Evelyn Marcus a Dutch Jew starts her documentary acknowledging about her extremely good fortune that both her parents, and their families, were Holocaust survivors. Growing up in a Amsterdam suburb as a comfortable middle class family in the post WW2 Years, the emphasis of the Marcus family was celebrating life to the fullest. This however is one of the few heart-warming facts in a scenario that will shake your very core.
Now decades later after Marcus saw the shocking re-emergence of vitriolic and threatening anti-semitism, she and Rosa her partner deemed that the Netherlands was no longer a safe place to live, and they emigrated to the US in 2004.
Marcus’s revelations about the sheer physical and mental violence that now pervades Europe targeting Jews is shockingly real, and an enormous wake-up call for anyone who hasn’t studied all the events in details like she has done. The way that European Jews are being attacked by others who have sheer hatred for anything to do with the state of Israel, is more than worrying especially as Marcus makes the comparison between them and the rise of the Nazis.
What is even more scary is that the Dutch Government by failing to condone outright hate speech that demands all Jews by killed, the extreme radicals feel empowered and the Jewish population even more threatened.
The turmoil in the Middle East has been exasperated by Western Governments giving their support only when it suits their own political agenda, and so in many cases actually making the region even more toxic. By standing by and they have allowed the unfettered birth of such extreme radical movements that has spread their evil doctrines throughout Europe and the US, that it has all reached the point of no return.
The sheer lunacy that a children’s kindergarten can only open if it has soldiers with machine guns guarding the premises would be enough for anyone to want to move countries, especially if you are Jewish and gay. But as evident in the Epilogue that Marcus has added to the film, the US turned out to be far the safe place she had imagined it would be
Marcus interviewed several experts Jewish and otherwise, to help her try and understand more of why this frightening rise in hate crimes seems to never stop increasing, The situation is complicated, as the current American Administration has so often demonstrated, swapping facts with outright barefaced lies is sadly so very acceptable this days. One comment in particular that did stick in our minds, and that is the violent minority will always get away with evil if there is a silent majority.
If there is one criticism of the movie that Marcius shot with fellow directors Ryan Cost, and Nick Jones is that it wrongly implied that all Muslims are bad, and we all know that is far from the truth.
Marcus chose to fight back against all this anti-semitism by making this riveting documentary and challenges us to find our own ways of joining in.
We have just celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall, maybe it’s time to go back further to acknowledge that the survival of gay men and women from the Holocaust are reason enough to fight back for all those that now face their own challenges.
PS The movie is NOW available at AMAZON PRIME
