UnBroken (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

UnBroken

UNBROKEN (2023)

Featuring Gertrude Weber Chapman, Renee Weber Dicker, Ruth Weber Gilliana, Ginger (Bela) Weber Lane, Senta Weber Saulters, Beth Lane, Sherwin Chapman, Mira Wagner, Ilja Stahl, Hans Holdzhaider, Sebastian Haller, Marie Haller, Marlis Schüler, Rudolf Fehrmann III, Thorsten Putscher, Matthias Kohl, Tobias Voight, Sister Borromȁa, Anna Andlauer, Arthur Schmidt III and the voice of Philip Boehm.

Written by Beth Lane & Aaron Soffin.

Directed by Beth Lane.

Distributed by Greenwich Entertainment. 96 minutes. Not Rated.

It is hard to believe that it could have been possible that seven Jewish siblings in the same family could have all survived the Holocaust. However, that did happen with the Weber family.

Even though the Weber siblings mostly avoided the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, it does not mean that their lives were not turned into a nightmare, being forced to hide from all other humans, dealing with hunger, lack of sanitation and lice, under constant threat of violence.

Their parents were sent off to the concentration camps – dad eventually survived the ordeal, but the mother was killed. Eventually the children were sent to the United States, where they were separated and all adopted by different families. While they tried to keep in contact, some of them didn’t see any of their sisters and brothers until decades later. Even when the father eventually made it to the US to live, the family was still scattered.

It is a horrific story, eventually learned by director Beth Lane, about her own family. Her mother Ginger (then called Bela) was the youngest of the Weber children.

She had heard some of the stories, but she decided that she wanted to learn the whole story of her family’s ordeal. Therefore, she spoke with her mother and her surviving aunts trying to put together the timeline.

These interviews led to UnBroken, which also relied strongly on the writings of her uncle Alfons, who had died in recent years.

Lane revisited the sites of her family’s ordeal; the places where they lived, a remote farm and nunnery where the children were hidden. Through this trip, she is able to meet the ancestors of some of the people who protected her aunts and uncles and to find more detailed information about the family and their parents.

It also causes her to ask the people around her – and herself – if they would have had the courage to take in the children when it meant potential devastation for themselves. “Would you hide me?” becomes the unofficial subtitle and the official conundrum of the documentary.

It also tells the story of the children’s trip to freedom in the Chicago area, their division and their eventual reunion. (Her mother, the baby of the family, didn’t see her brothers and sisters for decades after being taken in by her adaptive parents.)

However, they are eventually brought back together, and UnBroken also shares some cathartic home-video footage of that 1980s reunion in which all seven of the siblings (and their families) finally are under one roof again. (Their father, who had also ended up in the Chicago area, had died by then.) It is figured out later in the film that the survival of the seven siblings led to 72 children and grandchildren and counting.

After spending a couple of years on the film festival circuit, UnBroken will be available to stream on Netflix starting on April 23, 2025, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: April 20, 2025.