2002
Undying Love tells the poignant, enduring and miraculous love stories of the survivors of World War II. Against the brutalized landscape of post-war Europe, this film focuses on how survivors struggled to reconstruct personal identities and forge intimate relationships. Using searing testimonies, poetic dramatizations, archives and images of romantic love from the pre- and post-Holocaust era, Undying Love is a textured retelling of several extraordinary love stories which emerged “out of the ashes.”
The possibility of love blooming out of the ashes of the Holocaust is realized in fully human terms in Helene Klodawsky’s affecting docu, “Undying Love: True Stories of Courage and Faith.” The filmmaker, a daughter of a survivor of the camps (and who is one of pic’s subjects), has quilted together several testimonials that cover the emotional spectrum from love-at-first-sight to arranged marriage. These are layered with staged re-creations of the couples after the war….
Considering the utter destruction wrought on the European Jewish population by Nazi Germany, the fact that any meaningful and transcendent love stories amongst Holocaust survivors could be found and retold is a tribute to the Jewish people’s resiliency and nobility. With Undying Love: True Stories of Courage and Faith, documentarian and second generation Holocaust survivor Helene Klodawsky examines a handful of genuine marriages — including that of her own parents — founded in the Holocaust’s aftermath.
Ryan Shriver, New York Times, 2003
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