With Post-Screening Discussion with Ethan Bensinger and Elizabeth Loentz
In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, join us for the Chicago premiere of The Righteous Man from Fulda.
What do two tablecloths from the town of Fulda have in common with one Chicago family?
This compelling new documentary by Ethan Bensinger traces the filmmaker's own family Holocaust history through the unlikely story of the two tablecloths that belonged to Hugo Sichel, the filmmaker's great uncle, who lived in Fulda until his deportation in December 1941. Sichel gifted the tablecloths to his friend and non-Jewish neighbor Paul Römhild, who had put himself and his family at risk to secretly supply Sichel with food. Eight decades later, after a chance encounter, Bensinger travels to the Hessian hometown of his great uncle to receive the tablecloths from Paul Römhild's daughter, who had kept them safe throughout the years, and to reunite their two families.
This documentary interweaves one family's story with the broader events surrounding Kristallnacht in Fulda in November 1938, offering insights into the town's Jewish history and highlighting how the memory of the Holocaust continues to impact the present.
Opening remarks will by given by Michael Ahrens, Consul General of Germany in Chicago.
After the screening, Ethan Bensinger will be joined in conversation by Elizabeth Loentz, Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Advanced registration is required, and please bring a photo ID for check-in. Please note that this event will take place in
the Randolph Room, on the 3rd Floor of 150 N. Michigan Ave., in the same building as the Goethe-Institut Chicago. Light refreshments will be served.
This program is presented in partnership with the DANK Haus German-American Cultural Center.
PARTICIPANT BIOS
Ethan Bensinger
Shaped by the trauma of his family’s experience of being uprooted from Germany in the years preceding the Holocaust, Ethan Bensinger created his first film in 2012,
Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home.
Refuge explores the experiences, perseverance and resiliency of the last generation of victims of Nazi persecution. These residents of Selfhelp share a history of separation from family, place and of loss, but also of rebirth in America—a story similar to that of Ethan’s family.
Ethan’s Fulda-born mother and Frankfurt-born father found it necessary to leave Germany in the mid-1930s. His family's experience as refugees, first in Palestine/Israel and then as new immigrants to the United States, led Ethan to become an immigration lawyer. For over 25 years, Ethan served as the Managing Director of the Chicago office of a global immigration law firm. When he retired from law, Ethan became a filmmaker to give a voice to the last eyewitnesses to life as it was before, during and after the Holocaust.
With his latest film–
The Righteous Man From Fulda– Ethan widens the lens by using a small town, not unlike most other German towns and villages, to examine how “a common man” reacted within the framework of the Nazi regime. Though Fulda had its share of perpetrators and bystanders, Ethan uses the re-gifting of two tablecloths to his family to explore the deep friendship between his great-uncle, Hugo, and Hugo’s non-Jewish friend, Paul, during the darkest days for the town’s Jewish community.
Ethan has also deeply explored the history of the paternal side of his family, culminating in his co-authorship of the book:
The Bensingers–A Two Hundred and Fifty Year History of a German-Jewish Family.
Ethan continues to share the history of his family as a speaker for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and with students in Germany.
Elizabeth Loentz
Elizabeth Loentz is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and Associate Director of the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include: German-Jewish writing, German and Jewish women’s movements, Yiddish in Germany, contemporary transnational writing, and middle-brow literature. She is the author of
Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (Hebrew Union College Press) and is currently completing a monograph with the working title: “Mame-loshn in the Fatherland: The Meaning of Yiddish in Germany from the First World War through the Postwar Occupation.” Prior to her doctoral studies, she taught German at the Haus Chevalier Clearing-House for unaccompanied, minor-aged refugees in Hallbergmoos, Germany.
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