Film, music and a talk to mark the 80th anniversary of liberation
2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. However, for those liberated from the concentration camps, May 8 was by no means the end of the story. How do survivors remember this day and life in a post-war society shaped by National Socialism?
We are showing parts of the film “ Long is the road”, an impressive cinematic testimony by survivors of the Shoah. The film was made in 1948 and is an early attempt, partly in Yiddish, to record the immediate past for the future.
It was also a long way before the majority society recognized the suffering and persecution of the Sinti*zze and Rom*nja, the Jews and other victim groups. We will talk about this with second-generation witnesses.
The event will feature music by Daniel Stratievsky, Tara Daphne Bethke and Lisa Herzenberger. They will perform songs of resistance in Romani and Yiddish.
Photo: They fought in the resistance: Poet Abraham Sutzkever (r) and composer Shmerke Kaczerginski (l) on a terrace in the Vilnius ghetto, 1943.
© United States Holocaust Memorial Museum