UNDYING LOVE

“If I never would [have] come to Germany, never would [have] come to a concentration camp, I would never have met my husband. Hitler was my matchmaker.” A statement uttered with utmost sincerity by an elderly Holocaust survivor, who met the love of her life in the darkest hour of the Third Reich's Final Solution. Such things did indeed happen, as young men and women uprooted from cities and shtetls and thrown together by the cruelest of circumstances, found desire and solace with each other despite the surrounding horror. Testimonials and poetic re-enactments recall seven separate true tales of miraculous reunions, chance survival, and unexpected acts of mercy (even on behalf of Nazi guards) that played into ''bashert,' the Jewish concept of inevitable, divinely-ordained fate bringing particular people together. David first saw Zenia performing in a Lodz Ghetto theatre; later in a displaced-persons compound he was able to comfort the girl who had lost her entire family. Helen and Tania both pledged themselves to men under hopeless circumstances, seeking protection and compromise, with vastly different outcomes. Lily wore a wedding gown fashioned from a bartered German parachute. And refugee Bluma Klodawsky encountered a long lost boyfriend after an accident left her stranded and alone on a Frankfurt train platform; her story in particular inspired her documentary-filmmaker daughter Helene to commence this remarkable feature, a testimony to how love triumphed between various couples even when the machinery of genocide was set on destroying them.