We were so beloved

Duration: 145 mi

Year Published: 1985

Creator: First Run Features/Icarus

Format: 16mm

Color: Color & B&W

Sound: sound

Description: This documentary examines the experiences of German and Austrian Jews who fled Nazi persecution and settled in New York's Washington Heights in the 1930's. While reports came from the concentration camps, the new immigrants cooperated to build a new society. Washington Heights became a Jewish enclave dubbed by the Americans who lived there, The Fourth Reich, and Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson. In candid conversations, the interviewees reveal the ambivalencies of their situation: the trauma of leaving their homeland, the ties to German culture that remain, the relief and remorse of being saved, and the meaning of survival.