Memory Drops

28 February 2025

Hannelore Brenner

How to make a film about five of "The Girls of Room 28", three of them having gone through the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen? How to make a film with a very small budget that allows you to make not more than a 10-minutes film?

From the very outset Eliana Schejter and Addi Reiss knew that it was impossible to capture by camera the experiences that five of the survivors of Room 28 living in Israel - Chana Weingarten, Handa Drori, Judith Rosenzweig, Vera Kreiner and Eva Zohar - would have to tell. They also knew that it was impossible to grasp and convey the inspeakable crimes and atrocities committed by the Nazis during Second World War and the Holocaust in the media of a short film.

They chose a different approach... and created a deeply moving visual testimony of five of "The Girls of Room 28".  And a Work of Art.

Memory Drops was commissioned in 2009 by Hannelore Brenner/Edition Room 28 and Room 28 e.V. It is part of our Project of Remembrance and Education. It is shown as part of our Exhibition The Girls of Room 28, L 410, Theresienstadt.

The filmmakers' approch is to recreate the cognitive activity of remembering the distant past by using objects, colors and scenes that float for a moment and then fade into oblivion. The focus is on the sphere in between what is remembered and what is said, on the Unspeakable, on "the void".

Today Addie asked me to share the video. I feel, now it is a MUST. I cannot stop thinking of what happened on 7 October 2023 in Israel and what followed from it. I cannot stop feeling thrown back decades, when in 1996, my first questions to the survivors were: "What gave you the strength to overcome what you have experienced? How is it to live with this trauma in your soul that is far beyond imagination?" - I have found some answers. They are in the book The Girls of Room 28.

My thoughts are with Jarden Bibas and his family, with all hostages and their beloved and friends.

May those who have gone through the hell of Hamas, those who still are in the hell of Hamas, and all those who are suffering with them, find the strength not to get lost in a Sea of Tears.