Love Conquers All in Steal a Pencil for Me

Say Holocaust and people roll their eyes. Not that again. Is it over-kill? Over-saturation in film? Or just over? A new documentary, a hit at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival, illustrates: even during a time of haunting horror, humans do what they do, finding hope in the endurance of love. Corny as it sounds, hearing Jack Polak (93) and Ina Soep (83) tell their story in “Steal a Pencil for Me,” is uplifting. In Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland (Anne Frank and her family went there on their way to Bergen-Belsen), Jack and Ina wrote love letters to one another. You would think, given the dire circumstances, this on-going epistolary courtship would be impossible, even dangerous, but what made it most difficult was the presence of Jack's wife Manja who forbade him his trysts with Ina. “I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend,” deadpans Jack, “and, believe me, it wasn't easy.”
             Filmmaker Michele Ohayon took great care to provide unusual period footage. You will not see the piles of bones or skeletal men in stripes showing their tattoos. As this charismatic couple, now Manhattanites with children and grandchildren, recounts the sad and familiar history of being taken from their homes, elders boarding trains to “the East,” loved ones shot on the spot, Ohayon balances the Dutch Jewish experience with rich detail of the present. Jack's gregarious personality and candor are evident in a scene returning to the camp. Ina's attention to her hair becomes a humorous leitmotif. The tender letters inform this work and join Anne Frank's diary, and Sala Garncarz Kirschner's 350 letters and a diary as important Holocaust documents, not recreations of memory, or the imagination, but primary sources in themselves. Woven together, these form a superb documentary. Do not miss it.

          Regina Weinreich