I Am Here

This powerful film offers a portrait of 98-year-old Polish Holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal, whose vibrance and vitality has not been dimmed by either age or the weight of the terrible events she has endured. As Ella recounts her experience of the Holocaust, the corresponding events are rendered in sensitively drawn animation. The film follows Ella, who was a young adult at the time, from her happy life as a Polish teenager to the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and on to Auschwitz, where she narrowly escaped the gas chambers. At a time when Holocaust denialism has gained fringe legitimacy, this is an important film and a counter to those who deny the horrors of history. In documenting Ella’s narrative of survival and transcendence, the film provides a viscerally personal account of an historical event that is all too easily abstracted into ideology.