Vancouver man tells story of grandmother's survival in Auschwitz in new NFB film

In 2017, Vancouver film director Daniel Schubert watched as people chanted "Jews will not replace us" at a white supremacist rally in Virginia.

He was struck by the anti-Semitism on full display decades after his own grandparents survived the Holocaust, and how few people of his generation understood what happened. He realized it was time to tell the story of his grandmother, Martha Katz, and at 91 years old, time was ticking. 

"If millennials, of which I am one, don't know about the Holocaust, how are the next generations going to know, especially when these survivors are dying off?" he told CBC's The Early Edition.

"I said, 'I have to get these stories down. It's not just for her great grandchildren, but for the world.'"

Schubert's new short film, Martha, is being released today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The National Film Board film focuses on Katz, an Auschwitz survivor who moved to Winnipeg after the Second World War.

She was 14 when her family was taken from a village in Czechoslovakia and shipped to the death camp. Two of her siblings and her mother died in the gas chambers and her father died when the camp was liberated. She and four siblings survived.

Schubert's grandfather also survived a concentration camp, and would tell him stories when he was younger, but Katz remained more tight-lipped, he said.

In the film, Schubert and his grandmother visit the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. As they walk through the exhibits, Schubert asks how she is doing, and she remains stoic.

"She said, 'I don't care, I was there,'" Schubert said.

When they enter a makeshift gas chamber, they learn it could sometimes take up to 45 minutes for the people inside to be killed.

"That was kind of a big moment for her, because this whole time, her whole life, she had been picturing that her mother and two little brothers had died quickly," Schubert said.

In the film, Katz describes her time in Auschwitz and an encounter with Josef Mengele, a German officer and physician who was known for performing gruesome and unethical tests and experiments on prisoners, including children.

Katz was sick in the infirmary when Mengele tapped her on the shoulder to tell her she could stay.

Soon after, she escaped Auschwitz with two sisters and travelled to Germany, where they worked in an ammunition factory.

"She'll never know why [Mengele] kept her to live and pretty much sent everyone around her to the gas chamber after that," Schubert said.

"She says 'maybe it's luck, maybe he had plans to kill me tomorrow. But I'm just an extraordinarily lucky person.'"

Schubert says his grandmother is a "force of nature," a funny, tough and independent woman whose personality makes for a compelling account of one of humanity's most painful moments in history. 

"There's something about her that makes it a pleasure to learn about the Holocaust," Schubert said.

"She's a one-of-a-kind gem."