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When Shagrir returned to his childhood home in Austria, he made a shocking discovery. (AP, Sunday)
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| By Associated Press April 25, 2006 |
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When an Israeli filmmaker began researching his roots in Austria, he made a shocking discovery: His brother had bought his bar mitzvah suit at a clothing store owned by the family of future Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann.
While making a new documentary, Micha Shagrir learned that his family was closer to the Eichmanns than he ever imagined. There were business ties, social acquaintances and mutual friendships in their neighborhood of Linz, Austria.
Shagrir's film, "Sight of Memory," was being aired on Israeli television Monday night, the eve of the country's annual Holocaust remembrance day. It also is being shown at a film festival in Linz on Wednesday.
The 68-year-old Shagrir, whose parents fled Austria when he was a baby, worked on the project for more than two years. The quest took him to Bischof Strasse, the street where his family lived just four doors down from the Eichmanns.
In the film, after meeting with several residents of Bischof Strasse, some of whom knew and remembered Shagrir's family, the filmmaker looked up at the buildings where both families lived.
"First of all, they were neighbors ... the question is what do you want to remember from this," Shagrir noted in the documentary.
The family homes are still intact: No. 7, where he was born, and No. 3, where the Eichmanns lived. But their businesses are long gone. Shagrir's family owned a well-known candy factory, while Eichmann's father, Robert, ran an electronics store, and his mother had a tailor shop.
Yet some of the neighbors remain. Shagrir was pleasantly surprised to learn that the family factory - Schwager Candies - was something of a town symbol. Shagrir's family name was changed after moving to Israel.
"When I came to film on the street, people 80 and 70 years old passed by," Shagrir said. "Tears poured down their faces when they remembered the candies and cookies they ate."
Elderly people who still live on the street spoke easily of life between the Eichmanns and the Jewish Schwager family. Such ties were routine until the Holocaust.
Looking over town documents, Shagrir found a 1926 picture of his grandfather being crowned president of Linz's Jewish community. Sitting four seats away, at a ceremony attended by about 100 of the town's VIPs, was Eichmann's father, who as president of the Protestant community was a natural ally of the Jewish leader.
"The closeness between them was understood because they were both presidents of minority groups," Shagrir said.
Shagrir was even more surprised to learn that his older half brother, Haim Grunwald, bought clothes for his bar mitzvah - a Jewish ritual of entering adulthood - from the Eichmann's tailor shop. "He told me his bar mitzvah jacket was bought there," he said. Grunwald died two months ago, just before the film was completed.
Most of the Schwager family survived the Holocaust by fleeing Austria and Germany in the 1930s, narrowly escaping the systematic Nazi extermination of six million Jews.
Eichmann, the SS leader who organized the mass murder of Jews, was tracked to Argentina after World War II, abducted by Israeli agents in 1960 and tried and hanged by Israel.
As part of his research, Shagrir had coffee and strudel with Eichmann's nephew, Hannes, and spoke on the telephone with the Nazi killer's youngest son, Ricardo, a professor of Mideast archaeology in Berlin. Neither agreed to be filmed for the movie, but they expressed personal sorrow for their relative's actions, he said.
For Shagrir, going back to Austria was not just a professional experience, but also the first time he confronted the roots he spent most of his childhood hiding.
"When I was growing up, I didn't say that I was born in Austria. It wasn't something to be proud of, especially coming from a city that aside from me, Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Hitler were raised," Shagrir said in an interview at his cluttered Jerusalem home.
"On the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel, growing up as someone who came from German culture - classical music, singing - it was shameful and embarrassing," Shagrir said.
The second time Shagrir went back to Linz he visited with a group of Holocaust survivors, one of whom remembered standing just meters (yards) away from Hitler as the Nazi leader drove into town.
"This is his city after all," the survivor Uri Sela said. "We knew who Hitler was. He was scary, just how scary we didn't know. If we had known there would have been fewer crematoriums."
Shagrir is no stranger to controversy. He spent years studying the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey between 1915-1923, producing a movie in 1976 that set off a diplomatic tiff that almost led Turkey to cut ties with Israel.
The 50-minute movie, which focused on Armenian folklore, music, dancing and culture, included 45 seconds of footage from 1917 of hundreds of Armenian bodies hanging from trees and inside ditches, Shagrir said. Hours after the movie's premier showing in Jerusalem, he received an angry call from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Turkey, which is extremely sensitive to the Armenian killings and insists the deaths were not a planned genocide, was demanding Israel's state-owned TV cancel a planned broadcast of the film, Shagrir said. Israel TV later decided not to air the movie.
For Shagrir, the fact that Israel's Holocaust memorial falls on the same day as the 91st anniversary of the Armenian killings is especially significant.
Yet Shagrir said he would like all of his films to teach future generations that such incidents should not only be documented and researched, but prevented at all costs.
"What does it matter if there are 1,000 people in a ditch, 100,000 or a million," Shagrir said. "The message is that it is forbidden to kill or expel people because of their beliefs."
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