Mira Hamermesh
REVIEWS
LOVING THE DEAD
I was moved to tears and deep thoughts while watching Loving the Dead. It is another important brick in the monument that must be rebuilt to remind our children of the tremendous contributions and sacrifices Jewish people have made all over the world. It further inspires me in my quest to make SCHINDLER'S LIST a film. Thank you for your film. All my best, Steven Spielberg.
Steven Spielberg wrote a personal letter of appreciation to Hamermesh after viewing LOVING THE DEAD
The title, Loving the Dead, appearing as a piece of graffiti scrawled white on humanity's record, is a shock to the simple television viewer's eyes: it looms up clearing the mists around it, dispelling any sense of the macabre and telling you that this film is going to be something new and powerful. In her film, Mira Hamermesh, protagonist and director, went to Poland, the country of her birth, to find how the Poles in present day Poland live with the shadow cast over their lives by the millions of Jews murdered in their country during World War II.
The title, Loving the Dead, appearing as a piece of graffiti scrawled white on humanity's record, is a shock to the simple television viewer's eyes: it looms up clearing the mists around it, dispelling any sense of the macabre and telling you that this film is going to be something new and powerful. In her film, Mira Hamermesh, protagonist and director, went to Poland, the country of her birth, to find how the Poles in present day Poland live with the shadow cast over their lives by the millions of Jews murdered in their country during World War II.
Mira Hamermesh was far from home during the war, but her parents were there. Her father was sent to Auschwitz, her mother died in the Lodz ghetto. She revisits the house, looks up at a window where her parents had added some fitments, still there; opens a door in the ghetto, where they lived in a room with six other families, writing their letters, praising God that she is not with them, their only consolation in apartness. In the European backyard, home had shrunk to this.