As one of the earliest film projects made by Jewish displaced persons, LANG IST DER WEG had its premiere in Munich in June 1948. Originally conceived by the Cultural Office of the Self-Governing Bodies of Jewish Survivors, this Yiddish-language production tells the story of David Jelin, a young Holocaust survivor who, after the war, desperately searches for his family in a displaced persons camp. The hope for a new beginning eventually leads him, along with other survivors, to the British Mandate for Palestine. As one of the first films to focus on the experiences of Jewish displaced persons, LANG IST DER WEG combines personal stories with documentary realism, thereby occupying a special place in the history of postwar cinema.

Following the film screening, Rachel Salamander and Beno Salamander will read texts written by survivors of the Shoah after their liberation. Known as Schejres Haplejte (The Remnant of the Saved), these texts were originally written in Yiddish by survivors in order to document their experiences. from Schejres Haplejte (The Remnant of the Saved). From the end of the war until the early 1950s, survivors wrote autobiographical stories, novels, and poems in Yiddish and Hebrew. Under the motto Mir zenen do! (We’re still here!), the Writers’ Association of Liberated Jews, founded in 1946, provided a public voice for the experiences and challenges faced by Yiddish authors in the postwar period.

These texts are powerful historical documents that tell stories of survival, loss, and new beginnings, while also bearing witness to everyday encounters in postwar Germany. The literary voices selected for this evening stand out for their powerful language and preserve the memory of Jewish experiences during a time of transition and reorientation.

Actress Iris Berben will read from the German translation.

With an introduction by Felicitas Friedrich (The Monacensia in Munich)
In cooperation with Hessen Film & Medien
With reception hosted by Hessen Film & Medien

Rachel Salamander is a journalist who holds a Ph.D. in literary studies. In 1982, she founded the first bookstore in Munich specializing in literature related to Judaism. From 2001 to 2013, she was the editor-in-chief of the weekly supplement “Literarische Welt” for the daily newspaper Die Welt. From 2013 to 2014, Salamander succeeded Marcel Reich-Ranicki as editor-in-chief of the “Frankfurter Anthologie” column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and she founded the FAZ Literature Forum. She has received numerous honors, including the Heinrich Heine Prize in 2020.

Beno Salamander was born in 1944 in Mary, Turkmenistan. He spent his childhood from 1946 to 1956 in displaced persons (DP) camps in Bavaria, including the Föhrenwald camp, now known as Waldram in Wolfratshausen. After studying medicine, he worked in internal medicine and ran his own practice in Munich until 2025. In 2011, his memoirs of the longest-running camp for Jewish survivors from Eastern Europe were published under the title Kinderjahre im Displaced-Persons-Lager Föhrenwald (Childhood Years in the Föhrenwald Displaced Persons Camp). Currently, Beno Salamander is devoting himself to the study of Yiddish and Hebrew.

Iris Berben is one of the best-known and most successful actresses in the German film and television industry. In addition to her acting career, she has always been committed to taking a public stand — advocating for tolerance and humanity and opposing the forgetting of history and antisemitism. For her political activism, she has received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, among other honors, and was awarded the Leo Baeck Prize by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In 2013, the Jewish Museum Berlin honored her with the Prize for Understanding and Tolerance.