Listen 4 min

       Share

       Comment on this story Comment

       Add to your saved stories

       Save

       Filmmaker Aviva Kempner was not expecting to include herself in her documentary about the Holocaust experiences of her mother and her uncle. She knew that her mother, born Hanka Ciesla in Poland, had somehow survived the war. She knew that her mother had met and married her father, a U.S. Army officer, in Berlin, where Aviva was born in 1946.

       Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning. ArrowRight

       And Aviva knew that before his death in Israel in 1976, her father, Harold Kempner, had moved from home to home a can of black-and-white 8mm film. Aviva had never seen it.

       “Even when I was a filmmaker, I didn’t watch it,” said Aviva, director of such films as “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” and “The Spy Behind Home Plate,” about Moe Berg.

       “That’s dad’s stuff, I thought,” she said.

       But when she decided to make a documentary about her own family, she knew she had to find the film — buried in her Northwest Washington basement — and see if it was even viewable.

       Like her mother, the footage had miraculously survived. And it captured such domestic joy — Aviva’s parents’ wedding (her mother in a white dress made from parachute silk), Aviva as a burbling baby, Aviva as a toddler playing with a dog — that it’s almost a rebuke to the men who tried to wipe her family and millions of other Jews from the planet.

       “I was thrilled that none of the film was ruined, that I had not blown it,” said Aviva.

       Advertisement

       Several minutes of the home movies are included in “A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings,” screening at the Avalon Theatre through Nov. 9.

       “For 44 years I’ve been making films about underground Jewish heroes,” Aviva said. Two years ago she decided that rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial demanded a more personal response.

       When she was 13, she read the Leon Uris novel “Exodus.”

       “That’s when I found out about concentration camps,” Aviva said.

       Share this article Share

       She didn’t find out about them from her mother, who after divorcing and remarrying became Helen Ciesla Covensky, or her uncle, whose new name in a new country was David Chase, and who bore a number tattooed on him at Auschwitz.

       “My mother always said, ‘I wanted to protect you,’” Aviva said. “Once, my cousin asked my uncle, ‘What’s on your arm?’ My uncle said, ‘It’s a phone number.’

       Advertisement

       “When you’re told ‘don’t ask,’ you don’t ask. I know what it is to grow up in a home where you don’t talk because it’s so painful.”

       But in 1997, the siblings — who lost their parents, Leon and Helena, along with their younger sister, Cesia, in the Holocaust — sat down for filmed interviews with the USC Shoah Foundation. Aviva had never seen those interviews.

       “Most of the stories I just didn’t know,” she said.

       The stories are harrowing but also inspiring. David and his father were inseparable as they moved from camp to camp, the father protecting the son as long as he could. The blond-haired Helen was separated from her family but somehow was able to get falsified papers identifying her as a gentile forced laborer. Helen comes across in her interviews as both resolved — if given the chance, she says, she would kill the Polish woman who spotted her on a bus and threatened to out her as a Jew — and hilarious, telling her stories with a comedian’s timing.

       Advertisement

       “I knew my mother was funny and stood up for what she believed in,” Aviva said. “Now I know where I got my chutzpah.”

       David and Helen moved to the United States in 1950. David later settled in Hartford, Conn., where he became a developer and philanthropist. Helen settled in Michigan, where she became an artist. Aviva noted that while much of the art that grew out of the Holocaust is dark, Helen’s was bright and colorful.

       “She said every one of the strokes is for the 6 million,” Aviva said. (Some of Helen’s paintings, and works by her granddaughter Piera Kempner, are on display through December at the Kosciuszko Foundation at 2025 O St. NW.)

       Helen died in 2007, David in 2016. Aviva said the main message of “A Pocketful of Miracles” is a simple and direct one: “The Holocaust happened.”

       There’s another lesson, too: Nearly every family has a roll of film somewhere, either figuratively or literally — some history that deserves to be seen, shared and passed down.

       Said Aviva: “You’ve got to look and see what your family did.”

       Share

       Comments

       John Kelly’s Washington

       HAND CURATED

       Burger King, the erroneous apostrophe in your TV ad is killing me

       October 8, 2023

       Burger King, the erroneous apostrophe in your TV ad is killing me

       October 8, 2023

       He survived 9/11. Now he helps others touched by disaster.

       September 10, 2023

       He survived 9/11. Now he helps others touched by disaster.

       September 10, 2023

       Squirrel! Here are the winners from the 2023 squirrel photo contest.

       April 12, 2023

       Squirrel! Here are the winners from the 2023 squirrel photo contest.

       April 12, 2023

       View 3 more stories

       Loading...