Allan Appel Photo
A New Haven Holocaust survivor inspired a new movie — and a new police chief, as he inherits a challenge of bringing peace to recently bloodied city streets.
The subject of the new film is Sidney Glucksman, a tailor well known in West River for his superior work, the graciousness of his shop, and his dedication to teaching tolerance and dignity through recounting his survivor’s tale to groups around the city and state.
Now for the first time that story of 12-year-old Sidney’s capture in 1939 by the Nazis, his endurance, luck and eventual liberation by U.S. troops from the concentration camp at Dachau six years later, has been filmed. The movie is called “Threads”; the moviemaker is Cheshire-based James Campbell. (Click here to watch a trailer.)
Wednesday night the new New Haven Police Chief Frank Limon joined 400 people in the audience for the film’s debut at the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven for a screening of the new film. It was screened as part of the week of Holocaust remembrance activities.
Chief Limon came at the invitation of Capt. Leo Bombalicki, one of Glucksman’s good friends on the force. Click here for the story of their friendship.
Viewing the hour-and-twenty minute film gave the city’s new top cop (at right in above photo, with Glucksman at left and Bombalicki at center) a lot to think about as he copes with a rash of homicides that occurred just as took the reins of the NHPD last week.
“I had a hard week, but this [the film and Glucksman’s story] has reenergized and inspired me,” Limon said.
The film utilizes extended interviews with Sidney at his sewing machine, talking to student’s in a civics class at Wilbur Cross, and engaging others at Notre Dame of West Haven. There Capt. Bombalicki invited Sidney two years ago to talk to the boys and receive an honorary high school degree and Notre Dame football jacket, in part because the years 12 to 18 were stolen from him.
Campbell has deftly hung on Sidney’s personal story an efficient and effective history of the Holocaust, including its origins in the Jew-hatred of medieval Europe. There are harrowing old woodcut images of book burnings and equally chilling quotations of people such as Martin Luther. (“Their synagogues should be set on fire … they are to be driven out like mad dogs.”) So that Hitler, when he emerges, is seen not as anomaly but the articulation of a virulent progression.
Chief Limon responded emotionally, as did the gripped audience, to dramatizations of 12-year old Sidney’s experience of the boxcar rides to the camps, with a soundtrack featuring the racing lub-dub of a heartbeat, gasps, moans, and cries of the terrified and dying.
The film pulls no punches, with extensive historical still and film footage, mostly provided by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, of piles of emaciated bodies; lines of naked women waiting to be murdered, and the pre-crematoria mobile killing units, the Einstasgruppen, directing row upon row of Jews to jump into pits they have dug themselves where they are summarily shot.
And yet the experience of the film is not horror. Glucksman, now 83, has a voice that retains an offsetting sweetness of youth. It does so in measured, yet unbitter tones even when he is recounting to the boys of Notre Dame how the SS troops banged the heads of one-year old Jewish babies against the brick walls of the crematorium until they ceased crying.
What Limon ultimately responded to most, he said, was not so much the message of nipping intolerance in the bud as soon as it raises its ugly head, even in jokes or off hand remarks; but rather the endurance of Glucksman’s spirit.
“Here’s someone who went through a lot of pain, and he still love his community and gives back to it,” said the chief.
While Limon said he was honored to see the movie, the material is not new to him. One of his best friends in Chicago, David Werbell, has a mother who is a Holocaust survivor herself.
There was a message in all this for New Haven, he said: “Let’s change the attitude of the neighborhoods because we’re all here for only a short time. It’s about attitude, not color of skin.”
In addition to Limon, the screening drew other notables, including Dr. Julia McNamara, the president of Albertus Magnus College, which had presented Glucksman with an honorary degree in humane letters; Kathy DeStefano, representing the mayor and the city; Board of Aldermen President Carl Goldfield, and U.S. District Court Judge Janet Arterton (pictured with Glucksman).
Judge Arterton said she was in attendance because “He’s the best tailor in New Haven,” Arterton ruled when asked why she had shown up..
Filmmaker Campbell said that now that the film is complete, he wants to make sure “Threads” gets to Connecticut schools without cost by the end of the year