As the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Boulder JCC is presenting a two-part cinematic series at the Dairy Arts Center designed to bridge the gap between historical record and the lived human experience. By spotlighting "forgotten" narratives and contemporary acts of remembrance, these screenings aim to combat the "numbing" effect of historical statistics and the growing threat of historical revisionism.
On Monday, February 2, the Boulder JCC will host a screening and talk-back of the acclaimed documentary 999: The Forgotten Girls. The film brings to light a chapter of the Shoah that remained largely undocumented for decades: the story of the 999 young Slovak women—mostly teenagers—who were deceived into boarding the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz.
The film details a harrowing betrayal. In 1942, these young women were told by their own government that they were being sent to a government-sanctioned "work service." Instead, they were sent on a one-way ticket to a death camp. Of the nearly one thousand girls who boarded those trains, the film chronicles the three-year struggle for survival of the few who lived to see liberation.
Following the screening, director and author Heather Dune Macadam will lead a discussion on the meticulous research required to bring these voices back from the brink of being forgotten. Macadam, who authored the international best-selling book of the same name, spent years interviewing the last living survivors to ensure their testimony was preserved.
This program is supported by the Ilona Irene Rosenschein Holocaust Education Fund at the Boulder JCC, with special sponsorship from the Yagudin, Goldsmith, and Hoffman families in memory of Lily Shazar, an Auschwitz survivor whose personal archives were vital to the film's production.
To launch this week of remembrance, the Boulder JCC will also host a screening of For the Living on Sunday, January 26, at the Dairy Arts Center. This documentary explores the tension between dehumanization and empathy, focusing on how storytelling can prevent historical "whitewashing."
The documentary follows an extraordinary journey from 2019: 250 cyclists from 12 countries re-tracing the WWII liberation path of a single 10-year-old Holocaust survivor. Starting at Auschwitz-Birkenau—a site often viewed as the universal symbol of absolute evil—the participants ride across the Polish countryside to Krakow, a destination symbolizing common humanity.
For the Living draws startling parallels between the Holocaust and other genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The film suggests that while the American educational system often focuses on monuments for the dead, there is an urgent need to "re-humanize the living" to prevent the cycles of violence from repeating.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Co-Director Tim Roper, Producer Lisa Effress, and Jonathan Lev, Executive Director of the Boulder JCC.