Goodbye Theresienstadt

Goodbye Theresienstadt tells the story of six Danish Jewish children captured and put into cattle cars bound for the Theresienstadt concentration camp during the war. The six individual stories are intertwined, with each survivor recounting their family’s failed escape and journey to Theresienstadt.

When the Danish Jewish community is tipped off that the Germans are about to round them up, in early October 1943, ordinary Danes and the Danish Resistance manage to smuggle over 7,000 Jews from Denmark across the water to neutral Sweden using fishing boats and other vessels. Yet over 470 Jews are arrested before they can escape with most of them sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is currently the Czech Republic.

Seventy years after their miraculous rescue, the survivors return to the scene of the crime, the camp where they were consumed by hunger, anxiety and surrounded by death. Now in their 70s and 80s, they travel back to the concentration camp to tell their story of the horrific conditions, and of how they were rescued in the final weeks of the war. A poignant, dramatic story about survival amidst hopelessness, told firsthand by survivors from their childhood perspective.

The director Jonatan Jerichow is a guest of the festival thanks to the generous support of the Dannebrog Foundation.