Tags: jeweler

The Aching Heart of Samuel Kleinerman

Set in Berlin in 1936, with increasing anti-Semitic attacks against the Jewish population, a jeweler decides to steal the money that he has been entrusted with for his ill aunt. His moral quandary is heightened when the aunt’s son, a close friend and an escapee from a Nazi concentration camp, arrives in desperate need.

The Man in the Attic

In the last months of World War II, a Jewish man is found, half-starved and barely conscious in the woods near a small town in the north of Germany. For the German couple who finds him, taking this man in is highly dangerous, but they decide to hide him in their attic, thus saving him from discovery by the Nazi authorities. The man is a jeweler and watchmaker, and so he is expected to pay his way by repairing clocks and watches, which becomes a profitable income for the couple. When the war ends with Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the only way to avoid what was then a general starvation in Germany, was for the Jew to keep paying rent, so they don’t tell him the war is over. Based on a little-known, true story.