The Memory Thief

Au Revoir les Enfants

October 1987 •French

Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.

Shem

March 2004 •English

A young Jewish boy travels europe in search of the grave of his Great Grandfather who was killed by the Nazis in the War.

Amen.

February 2002 •French

Kurt Gerstein—a member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS—is horrified by what he sees in the death camps. he is then shocked to learn that the process he used to purify water for his troops by using Zyklon-B, is now used to kill people in gas chambers.

Delegation

November 2023 •Hebrew

Three young Israeli students take a school trip to Poland to visit the sites where the Nazis carried out the extermination of European Jews during World War II.

Visas and Virtue

May 1997 •English

Europe, 1940. For thousands of Jews, a Japanese diplomat and his wife defy Tokyo and the Nazis, and offer visas, for life.

Terezínské stíny

September 2020 •Czech

The Conference

May 2022 •German

On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference takes place in Berlin, a meeting that had only one item on the agenda: The Final Solution, the organization of the systematic mass murder of eleven million European Jews.

Train of Life

September 1998 •French

In 1941, the inhabitants of a small Jewish village in Central Europe organize a fake deportation train so that they can escape the Nazis and flee to Palestine.

The Counterfeiters

March 2007 •German

The story of Jewish counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch, who was coerced into assisting the Nazi operation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.

The Devil's Arithmetic

March 1999 •English

An American-born Jewish adolescent, Hannah Stern, is uninterested in the culture, faith and customs of her relatives. However, she begins to revaluate her heritage when she has a supernatural experience that transports her back to a Nazi death camp in 1941. There she meets a young girl named Rivkah, a fellow captive in the camp. As Rivkah and Hannah struggle to survive in the face of daily atrocities, they form an unbreakable bond.

The City and the City

April 2022 •Greek

Six chapters describe the lives and perils of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community which was almost entirely exterminated by the Nazis in 1943. Past and present become an echo chamber in which the viewer experiences, aghast, the madness of humanity.

Ensemble

January 2010 •French

In Paris in full German occupation in 1942, a Jewish child Isaac escapes a raid organized by the SS. He then took refuge in the Great Mosque of Paris. The imam decides to protect him by passing him off as a Muslim, as well as the other Jewish children that he manages to free with the help of the resistance networks. The French militia and the Gestapo have suspicions... This fiction film is based on the true story of the rector of the Paris mosque, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, who saved several Jews from deportation during the Second World War.

The Shop on Main Street

September 1965 •Slovak

In a small town in Nazi-occupied Slovakia during World War II, decent but timid carpenter Tono is named "Aryan comptroller" of a button store owned by an old Jewish widow, Rozalie. Since the post comes with a salary and standing in the town's corrupt hierarchy, Tono wrestles with greed and guilt as he and Rozalie gradually befriend each other. When the authorities order all Jews in town to be rounded up, Tono faces a moral dilemma unlike any he's known before.

Passenger

September 1963 •Polish

A German woman on a ship returning to Europe notices a face of another woman which brings recollections from the past. She tells her husband that she had been an overseer in Auschwitz during the war, but she has actually saved a woman's life.

The Grey Zone

September 2001 •English

The story of Auschwitz's twelfth Sonderkommando — one of the thirteen consecutive "Special Squads" of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of assisting in the extermination of fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life.

The Bloom of Yesterday

January 2017 •German

An almost romantic comedy on the edge: Holocaust researcher Toto is having a major life crisis. Just when things at home and work could not get worse, he unwantedly gets a new assistent assigned to himself. Zazie is french, jewish, slightly germanophobe and supposed to help Toto to prepare a major congress. As the star of the congress suddenly wants to pull out, the problems are piling up and the two have to fix it.

Conspiracy

May 2001 •English

At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials meet to determine the manner in which the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" can be best implemented.

Fatherland

November 1994 •English

Fictional account of what might have happened if Hitler had won the war. It is now the 1960s and Germany's war crimes have so far been kept a secret. Hitler wants to talk peace with the US president. An American journalist and a German homicide cop stumble into a plot to destroy all evidence of the genocide.

Spell Your Name

September 2006 •English

Survivors tell the story of the Babyn Yar massacre from WWII, where some 100,000 people were massacred by German forces.

While All Germans Sleep

July 1995 •German

After 50 years, Marek remembers his dangerous adventure as a five-year-old, when he and his friend Itzek left a Polish transit camp one night in 1942 – a few days before their evacuation to Auschwitz – to go get the toys they forgot at the ghetto. Based on Becker's personal memories and his 1980 short story "The Wall."