This documentary is about those who had plans for their lives, about adults who dreamed of a happy future and children who imagined what they would be when they grew up. The film tells the story of the fate of people whose dreams and plans did not come true. They were all doomed because of the Nazis’ inhuman regime. This documentary is a requiem, memory and warning for the future. It is about those Rivne residents whose descendants might live with us today. However, they were killed only because they were born by Jewish mothers.
Location: Rivne
Haya-Lea Detinko: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag
Haya-Lea was born in 1920 in Rovno, which then belonged to Poland. She grew up in a traditional Jewish family, joined a Zionist youth club called Hashomer Hatzair and looked forward to emigrating to Palestine, just like her sister. But the Soviets took eastern Poland in September 1939 and Haya-Lea’s membership in Hashomer Hatzair earned her a ten year sentence of hard labor in Siberia. The rest of her family remained behind, not knowing that the Nazis would overrun the town soon after Haya-Lea’s deportation to the east.
Haya-Lea survived the Gulag and moved to Leningrad (St. Petersburg), where she shared her story with Centropa in 2002. This film is dedicated to Haya-Lea, who died shortly after the interview.
Read the complete biography of Haya-Lea Detinko here.
Find more information in our comprehensive Study Guide.
Return to Rivne – A Holocaust Story
Centropa’s most unusual film to date. Shelly Weiner and Raya Kizhnerman live in Greensboro, NC. But these two kindly grandmothers were born in the bustling city of Rivne—then in Poland, now in Ukraine. In 1941 20,000 Jews lived in Rivne, but when the German Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS stormed into town, they planned on murdering every Jew they could find. How Shelly and Raya survived the massacre is a story they tell themselves, not long after they visited Rivne in 2013. With old photographs and exquisite, custom-made drawings by artist Emma Fick. Motion graphics by Wolfgang Els.
Find more information in our comprehensive Study Guide.