'Buried Prayers': Documentary unearths new memories of the Holocaust

One of the most remarkable things about Adam Frydman is his accent—a unique blend of guttural, eastern European R’s and Australian twangs. Frydman’s accent is the product of a history most students can hardly fathom, except through the stories told by grandparents and great-grandparents—those of life after the Holocaust and of the memory of those who did not survive.

Frydman is one of several survivors of Majdanek, a Polish death camp, whose stories are relayed through director Steven Meyer’s documentary “Buried Prayers,” premiering Friday, Nov. 18, at QUAD Cinema.

After their release from the camp in 1945, Frydman and several others, including Tessie Jacob, Ella Prince, and Alexander Blank, fled Poland for Australia and settled in Melbourne. Until the filming of the movie, none of them had returned to the scene where they lost their families to Nazi gas chambers. It would not take a film buff to recognize the carefully depicted humanity and beauty of these people’s stories.

The idea for the film was sparked by Frydman’s decision to tell the story of something he witnessed during his stay at Majdanek, a secret which he had kept for 63 years: Due to the unprecedented lack of space in the camp, many of the prisoners were forced to live for days in an open field, during which time they buried their most precious belongings to salvage them from destruction by the Germans.

Throughout the film, these characters, who talk with a disarming frankness about their experiences, speculate as to why the families chose to try to be remembered in this way. Meyer’s conclusion hinges on the idea that, in the knowledge of imminent death, these people sought to leave something behind as a final act of resistance. While most of the movie is constructed on the seemingly inconsequential burying of some familial artifacts below the soil of a one-time death camp, Meyer and his team artfully expand on the meaning such a small event can have in the context of a greater historical narrative.

The pensive nature of this subject is aided by the structure of the film. The film opens with a somber montage of images from Majdanek, which, though now repurposed as a museum, retains a chilling air. The characters most familiar with the horrors of these spaces are then introduced. Their lives are painted in broad strokes via interviews taken before the expedition.

The film’s only weakness is that Frydman seems to be the only shown survivor with a strong desire to excavate the items he saw others bury at Majdanek. While this is, of course, the preoccupying mission of the film crew and investigative team, it seems as though the others trek back to Poland in pursuit of a more general goal—to return to the place they inexplicably escaped to repent for the lives of their lost families. The scene in which artifacts are first discovered, though, overwhelms both the other witnesses and the audience with an overarching feeling of triumph. Not only is there proof of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in this hurried burying of belongings, there is a sense that salvation is possible.

The film delicately and purposefully progresses from a classically horrific Holocaust tale to a story that reverberates more clearly with the current generation, one of the overall struggle to remain human in a terrain of inhumanity. Meyer’s film successfully reminds viewers that those killed by the Nazis were not just historical figures but real people.