Revenge. Is it another word for justice?
That seems the justification for the actions depicted in REVENGE: OUR DAD THE NAZI KILLER, an observational feature length murder mystery documentary.
Three Melbourne brothers, Jack, Jon and Sam, become obsessed with uncovering the truth about their father Boris, a Partisan and Holocaust survivor.
After World War II, Australia became home to the highest per capita number of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world outside of Israel–over 30,000. It also became home to the highest number per capita of East and Central European displaced people anywhere in the world, numbering 175,000. A significant number of these came from the Baltic states such as Lithuania, where collaboration of locals with the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews was extensive. This includes the murder of Boris’s family.
Boris survived the war in a Belarus forest as a partisan fighting the Nazis and their local allies, part of a rare Jewish partisan group called Nekoma, the Hebrew and Yiddish word for “revenge”. It appears Boris carried on this mission after the War.
Boris migrated from Eastern Europe after the War and set up a jewellery store in Richmond, an inner city suburb of Melbourne. There, he became active in a covert Jewish vigilante group on discovering that the perpetrators of that Holocaust are also settling in his new homeland.
Beholden to separate the wheat of the truth from the chaff of rumour, the three brothers make the decision to bring on a private investigator, John Garvey, a retired senior detective and former special branch and police intelligence officer. The only clue is the recollection by Boris’ older son Jon about overhearing a conversation in the 1950s about something needing to be done about a Nazi in Sydney and something about a body in the Parramatta River.
Film maker Danny Ben-Moshe has certainly made a compulsive thriller, a documentary that contemplates the morality of revenge. A picture of the past, watching it now through the prism of current events in Gaza, brings the concept of revenge into chilling focus.
REVENGE: OUR DAD THE NAZI KILLER screens exclusively at the Randwick Ritz.