[NO PLACE ON EARTH opens in Cleveland on Friday May 3rd exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]
Review by Pamela Zoslov
“I forgot that there was a sun”
are the poignant words of a woman recalling the day in her
childhood when she emerged from a Ukrainian cave, where she and
her family hid from the Nazis for a year and a half. She recounts her
experience in the extraordinary documentary NO PLACE ON EARTH.
Janet Tobias' film tells the remarkable
true story of five Jewish families who took shelter in the dark caves
of the Ukraine to elude certain death during World War II.
Thirty-eight men, women and children improvised an underground life
between 1942 and 1944, scarcely seeing the light of day except when
the men ventured outside, at great peril, to gather food. Theirs was
the longest uninterrupted underground survival in recorded history.
For more than six decades, the story
was not known by anyone except the survivors. In 1993, Chris Nocola,
a cave explorer from New York, traveled to Ukraine to research the
history of his Eastern Orthodox family. Investigating the country's
77-mile cave system, he stumbled upon a forgotten piece of
20th-century history. “Every cave I enter has a secret,” Nicola
says. The secret of a particular cave, known as Priest's Grotto,
was suggested by objects Nocola found: buttons, stoves, earthen tables and chairs, a
fragment of a leather shoe. There were names written on the cave's ceilings and walls, signs of human life.
Nocola was intrigued but could not find
any information about who might have lived in the caves. “Maybe
some Jews,” suggested a resident of the nearby town. The mystery
remained unsolved until some years later, when Nocola learned that
the son of one of the men who survived the cave lived
less than seven miles away from him. Members of the surviving
families told a story so incredible it resembles the most outlandish fiction. “I went
looking for my family's story and found someone else's,” Nocola
says. He organized a highly emotional return trip for the survivors
– one of whom was in his 80s and another a robust 91 – to
reenter the dark Priest's Grotto that, against impossible odds, kept
them safe and alive. “We were fighters,” said one survivor. “We
were masters of our own fate.”
The film skillfully re-creates the
families' wartime experiences, with painstaking attention to
atmospheric and historical detail and an emotionally moving score by
John Piscitello. As the storm clouds of war gathered in their native
Ukraine, the families searched for a place to hide to avoid being
shot or sent to concentration camps. They were endangered not only by
the Germans but also by the collaborating Ukrainian authorities. The
Jewish families took refuge in their first cave, where they
improvised an existence until the Nazis found them and shot their way
into the cave. People were rounded up and marched off, though a few
managed to escape in the darkness and chaos. The others were
imprisoned by the Ukrainian police, who offered them a deal: in
exchange for some silver and gold, they would be allowed to escape.
The outcome of that deal is the film's most horrifying sequence.
The remaining men, women and children
managed to find a new, deeper and less commodious cave, where they
managed, through grit, mechanical ingenuity and sheer physical
strength, to forge a life. Food was scarce, the men leaving the cave
to forage for provisions while the women waited in worried silence
for their return. They ate only enough to survive and, covered by
perpetual darkness, slept 18 hours a day. They kept track of the time
and observed the Jewish holidays. They made their own flour, using a
stolen grinding wheel. Two of the men built a sleigh on which they
hauled grain across the snow. Tensions grew, as they did among the
hiding families in The Diary of Anne Frank.
There were fistfights and arguments. A boy whose family had been
murdered comforted himself by eating the families' flour, and was
beaten for it.
In
total, the families lived for 468 days before learning, via a note in
a bottle lowered into their cave, that it was at last safe to come
out. Joyful and free at last, the survivors eventually emigrated to the U.S. and Canada.
On
returning to the cave 67 years later, the survivors found a familiar
comfort in its darkness, which had become a friend in their time of
danger. One elderly survivor, visibly moved, said he wanted say
“thank you” to the cave. 4 out of 4 stars.
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