Terezin Diary

In 1941, the Nazis converted Terezin, an old fortress town near Prague, into a way station for Central European Jews headed for extermination camps further east. The Third Reich's Propaganda Ministry intended to create a "model ghetto" complete with children's pavilion, concert hall, and luxury apartments to display to the Red Cross and to use as a set for a notorious propaganda film recording Hitler's "beneficence to the Jews." Indeed, the degree of cultural activity was at times extraordinary, but the insanity of seeing a piano concerto one night and a death transport the next morning was not lost on any of the inmates. Through compelling interviews with survivors, works of art, readings from diaries, and rare footage from the Nazi film THE FUHRER GIVES A CITY TO THE JEWS, Weismann's TEREZIN DIARY raises profound questions about the deceptive uses of propaganda in the twentieth century.

David Weissman is a multi-award winning independent filmmaker whose short films have been broadcast domestically and internationally, and have been featured at numerous film festivals, including Berlin (COMPLAINTS, 1992; SONG FROM AN ANGEL 1989), Sundance (COMPLAINTS , 1992), and Telluride (SONG FROM AN ANGEL 1988). David was the first recipient in 1990 of the prestigious Sundance Institute/Mark Silverman Fellowship for New Producers, and was a 1992 recipient of the San Francisco Foundation's James T. Phelan Art Awards in Film. Currently, David Weissman is producer/co-director of THE COCKETTES, a feature length documentary about the legendary San Francisco theatrical troupe of hippies and drag queens, 1969-1972. http://www.cockettes.com/