It was certainly one of the best documentaries that I have seen and I found it deeply moving. There were so many layers to it: 1) Anita Lasker’s enormous strength and her ability to tell things as they were (in all senses), alongside Hans Jurgen Hoss being almost ‘made’ by his son Kai to face the reality of his father’s actions (alongside his sister, Brigitte, in America), 2) the post war effects on the families, both the Laskers and the Hoss’s, 3) the coming together of both families to confront their shared, but very different history.

I felt that this film would hit home to a larger range of age groups than the Zone of Interest, which was dependent on the audience having a detailed historical knowledge of the Holocaust, in order to highlight the juxtaposition of the Hoss lifestyle, alongside the barely imaginable horrors that were taking place just across the walls of Auschwitz.

It was fascinating to experience Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s deep awareness that the human capacity for genocide is ever-present, as evidenced post WW2 in countless countries, and therefore the need to speak out at the earliest stages possible against discrimination, be it based on religion, race, gender or nationality. In her 100th year, it must be very hard for her to have to question whether we learned anything from the Holocaust.

P.S. Reading up about the family, the Lasker-Wallfisch’s musical pedigree is quite extraordinary, both going back several generations and forward via her son and now his children….

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to see these films.