Das Schweigen

Ilana Lewitan's father, Robert Schmusch, did not talk about the past until his death. But in 2021, the daughter suddenly receives an email: "My name is Norman Baltrusch ... Grandfather had still found three survivors from the time he worked in the Warsaw ghetto who confirmed that my father was a good man, one of whom was your presumed father. In one particular situation, my grandfather even saved the lives of one hundred Jews." These lines come from a grandson who has been researching his grandfather, SS officer Willy Schmidt, for years. Particularly in the documents relating to the post-war court proceedings against Nazi criminals, he found witness statements indicating that his grandfather had saved Jews - including the testimony of Ilana Lewitan's father.

Through her contact with Norman Baltrusch, Ilana Lewitan learns her father's story piece by piece: that he was in the Warsaw ghetto, that he was a forced laborer, that he was able to escape - and that he worked in a workshop under SS officer Willy Schmidt. But much remains in the dark. Most of the documents were destroyed at the end of the Nazi dictatorship.
Norman and Ilana decide to go in search of clues together in Warsaw. Why did an SS officer save the lives of 100 Jews? What really happened over 80 years ago? And how did Robert Schmusch fare? In their search for the past, a daughter and a grandson discover how much the past touches and shapes them.

In her documentary The Silence, filmmaker Andrea Roth sets out with Jewish artist Ilana Lewitan and the grandson of an SS officer in search of traces of the unspoken.