A note from the producer and co-director

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Next week an audience will file in to a sold out cinema near Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach for an exlusive preview screening of REWRITING HISTORY – held in association with the Sydney Jewish Museum. Every filmmaker is humbled when people are prepared to invest an evening of their time to see their film, but I suspect few viewers appreciate the product they watch over 60 or however many minutes, and the multiple years it often takes to make. This is certainly the case with REWRITING HISTORY.

I feel the best documentary films are those that evolve organically, and the genesis of REWRITING HISTORY lies in a personal venture that many have embarked upon, tracing family roots. Yet when I first did so several years ago, I stumbled upon individuals whose endeavours I found heroic, which were tied in with a political situation I found shocking, intolerable and tragic. These encounters, and the realisation that few people were standing up in solidarity with these individuals or doing anything to try and stop this pernicious political development, changed my life. It led me to spend the last few years campaigning with these individuals against the political injustices and documenting this in the film REWRITING HISTORY.

On many levels it has been a long and difficult road, but throughout the process I have felt no alternative other than pursuing this journey. Not only has the situation demanded it, but the threat to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania, including my family, is simply too great to sit back and do nothing. Perhaps more humbling than people dedicating an hour of their busy lives to your film is the opportunity to try right a wrong, to teach your children the most important lesson that principles, truth and justice are worth fighting for and must be fought for. If the endeavours of the campaign that features in REWRITING HISTORY, and indeed the film itself, go only a small way to stopping the double genocide campaign which threatens to engulf the European Union, and in doing so highlights the brave struggle of people like Rachel Kostanian, Dovid Katz and Fania Brantsovsky, then the years of effort will have been more than worthwhile.

I am deeply indebted to all those who have made the film possible, including the many individuals who have supported our crowd funding campaign. I thank you for your interest which is manifest in the reading of this blog.

Now two new journeys begin.

Firstly for the film, which will screen on SBS TV later this year in Australia, we are currently pursuing film festival and TV broadcast screenings around the world, both of which will be announced through our Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/RewritingHistory.

Secondly, the campaign against double genocide continues. Most recently this has involved the formation of the Facebook group “Defending Truth in History”. I encourage you to “like” this and help spread the word. You can do so at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/DefendingHistoryOpposingDoubleGenocide

If you will be at the Sydney screening on May 14, or the Melbourne screening on June 28 at the Classic Cinema please come and say G’day and I look forward to meeting and chatting in person. If you are further afield, I hope you see and enjoy the film wherever you are.

Danny Ben- Moshe

Producer/Co-director


  • Elleni Bereded

    Hi Danny
    I’ll be attending the Melbourne screening.
    Well-done !! and Congratulations!
    Cheers
    Elleni Bereded-Samuel

  • Michael Milun

    Congratulations, I watched I cried and felt the frustration at the screening in Melbourne yesterday. My father and his family is also from Dussat (Dusatos) . When I was there with Sara Weise we interviewed older local Lithuanians through our interpreter. The Lithuanians told us what they saw and how they participated. I believe Sara has this on video. As I am sure you are aware many Jewish Lithuanians went to South Africa.

  • Nolan

    Dear Danny,

    Like you, I too am Jewish and have visited Lithuania several times.

    You’re a “nice Jewish boy” with a negligible understanding about life in Lithuania. You make a token visit to Vilnius and now you claim to be outraged by an anti-Semitic agenda in that country? Let me ask you this: What positive contribution have YOU made inside Lithuania that you can put a show like that on TV? You don’t represent the Jewish community.. you represent yourself.

    Lithuania is a wonderful country with equally wonderful people. You interviewed Efraim Zuroff who thinks little green anti-Semites are coming out of the woodwork as well as marginal people who do not represent the Lithuania mainstream. Your video footage made Lietuva look decrepid and sinister. In fact, it’s a country full of life and hope.

    Nolan.-
    Australia

  • Monica

    Nolan,

    Unfortunately, I wish that Efraim Zuroff and Danny Ben Moshe and Robert Wistrich and many others thousands of people were wrong regarding the Lithuanian government. However, you probably don’t realise this BUT

    ·
    Since 2008, swastikas have featured in public and legal city centre demonstrations. In 2010, the courts declared public swastikas legal.

    ·
    Two annual marches by nationalists, supported by neo-Nazis take place, in Kaunas on each 16 February, and in Vilnius on each 11 March.

    ·
    The majority of the exhibits in the Genocide Museum in Vilnius depict the nationalist resistance during the Second World War and against the Soviet and German occupation while the murder of 240,000 people, among them 200,000 Jews, is documented in a small room.

    ·
    Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, appointed prime minister by the German occupying forces, stood by while Jews were murdered. During the short time he was in power he was responsible for sending the Jews into ghettos and for commencing the construction of the ghetto in Kaunas. In 2012 his remains were reburied and a tribute to him was paid at Vytautas Magnus University, where a lecture hall was named after him and a bas-relief plaque erected.

    ·
    Streets bear the names of Lithuanian collaborators with the Nazis.

    ·
    Since 2006 the Lithuanian government has publicly defamed Holocaust survivors – Yitzhak Arad in 2006, Rachel Margolis now 91 in 2008, Fanya Brantovsky in 2008, and Joseph Melamed in 2011. Not a single Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator has been punished in Lithuania since it became independent. Instead the authorities try to prosecute Jewish anti-Nazi Soviet partisans on trumped up war crimes and to inflate the number of brave Lithuanians who helped Jews. To this day, these cases, all publicly announced with massive public defamation by prosecutors, have not been publicly closed with letters of closure/apology/good will from
    authorities.

    The equation of the Soviet occupation with the Nazi occupation which lies at the bottom of present-day Lithuanian policy diminishes the genocide against the Jews and Romani people. Memory, history, and politics have fused to distort the Holocaust. Until the Lithuanian government starts facing up to the part collaborators played in the Holocaust and stops whitewashing their history there can be no support for their attempts at respectability.

    ‘Lithuania, however, is a far worse case. For the past two decades, it has consistently omitted or minimized the massive scale of the nation’s complicity in the Holocaust, which greatly contributed to the barbaric slaughter of 95 percent of Lithuania’s 200,000 Jews 70 years ago. Rather than honestly confront this appalling record, the Lithuanian government has continuously stressed the Soviet “genocide” of Lithuanians, even insinuating that Jews were involved in these Communist war crimes.’ Robert Wistrich 21.05.2013

    You are therefore warmly invited to add your voice to the following petition which aims to mark progress across an array of issues the Lithuanian government could easily address:

    Petitioning HE President Dalia Grybauskaitė

    President of Lithuania

    Abandon defamation of Holocaust survivors and glorification of Holocaust perpetrators

    http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/abandon-defamation-of-holocaust-survivors-and-glorification-of-holocaust-perpetrators