While cave-exploring in western Ukraine in 1993, Chris Nicola of New York uncovered some puzzling items: medicine bottles, buttons, a shoe, all evidence that someone had lived there several decades earlier. The locals were tight-lipped; finally one offered, “Maybe some Jews hid there.”
After years of investigation, Nicola found out that 38 people — from toddlers to grandparents — had hidden there for 511 days during World War II. The veteran spelunker was flabbergasted. Even experienced people, Nicola says late in Janet Tobias’ documentary, would have trouble spending more than a few hours in the place.
The film is built from moving, frank interviews with survivors from two families who hid, speaking over and around extensive re-enactments. Passages from the memoir of one family matriarch, Esther Stermer, in many ways the heroine of the tale, also are used as narration.
They all tell of the forays to get food; of the raid by the Germans that most, but not all, survived; and of the Ukrainian neighbors who one day buried the entrance to the cave, hoping to starve everyone in it.
Purely as a filmmaker, Tobias doesn’t go for sublety, neither in the cave-like way the interviews are lit, nor in the stylized acting in the historical segments. It doesn’t matter that much. When the survivors and their grandchildren return to “thank the cave,” as one of them puts it, it’s a scene well beyond technique.