By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Having studied and taught about the Holocaust for 37 years, I realize that many stories from of it remain untold because their participants died while it was occurring or remained silent to rebuild their lives and avoid traumatizing their children. When spelunker Chris Nicola journeyed to the Ukraine in 1993 shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union to research his family’s history and explore the Gypsum Giant cave system that snaked below the landscape, he stumbled upon the relics of human habitation. He wondered who had worn the shoes, fastened the buttons, and ground grain on a millstone found in a chamber in the caves. Intrigued by rumors from locals that Jews had hidden in the caves when the Germans occupied the Ukraine during World War Two, the Queens’ native posted an inquiry on the Internet and waited until December 2002 to receive an answer from one of the survivors of the cave who resided in the Bronx.
No Place on Earth compellingly reconstructs the tale of the indomitability of a group of 38 Jewish children, parents, and grandparents from the town of Korolówka who escaped deportation or execution in the autumn of 1942 by descending into a sinkhole and transforming a grotto into a haven. Although betrayed and captured in their first hiding place, most of them managed to flee a second time and burrow into an even more remote cavern. Living on foraged or stolen food and water hauled back to their lairs after pools there were depleted, they lived most of the time in darkness and lit candles for short periods. Despite the harsh conditions, they persevered, prayed, and socialized with one another for over 500 days in their stone sanctuary.
Director Janet Tobias supplements the oral testimony of the surviving members of the Stermer, Dodyk, and Wexler families with reenactments of the events they recount. This combination of interviews with staged portrayals has been dubbed “documentary drama.” Many Holocaust scholars and survivors frown upon this technique and prefer interviewees to speak for themselves. I felt the dramatizations prevented the film from bogging down into a series of talking heads. Tobias bookends the film with Nicola relating how he originally got involved in the story and accompanying the survivors back to the caves to interview them. Rather than evoking haunting memories, their “homecoming” reminded them of the security they sensed when nestled in their subterranean abodes. As one recalls, though the creatures crawling in the caves scared them, they were far less dangerous than the humans living above them.
The movie’s title possesses several meanings. For Hitler, there was no place on earth for the Jews. For civilized people, there was no place on earth as inhospitable as the caves. But for the survivors, there was no place on earth other than the caves where they could evade the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators. As one of them remarks, “We beat the odds and they didn’t get us. We were masters of our own fate in the cave.”
Opening April 26 at the Landmark Theatre in Hillcrest.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com