Out Of The Forest Analysis

Over the years, Zeidel’s recalcitrance melted away. In the late 1970s, he sat for interviews with Lanzmann, a few minutes of which were included in the 1985 documentary Shoah. To Lanzmann, Zeidel confided that after his escape, he was sure he stunk of death. Later Zeidel agreed to participate in the making of Out of the Forest, a 2004 Israeli documentary about the role of Lithuanian collaborators in the mass killings at Ponar.

Once a year, on the anniversary of the escape, Zeidel would meet for dinner with Isaac Dogim and David Kantorovich, another member of the Burning Brigade. “The Jews are the strongest people on earth,” Zeidel would say. “Look at what they tried to do to us! And still, we lived.”

Amir told me that Zeidel made several pilgrimages back to
“Everything was demolished,” he tells the camera, finally, shaking his head in frustration. “Everything. Not that I care it was demolished, but I was certain there would be an opening, even if a blocked one, so I could show you the tunnel.” As it turned out, Zeidel had been standing very close to the tunnel; he just couldn’t know it.

Last summer, Amir returned home from a trip to the store to find her phone ringing. “Everyone wanted to know if I’d heard about my father,” she recalled. She booted up her computer and found an article about Freund’s work. “I started to shake,” she told me. “I thought, ‘If only he were here with me right now!’”

In a Skype call this fall, Amir cried as she described Zeidel’s final trip to Ponar, in 2002. He’d traveled with Amir and her brother and three of his grandchildren, and the family clustered together near a burial