page_title: Farewell Herr Schwarz
section_title: Synopsis
hierarchical_section_title: Farewell Herr Schwarz / Synopsis
caption_attribution_description: English: Train station Łódź Fabryczna (cropped) Polski: Dworzec Łódź Fabryczna
context_page_description: Farewell Herr Schwarz is a 2014 German–Israeli documentary film by Yael Reuveny, her first. In it she attempts to answer for herself and her family why her great-uncle, a Holocaust survivor, chose to resettle in East Germany afterwards and start a family there, a life her family in Israel only learned about after his death in the late 1980s. In the process of talking to his family, her family, and visiting the home in Vilnius where her great-uncle and grandmother lived with their family before the war, Reuveny considers issues of forgiveness, reconciliation and the effect of the Holocaust on the third generation of survivors, from her own perspective as an Israeli expatriate in Germany.
  Separated before the war, Reuveny's great-uncle Feivush "Feiv'ke" Schwarz and his sister Michla, both Lithuanian Jews, had agreed to meet at the train station in Łódź, Poland, if they survived. They were only two members of their family to do so and were in the city in 1945, but the meeting never took place and both assumed the other had died. Michla eventually emigrated to Israel and raised a family there, including Reuveny's mother Etty.
context_section_description: The film begins with Reuveny talking about herself and her background, describing herself as an Israeli descendant of Holocaust survivors. Footage showing her on a tram in wintry surroundings gradually reveals, along with her narration, that she lives in Germany, which she admits is an unusual choice. This is followed by an interview with her parents at her family home in Israel. Her father Shauli is of Iraqi-Jewish background, while her mother Etty is the daughter of Michla Schwarz, a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to Israel after surviving the concentration camps. Her parents have some difficulty coping with the fact that she lives in Germany, especially when she refers to it as "home".
  Reuveny next shows the only surviving photograph of the Schwarz family in Vilnius from before the war. In it her grandmother is shown seated next to her brother Feivush, known by the diminutive Feiv'ke. When German invaded Lithuania in 1941, he was conscripted into military service. The two made a vow that after the war ended, if possible, they would meet at the train station in the Polish city of Łódź.
  Through interviews with her mother and Michla's friends, Reuveny tells her grandmother's story. She survived the ghetto and later deportation to concentration camps, the only member of her family to do so. She made her way to Łódź after the war, where a stranger she encountered, upon confirming her identity, told her Feiv'ke had been taken as a prisoner of war and survived. He would indeed meet her at the station the following evening. But when it came time to take her to the station, the same stranger told her that Feiv'ke had been among refugees killed the night before by Polish nationalists resentful of the influx in the aftermath of the war. She instead began the journey that would ultimately end with her settling in what soon became Israel.
  Unbeknownst to Michla, Feiv'ke had survived—and had been in Łódź at that same time, where he was told that she along with the rest of the Vilnius Schwarzes had perished. He returned to Schlieben, where he had been held in a satellite camp of Buchenwald after it was liberated by the Red Army in the last months of the war, and began settling there. Reuveny travels there, visits his grave and interviews friends and family members, some of whom live in the former camp's barracks, repurposed as housing. She describes him as "liv[ing] like he were the last Jew on Earth" as he rebuilt his life in what became East Germany. He took the name Peter, joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party and married a Gentile woman. She had a brother who had served in the Wehrmacht and got along very well with Peter. He never acknowledged his Jewish background, and regularly celebrated Christmas with his relatives. In 1987 he died, with "Comrade Peter Schwarz" inscribed on the gravestone.
  Eight years later, Peter's son Uwe, searching for his father's possible relatives, sent Michla a letter in Israel. She had her daughter read it and, after comprehending that her brother may have lived out his life in East Germany, asked if he had at least married a Jewish woman. When Etty told Michla he had not, she recalls that she answered "Then I don't want to know", and never discussed him again.
  Uwe Schwarz tells Reuveny about his life growing up, recalling how his father became very angry one day when he and his siblings went into the nearby woods and played around some ruins of the camp. That was the first time he came to understand that Peter had been an inmate there. Together, he and Reuveny travel to Vilnius and find the former family home, abandoned and neglected. She meets another cousin, Stefan Kummer, who works at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and has embraced his Jewish identity.
  Uwe tells Reuveny that he wants to have his father moved to a Jewish cemetery and buried under his birth name. "You think [he] would want that?" she asks. Later, Reuveny is shown placing rocks from Peter's gravesite on Michla's tombstone, at Uwe's request. Kummer is shown in Jerusalem, buying himself a kippa and praying at the Western Wall. Reuveny's p
caption: The now-demolished station in Łódź, where Feiv'ke and Michla Schwarz were supposed to reunite in 1945
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