This unprecedented screening of Roberta Grossman’s award-winning documentary with the support of UNESCO at 350 venues in 55 countries and Facebook Live, marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, January 27, 2019.
Not Jewish? It’s even more important to watch. The great Colombian Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez wrote El coronel no tiene quien le escriba about how history repeats itself.
In the years before the Holocaust, people refused to see what was happening – until it was too late.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the day Soviet troops opened the gates of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Some still claim it didn’t happen.
New York’s Jewish community knows what happened because we have grandparents missing from our table, and some who are present have numbers on their arms.
Who will write our history is a movie about Jews in the Warsaw ghetto who resisted by writing their own history of what happened. It’s a counter narrative to the stories of the Nazi propaganda machine which would be all we have if those people didn’t risk putting pen to paper.
As immigrant communities, the courage and discipline of those writers provides an example for all of us.
Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in East Harlem (El Barrio) once said, “We have to tell our own stories because nobody else will.”
Join the world on January 27 and stream the movie on Facebook Live or see it in the theater.
Then let’s get busy writing our own histories. Make your mark! Let’s tell our own stories.
Who Will Write Our History Synopsis
In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper.
Now, for the first time, their story is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced, and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters.
They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon – the truth – and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not.
Watch Who Will Write Our History
On Facebook Live
12:30pm ET: Memorial Ceremony from Paris, France
1pm ET: Screening
1:20pm ET: One-on-one with director Roberta Grossman and executive producer Nancy Spielberg
2:40pm ET: Panel discussion
In ENGLISH: www.facebook.com/whowillwriteourhistory/
In FRENCH: www.facebook.com/UNESCOfr/
In New York City
Quad Cinema
Greenwich Village, Manhattan
January 18-31, 2019
Daily: $16
Across the Latin world
The film is screening at theaters in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Paraguay and Romania.