MELROSE PARK, Pa.— In honor of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, Gratz College on Sunday, Jan. 27, will host a screening of “Who Will Write Our History,” a film that documents the account of historian Emanuel Ringelblum and a group of journalists, scholars and community leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto who risked everything to ensure their archives of stories survived.

The screening is one of more than 200 held in venues across the United States and in more than 40 countries. It is a collaborative event sponsored by Gratz College, the Anti-Defamation League of Philadelphia, the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center, the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation.

“As a leader in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Gratz College is committed to facilitating thoughtful discourse,” said Lori Cohen, director of Adult Jewish Learning at Gratz. “Hosting this film with our local partners in Holocaust education aligns with our core mission.”

“With this event, we want to educate the community about the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto who risked their lives to tell their own stories,” Cohen said. “But we also want to build on the point of the movie, which is the value of histories written by the victims themselves. They sacrificed everything so the Holocaust will never be forgotten.”

The film, written and directed by Roberta Grossman with executive producer Nancy Spielberg, combines the writings of Ringelblum and his group with new interviews, rarely seen footage and dramatizations that detail life in the ghetto from the Jewish perspective. Although most of the 450,000 Jews who were sealed in the Warsaw Ghetto did not survive, their diaries, essays, poems and songs comprising 60,000 pages of documentation did survive and became the most important cache of eyewitness accounts from the war.

“This movie reflects the importance of the issues of memory and identity,” said Rabbi Batya Glazer, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. “The centrality of the Holocaust on the Jewish community’s undertaking of ourselves, of our responsibility to the survivors and to the memory of the victims, and to our future as a people cannot be overestimated. This is an opportunity to reflect not only on the strength and resilience of the individuals trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, but on the lives of real people who lived and celebrated their lives as part of a flawed society that succumbed to the worst of human nature.”

Director Roberta Grossman said the film is especially important in today’s world where people are questioning the truth. Told from the Jewish perspective, the film offers unique insights into a history that was largely told by German victors.

“Which side of the story becomes the official narrative?” Grossman said. “Whose accounts do we elevate to the level of ‘truth,’ and whose do we ignore or even bury? What is real and what is fake? These are top-of-mind questions in 2019, but they also preoccupied a courageous group of resistance fighters imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. This, in my opinion, is the most important unknown story of the Holocaust.”

All are invited to attend the screening at Gratz, which begins at 12:30 p.m. with introductory remarks by Josey Fisher, director of Gratz’s Holocaust Oral History Archive. The film begins at 1 p.m. and will be followed by a Facebook LIVE discussion with author Samuel Kassow, Executive Producer Nancy Spielberg and Director Robert Grossman.

The discussion will be broadcast from UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It will reach hundreds of thousands of viewers simultaneously, watching from movie theaters, churches, mosques, synagogues, museums and community centers worldwide.

Doors open at 11:45 a.m. Admission is $10 in advance or $15 at the door.

For more information or to register, visit www.gratz.edu/event/who-will-write-our-history-global-screening-event

CONTACT:
Alysa Landry | Communications Liaison | alandry@gratz.edu
Lori Cohen | Director of Adult Jewish Learning | lcohen@gratz.edu
Naomi Housman | Director of Institutional Advancement | nhousman@gratz.edu