Join us for Kristallnacht Film!

HERC is pleased to welcome filmmaker, director, and producer Aviva Kempner, who creates successful and critically-acclaimed documentaries about social justice. 

In A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings, she chronicles her mother Hanka and uncle Dudek Ciesla’s lives before and during World War II.

The mission of the Holocaust Education Resource Council works to build hope and silence all hate, including antisemitism, by providing instructional guidance, support and resources for educators who teach the history of the Holocaust, and other educational programs for the community at large.

A Pocketful of Miracles
Michael Berenbaum

Survivors’ Memoirs are often divided into three chapter Before, During and After and the story of the Ciesla family so beautifully told in Powerful of Miracles is no exception. 

Aviva Kempner, the award-winning filmmaker whose work ranges from the Partisans of Vilna to the Hank Greenberg Story, the Detroit Tiger slugger who came close to beating Babe Ruth iconic record of 60 home runs and who achieved the enduring admiration of his fellow Jews for sitting out a Yom Kippur game, gets most deeply personal in this film. She tells the story of her mother and her uncle. Cutting between the two narratives of two privileged siblings, each telling their story to the Shoah Foundation. Though taken separately, Kempner weaves them successful into a single narration, each sibling building on the other, seemingly responding to each other.

Children of privilege Helen and David were born to a wealthy family living in a marvelous villa in Sosnowiec filled with books, decorated with marble, a garden, tennis court and stables. Their mother, a linguist taught them many languages including Hebrew. They had loving parents who not only dotted on them but uncharacteristically for that time and culture were deeply and openly affectionate with each other. They rode horses and lived a life of comfort before. Their father understood the dangers that were looming and prepared for them with Swiss bank accounts and papers for emigration, yet their mother refused to go. She would not.  she could not, leave her mother behind.

And then!

The story of before always ends with and then!

And then the Germans invaded: their home was confiscated by the Germans even before the Jews were ghettoized. For the Ciesla family this was a rude awakening, privileged no longer they were forced to move to a walk-up apartment in the center of town with a communal toilet in the hall. Worse were certain to come. 

Deportation. 

The family was deported but not before their maternal grandmother was shot. Helen’s words still startle: “that was the best thing that happened to her. She wasn’t tortured.” David completes her sentence: “she was better off. Auschwitz was waiting for her.”
For David, his parents, and his younger sister Fanya, their destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau and selektion. Mother and daughter sent to their death. Father and son survive the selektion and are sent to work expanding the camp. David only tells part of the story, omitting some moments of extreme brutality, highlighting a moment of rare courage when he faced the barrel of cocked gun but would not betray his father. He also speaks movingly about the kindness of a fellow prisoner. Hearing his testimony, one again understands a most basic truth of human suffering. It certainly better not to suffer, but if you must suffer It is better to suffer with someone and not alone. David’s father continued to take care of his son even in the shadow of death. They sustain each other And when David is taken to the sick bay after a bout of dysentery, his father who believes that his son is lost, loses his own hope and his will to survive.

Helen was taken from the deportation place where her family boarded their death train back into the ghetto to sort what was left behind – the Germans not only wanted to kill the Jews but also to loot their property, to enrich themselves and the Reich. This provided her an opportunity to escape. She is hidden by Poles whom her family knew but cannot stay with them for fear of being identified and endangering them. She is able to get false paper identifying her as a Polish non-Jew and is incarcerated in a Polish work camp.

While Helen’s language is colorful, David is restrained.

The story of the siblings takes a fascinating turn after. For David there is the driving desire to go back home and to find if Helen is still alive – that was the most urgent need of so many survivors. Helen’s linguistic skills gets her a job with UNRRA, and after a time and a struggle the siblings are reunited with Helen and her soon to be husband, an Jewish American reporter having an important role in the DP camp and David joining in.

The ending is storybook. David comes to the United States penniless and with drive and desire gets an education, high school and college, rags to riches, he creates a financial empire and Helen becomes a world class artists whose works hang in US Embassies and even in the Plains Georgia home of Roslynn and Jimmy Carter. Only in America. David speaks of his gratitude, recalling his status as arriving in the United States as a DP, Displaced Person, he speaks of himself as a DP. Delayed Pilgrim.

As survivors Helen and David have a story to tell, a legacy to transmit. And Helen’s daughter Aviva weaves it together into a moving tapestry. 

Before was whole, full, joyous. And then During, shattering, brokenness, death, destruction and loss. And After is the long journey back from that place to a world that is whole again. 

The great Hasidic master Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Kotzzk once said: “nothing is a whole as a heart that has been broken and mended.”

Pocketful of Miracles is a film not to be missed.  

Michael Berenbaum is an American scholar, professor, rabbi, writer, and filmmaker, who specializes in the study of the Holocaust. 

See also: Jody Blecker. Interview | Aviva Kempner’s ‘A Pocketful of Miracles’. 9 May 2024. Moment Magazine.
https://momentmag.com/aviva-kempners-pocketful-of-miracles/