page_title: Misa's Fugue
section_title: Summary
hierarchical_section_title: Misa's Fugue / Summary
caption_attribution_description: English: Frank Grunwald in 2010 working on the female sculpture that will eventually be a reference to the day his mother and brother were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
context_page_description: Misa's Fugue is a documentary film created and produced by students and faculty of the Fleetwood Area High School in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania. The documentary tells the story of Holocaust survivor Frank Grunwald, born Miša Grünwald using student-produced artwork, as well as photos and film from both archived sources and the Grunwald family collection. The film was a collaboration of the school district's media, technology, history, music, art, and English departments.
context_section_description: The film begins by defining “fugue,” as a musical arrangement of several different components woven together.
  Holocaust survivor Frank Grunwald narrates his life story, beginning with his youth amidst the artistic elite of early twentieth-century Prague. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Grunwald was sent to internment and concentration camps. The film depicts his experiences between 1939 and 2010 as he continues to work on an incomplete sculpture that appears to be a hunched over woman in agony. Grunwald tells how his older brother John, who was born with a congenital defect, was accompanied by his mother to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and how his relationship with artist Dina Babbit spared him the same fate.
  The film describes Grunwald's liberation from Gunskirchen in 1945, his reunion his father, and their escape from communist Czheckoslovakia across Europe to London and later The United States.
  The film depicts Grunwald's love of art and music, his a career at General Electric, his professorial position at Pratt Institute, and his life in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he lives with his wife. He has two sons and five grandchildren.
  The film concludes with a discovery Grunwald makes after his father commits suicide in 1965: a letter that his mother had written to her husband before she and John were taken to the gas chambers.
  The film identifies the clinical definition of “fugue”: a loss of identity, especially following some significant trauma.
  In the final shots of the movie, Grunwald's completed sculpture is revealed, named for the date his mother and brother were murdered in a Nazi gas chamber.
caption: Frank Grunwald in 2010 working on the female sculpture that will eventually be a reference to the day his mother and brother were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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