Calgary previews new film documenting the 1946 murder of Shmuel Danziger

by Maxine Fischbein

(AJNews) – The May 29 preview of the film “Six Million. And One.” is unlikely to be forgotten by the more than 300 Calgarians who rallied around respected and beloved community members Morris and Ann Dancyger and their Vancouver-based son Howard, whose personal journey through painful family history figures prominently in the film.

The documentary, by German filmmaker Tina Fuchs, is about the shocking murder of Morris Dancyger’s father, Shmuel Danziger, in a Stuttgart Displaced Persons camp just one day after reuniting with his family, on March 29, 1946.

Despite the emotionally wrenching subject matter, the atmosphere at the pre-screening reception was one of eager anticipation, even celebration, as community members and friends of the Dancygers gathered at the Central Library.

It was the first time that a significant audience had the privilege of seeing the film which will have its premiere at a later date.

Shmuel Danziger’s family, who lived in Radom Poland, survived Auschwitz, only to face further trauma when armed German policemen marched through the Stuttgart Displaced Persons Camp in an alleged mission to curb black market activity. Although the survivors who lived there following liberation were supposed to have had the protection of the US military, shots were fired. Shmuel was the sole casualty. Several of his fellow survivors were injured.

Outrage was expressed around the world that such a shocking attack happened in the shadow of the Shoah, yet the policeman responsible for killing Shmuel Danziger was never brought to justice and government documents were sealed.

Danziger’s surviving family members eventually made their way to the nascent state of Israel, later settling in Calgary.

The Danziger tragedy – a source of embarrassment for both Germany and the US – soon became a political footnote and the coldest of cold cases. Fuchs remains shocked that she made it to the age of 50 with no knowledge of the events that took place in her home town and chalks up the silence to the shifting alliances of the Cold War.

Morris Dancyger and his future wife Ann – a child survivor from Ukraine – settled in Calgary and chose to face forward rather than dwell on the heinous crimes that robbed them of many family members and decimated Jewish life in deeply rooted communities throughout Europe.

With the passage of time, it has become more important to learn more about that painful history, says Ann Dancyger, who welcomed the May 29 audience on behalf of her family.

Fuchs became aware of the Danziger story while working on a television show for a German public broadcaster, said Ann Dancyger during a chat with AJNews earlier this month.

Having a deep sense of justice, Fuchs craved a much deeper dive into the fate of Shmuel Danziger and wondered what happened to his family, especially his son. Thus began a search that led her to the Dancygers and their children, Lisa and Howard.

Typically reticent to discuss his Holocaust experiences, Morris declined a prominent role in the film, but Howard – himself a former filmmaker – travelled to Stuttgart and New York City, where he participated in an odyssey that was part bicycle tour, part family-finding, and mainly whodunit as he joined historian Josefine Geib in a search for the individual responsible for his grandfather’s murder.

Morris Dancyger appears in the film, mainly in archival photos, at least one of which is frequently seen in books and film. In the image, Dancyger – four-and-a-half years old at the time – is among a group of children standing behind a barbed wire fence as they show their Russian liberators the dehumanizing tattoos that had been painfully etched on their forearms when they were sent to the hell that was Auschwitz.  Morris was among very few children to have survived the notorious death camp.

To help the viewers follow little Morris, Fuchs opted to colourize only his image in a series of black and white photos. The technique calls to mind the little girl in the red coat, a recurring motif utilized by Steven Spielberg in his 1993 black and white blockbuster Schindler’s List. Fuchs also uses the technique to emphasize national flags.

Some of the photographs in “Six Million. And One.” were previously unseen, even by the Dancyger family, including an image of Shmuel Danziger’s young widow, Regina, sitting on the street at the feet of her dead husband, staring in obvious shock.

“We have these many, many, many pictures of this raid in Stuttgart. It blew my mind to see that there must have been one DP who said, ‘I will take the picture of this, I will document this,’” Fuchs told her Calgary audience during a Q and A following the screening.

“The Jewish archives keep the evidence of what happened. And you’ll see the American document was 300 pages not acknowledging that a German policeman killed Shmuel Danziger,” Fuchs said.

Fuchs effectively utilizes many symbols and motifs throughout the film. Locations were meticulously chosen for their significance. Cars figure prominently; after all, German companies including Porsche, Volkswagen and Mercedes, benefited enormously from Jewish slave labour.

In the film, Howard rides by a Porsche dealership. Another scene captures the building where a Jewish department store was aryanised by the Nazis. A building at the University of Frankfurt was the headquarters of I. G. Farben, the chemical giant that used slave labour at Auschwitz, performed drug experiments on Jewish prisoners, and produced Zyklon B gas used in the gas chambers.

Ironically, Allied Command Headquarters were later located in the building, Howard Dancyger told the Calgary audience.

Like film locations, music was chosen for very specific reasons, including Dance me to the end of Love, by Leonard Cohen.

“A lot of people might think that it’s a love song, but it’s a song about the Holocaust,” Fuchs said.

Mir Lebn Eybek (We will live Forever), hummed by Berlin vocal trio Gurgulitza, is a beautiful though haunting musical backdrop. The songwriter, Leyb Rozental – who wrote the song while confined in the Vilna Ghetto – perished at the age of 29, just days before the liberation of Lithuania.

“Six Million. And One.” was at first titled The Surviving Remnant – the title that American Rabbi and Army Chaplain Abraham Klausner used as the title for lists of the living so that the survivors he ministered to in Dachau could find surviving loved ones.

