Survivor, by Crouch End artist Zoom Rockman, has a special screening at JW3 and is inspired by the early life of Golders Green resident Ivor Perl, who witnessed unspeakable horrors when he was sent to Auschwitz aged 12.
The 40-minute film was written by Zoom’s author mum Kate Lenard, and features music by Hampstead Garden Suburb-raised composer Erran Baron Cohen.
It screens on January 28 as part of the Jewish community centre’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations, which mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.
The 24-year-old animator, who started out selling handmade cartoon strips at his Crouch End primary school, has used a unique technique, making hundreds of handmade paper puppets and scenery, to relate Ivor’s journey from a village in Hungary to Auschwitz, Dachau, then England.
“When I read Ivor’s story, I immediately began to visualise the scenes as a film that I could bring to life using my paper puppet animation and create something powerful and accessible to an audience who wouldn’t normally think of delving into this vital subject matter,” said Zoom.
Now 92, Ivor published his memoir Chicken Soup Under A Tree (Lemon Soul Publishing) in 2023. It describes how he was born Yitzchak Perlmutter in 1932 and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family with eight siblings.
When the Nazis took over his town of Mako in Hungary in March 1944, his father and eldest brother were taken away as labourers, and the rest of the family were forced into the ghetto, then rounded up, herded onto a cattle truck and sent to Auschwitz.
His mother insisted he leave his sisters and younger siblings and stand with his two older brothers. Told to say he was 16, Ivor survived the selection of infamous Dr Josef Mengele, but never saw his mother or siblings again.
He and brother Alec spent the next six months witnessing the horror of Birkenau.
The film sees Ivor and Alec miraculously reunited with their father, on another cattle truck to Kaufering IV, where they are all put to work and where Ivor contracts typhus.
A Nazi officer is ordered to lead them on a death march and kill them in the mountains, but fearing he will be tried for war crimes, he delivers them alive to Allach 6.
When an artillery shell destroys part of the fence, they escape into the woods and hide in an abandoned hut. American soldiers break in looking for Nazis and explain the war is over and they must go to Dachau.
Once there, they are given fresh clothes and food and Ivor sneaks onto a bus to Munich and into a cinema, where he sees his first film.
On a second trip, he is arrested and accused of black marketeering. Appearing in court the judge is shown his Dachau papers and allows him to go free. Ivor and Alec are sent to Feldafing, the camp for displaced persons and are put on a plane to the UK.
Only Alec and Ivor survived from their family and rebuilt their lives in England, with Ivor marrying wife Rhoda in 1953 and having four children.
Zoom took research trips to the locations to get the geography correct, and used photos of Ivor’s family – along with other victims of the Holocaust – to create the characters in his film.
They include his own great-great-uncle, Lazar Rozenwajn, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and liberated from Dachau on the same day as Ivor.
Zoom became the youngest ever contributor to The Beano and Private Eye aged 12, and has gone on to hold exhibitions, illustrate books and win awards.
