THE FLAT

After Arnon Goldfinger’s 98 year old grandmother Gerda had died, he and his family descended on the Apartment in Tel Aviv where she had lived for over 70 years. Grandmother was a compulsive hoarder so Arnon and his siblings and Hannah their mother had their work cut. When Gerda and Karl her husband had re-located to Israel before WW2 from Germany she bought the entire contents of her apartment with her and then kept adding to it for the rest of her life.

They found countless dozens of white kid gloves, hundreds of handbags and some 20 pieces of luggage squirrelled away. But it was amongst the endless boxes of papers that they found a rather shocking surprise. It was copies of a notorious fascist newspaper from the 1930’s that had a series of articles ‘A Nazi Travels to Germany’ . Arnon was desperate to discover why rabid Nazi propaganda should be found in his Grandmother’s apartment BUT little did he know then that his research would open a whole can of worms.

Essentially the articles were about the travels of a high ranking Nazi Officer Baron Von Milderstein and his traveling companions who were Arnon’s grandparents. And if that fact wasn’t bad enough, to his utter disbelief he uncovered evidence that Gerda & Kurt had remained closed friends to this aristocratic Nazi and his wife for many years after the War ceased, and would visit them often in Germany.

Why a Jewish couple would maintain a close relationship with a man who the Nazi criminal Eichmann named in his 1961 trial as one of the instigators of the plan to rid Germany of Jews. was a mystery to Arnon and his mother. And even as they uncovered more relevant facts and evidence they could never really come up with a satisfactory explanation to it all.

Arnon’s research led him to meeting the surviving daughter of the Von Mildensteins who had settled in England after the war but was now back in suburban Germany. Edda had also hoarded masses of family paper but had never really even attempted to sort through this historical treasure trove for what appeared to be a fear of what she may uncover. Arnon made that slightly unnecessary by going to the Official Records recently recovered from the old East Germany which showed that the Baron was still a Propaganda Minister in the SS throughout the War. Sharing this information with her was not an easy decision.

This is a powerful film that does not really explain what went on with this two close knit families before and after the war, or indeed how complicit Von Milderstein was with the Nazi genocide. What was abundantly clear however was how very vital the need for denial is when children do not want to re-visit or even know about their parent’s past. Arnon never quite recovers from the fact that his own mother had never ever asked a single probing question from her parents, and it is patently clear that Edda refuses to even consider anything other than the sanitised facts of her father’s past that she insistently clings too. This intriguing documentary also suggests that in these unconscionable times of such vile atrocities the parents deliberately don’t want to burden or scar their own children with the reality of their pasts.

It’s hard not to take different viewpoint when the mystery is unravelling in front of your own eyes because despite the fact that Arnon Goldfinger’s film is a deliberate non-sensationalised and well-considered presentation of his story, its actually extremely easy to get irrationally angry when he encounters yet even more denial. In the cold light of day however I can recognize and acknowledge what an extraordinary piece of journalism that it is, and how I’m also convinced it will help others who may have own skeletons from this part of history in their own family closets.

Unmissable.

Available via Amazon

★★★★★★★ ★★

Posted by queerguru at 17:39

Labels: biography, documentary, Israeli, Jewish, war

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