Let’s Say Goodbye to the Night

In 1943, a group of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi extermination camp Sobibor revolted. This spectacular uprising fortunately allowed some to survive this “death factory”. In the 1980’s Jules Schelvis, himself a Sobibor survivor, interviewed 12 men and women involved in the uprising. Most had never told their stories until Schelvis captured them with his amateur camera. These twelve survivors give an intimate eyewitness account of the events in the camp.

‘Unterscharfuhrer Graetschus was lured inside. I made him try on a uniform. From behind I hit him on the head with an axe. He was dead immediately. We escaped from Sobibor!’ Chaskiel Menche’s testimony over 40 years later shows he is still reliving the past.

But the survivors’ stories do not end with the uprising, a question is raised: how do you live on after your entire family has been killed? The Sobibor survivors have traveled the world, away from Europe to the United States, to Ukraine and to Israel. In this film, we travel to meet the survivors and their children and grandchildren, who show how differently each generation deals with their ink-dark past.

The survivors’ children carry the history of their parents with them. Their personality, who they are, is shaped by their parents’ past. And now, in confrontational ways, the present cuts through the past. In Kyiv, the scars of Russian aggression are painfully visible, and the threat of a new dictatorship is very real. In Israel, fighter jets roar overhead towards Gaza and the violence Israel uses is increasingly condemned worldwide. What does this mean in the lives of the survivors’ relatives?

Let’s Say Goodbye to the Night is a documentary by Piet de Blaauw and Jan Pieter Tuinstra about the inescapable echo of history in today’s world