Ein blinder Held - Die Liebe des Otto Weidt (2014)

The film begins in 1941 at Weidt’s brush factory at Rosenthaler Straße 39 in Berlin-Mitte: the Gestapo is in the building and is harassing the Jewish employees. Weidt pretends to cooperate, but manages to bribe the Gestapo officer into allowing the employees of the “war-essential business” to continue working for him for the time being. Similar scenes recur, with Weidt repeatedly managing, through a combination of deception, acting, flattery, feigned submissiveness, persistence, cunning, and bribery, to protect the lives of his Jewish employees from the Gestapo, which keeps returning more and more often. His ability to shield them earns him the name “Papa Weidt” among them. His employees include, alongside several blind or severely visually impaired people, the Jewish women Inge Deutschkron and Alice Licht. A love story develops between Licht, who is about 35 years younger than Weidt, and her married employer. Conditions for Jews grow steadily worse over time, while the Nazi machinery of repression becomes increasingly efficient in its efforts to exterminate them. One day, while Weidt is away from his factory, the Gestapo rounds up all the employees except Deutschkron and Licht for deportation. Weidt succeeds one last time in saving them from certain death, but now their only option is to go into hiding, and Weidt helps again by providing accommodation and food. However, their hiding place is exposed by a Jew who betrays his fellow Jews to the Gestapo. Everyone is deported except Deutschkron, who goes into hiding with her mother at friends’ home and thereby survives the Holocaust, and Alice, whose parents have been taken away. Weidt tries to free her parents, but the only concession he can get from the Gestapo is that they will not be sent to Auschwitz if their daughter turns herself in voluntarily, so that she can then be deported with her parents to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Desperate to save her parents from certain death, Alice turns herself in. For a long time, Weidt sends around 150 food parcels to Theresienstadt concentration camp under fictitious addresses, thereby ensuring the survival of the Licht family. One day, he receives a postcard that has reached him by an unknown route. Alice writes that she is on her way to Auschwitz—without her parents. Weidt immediately sets off for occupied Poland to rescue the woman he loves. He presents himself to the concentration camp staff as a war-blinded representative of his Berlin brush factory, but is turned away. Weidt, however, does not give up: when he learns that Alice has been transferred to the Christianstadt subcamp of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, he follows her there. In the town near the camp, he rents a room and persuades the landlady to keep a suitcase, cash, and the room ready for Alice Licht. When the camp is evacuated as the Russians advance, Alice manages to escape. She finds the room, gets the suitcase and money, and eventually arrives at Weidt’s and his wife’s home in Berlin in early January 1945. After the war ends, Alice Licht emigrates to the United States because Germany is no longer her home and she does not even know where her parents died. Weidt initially still believes they might have a future together, but this does not come to pass. They never see each other again. The film ends with a real-life scene from the present day: Inge Deutschkron visits Weidt’s honorary grave at Zehlendorf Cemetery and lays a bouquet of flowers there. In the closing credits, viewers learn what became of Otto Weidt, his wife, Alice Licht, and the entire staff of the blind workshop: Weidt died of a heart attack in 1947, and his wife died in Berlin on June 8, 1974. Alfred Levi was deported on February 23, 1943, after which all trace of him is lost. Werner Basch was murdered at Dachau concentration camp on January 19, 1945. Rosa Katz was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on December 9, 1942, as was her colleague Chaim Horn, who died there on October 14, 1943. Alice Licht died in Israel on October 30, 1986.