“An excellent and important film...Martha is a charming, engaging storyteller who, through living a long, successful life, has beaten the Nazis.”
National Film Board of Canada
2021, Documentary, 21 mins.
Even at a frail 90, Martha Katz has an impish energy that remains undiminished. She chides grandson-filmmaker Daniel Schubert over his choice of shirt during a visit to her Los Angeles home, but there’s trauma beneath the humour. At 14, Martha and her family were torn from their village in Czechoslovakia and shipped to Auschwitz. A visit to a Holocaust museum ignites painful memories, including a haunting personal encounter with one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious figures. For Martha, however, the emphasis is on a tough but rewarding postwar life in Winnipeg, which she fondly recalls in this warm, intimate portrait of an unrelenting survivor.
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“Schubert’s film has that quality: unthinkable horror revealed amid the intimately familiar.”
