how jews had survive in Nazi rule
please answer in small points
Answers
Explanation:
Accessibility links
Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player
NPR logo
WORLD
'The Invisibles' Reveals How Some Jews Survived Nazi Germany By Hiding In Plain Sight
January 29, 20198:33 AM ET
Eleanor Beardsley
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY
4-Minute Listen
Alice Dwyer plays the young Hanni Lévy in The Invisibles, which focuses on the lives of four German Jews who stayed in Germany during World War II and survived.
Greenwich Entertainment
Hanni Weissenberg, now Hanni Lévy, survived as a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Today, the petite and lively 94-year-old lives in Paris. Earlier this month, she returned to Berlin, her home during the war years, to attend the screening of a film about her and other Jews who survived while hiding under the noses of the Nazis.
Docudrama On Jews In Nazi Germany Can't Decide On Docu- Or Drama: 'The Invisibles'
MOVIE REVIEWS
Docudrama On Jews In Nazi Germany Can't Decide On Docu- Or Drama: 'The Invisibles'
The Invisibles, a German documentary-drama based on the accounts of four survivors, opened Friday in the U.S.
In the film, Lévy is depicted first at age 17, sitting in her Berlin apartment in 1943, with the Gestapo pounding on the door.
"That's when I knew it was now or never," Lévy tells NPR. "I knew I had to disappear. When they knocked like that, usually you had to open. But I didn't."
She managed to slip out of the apartment that day and escape.
Her parents had died of illness. Her grandmother and another Jewish family she had lived with had been deported. She was living alone and working as a forced laborer at a factory, sewing parachutes. In February 1943, the Gestapo carried out the Fabrik-Aktion or "factory action," the last major arrest of Jews to be deported to Auschwitz.
Taking only her coat and handbag, Lévy hid in her large apartment building until nightfall. Then she made her way to the home of non-Jewish friends of her parents, the only people she felt she could trust. They took her in. It would be the first of many such places of refuge.
Article continues after sponsor message
Staying with these family friends, Lévy removed the yellow star that Nazis forced Jews to wear, dyed her hair blond and began a new life as Hannelore Winkler.
"You just had to ignore the fear in your gut and push it away, become someone else," Lévy says. "I had to try to lose myself in the masses and forget that I was scared and that I was someone who once submitted to the Nazi race laws. I had to act like a regular Berliner. And this is what saved me in the end."
"I knew it was now or never," says Hanni Lévy, 94, recalling when the Gestapo knocked on her door in 1943. "I knew I had to disappear."
Eleanor Beardsley/NPR
Barbara Schieb, a historian with Berlin's German Resistance Memorial Center, says Jews often went completely underground in Nazi-occupied countries, sometimes helped by resistance movements. But for Jews in Germany — where potentially everyone was a Nazi and there was no organized resistance — Schieb says people had to hide in plain sight.
"They just said, 'I'm somebody else,' " says Schieb. "They invented a new Aryan-sounding identity. And for this, they needed helpers. They needed a home, something to eat, money, of course — and they needed false documents. But they were visible. You see it in the film, how they are working, meeting. And yet they are invisible. It's the false identity that is visible."
German director and producer Claus Räfle, a 30-year veteran of the film industry, says he made The Invisibles because he finds the stories of people who have to hide themselves in their own hometown amazing.
"They have to climb into different identities, and these stories are so full of tension and emotions because every day is full of risks," he tells NPR. "Every day, you can be arrested. Every day, someone can notice something strange about you. And I thought this is something that never happened before."
Räfle's movie, a drama re-created around the interviews with survivors, is interspersed with footage of Berlin during the war. It was released in Germany in 2017 and aired on German prime-time television last week.
"These are some of the last victims of Nazism who could tell their story in a very interesting and touching way," he says. "It proved it happened and that some people were helping, and that made a difference."
In addition to Lévy's story, the movie focuses on the survival of three other young Jewish Berlin residents who made it through the war years. Today, Lévy is the only one of those four still living
In the film, for which interviews were conducted 10 years ago, the four survivors talk of the constant fear, the hunger and cold they experienced. They recall a culture of denunciation so pervasive that sometimes Jews denounced other Jews in the hope of avoiding a horrible fate.