- Starring: Bal, Chris Nicola, D, Fruzsina Pelik, Katalin L, P, Sam Stermer, Saul Stermer, Sima Dodyk, Sonia Dodyk
- Summary: In October 1942, Esther Stermer, the matriarch of a Jewish family in the Ukraine, leads her family underground to hide from the pursuing Nazis. Their harrowing story of surviving in near total darkness in two cold, damp caves for nearly a year and a half is like none ever told. [Magnolia Pictures]
- Director: Janet Tobias
- Genre(s): War, Documentary
- More Details and Credits »
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 7 out of 15
-
Mixed: 8 out of 15
-
Negative: 0 out of 15
-
90Add one more extraordinary survival tale to the canon of Holocaust documentaries: No Place on Earth.
-
75The film is built from moving, frank interviews with survivors from two families who hid, speaking over and around extensive re-enactments. Passages from the memoir of one family matriarch, Esther Stermer, in many ways the heroine of the tale, also are used as narration.
-
75Perhaps the most amazing thing about this story is that it would have been lost to history had not American spelunker Chris Nicola happened across mundane relics -- buttons, shoes and the like -- while exploring the cave complex in the 1990s.
-
60The bare facts of the feat seize the imagination, even if Ms. Tobias’s competent documentary doesn’t quite rise to the challenge.
-
60The film is not without its flaws, but the story it tells is both terrifying and inspiring.
-
50Fascinating but frustrating.
-
40This story is both uplifting and awe-inspiring. It deserves to be told better.
