Growing up as a Jewish kid in sunny southern California — the son of an American-Jewish redhead and an olive-skinned Israeli father — I only caught passing glimpses of our family’s roots in “the Old Country.” I saw them in a framed charcoal sketch that hung over our fireplace, depicting a group of Talmudic rabbis who looked nothing like anyone in my family. No living person, anyway.

And I heard echoes of our Eastern European Jewish heritage in the Yiddish words that peppered our English — words like schlep, which means to drag or carry something, especially when either you or the thing don't really want to be involved in this dragging or carrying. And also the word shtetl, which I eventually understood meant a small, rural Jewish town or village. But the word always had a mythical quality to it because shtetls now only appeared in folktales.

As I got older I wondered what this lost world was like, and why it disappeared. Of course I learned that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust — but I also learned that over three million European Jews survived. And yet, of the tens of thousands of shtetls that existed before World War II, none continued to exist as Jewish towns after the war. This sad mystery cloaked the legend of these shtetls like an impenetrable, dark fog.

Then, near the end of 2014, I was invited to Poland by my friends, Aaron Friedman Tartakovsky and Aaron’s mother Anita Friedman, to film the rededication of the Jewish cemetery in their ancestral town of Gniewoszów. I had no plans to make a feature documentary, but the chance to visit a shtetl — or what remained of one — intrigued me. I spent extra time in Gniewoszów interviewing Polish elders to see what they recalled about the era in which Jews were their neighbors — their bakers, butchers, tailors, and shoemakers, and for the children, their playmates. The first memories shared by these elders fondly depicted Jewish/Polish coexistence, but eventually, these individuals also described or revealed strains of antisemitism –– and they admitted that Poles murdered Jews in their town long after the defeat of Nazi Germany. The most heartfelt such account eventually came from Pelagia Radecka, age 85 during our first interview, who gave searing eyewitness testimony about those murders — and who sought my help in finding Janek Weinberg, the surviving child of two of the victims.

Then, in 2018, Poland’s government outlawed speech that blamed Poland for any part in the Holocaust. This legislation, championed by the ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, amounted to a blatant criminalization of historical accounts precisely like the ones I had been filming, and it ratcheted up this story’s connection to potent issues of our day, including nationalism, the reemergence of authoritarianism, and the fight for historical truth in the era of “fake news” denialism. As I followed every lead connected to this small town, I found the last living Holocaust survivor born in Gniewoszów, as well as answers to burning questions Pelagia had been asking for over seven decades.

The guiding ethic of my filmmaking practice on this project is to protect, support, and elevate the eyewitnesses — those aging individuals who were alive to witness a period of history that is now being debated, recast, and whitewashed for political purposes. I am also proud to be collaborating with Polish cinematographers and animators who are helping me tell this story in a way that is authentic to Polish culture and history. Like our subjects, they have bravely committed themselves to revealing hard truths at a time when Polish journalists and historians who deliver so-called “anti-Polish” or “unpatriotic” messaging have faced reprisals from government officials and from a large, nationalistic sector of Polish society. Collectively, our ethic is to use our storytelling tools truthfully, pushing back against a repressive narrative with authenticated, emotionally moving accounts of the past.

As a Jewish filmmaker, I have also found that this project has sometimes thrust me into a kind of ambassador role, whether I sought out such a role or not. Some of the elders I interviewed were thrilled to speak at length to a Jewish person — and with such a nice, big camera! I seemed to be the ideal outlet for childhood memories of playmates and candy shops, tales that they — in their final years — needed to entrust to a caretaker. At other times, such as when I interviewed the Polish Ambassador to the United States, or when I discovered that a father and son I interviewed had a stolen Jewish tombstone in their backyard, I felt obliged to advocate for change, be it a matter of national government policy or the return of a specific ritual object. In these circumstances, I have worked to navigate the ethics of being a filmmaker, a Jew, and a participant in the story in a manner that is transparent, honest, and human.