The Flat

Arnon Goldfinger's grandmother dies at ninety-eight in her flat on the third floor of a Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv. The family goes to clear the place out. Books, letters, photographs, the entire furniture of a life carried from Germany to Palestine in the thirties are all still there. Among the papers Goldfinger finds something he did not expect, and he follows it. What comes out is this: his grandparents were friends with Leopold von Mildenstein, an SS officer who worked in the Nazi propaganda apparatus, and the friendship continued after the war. The documentary does not present this as an accusation; it looks at what the family did with the knowledge, who knew how much of it, and why it was never talked about. The hardest scenes are not the arguments but the silences.