Touch of an Angel

This poetic​ documentary is the personal story of Henryk Schönker, a Jew from the town of Oświęcim, renamed​ Auschwitz by the Nazis​. In 1939, his father was the chairman of the Jewish community, whose task was to organize the Bureau of Emigration of Jews to Palestine,​ at the behest of the German military authorities. It was ​a several months before the idea of ​the creation of the Auschwitz Concentration ​Camp. ​This chance for legal immigration to save thousands of people has been completely unknown to the world at large. It poses difficult questions of timeless significance: had​ other countries been willing to accept Jewish refugees, how many could have been saved?

The film is a creative documentary whose style director Marek Tomasz Pawlowski has coined archicollage. It is a kind of journey into the past, creating short, silent impressions with imaginative staging and styliz​ed use of archival material. The artistic language of the film escorts the contemporary viewer through the six years of​ World War II. The director combines different types of visuals, experimenting as he had previously with his own signature style in the documentary portrait, “The Runaway,” winner of thirteen awards in competitions from Moscow to New York. In “The Touch of an Angel,” he re-creates copyrighted, archival realities by using actors and extras – Oświęcim’s own inhabitants. Schönker mesmerizes the viewer with his extraordinary memory and ​energy. The now-​deaf Jew, who has been living in​ Tel Aviv, explores many crucial and ​previously unknown facts which include ​his wartime encounter with John Gottowt, an actor from Murnau’s movie “Nosferatu.”