On March 10, the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies partners with the Lantos Foundation to present the Keene premier of Surviving Hitler: A Love Story.
The documentary presents a remarkable story of love, bravery, and determination, documented with rare historical footage. Jutta, a teenager in Nazi Germany, is shocked to learn she is Jewish. She joins the German resistance and meets Helmuth, an injured soldier, and the two become romantically entwined. They also become entangled in the Valykrie plot to assassinate Hitler. When the plot fails, the two are hunted, and theirs is a harrowing tale of war, resistance, and survival. Jutta herself narrates the story, and the movie includes rare 8mm footage that Helmuth took during the war years.
Tickets are $5 for students and $10 for non-students and can be purchased on-line at the Cohen Center website. The film starts at 7 p.m. in KSC’s Putnam Theater, and a ticket gets you admission to the 6 p.m. pre-film reception in the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery, where you can meet Jutta Cords, the subject of the documentary.
I haven’t seen this film yet, but your post remeinded me of an experience I had some years ago in Münster, Germany, where I studied as part of Kalamazoo College’s post-grad foreign study program. I eventually ended up living there for some twenty years and remembering watching “Schindler’s List”, which had just been released, in a movie theater full of Germans, who were there to see the movie even though it had not yet been dubbed in German. Needless to say, you could a hear a pin drop during the whole movie and many of us adjourned after the film to a Kneipe around the corner to talk about it. Something I’ll never forget!