Laura Morowitz: In 1921 my paternal grandparents left their shtetls in Poland to settle in New York City. Since their leave taking 100 years ago, no one in my family has ever stepped foot in Poland. My grandparents had no interest in returning; for them it would have been like wishing to return to a period of illness, something painful, frightening and laden with unpleasant memories. Their children did not feel the need to “search for their roots;’ their Eastern-European Jewish heritage in their Yiddish-speaking home was quite close, perhaps too close and there was certainly nothing glamorous or romantic about it. To them Poland represented poverty, persecution, ignorance and the murder of their family members.

In high school, my general ignorance about Poland was replaced by knowledge of its construction as the Land of Darkness, the landscape of the Holocaust  and of the death camps. Reading Jerzy Kozinksi’s Painted Bird (1965) in school did not do much to shake this image (despite the author himself being rescued by a series of Polish Catholics and clergy.) In truth, I hardly thought about Poland at all as a young adult, except to appreciate the work of great contemporary  Polish artists, writers, and filmmakers, who had nothing to do with the place my grandparents hailed from.

In the last few years several things conspired to change my feelings and my thoughts.  Studying the ghettos of Lodz, of Warsaw, of Krakow, I learned of heroes and heroines--both Jews and Christians--and of the richness and vitality of these communities that were destroyed. As a birthday gift someone gave me an ancestry kit  that revealed  my heritage was 99 % Eastern European. Clearly, my family had been there a long, long time. But the ancestry website also resulted in a contact from an unknown relative, Estelle Geller. Estelle was the daughter of Florence, my grandfather’s sister, of whom I had never heard. She sent me a sepia photo,the only photograph I have of Julius in which he is not already a grandfather. For me it signifies that these shtetls were not only places where my relatives had died, but also places where they had lived. And it occurred to me for the first time that generations, perhaps centuries, of my family had lived and died in proximity to those dense woods that stood in the back of the photo.

I sent the old photo to Marek, who was touched by it and determined that it was a branch of lilacs that Florence held. It was Marek’s idea to make a film of this return, and to ask the director Mikołaj Jazdon, also of Adam Mickiewicz University, to direct the film. We began by sharing our grandparents’ lives and experiences, as we understood them. Mikołaj invited the visionary cinematographer, Piotr Jaxa, to make the photos for the film. We realized that having my daughters with us would deepen the story and add a whole other dimension. We are all a team, each with a very different family history and connecting through our common desire to explore the notion of memory, time, the landscape, and to build a bridge to redeem the past.

Mikołaj Jazdon: Film and photography are for me a special way of describing and experiencing the world. Thanks to the filming of Lilac, it became possible to meet and build a relationship with Laura Morowitz, a descendant of Polish Jews. One of the consequences of the Holocaust was the irretrievable impossibility of contact and relations between Poles and Jews who lived in the same country. Jews perished and contact with their foreign relatives was thus severed. I believe that thanks to the production of films such as Lilac, these interpersonal relations can be rebuilt. As a film historian, I research documentary cinema. An important impulse that determined my professional choice was the meeting with Marian Marzyński, a documentary filmmaker who survived the Holocaust. In 1994, I met him in Chicago, while he was working on the editing of Shtetl, the film about Nathan Kaplan's journey from the USA to Poland, from where his descendants emigrated to America. Thanks to this meeting with Marzynski and his film, I understood the importance of a documentary filmmaker rebuilding relations severed by the war, or simply rebuilding them from scratch. The process of making  Lilac is building new interpersonal bonds that are important not only for a few people involved in the creation of the film, but also go beyond them, becoming, I believe, a creative impulse for others. That is why it is worth making this unique movie.

Piotr Jaxa: I decided to participate in the project because I think that especially nowadays we must contend with real history. There are a lot of examples of abusing the past in Poland in the context of politics. People are divided. I think that film means creating an image which can inform, but also can invite every one of us into the deeper journey to the truth hidden behind visual reality. We can throughout the images strengthen and widen our knowledge, our angle – and in this context – our being in time. Laura’s story is for me the way to a world full of acceptance and tolerance. Are we ready for this kind of experience? I wish that our audience would stay after watching our photo-film to reflect on this question. Maybe our work will open some people to completely new forms of thinking, that Laura’s and her daughters’ story will show us how we could look at ourselves from different points of view.

Marek Kaźmierczak: I met Laura because of my friend, Christian Karner. Laura wanted to visit the places where her ancestors were born and lived. At the beginning I helped her to organize a trip from Cracow to Chmielnik and Stopnica. The epidemic broke Laura’s plans at the physical level. We started travelling in time through stories, through articles, through symbols. And this was the beginning of the idea of the film. Then we invited a wonderful scholar and a filmmaker, Mikołaj Jazdon, for the cooperation. Three of us became one team. Then Mikołaj invited a great cinema photographer, Piotr Jaxa-Kwiatkowski. This is our story. We are the “engines” of the time ship. 

There is a big discussion about Jewish and Polish relations in Poland, in Israel, in the USA. I feel ashamed when I can hear, watch and read on the Internet, on mass media, in public life some people, actual people, who deny the Jewish past and presence in Poland and the Jewish commitment to memory and to looking for the truth. 

I am a scholar. And I realised myself that books, articles, conferences and grants are important but the number of the recipients is smaller than the number of users of the Internet and the receivers of films. I, or rather we, cannot accept the violence of ignorance, of bad will, of demagoguery and populism. This film is necessary if we love blooming lilacs, if we love a long way through the story to the truth.