The title did not translate well to German, said Fuchs, adding, “Nobody really understood what it meant.”

The title “Six Million. And One.” reinforces what Holocaust educators have long known:  Six million is a challenging number to comprehend. Focussing on the personal stories of individual Holocaust victims and survivors is a powerful tool in helping people to grasp the enormity of the Shoah.

The Calgary screening, organized by Calgary Jewish Federation’s Holocaust and Human Rights: Remembrance and Education Co-Chairs Marnie Bondar and Dahlia Libin, was embraced and enhanced by partnerships, some of them well established.

Libin expressed gratitude for the work of Calgary Public Library Community Engagement and Strategic Events Service Delivery Lead Steven Dohlman and his staff who have partnered with Bondar and Libin to deliver Holocaust education at the library over the past four years.

A long list of generous donors joined with the Dancyger family and Calgary Jewish Federation in sponsoring the pre-screening reception beautifully catered by Karen’s Café.

Most notable was the generous support of the office of Honorary German Consul Christina Hassan, who brought greetings prior to the screening.

“The Shoah was an unprecedented crime against humanity, planned and carried out from German soil. Millions of Jewish men, women and children were murdered simply for being who they were. This truth is a permanent part of Germany’s history and remains at the very core of our national identity,” Hassan said, her voice breaking with emotion.

“With it comes a responsibility that does not fade with time, a responsibility to remember, to educate, and to ensure that such horrors can never happen again. The words “Never Again” are not just a phrase. They are a solemn promise, a promise that obliges us to confront antisemitism, racism and hatred in all of its forms,” added Hassan.

Marnie Bondar described the film as exploring “…what happens after survival, when liberation does not mean peace, and when the search for answers becomes part of a family’s inheritance. It is a powerful reminder that history is not only written in textbooks, it lives in the stories we carry and the questions we dare to ask.”

It is Howard Dancyger’s “quest that is truly at the heart of this film,” said Bondar’s co-chair Dahlia Libin, who also expressed gratitude to Morris and Ann Dancyger for their support of the public screening, adding that theirs was “an act of courage.”

Additionally, it was a leap of faith. The Dancygers saw the film just one day before the May 29 screening.

Speaking on behalf of her family, Ann Dancyger praised Tina Fuchs’s “incredible tenacity, persistence, love, and months and months of research.”

A highlight of the evening was a videotaped message by Muhterem Aras, President of the State Parliament of Baden-Wurtemberg.

Aras, who immigrated to Germany with her Kurdish family at the age of 12, addressed most of her comments to Morris Dancyger.  Stunning in her sincerity, Aras did not mince words, delivering an apology in which she asked forgiveness even for expressing herself in the German language.

“German is the language of the perpetrators, a means of issuing terse commands, of humiliation, and of violence. It is also the language of the perpetrator who took your father’s life,” said Aras in her English-subtitled address.

“German is the language of the police who never investigated the murder. German is also the silence of the courts which never convicted the perpetrator because he was never charged…. As a Holocaust survivor, your father stood up that day for his right to live with dignity. For a life in safety. A life in freedom. A life with his family. A life with your mother, your sister. A life with you.”

“Dear Morris Dancyger, the lack of disciplinary and criminal prosecution…was and remains an unforgivable injustice,” Aras said. “I cannot undo this failure on the part of the authorities. As a citizen of Stuttgart and on behalf of the Baden-Wurtemberg State Parliament, I can only offer you our sincerest apologies for the injustice inflicted upon your family and upon you. I assure you that the fate of your family has not been forgotten. Your father has not been forgotten!”

“Memory is more than plaques, museums, and archives. It needs people who breathe life into memory,” continued Aras, who saluted the efforts of Tina Fuchs and Josefine Geib.

In the film Geib leads Howard Dancyger through archives in Germany and New York City, including those at the United Nations.

Both Geib and Fuchs live in Stuttgart. While they did not know each other, they were researching the Shmuel Danziger story parallel to one another.

While Fuchs was visiting with a friend who had previously lived in Stuttgart, she discovered that he once lived at 220 Reinsburgstrasse, the spot in front of which Shmuel Danziger was shot.

Fuchs accompanied her friend on a visit to his previous landlady. She gave Fuchs an envelope containing a letter Josefine Geib had sent to all residents in the building, asking them if they knew anything about the DP Camp and seeking documents or information they might have.

“It’s very telling…. The only person who answered was me,” Fuchs said.

In yet another astonishing coincidence, Howard Dancyger was born on Friday, March 29, the exact date on which his grandfather had been murdered in 1946. A scene in which Dancyger bikes to the site of the tragedy was filmed on his 60th birthday.

Josefine Geib leads Howard Dancyger to archival evidence that German policeman Otto Koch was the individual responsible for Shmuel Danziger’s death.

“It is not so important that probably Otto Koch killed Shmuel Danziger,” Fuchs told her Calgary audience. “What is important is that nobody wanted to find out, and that is what really upsets me.”

“There is one question a lot of people ask Morris,” Ann Dancyger later told AJNews. “Do you feel better now that you know the name of the perpetrator? His answer is always no, because [Koch] was never convicted, he never suffered. He didn’t die until he was well in his 80s and he had a very happy life. So we know his name. Big deal, but nothing happened. There were no consequences for this tragedy.”

At the end of the film, a wordless cameo featuring Morris Dancyger speaks volumes. To successfully describe in words his silent rebuke of Koch and the Nazis is impossible. It must be experienced and, more to the point, processed by each viewer in his or her own way.

Maxine Fischbein is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.