Inheritance Film Event

Release date: April 05, 2009 |

Goucher College Hillel presents Inheritance, a documentary by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Moll, at 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 5, in Goucher College’s Merrick Lecture Hall.

After the film, a panel discussion will be held with Moll; Helen Jonas, Holocaust survivor and subject of the documentary; David Zurawik, assistant professor of communications and media studies and Baltimore Sun columnist; and Dr. Gregor Peter Schmitz, a Washington correspondent for Der Speigel. The panel will be moderated by Goucher President Sanford J. Ungar.

This event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved by calling 410-337-6333 or by e-mailing boxoffice@goucher.edu.

Inheritance is a Holocaust film that documents the lives of two women with very different scars from the World War II genocide of Europe’s Jews. It is the story of Monika Hertwig, whose father, Amon Goeth was featured in the film Schindler’s List as a commandant of the concentration camp Plaszow. Sixty years later, Hertwig comes face to face with her father’s former Jewish slave, Helen Jonas, as they both search for closure and deal with new questions about their lives.             

Now in her 60s, Hertwig learned at age 11 that her father had not been killed in World War II like other soldiers, but was hanged as a war criminal when she was a baby. When Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List came out in 1993, Hertwig became, in her own words, “sick with the truth.”

As camp commander, the fanatically anti-Semitic Goeth oversaw the death of thousands and personally killed, beat, and tortured prisoners with apparent sadistic glee. He chose as a housemaid, Helen Jonas, who was 15 years old when she arrived with other Jews at the Plaszow camp in Poland.

One ray of hope in Jonas’ bleak life was Oskar Schindler, who ran the factory that used the camp's inmates for forced labor — which saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers. Schindler ultimately also saved Helen and her sisters

After Hertwig saw Jonas on a German television documentary, the two arranged to meet at the Plaszow camp memorial — though not without apprehension on both sides.

The meeting is a heartrending and searing evocation of the Holocaust. For all the terror and despair evoked by the memory of Amon Goeth, Inheritance is ultimately a portrait of two brave and remarkably resilient women who bear witness to an unchangeable past in the name of a better future.

This event is sponsored by Goucher Hillel, Goucher’s Judaic Studies Program and the Celeste Bachove Grynberg ‘57 and Jack Grynberg Fund, which was established to fund guest lecturers and other initiatives of the Judaic Studies Program.

Goucher Hillel’s mission seeks to enrich the lives of Jewish undergraduate and graduate students at Goucher College so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world;  our vision is to inspire every Jewish student to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life.