The Flat

Movie Title--  The Flat

Release Year--  2011

Running Time--  1 Hour and 42 Minutes

Film Type--  Documentary

Director--  Arnon Goldfinger

When documentarian Arnon Goldfinger's grandmother Gerda Tuchler dies at age 98, he and his family begin to clean out her apartment in Tel Aviv when they come across some shocking information about Gerda and their grandfather Kurt's past in Nazi Germany.

Gerda Tuchler, a 98 year old German woman living in Tel Aviv passes away and it is up to her children and grandchildren to clear her flat out.  Arnon Goldfinger, the son of Gerda's daughter Hannah Goldfinger, films the family going through Gerda's posessions.  When the clean up begins, they were disposing of roughly 60 garbage bags a day.  The clean up soon slowed down, with Arnon and Hannah sometimes being the only two to show up to clear out the flat.

Arnon comments that he liked to come to his grandmother's house as a child and although she had been living in Tel Aviv for  70 years, her flat looked as if she had never left Germany.  He also stated that his grandmother had never mastered Hebrew and Arnon himself had no desire to  learn German, so they would sit and talk together in English.  He then realized that during all of their talks, all the things of importance had always been left unsaid.  He then conducts interviews with some of his family members, only to find that the people that he interviews knew little to nothing about their grandparents' past.

When they got to the paper documents, Hannah reads each line of each paper before deciding to dispose of it or not.  As they were clearing out a closet, they came across a box that held letters and old newspapers.  When Arnon saw that the newspapers had Swastikas on them, he knew that they had stumbled across Nazi propaganda.  This discovery and the curiosity of why his grandparents would have Nazi propaganda takes Arnon on a journey through his grandmother and grandfather's pasts that will both shock and sadden him.

I liked this film but at times it can seem a little overwhelming.  It is about a German-Jewish family that moves away from Germany before the Jews started to get relocated to the Ghettos, so this film is heavily subtitled because most of the film is spoken in German or Hebrew.  For someone like me that doesn't speak either of these languages I had to make sure I was paying close attention to the subtitles so that I wouldn't miss anything.  For someone that isn't going to sit and read a film all the way through, this may be a little discouraging.  

When you get right down to it, this film is about a generation that didn't ask any questions of their parents, leaving the 3rd generation to dig through the past to learn more about their family.  As Arnon asks his family if they knew anything about the patriarch and matriarch of their families, very few knew just a little bit of information and even more knew nothing at all.  I was personally a little discouraged with Hannah Goldfinger, Arnon's mom and Gerda's daughter as I watched this because she says on several different occasions that she didn't care about the past; she didn't wasn't going to willfully go in search of it and it would make no difference on her life now knowing what happened back then.

After the film went off, it finally dawned on me that she didn't care about the past because that is how she was raised.  After the war, her parents taught her to live in the present and not to look back.  It could have been because then their children would learn things about Nazi Germany and what happened to their grandmother (Gerda's mother) that they did not want them to know or even the reason they left Germany for good.

I think the biggest lesson of this film is to always ask questions.  So many of us let time with the people we love just slip away and we never know what life was like for them when they were younger.  I admit I am at fault for that myself; I had a grandfather that was in WWII and never once did I ask him about it.  Although I was only 17 when he passed away, now that I am 31, I regret not at least mentioning it back then.  I feel the same way about my other deceased grandparents; I never asked and the family members that I ask about them, remember being told very little about how life was for any of them at a young age.  We don't think that these things are important to learn about when our family members are alive, it is only when they pass that we realize the questions we should have asked were always kept unspoken and that is a very sad but true fact.

This was a very good film.  It was presented in way that holds a person's interest because honestly, you want to see where it is going to lead Arnon in his search for answers.  If you are looking for a honest look inside a family that knew no family history, only to learn that they did have (although very very little) involvement with Nazi Germany, this is a good view.  Do take my warning from above, there are a lot of subtitles in this one.  Get ready for a wonderful  experience and Don't Forget the Popcorn!