Here I Learned to Love

Itzik and Avner, the heroes of the film, arrived at a courageous decision: to use this documentary account to open up; to lay bare, perhaps for the first time since their childhood expose the wounds and scars left by their worst intimate experiences; to connect, all along the way, with their memories and with the loss of their three mothers. Their story begins in Cracow, Poland – the town of their birth. After the Germans overran Poland, all the Jews were rounded up in ghettos. Their parents and grandparents were seized and sent to the Belzits death camp. "Take care of the kids" Minda asked her sister in law and their aunt Malka adopted the two 2 and 3-year old boys and became their second mother. She fled with them from Cracow to the fields and the forests. Thus began their wanderings through Poland that were to continue for 600 days. Somehow, Aunt Malka managed to smuggle them into Slovakia and from there to Budapest. Aunt Malka knew that the trains with Jewish passenger under Germ