SHADOWS FROM MY PAST

A documentary by Curt Kaufman and Gita Weinrauch Kaufman, which qualified for the Oscars.

Gita and her immediate family escaped Vienna on the day they were to be deported to Dachau Concentration Camp, thanks to Affidavits from relatives in Hudson. They came and settled in Kingston, NY.

1000 of the people in Paris or San Bernardino, did not think an act of terror, could happen to them. Nor did those who lived in Vienna the night before Nazi troops stormed into their homes and hauled people to concentration camps. But by then it was too late. Gita Kaufman and her family narrowly escaped that fate. It was a generation later that Gita Kaufman learned that some of those people captured and murdered were her close relatives – doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen who thought they were safe, then begged to be rescued before the axe fell on their heads. Their pleas were in letters Gita found in her mother's closet. But what could Gita do about it, now that the years of Nazi terror were long over, and the people who wrote the letters were dead?

Gita and her husband Curt realized what they could do. They could make a film about the experience -- a film that would say to all who saw it, in the words of the great American writer Sinclair Lewis: "IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE!"; even though you are deluded into thinking you are safe. Today's headlines should impel you to begin your resistance to terror NOW or it may be too late. The terrorists have already begun.

Shadows From My Past is a Fippy and Thump production, based on a project that received the Bruno Kerensky Award for Outstanding Achievement in Human Rights, screened at several film festivals, at the Quad Theater in NYC and Laemmle Theater, Ca, and sold out in New York at the Niue Galleries, Anthology and Lincoln Center Theaters.

Praise for Shadows Of My Past

“… Superb film…. They were indeed not at all victims. They were the first perpetrators. Bravo! “ – Erik R. Kandel, M.D.,Neuroscientist,Nobel Prizewinner

“Personal testimony is clearly the heart of the movie. As filmmakers from Claude Lanzmann ( “Shoah”) to Steven Spielberg (through his Shoah visual history foundation) have shown us, this is what’s essential to share.” - Ben Kenigsberg, THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘ A labor of love….it’s testimony on the Holocaust, something about which we do need every scrap so that we may not forget what humanity once allowed to happen." - THE VILLAGE VOICE

“…a deeply personal story…. it explores the nature of anti-Semitism within Austria past and present…the audience will be grateful for the light that has been shed, but also for the shadows that endure.” - Michael Berenbaum, Former Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

“…goes a long way to make us reflect on the past….and to guard against anti-Semitism and genocide in the future.”- Edith Kurzweil, Editor, Partisan Review

“Your film is already a great success. You’ve brought the truth of what happened in Austria into world consciousness.” - Jerome Coopersmith, Fmr. Prof. Film Writing, CUNY