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‘Finding Manny’ Is a Must-See Holocaust Documentary

Update: Since the time of writing, Finding Manny has screened at eight film festivals, winning awards at three, including a Platinum Remi Award at the Houston International Film Festival (Worldfest).

Commentary

When I was in high school, among the most popular academic aphorisms, particularly in history class, was philosopher George Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But that was in the early Paleolithic Age. Nowadays, in the era of “critical theory,” there’s said to be no factual past, no real past, to repeat. Everything is narrative, except their narrative, of course, like the 1619 Project, which is suddenly the truth.

How convenient.

Our educational system has been mired in this ideological trap of no information or disinformation with depressing, even mortifying, results.

A salient example is a recent survey of millennials and Gen Z that revealed their knowledge of the Holocaust is spectacularly low:

“Thirty-six percent thought that ‘two million or fewer Jews’ [not six million plus] were killed during the Holocaust, and 48 percent could not name a single camp or ghetto established during World War II, despite the fact that there were more than 40,000 of them.

“‘In perhaps one of the most disturbing revelations of this survey, 11 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust,’ Claims Conference writes.”

How do you counteract this woeful ignorance of what is numerically by far the most horrifying example of genocide in human history—and one that occurred relatively recently at that—so it will not, in Santayana’s words, be repeated?

One way is by making films such as “Finding Manny.”

This well-wrought, compelling, and heartfelt documentary is the true story of Manny Drukier, father and father-in-law of Epoch Times/NTD stalwarts Cindy Drukier and Jan Jekielek, who produced with the director, Kacey Oliver Cox, and Joe Wang. Stephen Baldwin narrated.

Cindy and Jan also appear in the film, as does Manny, of course, who was but 11 when WWII broke out. The young boy then went into hiding, was captured by the Nazis and shuttled between ...

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