LOVE IT WAS NOT – St. Louis Jewish Film Festival Review

The J’s St. Louis Jewish Film Festival showcases national and international cinema that explores universal issues through traditional Jewish values, opposing viewpoints and new perspectives. The Jewish Film Festival now offers year-round opportunities to experience Jewish films from around the world. In 2021, all films will be presented virtually! The St. Louis Jewish Film Festival runs June 6-13 and it’s site can be found HERE and a link to the festival’s brochure can be found HERE.

Review of LOVE IT WAS NOT by Doug Cooper

Forbidden love always raises intrigue. Whether it’s written into novels or as a subject in film, I must say, as a fine artist myself, I always enjoy extremely different ideas as subject matter in cinema. I’m saying this after having viewed the documentary LOVE IT WAS NOT by Israeli Filmmaker Maya Sarfaty, who recently graduated film school and I must say I’m impressed !

 When I was a young man I occasionally I watched war movies with my dad (who actually fought in WW II), and he always said “War is hell”. This axiom was never more truer than for LOVE IT WAS NOT, and having seen many Holocaust films over the years, this film between a Jewish girl and an Nazi Officer really caught me off guard. In this case Gold medal winner Maya Sarfaty (That’s right  – she won a first place award for this her first film as a graduate-film student), takes us back long ago to a very evil and hellish place, Auschwitz ,located in Poland and just one of many death camps run by Nazi Germany during the second world war. A beautiful Jewish girl named Helena Cattronova is sent to this infamous place for mass extermination. Using very different film styles and techniques, Sarfaty shows us a very different side of hell that was Aushwitz and told to us by Helena and her compatriots .They were the first 1000 women to be shipped like cattle to this place of death in 1942.

 Really though the “Hook, Line and Sinker”,of this film happens when our heroine Helena, while slave-laboring is asked to sing for her “Death’s Head Hosts”( the SS were often called “the death’s head”). When SS Unterscharfuher Franz Wunshe hears Helena sing for the first time,he falls Head-over-heels” for her and as a result, their lives are changed forever. This makes us wonder though if it’s fate or coincidence that Helena and her SS captor Franz met and fell in love with all this insanity surrounding them.Whatever the answer, I feel it’s safe to say LOVE IT WAS NOT is more than beginners luck for director Maya Sarfaty. While listening to the song that Helena sings; “It was Never Love”, I cannot help wondering if Marlene Dietrich used to sing this way back when, but really this is no fun-and-games movie.

 All the people interviewed for LOVE IT WAS NOT, (except for Franz Wunshe and a few relatives) were, like Helena Catronova, slave workers in Auschwitz and indeed, while listening to these Holocaust survivors describe their sometimes shocking experiences way back when, you get the sense they’re talking like these horrific times occurred only yesterday. Watching this film, one cannot help thinking that there is more to war than carnage, death and nightmares. As helena describes her captor  Franz Wunshe, her captivating question “where are the eyes of a murderer?” makes me wonder that this isn’t normal. Aren’t all Nazis sadistic monsters? In all that was WW II, with all the horrors of war and inhumanities, a chance meeting of  compassion and love between Helena and Franz  reverses our typical thinking that only bad things happen in war. 

A new filmmaker, Maya Sarfaty mixes many ideas about what happened over 70 years ago and still happens today. Genocide is worse than insanity, but Inhumanity seems to bring us to reality and perhaps after seeing this terrific film, people may wonder if the world is more or less civilized today than 70 years ago? I must say to Maya Sarfaty:  “I salute you”