Nadia's Friends

Their family name alone evokes horror: Himmler, Frank, Goering, Hoess. This film looks at the descendants of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime: men and women who were left a legacy that indelibly associates them with one of the greatest abominations in history. What is it like to have grown up with a name that immediately raises images of genocide? How do they live with the weight of their ancestors' crimes? Is it possible to move on from the crimes of their ancestors?

He is known as the Nazi officer who saves "The Pianist" -Wladyslaw Szpilman, in the Roman Polanski film, but his German hometown from which he ran the local school and went to the war, still refuses to recognize him as a hero. 70 years after the end of the war, a group of residents demand to commemorate the Nazi Officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, in the local school and the reactions are stormy. In the meantime, Hosenfeld's grandchildren discover their grandfather's secret diaries in which he documented Nazi war crimes and they embark on a journey of discovery. During this journey, they will find out that their grandfather was a serial savior and aside from "The Pianist", another 60 people owe him their lives.

They have finished their high school studies and deferred their service in the Israeli army to volunteer for a year's community work and preliminary military training in a special pre-enlistment program in Gilo, Jerusalem. These young men and women are both religious and secular, of a variety of political persuasions - are typical products of Israeli society trying to live together for one year during which they hope to get to know one another and to put the prejudices they have grown up with to the test of daily life. In the course of this "survival year," the main characters pour out their hearts and say what many Israelis think and feel. They provide us with a rare opportunity to observe Israeli society as it appears through the eyes of young people awaiting the start of their military service who have found themselves, one year too early, in the front line.