Holocaust Survival Story Told In Documentary ‘UnBroken’

The Nazi death machine came for the Weber children: Alfons, Senta, Ruth, Gertrude, Renee, Judith, and little Bela, the youngest. But somehow, against all odds, they survived – despite spending part of World War II in Berlin, the steel teeth of the Third Reich.

The incredible story of the Weber siblings – how they escaped death at every turn and later immigrated to the United States together in 1946 – is told in the documentary UnBroken. The film, released by Greenwich Entertainment, is directed by Beth Lane, Bela’s daughter.

“If I’ve learned anything from my ancestors, from my mom and her sisters and my uncle,” Lane said at a Q&A this weekend in Los Angeles, one the locations where UnBroken is playing theatrically, “is that they never gave up hope.”

Yet there was every reason to despair of surviving the Nazi regime. The children were born to Alexander and Lina Weber – she a Jewish woman, he born Catholic but a convert to Judaism after he fell in love with Lina. Before the war, Alexander was held as a political prisoner at Oranienburg, one of the first concentration camps built by the Nazis. After the war broke out, Lina insisted on helping shield the persecuted – Jews and Roma, among them – at great risk. In 1943 she would be killed at Auschwitz.

The children, too, faced a deportation order to Auschwitz, but avoided almost certain death when a kindly German farmer, Arthur Schmidt, an acquaintance of the Weber family, sheltered the kids at his farm in Worin outside Berlin. The town’s mayor knew of the children’s presence but kept the secret. More close calls came when, as the war reached a crescendo, the children and their father returned to Berlin, only to be buried in rubble after their home was destroyed by an Allied bomb. They took refuge in a U-Bahn station but managed to escape just before remaining Nazi forces flooded the tunnels.

“Why did we have miracle after miracle after miracle?” Lane wondered.

To emigrate from Germany, the Weber children had to be declared orphans – an arrangement their father agreed to in hopes his kids could live a better life in the United States. All seven children eventually reached New York and then traveled on to Chicago.

“They’re the only family of seven siblings known to have survived together and emigrated from Germany together,” Lane said. “So much so that their portrait hangs in the last gallery of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum… They were in all those press clippings [from that time]. That’s how notable the story was.”

Before they left for America, their father had enjoined the siblings to always remain together. But that was a practical impossibility and they all eventually separated, growing up in different homes in the Chicago area. Bela, just six when she immigrated, was adopted by a loving family, the Siegels. The Weber kids tried to stay in close contact, but it proved psychologically difficult for the young Bela.

“My mom was having a very hard time acclimating to her new life [as a child]. She would visit with her siblings, my grandma and grandpa [Siegel]… would arrange visitations and things like that. And then she would come back, and she would act out horribly,” Lane explained. “The prevailing sentiment at the time — the social workers actually recommended to my grandparents, ‘It might be easier for all of you, especially for [Bela], if she doesn’t see her birth siblings.’”

The film shows footage of a joyous reunion when all the Weber kids got back together in 1986, four decades after they came to the U.S. Lane says the documentary has profoundly affected her mother’s sense of her own past.

“She was so young that she didn’t even understand that the trauma happened to her,” she said. “My mom never, ever, ever called herself a Holocaust survivor. And she never called herself persecuted. She never called herself a refugee. And my journey through this film and coming back with details for her and then her seeing the journey that the film itself has had, now she does call herself a Holocaust survivor and she does call herself a refugee. She really, really aligns with refugees today and understands the plight deeply. I think for her it’s been a very positive journey.”

The documentary project – which evolved from an initial iteration as a play, to a monologue and then to a film — became a revelatory experience for Lane.

“I never considered myself to be somebody who had intergenerational transfer of trauma. And I do align with that 1740432586,” the filmmaker said. “I led a very Norman Rockwellian life [growing up] in Wilmette, Illinois. I got to ride bikes until eight or nine o’clock at night until somebody said, ‘Go home.’ Really, it was Norman Rockwell, leafy suburbs and all that kind of stuff. And so I would wonder, ‘Why do I have so much rage? Why have I grappled deeply with depression?’ And I would feel guilty about having the depression because I had such a beautiful life. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ And as soon as I really began to understand what you carry in your soul, and allow it to just be and not be scared of it, and just witness it and listen to it, then at least for me, it hasn’t been as painful anymore. I have more control over the choice of the rage or more control over the choice of the depression.”

UnBroken releases on DVD on March 4. It won Best Documentary Premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival in Indianapolis, audience choice awards at the RiverRun International Film Festival in North Carolina and the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in Iowa, among other awards.

The documentary is a production of De Lamorandiere Rock Productions and the Weber Family Arts Foundation – the latter a nonprofit established by Lane, a veteran stage and screen actor.

“UnBroken is the first project of the Weber Family Arts Foundation. We’re looking forward to giving seed money to other artists, whether it’s a dancer or a sculptor or whomever,” Lane said at the Q&A, adding, “Our mission is to combat antisemitism, bigotry and hate through the arts, and also specifically by sharing stories of hope. Hope is just so integral to how I operate in the world and what I hope, what I wish for everybody.”