PBS show a study of two families after Holocaust

A PBS program scheduled for broadcast Tuesday is an extraordinary study of how two families – one Orthodox Jewish and the other Polish Catholic – encounter each other 60 years after the end of World War II.

“Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust” (10 p.m. on KSPS-7 in Spokane, KUID-12 in Moscow and KCDT-26 in Coeur d’Alene) does not wrap up all the painful emotions into a tidy package. Instead, the 90-minute film raises disturbing questions and forces a re-examination of some fundamental beliefs.

Filmmaker Menachem Daum is caught between the traumatized Holocaust generation of his father and father-in-law and his proud Israeli sons, who seek to live an isolated religious life in Jerusalem.

That might have been the end of the story except for one startling fact: his father-in-law and two brothers were successfully hidden from the German occupiers of Poland for 28 months during World War II. The three brothers lived in a dark pit on a Polish farm covered by many layers of hay, fed and cared for by the farm’s owners, a Catholic family who faced death if the Germans discovered the hiding place.

Daum discovered that Honorata and Wojciech Mucha, the couple who saved the three Jews, are still alive and live on the same farm in rural Poland. He brings his wife and their two sons to the Mucha homestead, where they tearfully invoke Jewish prayers on the exact spot where Mrs. Daum’s father was hidden.

As you watch the film, focus your attention on the faces of the Jews and Catholics as a remarkable story of courage, fear, disbelief and affection unfolds.