About the darkest era of human history. At the same time a spotlight on current developments, raising timeless questions of human nature.
You think Antisemitism is phenomenon of the Nazi era?

Synopsis

Marko Feingold, born in 1913, grew up in Leopoldstadt, a Jewish working-class neighborhood of Vienna.

After an apprenticeship he dawdled through Italy together with his brother, Ernst, as a travelling salesman. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1938, during a brief visit to Vienna shortly after the “Anschluss” – the annexation of Austria to Germany. He survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Dachau and Buchenwald, where he was held as a prisoner until the liberation in 1945. After the war had ended, he helped funneling tens of thousands of former concentration camp inmates on their flight from Austria, crossing the Alps into Italy and on to Palestine. With 106 years of age he is the oldest living Jew in Austria, he is the president of the Jewish Community of the City of Salzburg and he is by his own account “not particularly religious”.

“A Jewish Life” draws the portrait one of the last remaining eye-witnesses of the Holocaust, documenting the fateful twists and turns of his life and of his survival in one of the darkest eras of human history. At the same time a spotlight is cast on current developments and timeless questions are being raised: Questions about human nature, morals, responsibility, human dignity – and their limitations. Marko Feingold’s experiences during the Nazi dictatorship dominated his entire life – his perception of his own biography to his views on the here and now.

We accompany Marko Feingold on his journey into the past, together we are looking for clues and we look back at a life that spans more than an entire century. The Story of his Life confronts us with the most inhumane events of the 20th century, but also with the Antisemitism before WW II, down to the present day. Marko Feingold’s memories are of nightmarish relevance in times of dramatic political upheavals. Embedded in never before shown archive footage, Feingold’s captivity in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime forms the pivot from which the cinematic narrative unfolds. It stands as a warning from the past for future generations.

After “A German Life”, the story of Joseph Goebbel´s secretary, a complete change of perspective, drawing a different picture of the 20th century – and still revealing some striking parallels.