(JEWISH GROUP) Bay Area-linked documentary about post-war Polish village reveals dark secrets
Anita Friedman didn’t set out to make a murder mystery.
When the longtime executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services first visited her father’s native village in Poland 20 years ago, she planned to document the story of her family and the other Jews who lived there before World War II, virtually all of whom were murdered in the Holocaust. She hoped to use what she came up with as part of Holocaust education in public schools, a major focus of the JFCS Holocaust Center.
“I wanted to use the story of my town as a lens through which to tell the story of the Jews of Poland,” she told J. “But things started to unfold.”
“Among Neighbors,” directed by award-winning Berkeley filmmaker Yoav Potash, tells the brutal tale of the murder of a Jewish family in the village of Gniewoszów after the war — not by the Nazi occupiers but by their own Christian neighbors, a horrific event that was repeated in about a dozen post-war Polish towns, with more than 1,000 victims.
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