Spell Your Name Screening at the Ukrainian Cinema Club in Berlin

Thu, 09/29/2011 - 12:00am

Honoring the 70th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy, the Ukrainian Cinema Club in Berlin presented a screening of Spell Your Name, a documentary film by Sergey Bukovsky, co-produced by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. The screening was followed by a discussion with Cristoph Filinger, a journalist and a freelancer at the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin. Leonid Zozovskii, an Institute-interviewed survivor who lived through the Holocaust under false identity in Zelenchukskaia (Ordzhonikidze, Russia, then USSR), attended the screening. In the audience were the Chief of the Cultural Affairs Office at the Ukrainian Embassy in Berlin and his wife; the head of the Central Union of Ukrainians in Germany; representatives of the German Federal Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" (Die Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft) and the American Jewish Committee; officers of Bundestag and the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and representatives of the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, dedicated to commemoration of the end of the war in Europe.

Christiane Bauermeister, a German producer and exhibition curator, expressed gratitude to the organizers of the screening, saying that Spell Your Name should not be lost sight of and should be shown in Berlin more often.

The screening was followed by a public discussion on the Babi Yar tragedy; commemoration and neglect of the Holocaust; and the tragedy of Kurenevka, a Babi Yar neighborhood flooded and destroyed as a result of Soviet construction at the mass-murder site; the number of victims remains unknown.

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute expresses gratitude to Olexandra Bienert, Coordinator of the Ukrainian Cinema Club in Berlin, for organizing the screening.

Click here to read about Spell Your Name.

Українською