to mention the material you shot yourself. And yet there is an evident narrative continuity. Initially, it felt as though I'd hardly recorded any of my mother's speech, but what there was sufficed to enable me to reproduce the sound of her voice. The film is built around the thread of her voice. My recordings of her stories took on an increasingly large role, yet in order that the story should not be exclusively plot-driven, the accompanying images were made multi-layered. They combined my father's 8mm films, my grandmother's sculptures, painted portraits, photographs, reproductions of letters written in German. The period between 1978 and 1980, when my mother was ill, was also the time when we made the recordings. My representation of those years is without doubt what brings the topographical and mental journeys in the film together. And in order for this sense of unity to function, I had to stand as a character in the story, a discreet presence that comes in the form of voiceover. My voice converses with Eva's voice. It precedes, supporting or responds to it. In terms of picture, I appear in the form of hands that manipulate various objects, a glimpse of a face reflected in a train window. The voiceover expresses a subjective point of view, regarding – for instance – the question of conversion to Judaism, but the subjectivity is really minimal because I need to establish a certain detachment. The point was to make the character of Eva as evocative as possible, not to succumb to self-analysis. Which is why your film addresses an entire generation, or this generation and the generations that will succeed it… Among the various things which motivated the film, one of the most significant was the notion that we are all haunted by the spectre of repetition. How can we avoid repeating our parents' decisions? And there was also the question of what to transmit to my own children. But the real sense in which this film is aimed at my generation concerns my own need to understand the questions it raises. I do not think I am alone in carrying the burden of the Holocaust, or in having to live with the complexities of a dual heritage. My sister Adélie's story represents a digression of sorts, but it is a legitimate one. It was her thinking which accompanied me as I travelled around Poland. The questions she raised drove me on. They relate to the questions raised by Anne-Lise Stern, Ania Francos and Fritz Zorn. We are the first generation to possess the requisite tools of analysis – and also the first generation to experience a sufficient duration of peace to be able to undertake such analysis.

ESTHER HOFFENBERG Born in 1950 in Paris, Esther Hoffenberg has worked for more than twenty years in the field of the production and distribution of documentary films. Founder of the company Lapsus in 1989, she has produced around fifty documentaries among which Charlotte, life or theatre? by Richard Dindo, Us, children of the XXth century by Vitali Kanevski, Those from Saint-Cyr military school by Philippe Costantini, The way by Ferenc Moldovanyi, La Devinière by Benoît Dervaux, La Raison du plus fort by Patrick Jean, Mozambique, diary of an independence and Natal 71 by Margarida Cardoso, Gaza, isolation by RAM Loevy, the collections Design and Artists for ARTE-France and France 5. Esther Hoffenberg was also for nearly ten years in charge of the sales, distribution and festivals for the Canadian National Film Office. She is now partner, together with seven other independent producers, of Doc&Co, an international distribution firm of documentary films. In 1980, she co-directed with Myriam Abramowicz As if it were yesterday, a documentary feature film which received the special Mention of the Femina Price in Belgium and was presented in various festivals, in France and abroad. The two lives of Eva is her first personal film.

Credits written and directed by Esther Hoffenberg produced by Yael Fogiel Les Films du Poisson coproducers Arte France Lapsus photography Laurent Fénart sound Benjamin Bober editing Anne Weil Françoise Arnaud sound design and mix Charles Schlumberger calibration device Eric Salleron

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