Learning From The Holocaust With “The Rescuers”

By an IPS Correspondent Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 2013 (IPS) - As the world continues to face the threat of genocide, Michael King’s poignant documentary film, “The Rescuers”, seeks to learn lessons through the little-known stories of 13 diplomats, who saved the lives of thousands of Jews during World War II.

“These diplomats saved thousands of lives and they came back home to be marginalized. A lot of them disappeared into the darkness,” said Michael King, director of “The Rescuers”, explaining his motivation for making this film, after its screening at U.N. Headquarters in New York last week.

This latest film from Emmy Award winning filmmaker Michael King explores these 13 stories which demonstrate the power of human goodness and set an example for future generations.

“This movie has to be proactive and not reactive,” he added, expressing his hope that audiences incorporate the values of the film into their lives and work actively against the kind of hate that brought about such terrible crimes as those that were committed in World War II.

The film follows a Holocaust historian and a young Rwandan anti-genocide activist, who lost 100 members of her family in the Rwandan Genocide of the 1990s.

Travelling to 15 countries and three continents, they interview descendants of the diplomats as well as Holocaust survivors, in an attempt to understand what could be done to stop the current genocides in Darfur and elsewhere in the world.

The film takes us from London, to the streets of the Champs-Élysées in Paris, to the sacred Valley of Destroyed Communities at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, by using archival footage throughout the film.

Survivors and descendants of the diplomats are interviewed in various countries such as Germany, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, and finally Hungary.

“This film has to be educational so that history doesn’t repeat itself,” King pointed out, stressing the need to link the past to the present in order to resolve the most complex political and humanitarian issues worldwide.

The “Rescuers” asks essential questions, such as how to break the complex cycle of genocide, and also how political leaders and their diplomats can use their power to prevent humanity from committing such atrocities and save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.