Berkshire County — The Berkshire International Film Festival will include several documentaries that chronicle the past but also show how the past has a substantial influence on the present. The documentary “UnBroken” will be shown at The Triplex on Friday, May 31, at 1:30 p.m.
Director Beth Lane is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and the movie is about her trying to uncover answers about her family. Lane’s mother and her six siblings in the Weber family escaped from Nazi Germany after their mother’s murder at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The seven siblings hid in a farmer’s laundry hut and spent two years in Germany before eventually escaping to America.
After immigrating to America, however, the once close family members were all told they had to declare themselves as orphans. “I did not hear stories over the years from my family about what happened to them,” Lane told The Berkshire Edge. “My family did not talk about the Holocaust.
My mother was so young when all of this happened and she had very few memories. Whenever we were talking about it, she would only share the same two or three memories. Each memory she shared was all less than 30 seconds long.
My uncle did share, but he shared more in the form of documentation.” Lane said that her uncle wrote a 40-page “kind of brief history” of her family in honor of the 50th anniversary of their immigration to America. “And that’s all I had,” Lane said.
“I never felt comfortable asking.
