5770 - 2009/2010

The current relationship between humanitarians and pacifists on the one side, and totalitarians on the other, is a complex one. There are many precedents in Western Europe from before the Second World War of how Philo-Semites turned into anti-Semites and how humanitarians and pacifists became Nazi supporters. To what extent can we learn from this in relation to the present?

In this documentary, the sole surviving member of the Jewish high command looks back on the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, a unique event in Jewish as well as non-Jewish history: for the first time the Jews took up arms against the Nazis. In 1943 the remaining 50,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto realized that there was no hope that any of them would survive the holocaust. Dr. Marek Edelman, who never left Poland, was a cardiologist in Lodz where in the 1980s he played a leading role in the then underground trade union Solidarity. He recently passed away.

Karl Pfeifer will be present and answer questions following the movie: Zwischen allen Stühlen - Lebenswege des Journalisten Karl Pfeifer (Somehow in Between). The movie has English subtitles. It includes the famous scene where Pfeifer asks the late extreme right wing FPÖ party leader Jörg Haider about his connections to Holocaust deniers. Between 1980 and 1987 Pfeifer was expelled from Hungary four times because of his journalistic activities.