The Flat (2011) is an Israeli movie, written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger. It's an unusual film, because I believe that the filmmaker truly didn't know how the movie would end when he started filming.Arnon Goldfinger's grandmother died in Tel Aviv at age 98. He and his family had the task of cleaning out the apartment in which his grandparents had lived since the 1930's. The family members were shocked to learn of their grandparents' close friendship with a German family, the von Mildersteins. This friendship had begun before WW II, but had endured the war, and had been re-established after the war.Goldfinger pursues the question of how his Jewish grandparents could have stayed in such close touch with a Nazi couple. Why did they do this? The director tracks down the daughter of the von Mildersteins, who welcomes them to her home in Germany. The daughter was well aware of the friendship, and apparently the friendship didn't strike her as strange.The director then digs deeper into the facts related to von Milderstein. Was he "just a journalist," as his daughter believes, or was he much more? (The facts about von Milderstein are now available in the archives from the former East Germany.) We can only speculate about the explanation for how the friendship could continue for so long. This is especially puzzling, because Goldfinger's maternal great-grandmother (his grandmother's mother) had been killed by the Nazis. Goldfinger interviews an expert in post-Holocaust Jewry. The expert offers what I thought was a good explanation for the psychology of Jews who retained their ties to Germany and to Germans after the war. That answer is probably the best that the director--or we as viewers--are going to get. It explains behavior that would otherwise be inexplicable.This is definitely a film you want to seek out if you are interested in post-Holocaust behavior. It's also informative to watch von Milderstein's daughter deal with the new information that Goldfinger has uncovered.We saw this movie in the Rochester Jewish Community Center as part of the outstanding Rochester Jewish Film Festival. However, it should work very well on DVD. After you see it, you'll keep thinking about it. I recommend it.

I found this documentary, written, directed, and narrated by Arnon Goldfinger, to be quite fascinating as it unravels like a detective story.When Arnon's grandmother Gerda Tuchler passes away in Tel Aviv, at the age of 98, Arnon and other family members, including his mother Hannah, converge on Gerda's apartment to help sort out its' contents. However when Arnon comes across an article from the 1930's, in the German newspaper Der Angriff ( a notorious Nazi propaganda publication), it opens up a Pandora's Box of questions and eventual investigations.Gerda and her husband Kurt Tuchler were living in Germany at the time, but they are shown in this article visiting Palestine with a known SS officer Leopold von Mildenstein and his wife. Further investigation by Arnon revealed letters and photos of a friendship between the Tuchlers and von Mildensteins which continued, after the Tuchler's migration to Palestine, during WW2 itself, and amazingly even after the war.One of the fascinating aspects of the film is that every time Arnon tried to find an answer to the past, new and vital avenues of inquiry would arise. It would take way too much space to document all that Arnon uncovered in the movie. However, I will say there were many surprises along the way which kept me quite riveted.Was von Mildenstein actually working with the notorious Nazis Eichmann and Goebbels, or had he left Germany on a world tour as his daughter Edda believed? Even after the war, did von Mildenstein work as a Coca-Cola executive despite the fact that his name was prominently mentioned by Eichmann at his trial? Was Arnon's great grandmother Susanne Lehmann sent to a concentration camp and murdered by the Nazis? If so, why wasn't he or any member of his family told about it?Crucial questions like these are attempted to be answered by Arnon, and as mentioned it all adds up to a riveting story where one layer after another is peeled off. I thought Goldfinger did an outstanding job, in his low key manner, of putting the pieces of this puzzle together in this exceptional movie.

