“How Saba Kept Singing” seeks to understand how Polish Jewish teenager David Wisnia survived nearly three years in Auschwitz. The ambiguous editing and timelines make it seem as if this latest document from Sarah Taxler (“Tickling Giants”) reveals something that hasn’t been reported before, even though a 2019 New York Times article did reveal the poignant love story that It lies behind the “How” of the title. However, as the more serious than artful movie points out time and time again, there will soon be no living witnesses to the hellish experience of the death camps. This indisputable fact lends a sense of urgency and emotion to first-hand accounts of how survivors were able to endure and move on.
If the title “One Voice, Two Lives” had not already been used in Wisnia’s 2015 memoir, which describes in more detail his remarkable journey from a prisoner of Auschwitz to the 101st Airborne Division, it could have come in handy for the film Taxler. As he tells it, music has been a part of his life since the beginning. He proudly remembers being a soloist in his church choir at a young age. He believes that his singing voice earned him more privilege in a death camp, where he entertained SS guards and then was given a better job than his initial task of collecting the bodies of those who committed suicide every day.
Using archival interview recordings held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Taxler also introduces another musical survivor from Auschwitz, Helen “Zippi” Spitzer Tichauer, and edits her memories to make it seem as if she was in dialogue with David. Like David, the Slovak mandolinist Zippi was a young musical prodigy, the only child to ever play with the Czechoslovak Radio Orchestra. She was also a trained graphic artist, a skill that proved even more important to her survival at Auschwitz since she was tasked with keeping records and making floor models. Its location also enabled it to be relatively free to move between the women’s and men’s camps.
David remembers that Zippy, who is eight years his senior, was his first girlfriend and taught him “everything”. The two met secretly in the “sauna,” a barracks where he sorted and sterilized the clothes of the murdered prisoners. They vowed that they would live and meet after the war. Taksler uses the couple’s late-life reunion as a climax disclosure to the question posed by the film’s title, but leaves other important undeveloped issues raised by their meeting.
Taksler wisely avoids dramatic re-enactments to illustrate memories of David and Zippy’s voiceover, and uses archival photos and footage, as well as simple animations that build up strength with their frequent use.
Meanwhile, David Taxler’s footage mostly revolves around two trips he took to Poland with his family to celebrate the 70th and 75th anniversaries of the liberation of Auschwitz and is similar to home movie footage. In 2015, 88-year-old David is still going strong, walking alone, telling stories and joking with his grandson Avi on their tour of the camp. By 2020, he is weak and in a wheelchair, although he is somehow able to summon a strong baritone to perform “Mamele” at the Warsaw Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
With David’s health deteriorating, it falls to several family members to relate the historical tales David once told them as Taxler let the camera get close to their worn-out ‘Saba’ face. But their account lacks the same effect as his eyewitness account. From the earlier footage, David’s outburst and love for life are so evident that one cannot help but feel that the film’s documentation of his extraordinary autobiography has begun belatedly. In turn, Tuxler was fortunate to have access to extensive recorded interviews with Zippi, which historians conducted at a time when she was powerful, along with rare archival photographs of her time in the camp.
While “How Saba Kept Singing” may pale in cinematic terms compared to the recently released document, “Love It Was Not,” a creatively executed story about a Slovak woman imprisoned at Auschwitz and how her singing inspired the love of a security force guard. The special ones who saved and have held her life, surely have her moments. One of the most poignant comes through a conversation between David and his loving grandson Avi, who is also a musician, in which David tells him it’s living proof that Hitler didn’t win. Also, it is touching Avi’s recounting of what David was thinking when he had to sing for SS.
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