MPTV to air film on Shoah survivors

          A new documentary “REFUGE: Stories of the Selfhelp Home” gives a voice to the final generation Holocaust survivors.

          It tells how a small group of them came together to create a community, called Selfhelp, in Chicago that has given shelter to more than 1,000 victims of Nazi persecution from Central Europe.

          The one%u2010hour film will air on public television stations nationwide beginning November 2013 to mark the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Nov. 9%u201010, 1938), the coordinated series of attacks by the Nazis against Jewish communities throughout Germany and Austria.

          The film is presented by WOUB Public Media and is distributed to public television stations by American Public Television.

          In Milwaukee, “REFUGE” will be broadcast on WMVT (Channel 36) at 3 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 10, and WMVS (Channel 10) at 11 p.m., Monday, Nov. 11.

          The film’s director, Ethan Bensinger, who lives in Chicago, comes from a German%u2010Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and settled in Chicago in 1958. The documentary grew out of a project to interview the last remaining survivors and refugees at the Selfhelp Home.

          Since its premiere at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in June 2012, “REFUGE” has been screened at film festivals, museums, schools, libraries and synagogues. It has been honored with the top award for excellence at the recent Beloit Film International Festival, as well as “Best Documentary” and “Best in Fest” awards at the Sycamore Film Festival, and the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award at the Geneva Film Festival.

          Selfhelp was founded in the late 1930s by a handful of young Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany to Chicago. It provided housing, food, English classes and job placement services to other displaced Jewish émigrés and later, after the war, to Holocaust survivors.

          In 1950, Selfhelp opened up a residential home for the oldest refugees and survivors, whose atmosphere reproduced some of the home life and cultural experiences that they had lost. To date, more than 1,000 refugees and survivors have spent their last years at the Selfhelp homes in Chicago’s Hyde Park and Edgewater communities.