The Holocaust never ended. Those who survived and those who come after see the past around them, and feel its weight. New victims are claimed every day.

"Gebürtig" is set in 1987, when the scandal of Kurt Waldheim's election as President again forced Austrians to confront their past. While forgetting the Holocaust and their country's role in it was official Austrian postwar policy, nobody has forgotten. In "Geburtig," the making of an American film about the camps creates absurd juxtapositions of fantasy and reality. Amidst them, the young struggle and the elderly remember their own losses, but ignore the pain of others.

"Gebürtig" displays a cast of injured Viennese. Danny Demant (August Zirner) is a Jewish orphan whose satiric cabaret skits about Austrian forgetfulness reflect his own bitter cynicism. Konrad Sachs (Daniel Olbrychski) bleeds when he imagines his father, an SS doctor, performing operations on concentration camp inmates. In New York, the composer Hermann Gebürtig (Peter Simonischek), whose parents were gassed, keeps his emotions bottled up and sneers at those who try to reckon with the past. By day, these men seek love but push away the women who try to love them; at night, the voices from their pasts can no longer be silenced.

Into the middle of these men's lives comes Susanne Ressel (Ruth Rieser), who wants to bring to justice a sadistic camp guard from Ebensee, the camp where her Communist father was imprisoned. She convinces Gebürtig to return to Vienna to testify against him. In the café where he ate with his parents, in the tobacco shop where his father bought cigarettes, at his old apartment, Gebürtig tries to let go of his self-pity, and to end his lifelong survivor's penance.

The film is based on the remarkable, prize-winning 1992 novel, "Gebürtig," by the Viennese Jewish poet Schindel, who also helped write the screenplay. The film remains true to the novel's themes and language, and while the occasional narrator's voice can seem jarring, its irony and distance help keep sentimentality at bay.

Steve Hochstadt teaches modern European history at Bates College. He is on the board of directors of the Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine. His book of documents, "Sources of the Holocaust", has just been published.

2004 MJFF Program Book edited by Abby Zimet