From Apr ’08 Spotlight: When I called Michèle Ohayon to ask about her new documentary Steal a Pencil for Me, she told me: “I thought I was numb to most Holocaust images since I’ve seen them before, but looking at hours and hours of footage took a toll. And dealing with all the archival houses in bureaucratic institutions all over the world? To convince them to look a little further than the usual and to really dig, that was really hard.”
I applaud Michèle’s persistence. Some of the images in this film, particularly actual footage from Westerbork (the Dutch transit camp through which Anne Frank also passed) will astonish you. This is a story about survival under the most extreme circumstances. “It was both the hardest film I ever made and the most daunting one, but the most rewarding and inspiring.”
