{"id":98744,"date":"2022-10-16T17:05:54","date_gmt":"2022-10-16T15:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=98744"},"modified":"2022-10-08T16:22:56","modified_gmt":"2022-10-08T14:22:56","slug":"09-05-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=98744","title":{"rendered":"A Nazi Collaborator in the Family"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>A Nazi Collaborator in the Family<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

LISA KLUG<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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With her groundbreaking documentary \u2018His Name Is My Name\u2019\u2014showing on Instagram\u2014Dutch filmmaker Eline Jongsma uncovers the crimes her great-grandfather perpetrated against Jews.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

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\nGerrit Jongsma, the filmmaker\u2019s great-grandfather, is the subject of \u2018His Name Is My Name\u2019COURTESY JONGSMA O’NEILL<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Dutch filmmaker Eline Jongsma was enjoying dinner with her father when he suddenly confessed a family secret: His paternal grandfather was a known Nazi collaborator during WWII.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere wasn\u2019t even ever hints of this being part of my family\u2019s history so it wasn\u2019t a moment of \u2018Oh, I see, I figured it out.\u2019 It was a total shock,\u201d Jongsma told Tablet in a Zoom interview from the Netherlands. \u201cI think the reason my father told me then was his father died very recently.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A decade later, her story sometimes voices itself in metaphor, like falling scraps of aging archival documents resembling cascading fingernail clippings\u2014imagery that embodies a poignant turning point in her groundbreaking documentary, His Name Is My Name<\/em>. Rather than bury the culpability of her great-grandfather, Jongsma, 42, mines it in the film\u2014in a sequence of three-minute videos living on Instagram, @hisnamemyname<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With Kel O\u2019Neill, 43, her American-born creative partner and husband, Jongsma expertly explores long discarded fragments of her complex history, generational trauma, and hope. Since its July release, the project has been gaining recognition, with 30,000 views and climbing, and installations at Kamp Westerbork,<\/em> the Dutch memorial at the site where more than 100,000 Jews, Roma, and Sinti people were deported to Nazi extermination camps in Central and Eastern Europe. As a child, Jongsma and her family gathered wild mushrooms<\/a> there. In addition to beingfeatured in a mural with images and a QR code at Westerbork\u2019s<\/a> The Memory of Camp Westerbork<\/em> exhibition, the documentary\u2019s 10 self-contained installments appear on YouTube<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere was [this] idea, maybe if artists can make something about this \u2018perpetrator perspective\u2019 as they call it, we can educate the youth a little more,\u201d Jongsma said. \u201cWe were asked to submit an idea and at first, we were not quite sure what to do with this.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Jongsma explains a complication of visual storytelling is that the filming itself lends itself to glorifying a subject, \u201cwhich of course was very problematic,\u201d she said. \u201cSo it took us a while to think about how to approach this.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As the heavily researched episodes explain, Jongsma shares her surname with her great-grandfather: convicted war criminal Gekke Gerrit, or \u201cCrazy Gerrit,\u201d a notorious Nazi-aligned mayor of the small Dutch town of Krommenie, north of Amsterdam. Known for his penchant for violence, Gerrit Jongsma sent at least one Jewish family, Esther and Benjamin Drilsma, to be murdered at Auschwitz. He subsequently hunted down their hidden 6-year-old daughter Fien (Adolphine), whom he doomed to death in Sobibor. He may not even be the only perpetrator among Jongsma\u2019s ancestors.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/div>\n\"Eline<\/picture>Eline Jongsma with her husband and creative partner, Kel O\u2019Neill<\/em><\/span><\/span>COURTESY JONGSMA O\u2019NEILL<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Despite such revelations, Jongsma and O\u2019Neill avoid sap. Jongsma\u2019s 33 minutes of Dutch-accented, English-language narration employ powerful, often poetic phrasing. The project is notable not only for its unusual platform-of-choice and social media shareability, but also its composition. As filmmakers, \u201cJongsma + O\u2019Neill<\/a>\u201c are known for balancing what they term \u201chuman-scaled storytelling.\u201d In this case, parts detective thriller and personal visual essay meet technical enterprise. The resulting His Name Is My Name<\/em> avoids the classic archival documents, black-and-white photographs, and wailing violins typifying Holocaust narratives. It relies, instead, on vividly colored short-form animation by acclaimed Slovenian animator Jure Brglez<\/a>, augmented reality, and an original synth score.