Mama L’Chaim! is a deeply moving story told by a ninety-year-old concentration camp survivor in the presence of her son Chaim, who is now sixty-five. Chaim has made it his mission to give his mother the 24-hour care she needs, as the least compensation for her hard life experiences.

The documentary constitutes a very personal discourse, set in a context of this one family: almost all shots are interior ones and the camera follows the son’s and his mother’s everyday life. The filming is direct and feels spontaneous so that the spectator experiences something on a shape of actual participation in this informal conversation. Perhaps we are invited as guests… Painful memories spring out in the course of a rather lively and humorous discussion: at times conversations end in tears, only to be followed by big doses of laughter seconds later.

The two characters’ light-hearted attitude and the humour they employ when dealing with Holocaust memories call for the viewer’s amazement and this is precisely what makes the film’s approach so unique. Chaim’s internal cry is for his past: he grew up with a crippled father (an effect of the camp experience) and a mother, who was always crying and mourning for the family she had lost, now comes out as laughter, a sweet sarcasm and a clever mockery of life’s pain and injustice.

There are some truly astonishing moments in this film: when the 92-year old mother sings a camp song – Peterswaldau – a very sweet and cheerful tune that now comes across as irony, we are presented with the grandeur of what it means to be human and stay human within the most inhuman conditions. What it means to keep faith and respect life in the light of injustice, violence and death…

Mama L’Chaim! is not a film about the past but a record of the present. As Chaim says ‘the Holocaust is the present’, since the past is in his blood and genes, it makes him who he is. Above all, Mama L’Chaim! is a celebration of the love between a son and his mother, a celebration of the power of memory that connects people of different generations and with different experiences.

This film’s significance lies in its ability to work as a speaking and listening witness that produces solidarity in anamnesis of the victims of history.

Dr Chrysanthi Nigianni
Visiting Lecturer in Sociology, University of East London

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