“Among Neighbors” Challenges Polish Nationalism

Among Neighbors (Yoav Potash, 2024) 4 out of 5 stars

Growing up, my introduction to the Holocaust—beyond school textbooks—came through narrative features. The Pianist and Schindler’s List, specifically, were screened to me at a young age, highlighting WWII and the heartbreaking atrocities Jewish people faced. But hardly any media I’ve seen focused on the post-war period in Poland, a country still riddled with virulent antisemitism. Today that antisemitism continues in the form of Poland’s nationalist government spearheading historical revisionism, which attempts to sweep anti-Jewish violence under the rug and maintain the squeaky clean image that Poles provided refuge to survivors. Perhaps the most extreme example of the effort to sanitize Polish history is the country’s ongoing law, passed in 2018, that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.

Yoav Potash’s live-action/2D-animated hybrid documentary Among Neighbors debunks this historical whitewashing through its two core subjects: Polish eyewitness Pelagia Radecka and Holocaust survivor Yaacov Goldstein. The lives of these two neighbors in a small, rural town were altered not only by WWII itself, but also by the murders that took place six months after WWII’s end at the hands of Polish criminals. It’s a fascinating story that offers a gripping look at families torn apart by Nazis, as well as by Poles, and it is a film that should also be shown in schools to highlight the aftermath of one of the world’s greatest atrocities.

The film documents subjects Radecka and Goldstein, who were interviewed around the mid-late 2010s at their elder ages of 85-90. Pelagia, of Polish heritage, is introduced early in the film as an eyewitness to the post-war murders who is now on a 70-year quest to find her childhood friend Janek Weinberg, who lived across the street. She shares pleasant pre-war memories of her neighbors and grew attached to a blue-and-white polka-dot fabric Mrs. Weinberg gave her during the war. In order to evade the Nazis, the Weinbergs went into hiding, only returning to their hometown after the war to find themselves still in grave danger.

On the opposite end, Yaacov Goldstein chronicles his struggle as a Holocaust survivor to evade not only the Nazis, but also a number of Poles who took it upon themselves to root out Jews and hand them over to the Germans. Separating from his parents in order to maintain a low profile, Yaacov lived in a cramped compartment within a Polish family’s attic for close to two years without even seeing the sun.

The film’s timeframe weaves together their tragic, heartbreaking accounts, and their tales are visualized with stunning 2D hand-drawn animation. The animators at Yellow Tapir Films, Animation Atlantica, and Boxel Studio embrace magical realism to bring Pelagia and Yaacov’s oral histories to life as vividly as their descriptions. It’s very reminiscent of previous Oscar-nominated animated docs Flee and Waltz with Bashir; heavy, but visually rich. The documentary’s visual style is reminiscent of Schindler’s List, as it is presented in black and white and punctuated by brief, colorful elements. And yes, the use of color evokes sheer pain whenever its symbolism is invoked.

Potash is strong in his choices of when to use animation versus when to allow us to see the interview subjects recall the trauma they endured. Seeing the two brave survivors go to the brink of tears recalling their respective tragedies is enough to make one enraged by Poland’s current revisionist movement—right-wing nationalists in Poland are trying to get the doc banned. Yaacov and Pelagia’s accounts prove that anti-Jewish violence did occur, and that the ongoing nationalist revisionism is simply another form of racism.

Among Neighbors sometimes struggles in its structure, as some points that break off to juxtapose Pelagia’s to Yaacov’s stories are rocky, but the compelling nature of it altogether is never weakened. Man, when the two do reunite, it’s so moving that I shed a few tears myself.

If anything, this is the perfect film to show a class of middle-schoolers, much in the same way that I was once shown Schindler’s List and The Pianist. For young people in particular, this film not only highlights accounts of the Holocaust and the difficult reality of Jewish reintegration after the war, but it also illustrates how damaging revisionist history can be. The film shows that a nation’s criminal past should not be shrugged off or pretended as if it never occurred for the sake of a narrow nationalist worldview. Nationalism, after all, can pave the way not only to propaganda but to catastrophic events. The two brave souls in this film found a way to survive one of history’s harshest chapters, and their pain is the history that should be told.

Rendy Jones

Rendy Jones (they/he) is a film and television journalist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. They created the self-published independent film-criticism outlet Rendy Reviews, which they’ve been running for over 14 years.