Three Roanoke-area Holocaust survivors share their stories about Jewish persecution, hiding from the Nazis when their countries were occupied, and their lives following the war in “Triumph of Hope,” a documentary that will be screened at the Grandin Theatre on April 2.

This is the film’s second showing at the Grandin. Tickets for the first event, in November, quickly sold out. 

“Sales were so brisk that we knew we were going to be close. People were still showing up to the theatre to buy tickets, and they were turned away,” Lori Strauss, the film’s executive producer, said.

In the film, Helga Morrow, Regine Archer and the late Arye Ephrath, each tell their stories of being hidden away as children during the Holocaust. As Jewish children living in Nazi-occupied Europe, hiding was their only path for survival. The Underground, a secret network of people who helped Jews hide from the Nazis, helped their families find living quarters for themselves, their parents, and their siblings. The occupation lasted four years. 

After the war, Morrow, 87; Archer, 100; and Ephrath, who passed away last year at 82, set aside their anguish and found ways to serve others through healthcare, philanthropy and education, respectively. 

“They're fighters,” director and producer Steve Mason said.

For Strauss, the film’s title is a message of hope. It reflects the idea that people can go through tremendous catastrophes and come out on the other side, having overcome paralysis in pursuit of growth.

“It can be paralyzing. I know a number of survivors who cannot, will not, speak about their experience — those who lived in concentration camps, for example,” Strauss said. Ephrath, Morrow, and Archer “have emerged from tragedy in a very positive way. We hope that other people who have been through tragedy and watch this film realize there is light on the other side of darkness.” 

A message of awareness

“A message of hope, at the same time, is also a message of awareness,” Morrow said. “We are the last generation of Holocaust survivors. There's nobody behind us.” 

“My family died because of a religious belief, and there was nothing we could do to prevent that,” she added. “We were exterminated.” 

Morrow lost 90 percent of her family in concentration camps. Nearly all of Archer’s family perished, and Ephrath was one of only four children from his hometown to survive.

“In Judaism, we feel strongly to never forget, never forget what happened to us,” Strauss said. “That is applicable not just to the Jews, but to anywhere that there’s genocide.” 

Nazi Germany conducted a deliberate, state-sponsored persecution and genocide of European Jews and other marginalized people between 1939 and 1945. In English, it is called the Holocaust. The Hebrew term is Shoah. Catastrophe.

Eleven million people died, including 5 million European Jews and 1.5 million children. These are estimates. Not all victims were registered.

“There’s something almost impossibly forbidding about the scale of the Holocaust. The sheer numbers make it difficult to understand,” said Robert Willingham, a Roanoke College history professor who served as the film’s historical consultant.

'There was no script'

Following the war, Ephrath grew up in Israel and then immigrated to the United States, where he worked for NASA and then the Department of Homeland Security. Eventually, he and his wife retired to the Smith Mountain Lake area, Strauss said.

As events coordinator for the Roanoke Jewish Federation, Strauss met Ephrath when she was planning a Roanoke performance of ‘Violins of Hope,’ presented by the Virginia Holocaust Museum. She says Ephrath, a speaker at the show’s Richmond performance, stepped onto the stage and said, “I may not know much about music, but I do know a lot about hope.” That stuck with her.

After that event, Strauss developed a curiosity about the catharsis of emotion that occurs for survivors of tragedies. 

As a volunteer for the Roanoke Jewish Federation, Strauss approached them with her idea for a documentary. They jumped at the opportunity and helped raise funds for the film, which the federation owns. Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, a trustee at Roanoke College, also contributed funds.

Roanoke College connected Strauss with Mason, who is the founder and president of Red Velocity, a video production company. Mason came on as the director, with Jim Dudley as creative designer. 

A mutual friend introduced Strauss to Morrow and Archer. Archer had moved to Salem from Tennessee with her husband James in the 1950s. Morrow moved here from Baltimore to be closer to her daughter and son-in-law following her husband’s death in 2013.

Together with the survivors and interviewer Debbie Kaplan, Strauss had built her team. She had never written a screenplay or made a film before. The team spent ten hours a day interviewing each subject. 

“I had no idea the time and effort that was involved in it,” Strauss said.

Additional days were spent with Willingham and his two-student panelist team at Roanoke College and with Dr. Robert Trestman, chair of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Those two segments appear at the end of the film, following the primary personal narratives that feature Ephrath’s, Morrow’s, and Archer’s stories as hidden children and Holocaust survivors. 

“There was no script. It was letting [Ephrath, Morrow and Archer] just reflect on their experience.” Strauss said.

Ephrath, Morrow, and Archer brought treasured photographs to share. The team found some holes in the plot where they knew pieces of the story would be best expressed in visual form, but they didn’t have suitable photographs to fit the vision. Dudley suggested bringing in an artist, Mason said. 

