Film: For the Living

In January 1945, after two years as 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-Birkenau and re-traced 84-year-old Marcel’s liberation path as a collective act of empathy called the “Ride for the Living.”

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

Igniting the conversation: When will we stop building monuments to the Dead and get busy re-humanizing the Living? When will we finally say NEVER AGAIN and truly mean it?

After the film, audience members will enjoy the exclusive opportunity to converse with the film’s writer/director Tim Roper and producer Lisa Effress, as well as UNE Professor David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., who appears as an expert commentator in the film.

This screening will be the film’s Maine premiere. Released: October 2024

1 hour, 57 minutes

Host or Publisher UNE Center for Global Humanities