S2.E3 ∙ Episode #2.3

Rajmonda, a young woman studying English as a second language, could not communicate until she was eleven years old when she moved to Texas from war torn Kosovo. Having overcome several language challenges, she is now at community college braving campus culture. Sometimes the simple things are the most difficult.

Bearing Witness: The Voices of Our Survivors shares the collective stories of six Holocaust survivors from Germany, Poland, Greece, Netherlands, and Hungary. Their experiences ranged from living through anti-Semitism and Kristallnacht, surviving the Lodz Ghetto, fighting in the resistance, being shuffled between forced labor camps, suffering as slave laborers, escaping the death march, being smuggled into an orphanage, and hiding for nearly two years alone in an attic room. Bearing Witness fosters dialog between the survivors and today's Jewish youth, cultivating personal awareness and one's responsibility to learn from history. Through these survivors' individual stories, the Holocaust's collective history is shared. Through the survivors' personal memories and messages of hope, we are inspired by the human will to survive.

Children of Conflict is about the kids who grew up in the IRA dealing with the British Occupation, and had to learn how to survive being born into a war. Our story centers on a Irish daughter of the I.R.A, Bernedette Laub, who ran away 20 years ago to protect her son, but has returned to find closure from the tortures of her childhood. In the end, and to our surprise as we were filming, she finds it in the forgiveness from a British soldier she had sworn off as the enemy.

Sounds From the Fog chronicles the odyssey of a gay musician in Nazi Germany. Director Klaus Stanjek's cheerful Uncle Willi lived with his family, except when he was touring as a musician across Germany. Only when Willi turned 90 did his nephew Klaus Stanjek detect what his whole family had hidden: that Uncle Willi has spent eight years in Nazi camps and that he was gay. In a radical personal approach, veteran filmmaker Stanjek follows the complex turns that his family takes when they confront his Uncle Willi's secret. The result is a personal and political portrait of his beloved uncle, a talented singer and accordion player, that is one part historical inquiry and one part fascinating detective story.