Synopsis
Around 900 children were born in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp between 1939 and 1945, only 2 to 3 percent of them survived. One of these children is Ingelore Prochnow. Left behind by her mother in a refugee camp after the liberation, she grew up with foster parents with no knowledge of where she came from. The place of birth 'Ravensbrück' displayed in her passport finally prompted her to research her past and her birth mother. The film deals with attempts at reconstructing events and preserving memory without having one’s own. How can you visualize what is so incomplete and sometimes only describable as a feeling? And how can today’s memorial sites and the available material be used for this? Only 40 survivors of the Ravensbrück concentration camp can tell us in person about this place and their experiences during the Nazi regime. Ingelore Prochnow sees herself as taking on this responsibility, and that is what makes this film important. [18 dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg]
With: Ingelore Prochnow, Heike Rode, Klaus Prochnow, Frau Sonntag
How is it possible to commemorate something about which you have absolutely no memory? Can you live your life as an eyewitness if you cannot give testimony as a survivor? These are the questions that plague Ingelore Prochnow, one of the last living concentration camp survivors. Her mother was pregnant when she was deported to the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück because she had “intercourse with a Pole”. Ingelore was born in the camp and lived there until liberation, when she was one year old – a fact she did not learn until she was an adult. Ingelore then began to search for her history, and for possible living relatives. Her mother, maybe a brother, her father, and other prisoners, without whose care no child could have survived the inhuman conditions, all came up in her research, but the details remained vague. Ingelore has dedicated herself to keeping the memory of the Nazi period alive. She meets with survivors, speaks publicly, and does educational work, yet she questions herself, her role, and her search for answers. [63 Nordic Filmdays Lübeck]
