In 1989, human rights activist Rajani Thiranagama was shot down by Tamil rebels near her small village in Sri Lanka. Thiranagama, a doctor, had once lived in relative safety in London with her daughters, yet decided to return home.
She felt safe. After all, she’d been a loyal supporter of the Tamils and had doctored their wounded. But her crime was to resign from the group and call for an end to all violence.
Canadian filmmaker Helene Klodawsky tells Thiranagama’s poignant story in a “Point of View” documentary, “No More Tears, Sister,” that debuts on KQED channel 9, June 27 at 10 p.m. Klodawsky, who has made a number of social and political films, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and sees similarities between Thiranagama and the experiences of her parents.
“Coming from a background like my parents’ and going into communities where people have suffered. The stories are never the same, but there are certain parallels: the importance of remembering, the importance of speaking out, the importance of bearing witness,” Klodawsky said by phone from Montreal.
Klodawsky, 50, was asked to make the film by the National Film Board of Canada, which is similar to the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, though less political and willing to tackle more controversial subjects. The board was looking for a film on women and war.
“I could choose any country, any subject. And, to tell the truth, I had not thought about Sri Lanka prior to that,” she said. Formerly Ceylon, the nation has seen strife between the Tamil and Singhalese people for decades.
“There are so many ethnic conflicts around the world; it’s rarely understood what was happening to them. As I was about to start filming, I heard about a peace accord in Sri Lanka. I thought, wow, this is interesting. I’ll make a film about how war is turned into peace.”
But that wasn’t how it turned out. “Rajani’s sister told me, ‘We’ve been waiting for you for 15 years,'” Klodawsky said, “and by that she meant Rajani’s family and the whole community of Tamils, who were critical of the movement and had been silent [in fear for their lives]. But they had the feeling I could be a trusted partner.”
Not everyone was convinced the film was a good idea. “When I started asking around, they [Sri Lankan officials] said, ‘Please, Miss Canadian filmmaker. This is a very limited peace,’ they cautioned me.”
Although there were no specific threats, those early warnings are the reason no photo of Klodawsky accompanies this story. “Because of the sensitive nature of the film, because the people who were interviewed are critical of certain groups, I decided it would be a good idea to keep my image out of the paper,” she said.
Klodawsky grew up in the heavily Jewish North York section of Toronto. Her mother, Bluma (born Rotenberg), spent most of the war on the Lodz ghetto and was on one of the last transports sent to the camps. Klodawsky laments that she does not know the exact dates, but she knows her mother spent time in both Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.
She knows, too, that the story of her parents was a most remarkable and dramatic love story that rivals their survival.
They knew each other before the war. Klodawsky’s father, Anszel, escaped to Russia, and he and Bluma had no contact during the war. She had no idea if he survived. Sometime around 1946 Bluma received a letter from an uncle, who had also survived. She promptly left the DP camp and took a 10-hour train ride to join up with her last living relative.
“He was a very unappealing man who was quite mean to her,” Klodawsky says. “My mother was a very proud woman and wasn’t going to stay.” So Bluma boarded a very crowded train back to the camp. She became ill during the journey, and at one stop — that she thought lasted several hours — she had to crawl out a window to get to a rest room. But when she returned, the train and her all her belongings were gone.
Almost unbelievably, Anszel was on the very next train on his way from the Soviet Union to another DP camp. They were reunited at the train station.
Bluma and Anszel immigrated to Toronto, where, it turned out, Bluma had other relatives. They married and raised a family. The miracle of their reunion was the subject of another documentary Klodawsky did, “Undying Love: True Stories of Courage and Faith,” which examined a handful of marriages of survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Klodawsky was raised in a secular environment. “My father had been a socialist in Poland and the Soviet Union and came from a leftist family. My mother came from a religious family” but was traumatized by the Holocaust, she said.
Today, Klodawsky and her Jewish husband are members of a synagogue and both their daughters have been bat mitzvahed.
At one time, Klodawsky wanted to be a painter and went to an art college. But after meeting a group of American documentarians, she was inspired by their work. “They were doing documentaries that seemed like a fusion of art and commentary,” she said.
Klodawsky’s work often looks at people in difficult situations who are trying to find hope. “There’s always a place in my films where I try to honor the human spirit,” she said.
And nowhere is that more evident than in “No More Tears, Sister.”
Thiranagama willingly sacrificed herself for what she perceived to be the greater good, Klodawsky said. “She believed that in a post-colonial society, life could be better.”