Among Neighbors

The documentary Among Neighbors tells the story of surprising violence in a small town in Poland after WWII, mixing crucial interviews with lively animation showing the events of the past. Director Yoav Potash focuses on the last living Holocaust survivor from the town of Gniewoszów. He also speaks to an elderly eyewitness who saw Jews murdered, not by Nazis, but by her own Polish neighbors.

Gniewoszów is a small village that once was home to a mix of Catholic and Jewish people who survived WWII, but seemingly, there was some period of hangover after the war when Jews were still persecuted and, in some cases, murdered outright. Currently, there are no Jews living in Gniewoszów.

Yaacov Goldstein, a holocaust survivor, lived there but is currently living in Israel. He was born in 1933. He refers to life in Gniewoszów before the Nazis as a “magic story” despite tensions between Jews and Catholics. During the war, he evaded the death camps and lived to tell the tale. Early on, the Catholic Poles made plans with their Jewish neighbors to create false papers to save the Jews, but this humanitarian effort of empathy fell apart as the war progressed.

“…after WWII Jews in Gniewoszów, Poland were still persecuted, and in some cases murdered…”

The other witness to history speaking here is Pelagia Radecka. A Polish woman of 85 now, but she was 15  during the war. She spoke to Potash at great peril to herself, defying Polish law. She hopes to learn the fate of a Jewish boy she loved named Janek Weinberg.

Potash speaks of the driving incentive to make this film in his director’s statement: “In 2014, I first set foot in the small Polish town of Gniewoszów, a place that had once been home to about 3,000 Jews. Today it was home to none. Ostensibly, Nazi Germany was solely responsible for the eradication of Jewish life in this quiet rural enclave, just as Hitler and his accomplices were responsible for the death of six million Jews across Europe. But when I interviewed town elders, I uncovered a dark secret––local Poles had murdered the Holocaust survivors who returned to the town a full six months after the surrender of Nazi Germany.“