How we documented my grandfather’s Holocaust… | Little White Lies

How we doc­u­ment­ed my grandfather’s Holo­caust sur­vival story

28 Jan 2018

Words by Darren Richman

Older man with glasses and younger woman smiling together in black and white.
Older man with glasses and younger woman smiling together in black and white.
Cap­tur­ing Zigi Shipper’s tes­ti­mo­ny of the Nazis’ atroc­i­ties is the most impor­tant thing I’ve ever done.

This Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Day, Sur­viv­ing Auschwitz: Pris­on­er 84303 aired on UK tele­vi­sion. The bulk of my adult life has been spent pur­su­ing cre­ative endeav­ours, but I can say, with absolute cer­tain­ty, that this is the most impor­tant thing I’ve ever been involved in. The film is a short doc­u­men­tary about my grand­fa­ther, Zigi Ship­per, who sur­vived the Holo­caust and now spends his days shar­ing his tes­ti­mo­ny in schools up and down the coun­try. Final­ly, his sto­ry has been cap­tured for posterity.

At school I can remem­ber being asked to write a piece about the per­son I most admired and the choice was obvi­ous. As I embarked on a career in jour­nal­ism and Zigi addressed the Eng­land foot­ball team before they depart­ed for Euro 2012, and hob­nobbed with politi­cians and roy­al­ty at char­i­ty events, I began to write about him in a more pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty. Even­tu­al­ly, in typ­i­cal­ly forth­right fash­ion, he asked me: When are you going to write a book about me?”

It is some­thing I had long won­dered myself, but some­thing about it didn’t sit right. Any­one who has ever had the priv­i­lege of sit­ting in the room while this genial, fun-lov­ing man recounts his sto­ry of endurance dur­ing the last century’s dark­est days with­out a trace of bit­ter­ness knows that no writer could ever hope to cap­ture his charis­ma. Any book would have to be writ­ten in his own words and, with that in mind, sure­ly a dif­fer­ent medi­um would seem more appropriate.

Around the same time, I stum­bled across a Jew­ish film fund online offer­ing mon­ey to make a short doc­u­men­tary. With a direc­tor friend of mine, Vaughn Stein, I put togeth­er a pitch about Zigi and was sur­prised to hear noth­ing back. I asked Vaughn how much we need­ed to make the thing and he insist­ed £10,000 would be enough since he had enough friends in the indus­try who’d be will­ing to work for a reduced rate on some­thing of such impor­tance. We cre­at­ed a Kick­starter and were over­whelmed by the lev­el of sup­port from the many peo­ple whose lives have been touched by Zigi; we reached our tar­get with­in a few days.

Olivia Wayne, a Sky Sports News pre­sen­ter who sees her Jew­ish her­itage as being of the utmost impor­tance, agreed to come on board as Zigi’s inter­view­er and the three of us spent hours chat­ting to Zigi at his bun­ga­low about any­thing and every­thing relat­ed to his life. We record­ed hours of audio footage and I knew, even if the film was nev­er made, that we had done some­thing worth­while in cap­tur­ing his testimony.

Our first major cre­ative deci­sion was to shoot in black-and-white and eschew any archival footage of the camps. Such images are unde­ni­ably haunt­ing but, hear­ing Zigi speak, what comes across is his opti­mism and love of life. This was sim­ply about try­ing to repro­duce the expe­ri­ence of sit­ting in a room and being addressed by the man rather than a didac­tic approach. The name had to be 84303 after my grand­fa­ther informed us that he will some­times for­get his PIN num­ber and start to type in the num­ber that the Nazis reduced him to a life­time ago.

Stal­in claimed, The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of mil­lions is a sta­tis­tic” and we felt we had to show the sig­nif­i­cance of these events on just one per­son to give a sense of the sheer scale of the tragedy. The film gives as much weight to Zigi’s expe­ri­ences after the War since his life has not been defined by the hor­rors he wit­nessed. We were try­ing to pay trib­ute to the vic­tims and the sur­vivors and thus the film is ded­i­cat­ed to our grand­par­ents and those who were not so lucky.

Olivia’s old school was kind enough to let us shoot in their the­atre space and it was a gru­elling week­end. Zigi was suf­fer­ing with a cold and, despite a sched­ule that sees him con­stant­ly on the move, he made the unprece­dent­ed deci­sion to tell me he was feel­ing tired late on the Sun­day and asked if we had almost fin­ished. Vaughn had the unen­vi­able task of hav­ing to ask for a few takes in which Zigi respond­ed to the same ques­tions but there was no ele­ment of arti­fice and the respons­es were gen­uine and heart­felt on each and every occa­sion. The crew were enam­oured and crowd­ed round the documentary’s sub­ject at lunch so as to make the most of the expe­ri­ence. The food, inci­den­tal­ly, was pro­vid­ed by Zigi’s daugh­ter (my moth­er) and she receives a cater­ing cred­it. This was tru­ly a fam­i­ly affair.

Dur­ing post-pro­duc­tion, Vaughn start­ed work on his fea­ture length debut (the upcom­ing Ter­mi­nal star­ring Mar­got Rob­bie, Simon Pegg and Mike Myers) while I was dis­tract­ed by my first child being born two months ear­ly and begin­ning his life in inten­sive care. I spent that sum­mer in hos­pi­tal while fin­ish­ing touch­es were put on the film but, for­tu­nate­ly, our son showed some of his great-grandfather’s sur­vival instinct. Names are impor­tant to peo­ple who have been robbed of theirs and my grand­fa­ther is no excep­tion. Our child, the great-grand­son of a man who wasn’t sure he’d reach 14, is named Isaac Zigi.

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