Those Days in Terezin

Three women pay a joint visit to the Czech town of Terezin, formerly known as Theresienstadt. Their motives are as divergent as their backgrounds. The Israeli Victoria is a singer looking for an individual way to understand the Holocaust. Filmmaker Sibylle returns to the city that her German parents used to drive past, but never stopped at, on holidays. Lena, also Jewish, emigrated from Russia to Israel. She can hardly bear the idea that thousands have disappeared in this area without leaving a trace. Therefore she wants to give at least one of the survivors a face: the cabaret performer Karel Svenk. While he was living in the ghetto, Svenk wrote around 130 songs and cabarets. The ‘Charlie Chaplin of Theresienstadt’, as he was often nicknamed, possessed the unusual talent to convert topical events into satire, and he even managed to make his audience laugh in grim conditions. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)