Documentary | For The Living

THE FILM

In January 1945, after 2 years as a prisoner in a death camp, 10-year-old Holocaust survivor Marcel Zielinksi embarked on a perilous 60-mile journey by foot from Auschwitz-Birkenau through an active war zone to Krakow, Poland. A child’s desperate search for any surviving family members. A journey from Darkness to Light.

Decades later, 250 cyclists from 12 different countries traveled to Auschwitz and re-traced 84-year-old Marcel’s liberation path as a collective act of empathy called Ride for the Living, which was created by JCC Krakow.

Marcel’s dehumanizing Holocaust experience and the empathy demonstrated during Ride for the Living provide a stunning parallel for Humankind’s equally perilous journey between the two extremes of our nature: Dehumanization to Empathy. Darkness to Light.

Igniting the urgent conversation: When will we stop building monuments for the dead and get busy re-humanizing the living? When will we finally say NEVER AGAIN and truly mean it!

THE FILM

Years To Complete

Creative Team

Members

90+

Piece Orchestra

& Choir

Years Book In Print

GALLERY

MOVIE STILLS

VISION

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

In recent years, we’ve watched human empathy become an endangered resource. Rampant dehumanization has immersed our discourse in genocidal language like never before.

So, when we had the opportunity to chronicle a cycling event (“Ride for the Living”) where 250 Riders mount their bikes at the universal symbol of absolute evil—the death camp Auschwitz Birkenau—and peddle their way to a destination that symbolizes empathetic humanity—Krakow, Poland, the parallel was obvious.

Just 60 miles from the largest burial place for Jews on the planet, Krakow’s Jewish community has been reborn and is now using what they learned from The Holocaust to help non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. An amazing contrast.

The fact that these two places—one representing Darkness and the other Light—are just miles apart, underscores how Dehumanization and Empathy exist side by side in our society and struggle for dominance.

One of our film’s many interviewees, Ben Ferencz, prosecuted Nazi mass murderers in the Nuremberg war crime trials in the late 1940s. Just after wrapping this film, he passed away at the age of 103. This remarkable man—who helped liberate Europe as a soldier after D-Day and faced down Nazis in a courtroom—told us that the period that we’re living through right now is the most dangerous of his entire lifetime. Unsettling. But a huge validation of our film’s hypothesis.

Our objective with this film has been to provide a mirror for humanity and to start a conversation:

How can we re-humanize and break a centuries-long pattern of brutality?

When are we finally going to say “NEVER AGAIN” and truly mean it?

Our planet has thousands of monuments that honor The Dead. This movie is an urgent cautionary tale to alert The Living.

Marc Bennett + Tim Roper
Co-Directors, For The Living