Ida Fink - Traces

The writer Ida Fink was born in Zabrosh in Galicia to a bourgeois Jewish family. Between the world wars, Zabrosh was part of Poland. Ida received a Polish education and at age 18, on the eve of World War II, she began to study music at the Lvov Conservatory. The Russians controlled the area until 1941, and with the Nazi occupation, a ghetto was established for the inhabitants of the town. Ida Fink, a woman in love with life and with beauty, survived four selections and worked as a forced laborer. With the liquidation of the ghetto, she and her sister disguised themselves as Polish peasants and fled to Germany, where they survived until the end of the war, in constant danger of being identified. In 1957, she immigrated to Israel with her sister, father and husband Bronek, a survivor of four camps. The sisters lived next to one another in Holon, they see each other every day and call one another by their "lucky names" from the war. The film follows Ida on a vacation trip to the Galilee, accompanied by Uri, a young writer who wants to understand her past. The film moves between the kitchen and the porch, between Mt. Meron and Hershim, between Hebrew, Israeli and Polish literature in an attempt to focus upon Ida and the history that she embodies in her life and writing. Above all, this is an attempt to touch the coattails of a great artist.