SUMMARY OF OUR HOLOCAUST VACATION. PRESENTATION BY DONIPHAN BLAIR

SUMMARY OF OUR HOLOCAUST VACATION. PRESENTATION BY DONIPHAN BLAIR

Афіша Львів №1

2023-10-09 18:30:00 –
Василя Стефаника вулиця, 11, Львів, 79005, Україна

After the 84 minute movie, Doniphan Blair reads a couple of passages from his mother’s book, Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption, and summarizes the philosophy he gleaned from both it and making the movie, which he calls “Survival of the Lovingest.”

“Our Holocaust Vacation” (84 minutes, 2007) is an alternative take on the Holocaust, which follows a New York City family to see where their mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, grew up in Poland and endured Auschwitz and other camps. Its novel qualities include being made her sons, Doniphan and Nicholas Blair, who are in the film, performance pieces, like walking with Jewish stars in a German town, and focusing on how a teenage woman survived through kindness, caring and romance. Not only did Tonia work as nurse through most of the war, she fell in love a couple of times, including with a German pilot in a work camp.

Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption
After thirty-five years of quiet acceptance, Tonia Rotkopf Blair returned to Poland and confronted the Holocaust. Growing into an outspoken survivor, she began to write precise, poignant stories. Some are about her childhood, or travelling half way around the world, or New York City, where she made her home, but all grapple with the struggle between memory, dreams, and the Holocaust. What makes her perspective unique is that, while working as a nurse in the Lodz ghetto or enduring Auschwitz, she remained very much a romantic young woman. Indeed, she had many amazing, life-sustaining relationships, during and after the war — including with Germans. So unique are these views, “Love at the End of the World” includes an essay by her son, Doniphan Blair, “Darwin and Love”, which revises Darwin’s theory of evolution from “survival of the fittest” to “survival of the lovingest.” It can be summarized as “love abides,” tolerance, and that the trauma of the Holocaust is universal and overwhelming but it can be addressed through art, romance and kindness.

Doniphan Blair (1954-) is a writer, filmmaker, artist and musician dedicated to multicultural and alternative projects. Raised in New York City, he travelled Asia and South America for five years before settling in San Francisco, where he started a commune and art gallery. A graduate of San Francisco Art Institute (1989), he has written about Darwinism, Japanese romanticism and Alfred Hitchcock, among many other topics, including Ukraine and the Holocaust. The latter includes the award-winning article, “Bruno Loewenberg: Artist and Survivor” (1983), the PBS-shown movie, “Our Holocaust Vacation” (2007), and his mother’s book, “Love at the End of the World” (2019), , which he edited and contributed the chapter, “Darwin and Love”. Now living in Oakland, California, he has a daughter and publishes cineSOURCEmagazine.com, a film-politics-culture zine.

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