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Friday April 23, 1999

Filmmaker-child survivor says luck, wit saved him

JUNE BROTT
Bulletin Correspondent

Zev Kedem, a filmmaker and child survivor of the Holocaust, was only able to make it through half of "Life is Beautiful."

He admired the first part of the film. "But when I saw that little boy in the concentration camp, it brought back too many painful memories. "So," he paused, "I had to leave the theater."

For 50 years, Kedem's memories of the Holocaust were so strong that he kept silent about what he experienced.

"A million and a half children died; I didn't," said Kedem, implying that survivor guilt may explain his silence. Today, however, as a popular international speaker, Kedem talks openly about the Holocaust (he calls it "a culture of death") and also about his work to restore a united Jerusalem ("a culture of life").

In Berkeley last month on a visit from Jerusalem, Kedem delivered the annual Walter Lowdermilk Memorial Lecture at a meeting of the Berkeley-based California Christian Committee for Israel. CCCI is the nation's oldest group of pro-Israel Christians.

During his speech, Kedem told the group, which included representatives from 21 cities and 20 Christian denominations, of the profound effect Lowdermilk had on his life. Lowdermilk, a staunch Christian friend of Israel, is known as the father of Israel's water, forest and soil conservation service.

"He was a mentor to me," said Kedem, who worked for years in Israel as an engineer before embarking on his film career.

As district engineer in the Galilee, the Golan and also Mount Sinai, Kedem carried out Lowdermilk's goals: "Pushing the desert back and converting it to green fields of avocados and oranges."

In 1967, when the Israelis reunited Jerusalem, Kedem was struck by what he sees as the contradictory overlapping of the cultures of death and of life. "To me, Jerusalem represented the light at the end of a dark tunnel, but when I saw how the Arabs had ruined the Jewish section -- with synagogues used as stables, cemeteries desecrated, tombstones used as pavement -- it reminded me of one of the camps had been in, Plaszow."

There, the nearby Jewish cemetery had been dug up, gold wrenched from corpses and tombstones broken up to form the camp entry. "The Jewish slave workers were actually forced to tread their own culture into the ground," Kedem said.

As chief engineer in the Old City, Kedem filmed the restoration of a 400-year-old house for his family as well as the reconstruction of other buildings in the Jewish Quarter. That project --later commissioned by a Dutch Evangelical group -- resulted in a dramatized documentary called "The Jerusalem Quartet," an award-winning documentary portrait of the Old City's Jewish, Muslim, Armenian and Christian quarters.

"I tried to show that others' spiritual beliefs were as precious to them as Judaism was to me," Kedem said about the film, which was translated into four languages, shown in 60 countries, and featured on PBS. Kedem's work also includes a documentary on Lowdermilk.

Kedem, who appeared in the film "Schindler's List," was 5 years old and vacationing with his family when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. An immediate refugee, he managed to live through six concentration camps.

Small for his age, he hid amid adult slave laborers, and he slept concealed underneath instead of on the topside of a bunk.

"Until I was 11, I was competing every day in the game of death for the game of life," he said.

He believes a dose of good luck and sharp wits enabled him to survive.

"My mother actually smuggled me into a concentration camp because she thought I would be safer there than on the outside."

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