'Six Million and One' movie review, trailer: Siblings on trail of father's World War II Holocaust memoir

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Lately, it seems the Israelis have taken over the Holocaust-film business, at least, the documentary division. That shouldn’t come as a surprise since a large percentage of Israel’s population is descended from the many Holocaust survivors who settled there after the war. Perhaps because of this familial connection, the good Israeli films about the Holocaust are free of the automatic reverence many other filmmakers feel they must bestow upon the survivors of this unimaginable horror.

“Six Million and One” is filmmaker David Fisher’s account of a trip he took with his three siblings to the Austrian labor camps where their father Joseph slaved to build tunnels for the Nazis. A taciturn man, Joseph began a memoir a few years before his death detailing his experiences at Gusen and Gunskirchen, the Austrian camps where he was interned. The prisoners at those camps, part of the Mauthausen complex, first worked at the nearby quarries and then dug underground spaces where German armaments companies could build fighter jets. The life span of a Jewish worker at Gusen was only a week, one expert tells Fisher. That Joseph survived the war was nothing short of a miracle.

Fisher read Joseph’s memoir after his death and was determined to follow his father’s steps as best he could. He visits the Austrian housing development that stands right by the camps now and travels to the U.S. to interview the men who liberated Gunskirchen. A haunted veteran, his voice breaking, describes how the starving inmates died from the food the American troops gave them. Weighing 70 and 80 pounds, their bodies couldn’t absorb the nutrients and went into shock.

Fisher’s younger siblings refuse to read Joseph’s memoir, but the filmmaker drags his two brothers and sister along to Austria to confront the experiences that helped make their father who he was. It’s this latter part of “Six Million and One” that gives the film its power and its originality. Fisher’s siblings do not share his obsession with their father’s Holocaust experiences and mock him for it, as only siblings can. What kind of man would drag his relatives on a trip to concentration camps, his sister Esti demands. This isn’t her idea of a vacation. Then there’s their radically different memories of their parents. One brother remembers their mother as warm and loving, another as distracted and distant. Such disagreements aren’t unusual among siblings, but the guilt that all children of survivors feel makes it more poignant.

The question of how their father stayed sane during his imprisonment torments the Fishers, but the question they are really asking is ‘how would I have fared in the same place?’ That’s the question that every child of Holocaust survivors asks, and the answer usually is I wouldn’t: I wouldn’t stay sane, I couldn't bear it, I would not have survived. That reality goes a long way to explaining the intense focus many children of survivors have on their parents’ experience. Internalizing it, they almost imagine it was their own. Clearly that’s not true, but in some deep way they have tried to ease their parents’ burden by carrying some of it on their own backs.

The Fishers have radically different explanations for their father’s endurance, some not particularly flattering. The scenes of them wandering through the tunnels at Gusen and then picnicking in the Austrian sunlight--moving from darkness to light--are both funny and heart-rending. As different as each is from the others, they are all the children of the same man, and his tragic and amazing history binds them together. “Six Million and One” celebrates that bond while it grieves over its cause.