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UPDATED EVERY FRIDAY
Last Update:
Friday 14th January, 2005
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All content ©
New Journal Enterprises, 2004.
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Premiere stars 100-year-old who fled Holocaust
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WHEN Irma Faith fled Hitler’s pogroms in the 1930s she,
along with many other Jewish refugees, found it impossible to get
the visas needed to enter other European countries or America.
So instead Ms Faith, now 100, headed to Shanghai, a free city that
refugees needed no permits to enter. Her story is to be told at
a film premiere at Highgate Highgate Scientific and Literary Institute
next Thursday.
The Institute’s film society, formed two years ago, is screening
a documentary, made by the brother of one of its committee members
charting the exodus from Nazi Germany of Jewish people to the free
city of Shanghai in the years leading up to World War II.
To accompany the film, Irma Faith, who lives in Balint House, a
Jewish care home in The Bishops Avenue, Highgate, has told her story
on camera to society members.
The documentary, titled the Port of Last Resort, tells the story
of the 20,000 refugees who arrived between 1938 and 1941 to establish
a Jewish community in the Far East.
Ms Faith’s account is due to be screened after the main film,
while four other refugees – Fred Fields, Ernest Heppner, Illo
Heppner and Siegmar Simon – have narrated their stories over
archive footage telling of the hardships, and triumphs, of European
Jews settling in the Far East to escape persecution.
Society chairman Eric Dalton said Ms Faith’s story had fascinated
the committee. “One of our members, Veronica Ryan, is from
Austria, and she told us her brother, Paul Rosdy, had made the film,”
he said.
“We watched it and were impressed – and then we remembered
Irma Faith lived locally, so we thought we’d make a film of
her too.”
Her harrowing story – she saw her husband taken by the Gestapo
to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and had to rescue him before
they fled – moved the society’s committee.
Mr Dalton said: “Both films are poignant, brilliant and historically
important. We wanted the society to screen them back to back.”
• Tickets for the screening on January 20 are available
from the Institute in Pond Square on 020 8340 3343.
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