10/11/2021
As soon as again, the work on the website continues to spin a web of fantastic new contacts. My incredible dentist, Dr. Rajiv Arya, one of the really informed humans (we go over world approach while he drills on my molars ...), told me last year about this trip he went on a few years back. He discussed that it was a Holocaust education trip which the entire 2-week journey was documented by two young women from Toronto in a documentary entitled 'Those Who Lie Below'. Well, no doubt, I needed to satisfy these 2 imaginative and ambitious girls. Getting In Touch With Esther Garfin and Li Yeh has actually been in the producing many months because they are both hectic specialists in the tv industry in their particular fields of law and organization affairs. This Holocaust education and anti-discrimination trip literally fell into their lap unexpectedly in early 2002. At that time, both operated at the same TV production company (although on the non-TV production side of things), and they understood to do a documentary on this very distinct journey. With a little pre-production on this project, they essentially grabbed an electronic camera individual and went off to explore some crucial websites associated to the Holocaust in Germany and Poland. Remarkably, Esther's background is Jewish and one set of grandparents was originally from Poland so Esther has a rather individual connection to the Holocaust. Li, on the other hand, is of Asian descent and simply wished to find out more about this specific era in history. To make it much more interesting, the video camera individual is a young Canadian lady of German heritage who also narrates the documentary. She explains her own individual journey of confronting her fore-father's past. With a varied group of 12 other visitors Esther and Li checked out different historical sites in Berlin, and the prisoner-of-war camp of Ravensbrück in Germany. Then they headed east on a train (the historic irony of this choice of transport is not to be missed) to Poland to go to Warsaw, Lodz and Cracow. They checked out the extermination camps of Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. In their words, the harshness progressed the further the journey went on. Esther even had a chance to visit her grandparents' birth town of Kielce, Poland. What actually interests me is that this documentary is intended for a varied audience of people from various ethnic groups and religious associations. Even the choice of having the documentary narrated by a young woman of German descent highlights this cross-cultural angle. 'Those Who Lie Beneath' shows that the Holocaust is a disaster and lesson of pan-human proportions, going beyond all faiths, generations and cultures. Eventually, the documentary enhances that although some individuals may have grown tired of finding out about the Holocaust, it continues to hold crucial lessons for everybody as hate can exist in any community at any given time. In the upcoming interview, Esther and Li will speak to us about their individual experiences on this journey, the fascinating subthemes in this varied travel group, the discovering experiences and obstacles involved in producing this documentary and the insights they acquired from this journey.
