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Film Screening: The Righteous Man From Fulda

  • Tuesday, January 30, 2024
  • 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
  • DANK Haus German American Cultural Centern
Registration is closed

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The Righteous Man From Fulda Film Screening

At DANK Haus American Cultural Center 

In Partnership with Goethe-Institute Chicago

Tuesday, January 30th at 6:00 PM

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, join us for the Chicago premiere of The Righteous Man from Fulda.

What do two tablecloths from the town of Fulda have in common with one Chicago family? 

This compelling new documentary by Ethan Bensinger traces the filmmaker's own family Holocaust history through the unlikely story of the two tablecloths that belonged to Hugo Sichel, the filmmaker's great uncle, who lived in Fulda until his deportation in December 1941. Sichel gifted the tablecloths to his friend and non-Jewish neighbor Paul Römhild, who had put himself and his family at risk to secretly supply Sichel with food. Eight decades later, after a chance encounter, Bensinger travels to the Hessian hometown of his great uncle to receive the tablecloths from Paul Römhild's daughter, who had kept them safe throughout the years, and to reunite their two families.
 
This documentary interweaves one family's story with the broader events surrounding Kristallnacht in Fulda in November 1938, offering insights into the town's Jewish history and highlighting how the memory of the Holocaust continues to impact the present.
 
After the screening, there will be a Q&A session with filmmaker Ethan Bensinger and Leora Auslander, Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History at the University of Chicago. This program is presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institute Chicago.
Filmmaker Bio: Ethan Bensinger 
 
Shaped by the trauma of his family’s experience of being uprooted from Germany in the years preceding the Holocaust, Ethan Bensinger created his first film in 2012, Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home. Refuge explores the experiences, perseverance and resiliency of the last generation of victims of Nazi persecution. These residents of Selfhelp share a history of separation from family, place and of loss, but also of rebirth in America—a story similar to that of Ethan’s family.
 
Ethan’s Fulda-born mother and Frankfurt-born father found it necessary to leave Germany in the mid-1930s. His family's experience as refugees, first in Palestine/Israel and then as new immigrants to the United States, led Ethan to become an immigration lawyer. For over 25 years, Ethan served as the Managing Director of the Chicago office of a global immigration law firm. When he retired from law, Ethan became a filmmaker to give a voice to the last eyewitnesses to life as it was before, during and after the Holocaust.
 
With his latest film–The Righteous Man From Fulda– Ethan widens the lens by using a small town, not unlike most other German towns and villages, to examine how “a common man” reacted within the framework of the Nazi regime. Though Fulda had its share of perpetrators and bystanders, Ethan uses the re-gifting of two tablecloths to his family to explore the deep friendship between his great-uncle, Hugo, and Hugo’s non-Jewish friend, Paul, during the darkest days for the town’s Jewish community.
 
Ethan has also deeply explored the history of the paternal side of his family, culminating in his co-authorship of the book: The Bensingers–A Two Hundred and Fifty Year History of a German-Jewish Family.
 

Ethan continues to share the history of his family as a speaker for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and with students in Germany.


Discussant Bio: Leora Auslander

Leora Auslander is the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization and Professor of Modern European Social History at the University of Chicago where she was the founding director of the Center for Gender Studies and is a member of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of the micro and the macro: citizenship law and domestic interiors; clothing and colonialism; European regulation and everyday religious practice. At the Katz Center, Auslander will work on metaphorical eruvs in Germany and France between the years 1880 and 1970. Auslander received her PhD from Brown University and has taught at the University of Paris, Potsdam University, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, among others.



DANK Haus
 German American Cultural Center 

4740 North Western Ave. 
Chicago, IL 60625

DANK Haus German American Cultural Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.


DANK Haus German American Cultural Center does not discriminate based on race, color, sexuality, national origin, sex, disability or age.

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