Halina Birenbaum is a Holocaust survivor from Poland.  She has gone back many times guiding tours of the death camps and told her story countless times.  In a Hebrew language documentary film, “Where Are You Going?,” her son Gilad and Halina follow a mother and son to Poland.  Halina is deeply touching. She speaks with unusual clarity and directness. “Gilad sees his elderly mother standing in the shack at Auschwitz where she spent two horrible years, standing at the foot of the bunk she slept on, reconstructing the moments she realized her mother had entered the gas chamber and would never return.

What is most unusual is that Halina reports vividly the utter vicious animalistic cruelty of the police who rounded her and others up to be sent to the camp and these police are no less Jews in the Jewish police force the Nazis created.  Halina’s work is very well known and widely celebrated in Poland and barely so in Israel where, among others, she has been the object of major criticism such as by Yad Vashem who wrote her “I know there were Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, there were Jewish traitors, there were Jews who tried to save themselves at the price of the lives of others. … But where is the proportion?  You, Madam, describe the truth.  It is hard for me to believe that you have never heard about the informing, the exposing, the extortion and the active efforts by the Poles.”

Jasmine Kainy was the director of the film.  She realized she had found why Birenbaum was almost unknown in Israel.  “It’s in the politics of memory, the question of what’s comfortable for the Poles to hear and not for us…We see in the letter the attitude toward survivors in that period, and the establishment’s inability to accept the alternative narrative that Halina offered, that the Jews were part of the destruction of the Jews, that part of the Nazis’ horror was they managed to turn the Jews against themselves.  The current new chairman of Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan had said that she is the hero of her story and that “to our shame Israel did not know how to receive Holocaust survivors.” – Anderman, Nirit (20 April 2023). Haaretz English Edition.