The resulting black and gray drawings are sobering; their lines are drawn in a precise hand. Each subject feels weighed down by dark colors, by every calculated stroke. 

Someone to help

On April 7, 1942, authorities in Bardejov, which was then a part of Slovakia, called all young Jewish adults to the trains. Miriam and Shmuel Friedman were young, but Miriam was pregnant with Ephrath and in pain. She couldn’t make it to the train. At home, she went to the basement. Shmuel ran to the woods. 

Ephrath was born that day, and his parents avoided deportation. They spent the following years in hiding, as did Morrow and Archer.  

“If you didn’t have someone to help you, you couldn’t make it. And a lot of people didn’t make it because of that,” Archer said.

“My grandfather and grandmother had walked us up and down the street before the war,” Morrow said. There were five children in the line. A government official lived in the neighborhood and took note of the walks.

That official later helped Morrow’s family escape, sending word to her parents when he learned that Morrow’s family was on a list to be deported. 

Morrow and Archer were each issued false identification cards before fleeing their hometowns. They were given new names and new birthdates. Unlike their old cards, these new IDs also lacked any sort of indication that they were Jews. Archer and her sister took the train to a Catholic boarding school, where they would hide. 

Morrow and her family set off for Venlo and then Valkenburg, where they said they were refugees. That began Morrow’s journey through several Underground homes during the occupation years. 

Ephrath believed he survived the Holocaust because his father took action to avoid deportation, he says in the film. “My father saw the evidence and he took it to heart.” The Jews who boarded the train that day had been sent to Auschwitz.

'Those are not stories'

“We need to start educating our children about what's happening in the world. Early on, we can't wait until they are teenagers in high school,” Morrow said, referring to an incident that happened at a private school her niece operates in Florida. 

Middle school students laughed during a lesson about the Holocaust, Morrow said. Just two weeks ago. They didn’t believe that what they were learning about had happened.

“If you do not know anything about what happened in the past, how can you do something about it today?” Morrow asks. “This, to me, is fundamental to education.”

“I know it is true because I was there,” Ephrath says near the close of the film. “Those are not stories.” 

Strauss says anti-semitism and bigotry also prevent learning about the Holocaust.

“There are so many naysayers about the Holocaust that say it is all made up, it never happened. Especially the supremacists, because their job is to minimize the importance of any diversity,” she said. 

In the film, Ephrath reiterates the importance of being accepting of diversity, Strauss said. He wanted people to recognize that everyone is to be accepted, that everyone has something to contribute, even if they don’t worship or look like you. 

Before the war, Germany had been a cultured country. “It produced such wonderful music and poets. If it could happen in that country, it could happen anywhere,” Archer said, reflecting on Ephrath’s sentiment.

“If that country, within a matter of months, could turn into a pack of savages who went out of their way to murder complete strangers for no other reason than those strangers held a different faith than they did, that can happen anywhere,” Ephrath says in the film.

“I feel more strongly today that this story needs to be told and repeated over and over again, because we are on the cusp of something happening in the United States that is foreign to us, but it is extraordinarily dangerous.” Morrow said, referring to recent developments in U.S. immigration enforcement.

It currently takes at least five years to legally become a U.S. citizen. Morrow went through that process. That was after she faced deportation, became a refugee, lived in hiding, and faced the threat of genocide every day for years. Her baby sister died — that’s her earliest memory.

There were no secrets

Archer was a teen and remembers more of the earlier days leading up to occupation.

First, there was a curfew. Then, they were made to sew yellow stars on their clothing. Next, all the Jewish students were kicked out of school in January 1942.

“I was in my last year of college preparatory. I was supposed to take my exams in May or June. I couldn’t go. I had to stop right then,” Archer said.

Food was in limited supply, and only available to purchase with ration stamps — stamps were to be used for other commodities, too.

“You had 20 cigarettes for the whole month, if you were a man and you smoked. If you were a woman, you didn't get tobacco,” Archer said.

And then things accelerated quickly. 

Teenagers received notices to go work in a factory. Some of the youth believed that they were really going off to work somewhere. They were taken to the concentration camps.

“Within two or three weeks, they knew where every Jewish family lived,” Archer said. “They started just driving up in trucks and grabbing you out of the house.” They were Nazis.

People who were in hiding lived in constant fear. They could be discovered at any moment; their parents could be discovered at any moment. 

When Archer and her sister had to ride the train several times a year, they feared for their lives. The S.S. officers would board the train to check everybody’s suitcases and IDs. 

“We stood there. Both of us with fake papers and fake names and you had to keep a very straight face and certainly not show any fear,” Archer said. “Just imagine four years of that.”