Michele Ohayon’s elegant “Steal a Pencil For Me” is, in a sense, two movies woven into one. For stretches it plays like a shining love story set against the dark backdrop of the Holocaust, while at other times it is a sober Holocaust documentary accented with a saga of survival.
The great accomplishment of this beautifully crafted film is that it loses nothing in the transitions.
Unless you’re paying extraordinarily close attention, you’ll scarcely notice the shifts in emphasis.
“Steal a Pencil For Me,” which screens Oct. 12-18 at the Roxie New College Film Center, is likewise a classy hybrid of the main genres of Holocaust films — the big-picture history brought to life through archival footage and still photographs, and the personal history recounted by survivors decades after the war.
Most moviegoers will be captivated by Jack (Jaap) and Ina Soep Polak’s inspiring relationship, the heart and soul of the film, rather than the structure or technique. But while countless fascinating Holocaust experiences have been recorded by documentary makers, only a fraction of those films have been as artful and accomplished as this one.
“Steal a Pencil For Me” has a great hook, and it springs it on us in the first minute: Jaap was in the same camp with his wife and his girlfriend. As he recalls wryly, that was no easy thing.
Jaap married a girl named Manja in the late 1930s in Amsterdam, but they soon agreed they were a bad match. When the Nazis invaded Holland, however, the couple decided they’d be better off together and agreed to stay married until the war was over.
But Manja was quite the flirt, to hear Jaap tell it, and left to himself at a party he found himself smitten with a fresh face. Ina was 10 years younger and her father owned one of the largest diamond-polishing operations, which is to say she ran in different circles than Jaap, an accountant from a poor family.
Their relationship did not pick up steam until they were interned together in Westerbork, a camp (Jaap notes ironically) that the Dutch Jews had built a few years earlier as housing for fleeing German Jews. Now it was a way station from which 2,000 people a week were shipped to Auschwitz, although they didn’t know the destination.
So life in Westerbork was far from awful. Jaap had arranged for Ina’s family to be housed in the same barracks that he and Manja were housed in, which meant they saw each other every day, often taking evening strolls together. “He won my heart by sheer persistence,” Ina recalls.
Jaap became a principal of one of the schools, and had ample time to write letters to his beloved. So as not to embarrass and provoke Manja, Ina’s sister would secretly deliver the missives and Ina’s replies.
Jaap and Manja, and later Ina, were among the few lucky ones who were deported to Bergen-Belsen instead of Auschwitz. But it was a full-time job staying alive, and Jaap and Ina lost track of each other until after the war. Jaap and Manja got divorced lickety-split after the liberation, and he and Ina married in 1946 and moved to the United States.
They mark their 60th anniversary as the film begins, but they’re far from finished. Jaap is a stunningly active 93, and Ina, like many survivors, still has a thing or two to clear up with their now-adult daughter.
Their “work” also includes talking to young people about the Holocaust. On a path at Westerbork, in a Los Angeles classroom and at a family seder, Jaap and Ina
discuss the suffering wrought by discrimination and each generation’s obligation to build a better world.
Actually, they don’t have to say much. Their lives, and their ongoing love affair, make the film a perfectly eloquent and optimistic statement.
“Steal a Pencil For Me” plays Oct. 12-18 at the Roxie New College Film Center, 3117 16th St., San Francisco. Tickets: $5-$9 at www.roxie.com or (415) 863-1087.