The Children of the Silent Ones

Based on an exclusive interview with 97-year-old Abba Naor – who survived Dachau concentration camp as a teenager and has been telling his story to schoolchildren in Bavaria as a contemporary witness for decades, but long spared his own children in Israel – the second part of the trilogy is dedicated to the memory and silence of concentration camp survivors.

What does it mean to remember when those who can tell of the unimaginable horror of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps will soon no longer be around? When those who experienced and survived the dehumanisation themselves can no longer bear witness to what happened?

The film asks:

To what extent have THE CHILDREN OF THE SILENT been shaped by their parents’ imprisonment and/or silence to this day?
Did they realise their parents’ traumas as children? If so, would they say that the traumas have also been passed on to subsequent generations?
What does it do to a person to know that their parents or grandparents only narrowly escaped extermination? To know that their own existence is merely due to a “mistake in German thoroughness”?
To what extent did the children feel the “guilt of the survivors”?
To what extent were the concentration camps and the dead part of their own childhood, even though or especially when these painful experiences were not talked about at home?
Was the silence possibly only broken with the grandchildren? What memories are there of these moments of first speaking?
How can we (continue to) live with and despite this history?

Six million Jews were murdered in the 1,634 Nazi concentration and extermination camps (including the subcamps): through mass shootings and gassings, but also through destructive labour, systematic malnutrition, the consequences of abuse and neglected medical care. Many of those who initially survived the concentration camps fell victim to the so-called death marches. The goal and core of the delusional anti-Semitic National Socialist ideology was what the Nazis called the “Final Solution” – the complete extermination of European Jews.

Sinti and Roma, political prisoners such as communists and social democrats, homosexuals, those labelled “asocial” by the Nazis, Jehovah’s Witnesses and criminals were also imprisoned in the concentration camps, forced to perform inhumane labour and murdered. People with disabilities in particular, but also Sinti and Roma, died in the cruellest medical experiments or were victims of forced sterilisation.

In DIE KINDER DER SCHWEIGENDEN, survivors and their children and grandchildren talk about the inconceivable and how it continues to have an impact (even today) – including on those born later. Academics categorise the stories. Concentration camp memorials are visited for research purposes as well as for filming, not without reflecting on the function the camera could take on when visiting these places.

The film will be premiered on Okto TV on 5 May 2025, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp.