Long Is the Road (film)

Last updated
Long Is the Road
Directed by
Written by
Produced byAbraham Weinstein
Starring
Cinematography
Music by Lothar Brühne
Production
company
International Film Organization
Release dates
  • September 1, 1948 (1948-09-01)(Germany)
  • November 11, 1948 (1948-11-11)(US)
  • March 18, 1949 (1949-03-18)(Israel)
Running time
77 minutes
CountryGermany
Languages
  • German
  • Polish
  • Yiddish
Budget £20,000 [1]

Long Is the Road (German : Lang ist der Weg) is a 1948 German drama film directed by Herbert B. Fredersdorf and Marek Goldstein and starring Israel Becker, Bettina Moissi and Berta Litwina. The story examines the Holocaust from the perspective of a Polish Jewish family and a young man who is able to escape while he is transported to a concentration camp. The film was made during the summer of 1947. [2] It was the first German-made film to directly portray the Holocaust ( Morituri was released earlier but made later). It was made with the support of the US Army Information Control Division. It was partly shot at the Bavaria Studios in Munich with sets designed by the art director Carl Ludwig Kirmse.

Contents

A major aim of the film was to lobby for Jewish survivors still living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps to be allowed to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. It drew a comparison between the plight of the Jewish population and the sufferings of other Europeans who had ended up in DP camps. This was partly done through the principal character's romantic relationship with Dora, a Jewish holocaust survivor. The film employs a semi-documentary technique to tell its story. Many of its themes were similar to other German rubble films of the era, but it was notably different partly because of its advocacy of an optimistic, idealistic new world in Palestine. The film only ever went on a limited release, and by the time it received its German première, many inhabitants of the DP camps had been re-settled, with large numbers emigrating to the newly founded state of Israel. [3]

Cast

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jewish Brigade</span> Palestinian Jewish unit of the British Army (1944–1946)

The Jewish Infantry Brigade Group, more commonly known as the Jewish Brigade Group or Jewish Brigade, was a military formation of the British Army in the Second World War. It was formed in late 1944 and was recruited among Yishuv Jews from Mandatory Palestine and commanded by Anglo-Jewish officers. It served in the latter stages of the Italian Campaign, and was disbanded in 1946.

Aliyah Bet was the code name given to illegal immigration by Jews, most of whom were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany, and later Holocaust survivors, to Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, in violation of the restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, which dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new state in the midst of the 1948 Palestine war.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atlit detainee camp</span> Concentration camp in Mandatory Palestine

The Atlit detainee camp was a concentration camp established by the authorities of Mandatory Palestine in the late 1930s on what is now the Israeli coastal plain, 20 kilometres (12 mi) south of Haifa. Under British rule, it was primarily used to hold Jews and Arabs who were in administrative detention; it largely held Jewish immigrants who did not possess official entry permits. Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were interned at the camp, which was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers.

<i>Holocaust</i> (miniseries) 1978 American television miniseries directed by Marvin J. Chomsky

Holocaust (1978) is an American television miniseries which aired on NBC over four nights, from April 16 — April 19, 1978.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bricha</span> Underground organized migration 1944-48

Bricha, also called the Bericha Movement, was the underground organized effort that helped Jewish Holocaust survivors escape post–World War II Europe to the British Mandate for Palestine in violation of the White Paper of 1939. It ended when Israel declared independence and annulled the White Paper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe</span> Temporary refugee camps in Germany, Austria and Italy

Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A "displaced persons camp" is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Czechoslovaks, Estonians, Greeks, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Belarusians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp</span>

Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp was a displaced persons (DP) camp for refugees after World War II, in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. It was in operation from the summer of 1945 until September 1950. For a time, Belsen DP camp was the largest Jewish DP camp in Germany and the only one in the British occupation zone with an exclusively Jewish population. The camp was under British authority and overseen by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) with camp directors that included Simon Bloomberg. Today, the camp is a Bundeswehr barracks, having been a British Army base until 2015.

Sh'erit ha-Pletah is a Hebrew term for Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. These were active between 27 May 1945 and 1950–51, when the last DP camps closed.

Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accepted definition of the term, and it has been applied variously to Jews who survived the war in German-occupied Europe or other Axis territories, as well as to those who fled to Allied and neutral countries before or during the war. In some cases, non-Jews who also experienced collective persecution under the Nazi regime are considered Holocaust survivors as well. The definition has evolved over time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nakam</span> Jewish partisan militia

Nakam was a paramilitary organisation of about fifty Holocaust survivors who, after 1945, sought revenge for the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Led by Abba Kovner, the group sought to kill six million Germans in a form of indiscriminate revenge, "a nation for a nation". Kovner went to Mandatory Palestine in order to secure large quantities of poison for poisoning water mains to kill large numbers of Germans. His followers infiltrated the water system of Nuremberg. However, Kovner was arrested upon arrival in the British zone of occupied Germany and had to throw the poison overboard.

Abraham Judah Klausner was a Reform rabbi and United States Army captain and chaplain who became a “father figure” for the more than 30,000 emaciated survivors found at Dachau Concentration Camp, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Munich, shortly after it was liberated on April 29, 1945. He also cared for thousands more left homeless in camps as the victorious Allied Forces determined where they should go.

<i>Jacob the Liar</i> (1975 film) 1974 film

Jacob the Liar is a 1975 war drama film directed by Frank Beyer, adapted by Beyer and Jurek Becker from the latter's novel of the same title. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust, the film centers on Jakob Heym, a Polish Jew who attempts to raise the morale inside the ghetto by sharing encouraging rumors that he claims he has heard on an (imaginary) radio. The film was a co-production between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. It premiered on East German television on 22 December 1974, and was released theatrically on 18 April 1975.

Samuel Brand was a German Jew who became officially the first immigrant to enter the State of Israel after its creation on 14 May 1948. He was also a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Brand carried with him the first visa ever issued by the Government of Israel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jewish Vocational School Masada</span>

The Jewish Vocational School Masada in Darmstadt was established and run by Samuel Milek Battalion between 1947 and 1948. The school trained and prepared about 45-60 young Holocaust survivors for the purpose of building a kibbutz in Israel. Although the school only existed for ten months, it nevertheless represents an important aspect of the post-war history of Hesse and a manifestation of the re-emergence and establishment of Jewish life in post-war Germany.

Jakob Edelstein was a Czechoslovak Zionist, social democrat and the first Jewish Elder in the Theresienstadt ghetto. He was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

<i>In Those Days</i> 1947 film

In Those Days is a 1947 German drama film directed by Helmut Käutner and starring Gert Schäfer, Erich Schellow and Winnie Markus. It was one of the cycle of Rubble films made in the wake of Germany's defeat during World War II. The film addresses issues of collective guilt during the Nazi era, using the device of a car built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 narrating the various experiences of its owners in a series of seven separate episodes. The film's objective was to highlight the private resistance of various figures to the Nazis even while they publicly accepted the repression of Nazi society.

Bettina Moissi was a German stage and film actress. She played the female lead in the 1948 film Long Is the Road, the first German film to portray the Holocaust.

The Central Committee of the Liberated Jews (ZK) was an organization which represented Jewish displaced persons in the American Zone of the post-World War II Germany, during 1945–1950.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Holocaust in Libya</span> Overview of the Holocaust in Libya

Conditions worsened for the Jews of Libya after the passage of Italy's Manifesto of Race in 1938. Following the German intervention in 1941, some Jews were sent to camps in continental Europe, where those who survived stayed until the end of World War II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Holocaust in Germany</span> Nazi genocide of Jews

The Holocaust in Germany was the systematic persecution, deportation, imprisonment, and murder of Jews in Germany as part of the Europe-wide Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. The term typically refers only to the areas that were part of Germany prior to the Nazi regime coming to power and excludes some or all of the territories annexed by Nazi Germany, such as Austria or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

References

  1. Y. M. Neiman (22 March 1949). "S'ratim" [Films]. Davar (in Hebrew). p. 4.
  2. Shandley p. 101
  3. Shandley p. 101

Bibliography