Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.

Róża Berger-Fiedler’s walk through the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee in search of her grandmother’s grave turns into a walk through the chequered Jewish history of the whole city. Interspersed are impressions of Chanukah celebrations at the “Restaurant of Nationalities” Café Moskau in Karl-Marx-Allee in East Berlin, light-drenched and devout. The film artfully interweaves the past and present of active Jewish life with memories of expulsion and annihilation, brings private and historical perspectives together and thus creates a sensitive approach where in the GDR formal distance was long dominant.