Willy Lindwer | |
---|---|
Born | 18 March 1946 |
Nationality | Dutch |
Alma mater | Netherlands Film and Television Academy |
Occupation | Documentary filmmaker |
Spouse | Hanna Emanuels |
Children | Two |
Website | The Willy Lindwer Film & Video Collection |
Wolf "Willy" Lindwer (born 18 March 1946) is a Dutch documentary film producer, director, photographer and author. He is best known for his films on the Holocaust, Israel and the Middle East, Judaism and Christianity.
Willy Lindwer was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1946. His parents fled anti-Semitic Poland and Ukraine and settled in Amsterdam in the 1930s. They were among the 10% of Jews in the Netherlands who survived the Holocaust.
Lindwer studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy.
After graduating, Lindwer worked for several Dutch Public TV stations. In 1985 he established his own company, AVA-Productions, in which he has made most of his films.
In 1988 he won the International Emmy Award for his film The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank . This film contains the testimonies of seven women who were witness to the last months of Anne Frank's life in the Nazi concentration camps, including Hannah Pick-Goslar (Hanneli), a former neighbor of the Franks; Bloeme Evers-Emden, a classmate of Margot; and Janny Brilleslijper who buried her in Bergen-Belsen. [1]
On 29 April 2010 he was bestowed with the Dutch order Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau by Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands in recognition of his film-work for the Netherlands.
Willy Lindwer has also published several books, some of which are based on the films he has made. His most famous work as an author is also The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank , translated into English by Alison Meersschaert.
Willy Lindwer has been a documentary filmmaker, producer and scriptwriter since graduating the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam in 1971. For many years he was on the program staff of Dutch Public TV. He founded his company AVA Productions in 1985 in the Netherlands. Currently, he also heads an Israeli corporation, Terra Film Productions in Jerusalem. His companies are dedicated to the development and production of international documentaries and co-productions for television high quality. Willy Lindwer's documentaries are distributed worldwide, including Europe and the US.
Driven by a passion for oral history and his interest in exploring human hardships, Lindwer has travelled extensively around the globe, producing highly acclaimed series of documentaries about Europe, Africa and the Far East. Willy Lindwer's major international breakthrough came in 1988, when he was awarded the highest TV award, the International Emmy Award for his documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. In 1993 he won 'the Dutch State Award for Filmmaking, the Grand Prix of the Dutch Film Industry' in the category 'best documentary' for another major Holocaust documentary: Child in Two Worlds, the story of Jewish war orphans. Willy Lindwer has earned worldwide recognition with his series of documentaries about the Holocaust, Israel, the Middle East and the Arts. Willy Lindwer also produced the highly acclaimed documentary, The Lonely Struggle: Marek Edelman, Last Hero of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising . According to the many flattering press reviews and reactions, the Dutch audience was equally impressed by his 1990 film and book Camp of Hope and Despair, Witnesses of Westerbork, 1939-1945. Willy Lindwer's film Simon Wiesenthal: Freedom is Not a Gift from Heaven was the Dutch Nominee for the International Emmy Award for Best Documentary, 1994. And a one-hour documentary about the life of Teddy Kollek. His feature-length film Yitzhak Rabin: Warrior-Peacemaker, was in 1998 awarded the 'Finalist Prize' at the New York Film and Television Festival. His film Goodbye, Holland (2004) was shown in three successive years on Israeli TV.
Camp Westerbork, also known as Westerbork transit camp, was a Nazi transit camp in the province of Drenthe in the Northeastern Netherlands, during World War II. It was located in the municipality of Westerbork, current-day Midden-Drenthe. Camp Westerbork was used as a staging location for sending Jews, Sinti and Roma to concentration camps elsewhere.
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary documenting her life in hiding amid Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. A celebrated diarist, Frank described everyday life from her family's hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. She gained fame posthumously and became one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, which documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944. It is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.
Anne Frank Remembered is a 1995 British documentary film produced and directed by Jon Blair about the life and posthumously published diary of the German-Jewish diarist Anne Frank, who spent most of her life in the Netherlands. The film was produced in association with the Anne Frank House, Disney Channel, and the BBC, and features narration by Kenneth Branagh and extracts from Frank's diary read by Glenn Close. It originally aired on television in April 1995 before it was screened theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics in February 1996.
The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Anne's diaries were retrieved by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Miep gave them to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only survivor, just after the Second World War was over.
Karl Josef Silberbauer was an Austrian police officer, Schutzstaffel (SS) member, and undercover investigator for the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst. He was stationed in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II, where he was promoted to the rank of Hauptscharführer. In 1963, Silberbauer, by then an inspector in the Vienna police, was exposed as the commander of the 1944 Gestapo raid on the Anne Frank House Secret Annex and the arrests of Anne Frank, her fellow fugitives, and two of their protectors, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman.
