A Jewish Life (2021)

A JEWISH LIFE is a portrait of one of the last contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust. By means of this film Marko Feingold's story and legacy is to be preserved as an immortal record. At the same time, current developments are also illuminated, timeless questions concerning morality, responsibility and human dignity are posed - and their limitations are indicated. Even at the great age that he attained Marko Feingold never tired of issuing warnings and encouragement, of standing up to anti-Semitic and antidemocratic tendencies, of fighting denial and deliberate forgetfulness. His memories have lost none of their immediacy as a warning from the past to future generations. Marko Feingold was born in 1913 in Neusohl (Besztercebánya), which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time and is today in Slovakia. He and his three siblings grew up in a Jewish quarter in the Leopoldstadt suburb of Vienna. After training in business, in 1932 he and his brother Ernst moved to Italy. There the two of them became successful and relatively wealthy as travelling merchants, but they returned to Vienna in 1938 - at a fateful moment. Shortly after the "Anschluss", the annexation of Austria by Germany, Feingold was arrested by the Nazis for the first time. When he was released he fled to Prague, but from there he was deported to Poland, though he managed to return to Prague with forged papers. There he was seized again, in May 1939, and later sent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. He survived imprisonment in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Dachau and Buchenwald until being liberated in 1945. When the war was over he devoted himself to helping former concentration camp inmates, assisting tens of thousands of them to make the illegal journey from Austria over the Italian Alps to Palestine. Marko Feingold was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, and memories of this period have defined his life. When he died in 2019 at the age of 106 he was the oldest Jew in Austria and President of the Jewish Cultural Community of the city of Salzburg, even though he never regarded himself as particularly religious. With the aid of unique and previously unpublished archive material, A JEWISH LIFE accompanies Marko Feingold on his journey into the past. The film reflects on historical events, confronting the audience with the most inhuman period of the 20th century and illuminating the sometimes terrifying parallels between the past era and present social developments.