'UnBroken' is the amazing story of a family's Holocaust survival

Beth Lane directs the documentary about the survival of the seven Weber siblings, the youngest of whom is her mother.

With UnBroken, filmmaker Beth Lane tells the inspiring, century- and continents-spanning story of her own family, specifically how her mother and six aunts and uncles escaped nearly certain capture by the Nazis.

Named Alfons, Senta, Ruth, Gertrude, Renee, Judith, and Ginger, the Webers were shielded for two years by a family of German farmers, the Schmidts, in a German town called Worin.

Their mother was Antifa, literally- she fought against the Nazis and later died in Auschwitz, while their father was a Catholic convert to Judaism. The Webers are believed to be the largest group of siblings who all survived the Holocaust.

To leave Germany and reach the United States, the siblings had to declare themselves orphans. Therefore, they were separated from one another for decades, despite all ending up in the Chicago area, only reuniting in the 1980s, in a family reunion that we see in the film.

UnBroken contains unmistakable echoes of two of this year’s Oscar-nominated films, The Brutalist and A Real Pain. It is assembled from three very effective elements: interviews with the survivors, old photos and archival footage, and Lane’s visit to the places in Germany where her ancestors had been, as part of the project of answering questions about the family’s story.

There are also some animated sequences to tell stories from wartime for which there are no photographs.

Today, we see Lane speaking with young Germans, asking if they would hide her if given the chance. She also meets the grandson of the town’s mayor, who helped save her family.

(UnBroken is not to be confused with the other movie called Unbroken, from 2014, about Louis "Louie" Zamperini, although that was also the story about a young person who survived a terrible ordeal in World War II, and ended up living into his 90s.)

After a run last year on both the Jewish and documentary film festival circuits, UnBroken recently began a slow rollout across the country. It’s a very personal, highly effective debut film by Beth Lane.