A love story that bloomed where humanity died — survivor testimony you cannot unhear.
In March 1943, twenty-year-old Ovadia Baruch was deported together with his family from Greece to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, his extended family was sent to the gas chambers. Ovadia struggled to survive until his liberation from the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945. While in Auschwitz, Ovadia met Aliza Tzarfati, a young Jewish woman from his hometown, and the two developed a loving relationship despite inhuman conditions. This film depicts their remarkable, touching story of love and survival in Auschwitz, a miraculous meeting after the Holocaust and the home they built together in Israel. This film is part of the "Witnesses and Education" project, a joint production of the International School for Holocaust Studies and the Multimedia Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this series, survivors recount their life stores - before, during and after the Holocaust. Each title is filmed on location, where the events originally transpired.
Direction
Filmed on location in Auschwitz — no reenactments needed.
Production
Witnesses and Education project pairs scholarly rigor with raw emotion.
Director
Zvi Nevo
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Salonika's Jewish community was 90% murdered — among the highest annihilation rates in Europe, making Ovadia's Greek Sephardic perspective rare in Holocaust cinema dominated by Ashkenazi narratives.
The 'Witnesses and Education' project's on-location filming policy means Ovadia walked Auschwitz's grounds for this testimony in his eighties — a physically grueling act of memory preservation.
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