Escape to Borkum

Escape to Borkum tells the story of my father, Ingomar Steineck, whose privileged German childhood in Stryków, Poland, abruptly comes to an end with the final phase of the Second World War.
Together with his mother and sister, he is forced to flee, spending nearly two years as a refugee while travelling through a collapsing post-war Europe. The family finally reaches Borkum, a remote island in the North Sea, where they are housed in a refugee accommodation in a former naval barracks.
For the boy, still marked by the experiences of the previous two years, nature, school, friendships and the freedom to explore the remnants of the recent past offer a radically different childhood from the one he had known before, gradually creating a sense of normality in a world still profoundly shaped by war.

The film follows the story beyond the flight itself, tracing the family’s years on Borkum and my father’s gradual transition into a new life. Decades later, he reflects on his childhood, his family and the experiences that shaped him, including the repression and silence that characterized how many people dealt with the aftermath of the war. Memories of the flight remain present in unexpected ways, including recurring dreams of events that took place more than seventy years earlier.

Combining eyewitness testimony, historical photographs, archival material, filmed scenes and AI-assisted animation, Escape to Borkum moves between past and present, historical reality and personal memory.

With Escape to Borkum, I wanted to explore the experience of displacement not through the distant lens of historical documentation, but through the immediate and sensory perspective of a child.
This deeply personal film is based on the eyewitness account of my father, Ingomar Steineck, whose childhood was abruptly disrupted by the end of the Second World War and the nearly two-year flight that followed.

As a filmmaker drawn to deceleration and immersion, I wanted to give these memories time and space to unfold. The challenge was to reconstruct the world my father experienced - a world he had been telling me about since my own childhood, and one that exists today only through his memories, a few historical photographs and other surviving traces.
I therefore chose a hybrid form. Extensively researched AI-assisted animations, closely anchored in historical photographs and other visual sources, make it possible to reconstruct places - many of which no longer exist today - as well as situations and moments that could otherwise only be imagined. They are combined with filmed material, sound and music to create a continuous sensory experience.

The form is deliberately unagitated and restrained. Rather than illustrating history from a distance, the film attempts to approach it through perception: the sudden loss of familiarity, confusion, the strangeness of new places, the ever-present remnants of war, and the way a young boy finds his way through an unfamiliar world on a remote island.