AllMovie

As directed by Slawomir Grunberg, this historical documentary discusses one of several deliverances from the Holocaust that occurred during the Second World War. Intriguingly, this particular series of circumstances entailed not an act of heroism or a valiant rescue effort per se (as, say, the Kindertransport did), but a by-product of political annexation. Though only 300,000 of the 3.3 million Jews in Poland survived the Holocaust, 80% of those individuals found deliverance at the hands of the Soviets, who annexed Eastern Poland in 1939 - and promptly shipped its residents off to Stalin's gulag labor camps. That might seem a harsh fate to some (with the forced marches, hard labor, exhaustion and bedbugs), though it of course represented a welcome alternative to the torture and death of the camps, prompting at least one of the transports to refer to the gulag camps as "Heaven" in retrospect. In this film, Grunberg interviews seven of those who evaded the concentration camps in this manner; he places a particularly strong emphasis on transport Asher Scharf, who (along with his wife Schyfa) makes an on-camera trip to Chelyabinsk, Siberia - the location that once held the gulags. When the filmmaker and his subjects arrive, they then uncover another irony - the irony that many of the transports, upon being released from the gulags, were promptly shuttled off to Muslim-dominated Tajikstan and Uzbekistan and began new lives there.