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBecause we are depicting actual events, we also had to be accurate visually,\u201d said Brglez. \u201cThat meant researching the maps, towns, and the architecture, document design, which Dutch bank notes were used in the \u201940s, patches on the uniforms, color of the wagons \u2026 and when you\u2019re doing that you\u2019re constantly surrounded by the horrible imagery of WWII. Some moments were quite heavy and haunting.\u201d Brglez had his own Holocaust-related family lore; his grandparents mentioned their survival in hiding, but the full story nonetheless died with them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHis Name Is My Name<\/em> is a product of collaboration between a group of talented teammates acting in the service of one goal: honor Eline\u2019s story,\u201d O\u2019Neill said. \u201cEarly on, we realized that the more we collaborated, the more cohesive the project and its voice became. Scripts inspired music, music inspired animation, animation inspired design, and the design inspired us to rewrite the scripts. I find myself using soccer metaphors to talk about the process. We need to pass more, I\u2019d say, or we need more touches on the ball. It\u2019s exciting to work this way.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is not the first time Jongsma and O\u2019Neill have produced a successful experiment. Their Emmy-nominated and Webby-honored interactive POV\/PBS documentary series Empire <\/em>dives into the lasting implications of Dutch colonialism across 10 countries. And their virtual reality film The Ark<\/em> puts users face-to-face with the world\u2019s last remaining northern white rhinos. J+O work also screens at leading festivals (Tribeca, SXSW, The New York Film Festival, HotDocs, IDFA, REDCAT, Rencontres d\u2019Arles, and AFI Docs), landed the inaugural Tim Hetherington Visionary Award, and earned the support of The Sundance Institute, Eisenhower Fellowships, and The Economist <\/em>Media Lab. My Name Is His Name <\/em>is part of a joint endeavor exploring perpetrator histories with Germany\u2019s Bergen-Belsen Memorial, Norway\u2019s Falstadsenteret history museum of imprisonment, and the Dutch nonprofit documentary project developer Paradox<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAs a viewer you almost don\u2019t notice that you are being told some facts about the Netherlands in the war,\u201d said Jongsma, a mother of two, who reflects on her family\u2019s revelation, research, and reflection with an unemotional yet intimate, confessional tone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI was struck by how she wanted to approach her very personal story in such a head-on manner, and in such an honest and vulnerable way,\u201d said Ben Evolo, aka San R\u00e9<\/a>, the Amsterdam-based American musician, producer, and composer who created the doc\u2019s soundtrack. \u201cAfter I read the script, there were a few concepts that I wanted to emphasize\u2014secrets, time, deception, tragedy, and family\u2014to inform the sonic fabric, texture, and music the best way I could, through dissonance, tension and noise.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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San R\u00e9 considers Jongsma\u2019s approach \u201ca real breath of fresh air\u201d and an enduring example of \u201ccorrecting or reshaping a small piece of history.\u201d In that way, Jongsma underscores what San R\u00e9 considers a \u201cresponsibility to tell a story that ensures a more granular and factual version of that history.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Award-winning journalist Lisa Klug<\/a> is the author of the bestselling pop culture titles Cool Jew, a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, and Hot Mamalah: The Ultimate Guides for Every Member of the Tribe. Her work has appeared in many outlets, including The Atlantic, Forbes, Forward, Huffington Post and The Los Angeles Times, as well as The New York Times, The Times of Israel, and Variety, where she is a stringer. Visit her Facebook<\/a> page, or follow her on Twitter @lisaklug<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A Nazi Collaborator in the Family LISA KLUG With her groundbreaking documentary \u2018His Name Is My Name\u2019\u2014showing on Instagram\u2014Dutch filmmaker Eline Jongsma uncovers the crimes her great-grandfather perpetrated against Jews. . Gerrit Jongsma, the filmmaker\u2019s great-grandfather, is the subject of \u2018His Name Is My Name\u2019COURTESY JONGSMA O’NEILL Dutch filmmaker Eline Jongsma was enjoying dinner with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98744"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98937,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98744\/revisions\/98937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}