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Following World War II, more than a hundred thousand Jewish Holocaust survivors immigrated to the United States. They became teachers, artists, nurses, husbands and wives—and one survivor was documentary filmmaker Michael Turner’s Grandma Lici, who kissed his head and gave him his first camera in high school.
When Turner was 12, Grandma Lici returned to her Hungarian hometown and led the creation of a monument to honor the town’s slain Jewish community, including her mother and sister who died in Auschwitz. But Grandma Lici never talked to her grandson about the monument or the war, and he didn’t know how to ask. Then she died in 2010.
“I felt [her death] gave me permission to ask all the questions I hadn’t asked,” Turner, who will attend Cinema 21′s Oct. 18 screening of the film, tells WW.
In Monument, Turner travels with his camera to Sárvár, Hungary, and visits the monument, which was built on the grounds of a historic castle where his grandmother strolled on Saturdays with her family when she was a girl. The film features a collection of archival footage, including home videos of Turner’s boyhood in his grandmother’s house, the early years of his own daughter’s life, and interviews in which Grandma Lici, whose name was Alice Craig, recalls the suffering she experienced at Auschwitz.
Turner dedicated Monument to his grandmother and his 7-year-old daughter, Osa. He says the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that killed 11 people catalyzed the film, making him wonder how he would explain the world to his daughter, teaching her to live well in spite of antisemitism and hate. He sought insight by turning to his grandmother and the story of his family’s survival.
“The coolest part of making the film was how close I felt to my grandma,” Turner says. “It felt like I was spending time with her.”
The Holocaust wiped out Sárvár’s Jewish community—and the few Jewish records that survived Nazi burnings were kept in Sárvár’s neighboring town, Szombathely, where few Jewish people remain. In the film, Turner meets Sándor Márkus, the Szombathely Jewish community president. He tries to help Turner find his grandmother’s birth records, but he only has documents of births up to 1923 (Craig was born five years later).
András Csillag, a Jewish heritage tour guide whose family were also victims of the Holocaust, accompanied Turner in his nine days in Hungary. They visited the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation in Budapest, which features an eagle descending to attack an angel. The eagle represents Germany and the angel symbolizes Hungary.
Critics say that monument attempts to rewrite history and obscure Hungary’s complicity in the Holocaust as a German ally. So the Jewish community created a counter-monument in front of the government’s memorial—old shoes, flowers, and laminated handwritten stories of friends and family who died in the Holocaust.
In the film, Turner also visits the ghetto where his grandmother and her family were held. Csillag tells him that the ghetto will soon reopen as a hotel, and there is no signage memorializing the building’s bitter history.
Monument is Turner’s attempt to access the parts of his grandmother he previously couldn’t, to retrieve and preserve her in art. The trip to Hungary allowed him to answer some of the questions he had about her past, but he admits leaving feeling somewhat disappointed.
One scene perfectly embodies Turner’s complex emotions: when he and Csillag visit the house and bakery where his grandmother grew up and find it inhabited by a non-Jewish family.
“As much as I wanted to see all these places, what I wanted to see was my great-grandfather in the bakery, the girls playing in the courtyard, my grandma looking through family photos, telling me stories,” Turner narrates in the film. “Things that were really, truly gone.”
In Monument, Turner draws a parallel between the erasure of Jewish history and culture in Hungary and the systematic destruction of Native American communities in America.
“I also live on land back in the U.S. that was forcibly evacuated before my time,” he says in the documentary. “How often do I think of family, friends, communities that are no longer there? At home there are no pictures of them, no memorials.”
Monument also shows Csillag and Márkus organizing a 25th anniversary service for the monument that Craig created. Márkus makes a speech in front of the monument about one of the most important Hebrew words, zākar, meaning “remember.” He reminds the few attendees to remember what happened to the people they love and why it matters.
Turner says he regrets not asking his grandmother about the Holocaust while she was alive. Still, making the film deepened his connection with where and whom he came from (he hopes to have a screening of the documentary in Sárvár and bring his daughter). Monument, though tonally static and sluggish in pace, is a precious family memento and an important close-up of the Holocaust’s impact on one family’s unfolding story.
SEE IT: Monument screens at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave., 503-223-4515, monumentfilm.org. 7:15 pm Wednesday, Oct. 18. $10-$12.