UKRAINE: Steven Spielberg screens his documentary film based on the accounts of Holocaust survivors in Kiev in the Ukraine

Record ID: 1517093

  • Title: UKRAINE: Steven Spielberg screens his documentary film based on the accounts of Holocaust survivors in Kiev in the Ukraine
  • Date: 26th October 2006
  • Summary: KIEV, UKRAINE, (OCTOBER 18, 2006) (REUTERS) UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT VIKTOR YUSHCHENKO APPLAUSE TO FILM GUESTS APPLAUD FILM
  • Embargoed: 11th November 2006 01:08
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Ukraine
  • Country: Ukraine
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVAACE4UPYVTRFXNMHHJB7M2CB9C
  • Aspect Ratio: 4:3
  • Story Text: A documentary film based on the accounts of Holocaust survivors in Ukraine can help focus attention on the huge effects of wartime Nazi occupation, U.S. filmmaker Steven Spielberg said on Wednesday (October 18).
    Spielberg, who co-produced "Spell Your Name", was attending its premiere after visiting Babiy Yar, one of the first sites of Nazi mass killings outside Kiev city centre -- where more than 33,000 Jews were slaughtered over two days in September 1941.
    "I don't think I ever set out, when I make my movies, my own films, I never assume that anything I do is gonna change anything or change the world. But I really believe that listening, hearing the stories of Holocaust survivors from all around the world is going to change the world. It already has in many ways. And a film like this is certainly going to bring tremendous attention to the Holocaust in the Ukraine at Babiy Yar and in hundreds of towns and villages throughout the Ukraine where Jews were rounded up and liquidated."
    The film, co-produced with Ukrainian industrialist Viktor Pinchuk, brings together poignant, heart-rending accounts from Jews who survived and Ukrainians who sheltered them.
    Yuri Pinchuk relates how he saw his mother for the last time in a ghetto after she had helped negotiate his safe passage out.
    Polina Belskaya describes emerging from a mass grave and later escaping from a concentration camp.
    Irina Maksimova winces at the memory of seeing a German soldier remove a crying infant from a truck, smash its head and hurl the corpse back into the vehicle. She then talks about how her family took in and concealed 16 Jews.
    Director Sergey Bukovsky intersperses the accounts with images of life in towns and villages through the seasons.
    Spielberg, whose grandparents came from Ukraine, said showing the film would build understanding of the Holocaust in Ukraine -- where Soviet versions of history downplayed its scale.
    "All hatred starts with fear and we have experienced a century of fear and I fear we are going into another century of heightened fear," he said.
    He said he had been moved by his visit to Babiy Yar, where the Nazis ordered Jews to gather 10 days after they marched into Kiev largely unimpeded. No monument stood at the site until the 1970s and it was not until the end of Soviet rule that a menorah was erected to honour the mainly Jewish victims.
    Gypsies, partisans and other victims were later shot there, with the total number of victims believed to exceed 100,000.
    "I had mixed feelings to be quite honest because the epicentre of Babiy Yar is a train station...," he said.
    "I had a very tough time picturing what that place looked like 60 years ago and why it had changed so much. I was then able to see some pictures in books...get my bearings and my geography and go to the monuments."
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