Relying on themselves

MICHAEL FOX

Most of the Holocaust survival stories that have been adapted for the movies, from Schindler’s List to last year’s In Darkness, feature a righteous, mendacious or conflicted non-Jew whose help is essential. No Place on Earth, however, recounts the saga of a group of Ukrainian Jews forced to rely solely on their own resourcefulness, courage and stamina. As a result, their travails are both more inspiring – and more infuriating.

A tense, engrossing and extraordinarily well-produced docudrama, No Place on Earth opened in limited release across the United States in May. Plans for a Canadian release date have not been announced, but the film will receive a television broadcast on the History Channel at some future date.

The film’s protagonist is Esther Stermer, a middle-aged Ukrainian Jew, who realized, through instinct or experience, that obeying orders from the occupying Nazis or the local police to go to the town square or the train station with a suitcase – or even moving into a ghetto – would be a fatal mistake. A fearless advocate of taking one’s fate into one’s own hands, the family matriarch led some 28 people, from toddlers to septuagenarians, into a vast, unexplored cave in October of 1942, equipped with little aside from beds, pillows and food.

Stermer’s memoir, We Fight to Survive, provides the dramatic core of No Place on Earth, including reenactments of events and moments that director Janet Tobias interweaves with recollections from a handful of elderly survivors of the harrowing years underground.

The story, as is typically the case with real life, twists and corkscrews, and it’s hard to keep the protagonists and even the chronology straight. However, the filmmaking is sufficiently strong and the stakes so self-evident that viewers are not stymied by the lack of clarity.

On the contrary, we’re riveted by depictions of nocturnal forays aboveground for food, or the theft of a millstone to grind flour, or a sleigh built to transport necessities in winter, or the terrifying discovery of the hiding place by a patrol dead-set on rounding up any remnants of the Jewish population. (According to the film, 95 percent of western Ukraine’s Jews, 1.5 million people, were killed.)

While chopping and gathering wood in the forest one day, a couple of the younger men encounter a non-Jewish classmate they knew years earlier. Should they kill him to protect the fact that they’re hiding nearby, or trust him not to betray them?

At moments like these, we’re so involved in the drama that it doesn’t matter if we know their names. Indeed, No Place on Earth is so well done that we readily imagine, and experience, some tiny part of what it must have been like to hide, strategize, cooperate, bicker and wonder what kind of world one would be able to return to one day.

The survivors’ emergence from the cave at the end of the war to a wave of silence from their former neighbors – who, in large part, ignored the plight of the Jews, profited from them and/or betrayed them – provides a suitably appropriate conclusion. The film slathers on a present-day epilogue, however, in which two of the survivors return to the cave with their respective grandchildren in a kind of happy ending.

No Place on Earth is bookended by amateur spelunker Chris Nicola, a friendly New Yorker who came across evidence of human habitation in the cave in 1993. He resolved the mystery by eventually locating some of the survivors, then made their experiences public in an article for National Geographic.

“Some people are afraid of the dark,” Nicola says, by way of encouraging viewers to share his passion for exploring caves. “There are no monsters down there.”

The documentary reminds us of a time when monsters operated in plain sight in broad daylight, with the overt or tacit approval of ordinary people. Even as we revel in the survival of the Stermers and others, we recognize the tragic reality of the many complicit Ukrainians who escaped justice.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Franscisco.

^TOP