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TO LIFE !

By Jean-Jacques ZILBERMANN

LE PACTE - as SALES All rights, World / DISTR Theatrical, TV, DVD-video, VOD, FRANCE

Drama - Completed 2013

Helen, Lili and Rose met in Auschwitz. During a warm summer in the 60s and after 15 years without seeing each other, they finally plan a reunion in Berck Plage in the north of France where they will face their old deportation demons and re-experience the pleasures of life.

- Year of production
- 2013
- Genres
- Drama, Comedy
- Countries
- FRANCE
- Languages
- FRENCH
- Duration
- 104 mn
- Director(s)
- Jean-Jacques ZILBERMANN
- Writer(s)
- Danièle D’ANTONI, Jean-Jacques ZILBERMANN
- Cast
- Johanna TER STEEGE, Julie DEPARDIEU, Suzanne CLÉMENT
- Producer(s)
- Denis CAROT (Elzevir Films), Marie MASMONTEIL (Elzevir Films)
- Synopsis
- Helen, Lili and Rose met in Aushwitz, where the 3 twenty-year-old jewish girls were deported. Thanks to German-speaking Dutch Lili who was working in the camp kitchen, the two French girls survived.
  However, after the liberation of the camp, they lost touch. Lili went back to the Netherlands. Rose married a former deportee and settled down in Canada.
  Helen, whose parents died in deportation, returned alone to France where she met an old childhood sweetheart again, Henri, who was also deported. She married him, aware of his impotency caused by sinister doctors carrying out experiments on him in the concentration camp.
  Determined to find her old companions, Helen puts an add in a deportees’ newspaper. Against all odds, as Helen believed her dead, it’s Rose who answers first, whereas it takes them fifteen years to find Lili.
  The reunion takes place in Berck Plage in the north of France, during a warm summer in the 60s, around the 14th of July.
  During this interlude that only lasts a few days, they rediscover each other, sharing their first real meal together, their first fits of laughter, and also experiencing the simple joys of a dip in the sea, a refreshing ice cream...
  They also help each other to overcome their Auschwitz demons.
  Rose, hiding behind a façade of a pretend real live wire, refuses at first any references to their deportee past. But eventually, she comes to terms with her grief from the death of her little girl who was gased on their arrival at the camp.
  Lili, the intellectual of the group, who campaigns for equal rights for man and woman in the rabbinate and who’s always been in love with Helen, helps her have her first sexual experience with Pierre, the young manager of the Mickey Club.
  At the end of their little holiday, as each of them returns to their post-camp life, they vow to come back to “Auschwitz-beach”.