"The Flat" is a great documentary that leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is as it should be. There are really no good answers for what unfolds over the next 97 minutes. Through the course of the film director Arnon Goldfinger tries to find out his family's recent past, in both Germany and Palestine, something that had never been discussed until after his grandmother died. The documentary confronts the messy business of life, and how people deal with family scandal and buried secrets. A war generation, both German and Jewish, forgets their past on purpose, the next generation is not encouraged to question their elders about it, and the third generation wonders why the two that went before could so conveniently ignore their own, and their parents, history. Goldfinger does a good job of laying out how all the participants in this documentary handle, or don't handle, their part in the story. It's a quiet film that is shadowed by immense subjects. As the viewer, we are left to wonder just how much we understand of our own family and its history, and if we have denied parts of our own past just as conveniently as some of the participants in this documentary have.It's a human story, in the end. Humans do terrible things and justify them in ways those of us who come after might find callous and chilling. Goldfinger cannot interview any of the original participants in this story, since they are all dead; some of natural causes, some in the Holocaust. The final scenes are just as void of answers as the rest of the film. Goldfinger and his mother look for her grandfather's grave in Berlin, in an old Jewish cemetery, during a driving rainstorm. They look in vain for any sign of their family member in this overgrown graveyard, but can find none. Both say they were not prepared for not finding the grave, as if it now suddenly is of the utmost importance that they find some link with their past, after so many years of silence on the subject. That's a good sign, because it might mean they will continue to confront the hard answers and keep up the search for their history, but as the viewer you weep, just the same, for all the love and knowledge that has been lost to time and death. We don't ever get that back.

The death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II is a well known fact. What is less known and generally not talked about is that there were Jews who, for whatever reason, collaborated with the Nazis. Though Jews were forbidden to join the Nazi Party, some were members of the ghetto police that helped round up Jews for deportation, some were known as Judenrats who, under Nazi orders, compiled a list of other Jews to be deported. Others edited pro-Nazi anti-Semitic magazines, turned in fugitive Jews hiding under false identities, or were informers and Kapos who served as Nazi enforcers in the concentration camps.The issue of possible Jewish collaboration comes up in Amon Goldfinger's award-winning documentary The Flat, a story of three generations of Jews seeking to come to terms with uncomfortable events in their family history. A short time after their 98-year-old grandmother dies in Tel Aviv, the son Amon, who is also the writer and director of the film, together with his mother Hannah begin the process of going through mountains of the grandmother's accumulated belongings including books, clothes, antiques, letters, and photos. It is readily apparent that the grandparents, Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, who came to Palestine from Germany at the beginning of the war, retained a strong identity with the old country."They never leave their homeland behind," Amon remarks, noticing that Gerda's books are all in German and that neither of his grandparents ever learned Hebrew. He also discovers a strange two-sided coin that has a Star of David on one side, and a Nazi swastika on the other side. In looking through piles of letters, Amon is baffled by finding a Nazi propaganda newspaper, Der Angriff, containing an article titled "A Nazi in Palestine," showing pictures of his grandparents accompanied by SS member Baron von Mildenstein, and his wife during a trip to Palestine in 1934. After more searching, Amon finds that other letters and photos reveal that the Tuchlers maintained a friendship with the Mildensteins during and even after the war, even though Gerda's mother had been killed at Theresienstadt.Mother and son travel to Berlin to meet with their remaining relatives and try to make some sense of the relationship their grandparents had with the von Mildensteins. They also travel to Wuppertal, Germany to engage in conversation with the Mildenstein's daughter Edda. In the beginning, the discussion is friendly but becomes more and more uncomfortable as Edda repeatedly denies that her father was ever a Nazi official. Unwilling or unable to confront deeply unpleasant truths, Hannah insists that she knows nothing about her parent's friendship with the Mildensteins, had never asked about it, and that children in her day were brought up to not ask any questions.Though the truth is incomplete and still uncertain in its scope and detail, both Edda and Hannah remain in denial that anything out of the ordinary took place, unwilling to confront troubling aspects of the Jewish past. The Flat is short on dramatics but it serves as a potent reminder that, as author Andrew Sullivan has said, "When there's a challenge to our established world-view, whether from the absurd, the unexpected, the unpalatable, the confusing or the unknown, we experience a psychological force pushing back, trying to re-assert the things we feel are safe, comfortable, and familiar," or as Matthew Henry put it, "None are so blind as those who will not see."