In 1987, in a Viennese Antique shop, about four hundred color slides were found in mint condition. As it turned out, they had been taken in the Lodz Ghetto by Walter Genwein, the Ghetto's Austrian chief accountant. Tracing the history of an old family photograph, filmmaker Esther Podemski travels to Poland with a group of her parent's contemporaries. Holocaust survivors, these elders are returning to conduct a memorial service in the Jewish graveyard in their home town, Poddebice. Here they find a destroyed graveyard and eventually discover that all of Poland is all but cleansed of Jews.
History sadly repeats itself.
Utilizing clandestine, startling footage of the town's final days, Warsinski unflinchingly documents Western guilt and the UN's final, bloody capitulation. Powerful interviews detailing the disparate views of combatants on both sides are woven together with vivid descriptions of the impossible journeys faced by the few civilians who made it out alive. Secret People recounts the shocking past and present of leprosy in America. It explores the incessant damage of a powerful stigma that destroyed the lives of many in our nation's only remaining leprosarium, but mobilized others to accomplish the remarkable act of transforming their prison into a home. Within Four Walls explores the lives of women who have escaped from violence in their own families and sought help in local shelters in Slovenia.