The 26th annual Santa Cruz Film Festival concludes on Sunday, October 18, with a special screening at the Rio Theater of the documentary “My Name is Gitta.”
The film, which premiered at the Dances With Films festival in Los Angeles in June where it won an Audience Award for Documentary Feature, tells the story of 94-year-old Gitta Ryle of Santa Cruz. Born in Vienna, she and her older sister were sent to France during World War II, where organizations and total strangers helped hide them and thousands of other children from the Nazis.
Ryle would spend decades coming to terms with the trauma, but her journey would not be complete until her son, Marcus, a producer of the film, brought her back to Europe in 2021 to retrace her steps. The film is written and directed by Ryle’s granddaughter, Beatrix.
KAZU’s Scott Cohn, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor almost exactly the same age as Gitta, spoke with the Ryles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Scott Cohn (SC): It’s only the child survivors who are left now. I’m the son of a child survivor, and there is a particular way that it affected children that I don’t think is kind of the story that’s told, is it?
Gitta Ryle (GR): You’re right. We try to break the trauma. You try to give your kids a normal life, but you can’t escape a past history. So, they all have their own way, but this is, again, you know, it’s so beautiful that when we start learning, understanding, what people are telling us as children, we form our personality. And that’s how we learn how to deal with life.
Marcus Ryle (MR): There are many, many people who have to deal with childhood trauma. My mom’s childhood trauma happened to be the Holocaust. That’s a pretty big one. But it’s an opportunity for people to see through her story and her eyes the journey she took to be able to heal from that trauma.
Beatrix Ryle (BR): I think my dad definitely was the instigator in actually making the project come to be, but I, of course, have known my grandmother’s story my whole life. You know, Holocaust stories are so overrepresented in media, but this felt special. I had never met a Holocaust survivor who was so upbeat and bubbly and optimistic and full of energy and passion, and I really wanted to dive into all of the things that made her that way.
SC: When did it become important and a priority for you to tell the story, and why did it become important?
MR: So, for me, you know, I’ve always admired how my mom persevered and the work she did on herself to be able to talk at schools. And I would see the impact she has and, uh, the hundreds and hundreds of letters she gets from students about how, how much it meant to them to hear her story.
GR: And when you read some of these letters, you see what they got out for themselves. Then I just say, ‘I’ve got to keep doing it.’
SC: What do you want them to take away? When you speak to a group of school kids, what is the message that you want them to come away with?
GR: Well, in the, in the film, one student asked the question. But anyway, what I want them is to know themselves, to try and learn to love themselves, and like themselves. And that if you need help, that there are people out there, not to be ashamed of it.
MR: She also talks about the importance to never forget and that she wants them to remember that they met someone who went through this. They saw a real human being.
GR: I make them my ambassadors. So that you met somebody who actually lived through the war, and that you never forget that there was a Holocaust and a war.
MR: I’d had this notion some time ago that it would be really interesting to travel back with her and actually retrace her steps. I didn’t imagine how much deeper we might actually end up going in the story, and that was really the unexpected surprise.
I like to say that all the work my mom did was her healing who she calls Little Gitta. Little Gitta who had to live through that trauma and, and Little Gitta had learned to forgive her parents for abandoning her and to forgive for all the, the things that she had to go through. And in the course of this journey, she learned a whole new appreciation of what her parents and what her family went through.
GR: And peace.
BR: All of these people who took on the risk for no reason to help these kids survive, to give them a family, to give them a place to stay, to give them education. Anybody can be like these people. Anybody can step up when they see injustice, step up when they see people who are in danger of being persecuted. I think that’s increasingly important all across the world right now.
GR: I know there’s bad things happening right now, but there’s also good things, and I try to show the yin and the yang. Know that if there’s bad, there’s also good.
