It Takes a Family
De skygger vi arver | Susanne Kovacs | Denmark, 2019 | Danish (English subtitles) | IMDB | Documentary | 59m | IMDB | Distributor/Sales: Tarkovski Films | Trailer
Description: This personal documentary by Susanne Kovacs explores her relationships with her parents and paternal grandparents and the fraught relationship between her father and his parents, both holocaust survivors, using interviews, home movies and family snapshots.
Internment in Nazi concentration camps is not correlated with subsequent good parenting practices if the memoirs and documentaries on and by the children of holocaust survivors are to be believed. Susanne’s father’s experience was no exception. Clearly he is not a habitué of Jewish film festivals or reader of such memoirs as he refuses to accept that his parents’ traumas of the holocaust had anything to do with their terrible parenting. The cause must have preceded the Nazis, he muses, possibly the patriarchal nature of Hungarian society of their childhood. His decision to marry a gentile German whose uncle received an Iron Cross from the Führer does not go down well with his parents. Nor does his parents’ determination that the fetus of their offspring, Susanne, be aborted, contribute to their reconciliation.
Merits: The traumatic childhood of second (and third) generation holocaust survivors has been explored before, most directly in the excellent Shadows (2017) but also in countless other cinematic and literary works. Fortunately, Kovacs was spared much of the abuse that befell other third generation survivors and was able to share her family’s story in a moving and engaging way.
Rating: Discussion of childhood abuse, reference to abortion.