“What I often say to my classes is that this story doesn’t concern only Jews, it concerns every human being. For example, the film includes a poignant interview with Belgian historian Ina Van Looy, in which she says: Serena makes that a focus of her film, showing viewers that though the Holocaust is in our past, we must continue to work every day to prevent one from happening in our future. As a Jewish woman, Maryla was in the position to share only Jewish perspectives and experiences-but throughout her years of work, she reminds us constantly that the story of the Holocaust, and of genocide in general, is not just about Jewish people.

NANA, however, does not make that mistake. Often when we talk about the Holocaust, we mention the six million Jews who perished and forget about the millions of people who were targeted and killed for their sexual orientation, ethnicity or political beliefs. Like Serena, I’d grown up hearing about it at Hebrew school and from my family, but I hadn’t quite understood-felt-how painful the Holocaust was and is until I embarked on my own personal journey. It was there, at Auschwitz, that I finally understood what the Holocaust was. My sister and I walked around the remains of the concentration camp for more than four hours, looking bleakly at the portraits of thousands of people who had perished in the Holocaust, walking slowly through the blocks where Jewish women had been strapped down and forcefully “experimented” on by faux gynecologists, and I felt a kind of heavy, penetrating sadness that I couldn’t shake. When we arrived at Auschwitz, my chest tightened and remained that way for entire time I was there. When the day finally came, my heart sat in my throat on the bus ride there. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I was dreading visiting Auschwitz in the weeks leading up to it. My sister and I spent six weeks backpacking in Europe last summer and visited Auschwitz at the end of our trip. I saw a lot of myself in Serena’s story, and I think other Jewish people and people who identify with the various ethnic, religious and sexual orientation groups targeted in the Holocaust will feel the same way. Later in the film, Serena and her mother visit a synagogue in Warsaw, Poland at the end of their journey, and Serena says that there’s a difference between understanding and knowing-that she knew about the Holocaust her whole life but only began to understand it through her journey to understand Maryla. When asked if there was one moment when Alice found out that her mother was a Holocaust survivor, she says no, that she had known since she was in the womb, and that the memory of the trauma was transmitted through her mother’s breast milk. In a tearful interview, Alice says that as a young child, she would scream out in the night not because she was scared of monsters or the dark, but because she could physically feel the pain and the fear that her mother and her ancestors who perished felt. She dedicated the rest of her life to sharing her story and educating others about the importance of preventing another tragedy like the Holocaust from happening.Ī major theme of the film is Serena and Alice’s path to understanding Maryla’s life and legacy, and how the trauma of the Holocaust has been transmitted to them. In all of her interviews, Maryla is adamant in the fact that she survived out of pure luck, and that she is no better, smarter or more worthy of life than the millions of people who perished. She survived in Auschwitz for a year and a half after becoming the translator for Joseph Mengele, known as “The Angel Of Death” by people in Auschwitz because of his role as the man who sent them to the gas chambers. Maryla Dyamant was born in Poland and was a teenager when she and her family were captured and sent to concentration camps. The film is not simply a retelling of the horrors of the Holocaust, but a story of a mother and daughter navigating intergenerational trauma and a reminder of why the need to tell these stories is as urgent as ever. Serena and her mother, Alice, embark on a journey through Europe to do so, visiting Maryla’s hometown in Poland, meeting with her students, friends and interviewers, and ultimately visiting Auschwitz. In NANA, Serena Dykman traces the life of her late grandmother, Maryla, who was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager and spent the rest of her life sharing her story of surviving the Holocaust.

Intergenerational trauma holocaust