Diána Groó

I was found with the story of Regina Jonas. My first feature film was premiered at the Jewish Film Festival in Amsterdam, with opening remarks by Rabbi Eliza Klapechek. Later, she came up to me and asked if I wanted to make a film about the world’s first woman rabbi. I didn’t think the topic interested me. I only remembered Regina Jonas’s name and had no idea when and where she’d lived. Years later, out of curiosity, I checked up on who she actually was. That’s when I learned that she lived in the Germany of the 1930s, in Berlin, and her greatest dream was to become a rabbi. She felt that she was born to be a rabbi. This was what she had to do. She knew it from the time she was a little girl. But a woman could not be a rabbi according to the laws of Jewish religion.

I am the only member from my family who is able to travel with my Holocaust survivor grandmother from Budapest to the yearly Generation Forums in Ravensbrück former Concentration Camp. We stay there at houses, which used to serve as female SS guards’ accommodation. Artists come to perform, young people listen to survivors, we remember, days are devoted to memories. Although I am there to support my grandmother, it seems she is much stronger than me. But how do I deal with this location, spending summers in a death camp? How can I balance my feelings in between hate for this place and overcoming the unbearable memories of my grandmother’s past that all became part of mine?

I grew up with the knowledge of a horrible trauma that happened to my family 80 years ago. Almost everyone perished of my family in concentrations camps. One of the only survivors is my grandma. I know every single detail. She is 97 years old. We have a very special bond between us since my childhood. I follow her everywhere she goes even if it is painful for me. I hoped our last visit together at the Holocaust Memorial event in 2021 of Rechlin KZ would end to my painful journeys and let me live in the present, but I ended up with a different conclusion.

"Dear Helen" is a film-letter, an experimental docu-diary, dedicated to my great-grandmother Helen, who perished in Rechlin KZ, in the arms of my grandma.