For the veteran producer Paula S. Apsell, Monday’s PBS premiere of the documentary “Resistance: They Fought Back” is a fitting memorial on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A passion project, “Resistance” is also a corrective to the long-held assumption that as Hitler’s Nazis swore to erase the entire Jewish race, “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.”
Apsell knew that was definitely not true. She filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., determined to tell the real story.
A senior executive producer of ‘Nova’ for 33 years, “In 2016,” Apsell, 77, said in a phone interview, “I made a film for Nova, ‘Holocaust Escape Tunnel,’ and spoke with professor Richard Freund, known as the inventor of Holocaust archeology.
“He and his team discovered in the Ponary killing site an escape tunnel where 100,000 people — 70,000 of them Jews — were killed by Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators in the most horrible way.
“Prisoners were brought from the countryside to burn the bodies, because the Germans were losing the war at this point and needed to destroy the evidence.
“At any rate, the last night of Passover, after finishing their horrible work, 76 Jewish prisoners attempted to escape from the tunnel — 12 of them made it.
“These archeologists, using high-tech equipment (because you can’t dig in a place where so many people have died), confirmed the tunnel’s existence, which had only been rumored to exist.”
Her film aired in 2017 and “got me thinking. I had never heard of this tunnel! Or any other example of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust (excepting the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, which all of us have heard of).”
Apsell reveals many stories, often from the survivors’ children. She notes there were many types of resistance — putting on a play, giving a concert, not just armed resistance.
Among the most is remarkable: The mother who took her little daughter, smuggled her in a potato sack to a Gentile woman who had children and raised that girl.
We see her on camera today! Talking about what it took for a mother to give up her child in order to save her.
“That story of Dana Pomerants-Mazurkevich was one of the most amazing experiences,” Apsell said. “We were in Lithuania with a guide. She said, ‘Are you from Boston? You have one of what they call ‘potato sack children’ living in Boston. A violinist at Boston University.’
“I came home and looked her up. She’s a professor of violin at BU and lives 10 minutes away from me! Who knew?
“It’s just an amazing story. The courage of her mother to give up her child, understanding she had to make that sacrifice in order to give her child a chance at life.”
“Resistance: They Fought Back” airs on PBS Jan. 27 at 10 p.m.