Margot Betti Frank was the elder daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank and the elder sister of Anne Frank. Margot's deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding. According to the diary of her younger sister, Anne, Margot kept a diary of her own, but no trace of it has ever been found. She died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from a typhus outbreak.
Edith Frank was the mother of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank and her older sister Margot. After the family were discovered in hiding in Amsterdam during the German occupation, she was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Raphael Evers is a Dutch-Israeli Orthodox rabbi. He was a rabbi in the Netherlands and Germany. On August 1, 2021, he made aliyah to Israel.
Goodbye Holland is a 2004 documentary about the extermination of Dutch Jews during World War II. The film debunks the accepted notion that the Dutch were 'good' during the war, exposing how Dutch police and civil servants helped the German occupying regime implement massive deportations, which resulted in the death of 78 percent of the Jews in the Netherlands.
Hannah Elisabeth Pick-Goslar was a German-born Israeli nurse and Holocaust survivor best known for her close friendship with writer Anne Frank. The girls attended the 6th Montessori School in Amsterdam and then the Jewish Lyceum. During The Holocaust, they saw each other again whilst imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Goslar and her young sister were the only family members who survived the war, being rescued from the Lost Train. Both emigrated to Israel, where Hannah worked as a nurse for children. They shared their memories as eyewitnesses of the Holocaust.
Marianne "Janny" Brandes-Brilleslijper was a Dutch Holocaust survivor and one of the last people to see Anne Frank. She is the sister of singer Lin Jaldati. Both Brandes-Brilleslijper and Jaldati were in the Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps with Anne and her older sister Margot Frank.
Bloeme Evers-Emden was a Dutch lecturer and child psychologist who extensively researched the phenomenon of "hidden children" during World War II and wrote four books on the subject in the 1990s. Her interest in the topic grew out of her own experiences during World War II, when she was forced to go into hiding from the Nazis and was subsequently arrested and deported to Auschwitz on the last transport leaving the Westerbork transit camp on 3 September 1944. Together with her on the train were Anne Frank and her family, whom she had known in Amsterdam. She was liberated on 8 May 1945.
Susanne "Sanne" Ledermann was a German Jewish girl who was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. She was best-known for her friendship with sisters Anne and Margot Frank.
Laatste Zeven Maanden van Anne Frank is a 1988 Dutch television documentary directed by Willy Lindwer about the last seven months in the life of diarist Anne Frank. Seven different women, who were fellow prisoners of Anne Frank in the Westerbork transit camp, and the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, gave interviews about Anne's last months in this documentary. Among them are Hannah Pick-Goslar ("Hanneli"), Anne's childhood friend and fellow prisoner in Bergen-Belsen, and Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, Anne's fellow prisoner in all three camps. Both women, who were cell mates with Anne and Anne's sister Margot, are believed to be among the last known people to have seen Anne alive.
The Holocaust in the Netherlands was organized by Nazi Germany in occupied Netherlands as part of the Holocaust across Europe during the Second World War. The Nazi occupation in 1940 immediately began disrupting the norms of Dutch society, separating Dutch Jews in multiple ways from the general Dutch population. The Nazis used existing Dutch civil administration as well as the Dutch Jewish Council "as an invaluable means to their end". In 1939, there were some 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 24,000 to 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany in the 1930s. Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust. The 1947 census reported 14,346 Jews, or 10% of the pre-war population. This further decrease is attributed to massive emigration of Jews to the then British Mandate of Palestine. There is debate among scholars about the extent to which the Dutch public was aware of the Holocaust. Postwar Netherlands has grappled with construction the historical memory of the Holocaust and created monuments memorializing this chapter Dutch history. The Dutch National Holocaust Museum opened in March 2024.
Frank Sinatra was a strong supporter and activist for Jewish causes in the United States and Israel. According to Santopietro, Sinatra was a "lifelong sympathizer with Jewish causes". Sinatra participated in Hollywood protests and productions supporting Jews during the Holocaust and the formation of the State of Israel. He actively fund-raised for Israel Bonds, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and helped establish two intercultural centers in Israel which bear his name. Due to his support of Israel, his recordings and films were banned by the Arab League and by Lebanon.
Gerritdina Benders-Letteboer (1909–1980) was a member of the Dutch Resistance, who actively protected multiple Dutch Jewish citizens from Nazi persecution and deportation during World War II. Posthumously declared with her husband, Johan Benders (1907–1943), to be Righteous Among the Nations on 27 March 1997 by Yad Vashem, she and her husband were also honored by The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, which placed their names on their “List of Dutch Saviors.”
Moriah Films is the Jack and Pearl Resnick Film Division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Irene Hasenberg Butter, is a German-American Professor Emeritus in Economic Sciences at the University of Michigan and a Holocaust survivor.
bloeme evers-emden.