Where is home?

Journal voyage 8 –Amsterdam

Our journey continues in Austria’s capital Vienna. Miriam, Harry’s eldest daughter lives here in a small well maintained apartment with Stephan, her Austrian boyfriend. Miriam works as a nanny for children for some Jewish family in town. She feels at home here in Vienna and yet her heart and eyes looking eastward as well. Through Miriam we meet a pair of artists, She is an Israeli from Jerusalem; he is a Palestinians from Ramallah. Together, they raise their one year and a half baby. They talk to us about the exile forced upon them here in Vienna. Even though they live quit comfortably and make an honest living, their future is ambiguous.

My old friend Hans Fels, a Dutchman, comes to Vienna to support my film. After several days Harry returns to Israel and I’m going to Holland with Hans. Hans is a filmmaker. We met sometimes at the beginning of the first Intifada. Over the years we shot together about ten documentaries on the Palestinians Israeli conflict for VPRO, a Dutch TV network, he works for. Ironically, none of these films ever broadcast in Israel.

The next morning we arrived to Amsterdam, Hans shows me the Jewish Theater. He explains to me that this theater assembled hundreds of Jews twice a week to prepare them for deportation to extermination camps. The vast majority of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust. We climb to the second floor together. There I see a bronze statue of Hans’s mother, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp. After the war and for many years, almost until her death, she was decisively active to commemorate Dutch Jewry of Second World War.

When we met twenty-three years, Hans express big interest in Israeli life and in the conflict. Today, like many others Europeans, his curiosity faded out and he looks at the whole thing with some skepticism, even contempt. The bloody conflict seems to him a senseless conflict of two primitive tribes, but the blame today is mainly of the Israeli establishment.

My last two days in Europe I spent at the attic of the apartment of Elias, Hans’s son, and his girlfriend. I look through the big windows at a typical Amsterdam view. I write and edit the journal of my trip here. I suddenly remember Hans’s words in the car yesterday. He paints his house in France an ideal home that he yearns for much of the time. And yet at a certain moment he longs for his homeland, Netherlands. Perhaps Home is not a place you always proud of , you don’t always like your home, and you might have much critisizem about it, and yet it is a place you are attached to no matter where you go..

For the last 12 years I've been working on a long documentary film that is very precious to me. "Where is home" deals with the relation between our private home and homeland in its various implications... Learn More