Nedo Fiano, born in Florence in 1925, survived Auschwitz because he was assigned to the Kanada Kommando, a group of prisoners forced to sort through the personal belongings of the deportees upon their arrival on the ramp of the camp. The film, which retraces his testimony regarding his arrest, deportation and the devastating loss of his entire family upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as the harrowing “death march” that took him to seven other camps after the evacuation of Auschwitz, unfolds on three levels: the direct account by Nedo, a unique witness for the immediacy and power of his words, and that of his family members, his three children and his grandchildren, who describe the transmission of the trauma and the weighty legacy of silences and painful accounts. His personal story thus stands beside his family’s story, and is set against the collective story and a present time unable to free itself of the war.

Director's Statement

The intimate story evoked directly by Nedo Fiano moves through places dictated by historical events. Nedo’s testimony is woven throughout the film into the story told by his three children and his grandchildren. These voices form a family lexicon and an intergenerational dialogue on different planes of time, creating fragments of shared memory.