I went to meet Simon Gronowski when I heard that during lockdown he opened his window every evening and played the piano to cheer up the residents of his neighborhood in Brussels.
I knew he was a Holocaust survivor, but I didn’t know the whole story he told me: how his mother pushed him off the train that was taking them to Auschwitz. His adventures to return to the capital and hide, at only 11 years old. How he grew up an orphan after the war. His love for jazz, which his beloved sister, also a victim of the Nazis, had introduced him to.
I had found an amazing person and the challenge was how to show his love for life, his humor, but also his deep sorrow at losing his family. At the beginning of the film, he says that sometimes he would have preferred to have died in Auschwitz. The last scene of the film moves me, every time I see it.
I started filming him for two years with a camera that follows him throughout the film, recording his reactions and those of his friends, children, and grandchildren. I didn’t need to comment at all; Simon said and did everything.
Simon speaks twice a week in schools, warning of the dangers of fascism and the far right. He often gives concerts with his jazz band. And he still, at 95 years of age, is practising law. But only on cases where innocent people are wrongly accused and justice must be served.
If love for life is one premise of the film, the other is the theme of memory and forgiveness. Simon’s best friend is the anti-fascist artist Koenrad Tinel, the young son of a notorious Belgian Nazi collaborator. His father was imprisoned after the end of the occupation, as well as his two older SS brothers. One defended Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. The other was Simon’s guard at the Brussels camp, from where the train left for Auschwitz.
Shortly before his death, the latter asks Simon for forgiveness. Koenrad does not believe that his older brother truly repented. He carries the guilt of his family; he never had the opportunity to ask his father for explanations.
Before playing piano four-handed together, to end this not only a european but universal story, the two friends ask the question: is it better to be the son of a Nazi who grew up with a family, or the son who lost his family ?
