Wednesday, Jan 30, 2013
The award-winning documentary film, co-produced by Dr. Shawn Kildea and Gina Grosso ’11, will also air on NJTV on February 3.
by Sean Ramsden
The award-winning documentary film Children of Terror, co-produced by Dr. Shawn Kildea, assistant professor of Communication and Journalism, and Gina Grosso ’11, will be in the spotlight over the next week.
Kildea will host a screening of the film, a documentary tale of two girls – a Polish Catholic and a German Jew – who both survived the Holocaust as children to forge a close friendship, on Thursday, January 31, at 7:30 p.m. at Mercer County Community College’s Holocaust-Genocide Resource Center. The Center is located on MCCC’s West Windsor campus at 1200 Old Trenton Road, on the second floor of the Library Building, Room CM107. Doors open at 6 p.m., and the screening will be preceded by a reception. Afterward, Kildea will discuss Children of Terror in an informative Q&A session. The screening event is sponsored by the Mercer County Holocaust Genocide Resource Center.
Children of Terror will also air statewide on NJTV, New Jersey’s public television outlet, on Monday, February 4, at 10 p.m. A studio interview with Grosso, who co-produced the film as a Rider undergraduate, will air prior to the NJTV broadcast. Check local listing for NJTV in your area.
Though Bozenna Urbanowicz Gilbride and Inge Auerbacher were born in two different countries and into two different traditions, both were also forced to endure deportation, labor and concentration camps, starvation, disease, and isolation during the Second World War. Despite their dramatically different traditions and background, they are united by a common trauma: the fear experienced by children in wartime.
Children of Terror combines the stories of these two Holocaust survivors. Auerbacher, a German Jew, survived Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp located in what is now the Czech Republic, while Gilbride, Catholic Pole, survived Chemnitz, a Nazi work camp in Germany. The film focuses on the interfaith relationship these two women have built in spite of the resistance from some within their own communities to their friendship.
Children of Terror is based on Gilbride’s and Auerbacher’s 2009 book of the same name. Kildea organized the premiere screening in February 2012 at Rider’s Bart Luedeke Center Theater, which featured a presentation by Gilbride and Auerbacher. Children of Terror won the Viewers’ Choice Award at the Re:Image Film Festival last spring, and is currently a finalist in the Best Picture category in the National Broadcasting Society’s annual competition, to be awarded at the organization’s national conference in Las Vegas in April.
