Based on 400 hours of interviews recorded in twenty countries on five continents over the course of ten years, each of the four films describes one destination of Nazi transports and one unique "mode of survival" in extreme conditions—told by Czech and Central European Jews deported to unknown ghettos and camps in Latvia, Belarus, Estonia and Poland.    

In an interview with Radio Prague, director Lukáš Přibyl said the following about his film series, "...I am interested in places where Czech Jews and Central and Western European Jews were deported during the early stages of the Holocaust, mostly 1941-1942. And because most of these people perished, to an extent even greater than people who were deported to Auschwitz and so on, these places have been left completely in obscurity, I would say. Nothing has been written about them, there are no documentaries, and when I was researching them, in the early stages, I realized that the fates of these people, and the stories that they have are so radically different from what we got used to, from what we sort of acknowledge as the general survival story, that they should be recorded."  (The complete interview can be found at http://www.radio.cz/en/section/special/lukas-pribyls-forgotten-transport-films-illuminating-places-left-in-obscurity)

While in Washington, the filmmaker will also present from the documentary series Forgotten Transports to Estonia at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) on November 10, from 2-4 pm, and Forgotten Transports to Poland at Congregation Beth El on November 10, at 7:30 pm. All of the events are free and open to the public. The screening at the USHMM requires an RSVP. For further information, please see the events below. For more information on the films, please visit http://www.forgottentransports.com/.        

PDF Invite for Forgotten Transports (PDF, 326 KB)

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR         
Lukáš Přibyl (born 1973, Ostrava, Czech Republic) studied Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Brandeis University and the  Hebrew University in Jerusalem; Religion and Human Rights at SIPA at Columbia University in New York; History at Central European University in Budapest; and Jewish Religion and Philosophy in Sweden. He has published on various aspects of Jewish history and curated exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in Prague. He also served as the first Director of the European Shoah Legacy Institute. Currently, he is the director of the Czech Center in Tel Aviv. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Shatz)          

EVENTS            
Nov. 9, 12 noon - Lecture with director Lukáš Přibyl at the Library of Congress Law Library            
Nov. 10, 2-4 pm – Film: Forgotten Transports to Estonia w/director at USHMM  
Nov. 10. 7:30 pm – Film: Forgotten Transports to Poland w/director at Congregation Beth El

Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016 at 12 noon 
Lecture: Forgotten Transports by Lukáš Přibyl

Location: Library of Congress                     
Law Library Media Center           
LM 240 Madison Building           
101 Independence Avenue          
Washington, DC 20950 
RSVP not required, free admission
For questions, please contact Galina Teverovsky gtev@loc.gov or Gail Shirazi at gshi@loc.gov. 

Film director, political scientist and historian Lukáš Přibyl documents every word of witnesses to the Holocaust through painstakingly researched visual materials–pictures exchanged for bottles of vodka in Polish villages, found in albums of former SS men and their lovers, fetched from KGB holdings , and through film fragments selected from over 1600 hours of footage perused in official archives. In a series of four award-winning documentary films, he traces the history of Czech Jews during the period of World War II. 

Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, 2-4 pm         
Film: Forgotten Transports to Estonia         

US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)       
Helena Rubinstein Auditorium
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW              
Washington, DC 20024 
RSVP: lswift@ushmm.org, free admission         

Forgotten Transports to Estonia tells the story of the extraordinary bonds formed by a group of women and girls deported from Czechoslovakia to a concentration camp in Estonia. Through extensive interviews and archival research, filmmaker Lukáš Přibyl reveals the spirit of community and mutual aid that helped these women to survive. Forgotten Transports to Estonia is one of four documentary films about the fate of approximately three hundred Czech Jews who survived their deportation to virtually unknown concentration camps and ghettos in Eastern Europe. Lukáš Přibyl will introduce the film.

Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, at 7:30 pm 
Film: Forgotten Transports to Poland          

Location: Congregation Beth El
8215 Old Georgetown Road         
Bethesda, MD 20814  
RSVP not required, free admission
For questions, contact the Beth El office at 301/652-2606.  

Forgotten Transports to Poland by Lukáš Přibyl is the final installment of a quartet of documentaries about survival during the Holocaust. The film deals with the difficult choices people escaping Nazi ghettos, labor, and death camps in the Lublin region of Poland had to make in order to adapt and survive in utter extremity, on the run, in hiding—with a great deal of ingenuity, much humor and tremendous optimism. Out of 14,000 Czech Jews deported to forgotten places such as Sawin, Luta, Krychow, or Zamosc in the Lublin district of Poland, fifty survived the war. The handful of witnesses share their past, for the first time