(inspiring music) - Basically, "Schindler's List" is my father's story.

- [Narrator] For Gail Offen, the film seems like a reflection of her father's lived reality.

The brutality and quiet endurance all mirrored what he went through during the Holocaust.

- My father was in a camp with my uncle called Gusen, and it was a rock quarry, and their job was to take rocks, big rocks, and break them into smaller rocks, but not just standing still, this quarry has 186 steps, and I know this because I've been there and I counted the steps.

And their job was to take big heavy rocks and go run up and down these steps all day long carrying these rocks, and I mean run, you know?

Hot weather, cold weather, you didn't have shoes, you were sick, you still had to run, because if you didn't run, the guards would shoot at you.

And as my father said, "Once in a while, they missed."

So this was one of the horrible camps my father and my uncle were in.

And of the 500 men that were in this camp, only five or six men survived.

And my father and my uncle were two of the lucky ones.

- [Narrator] Growing up, Offen was shielded from the horrors of what her father went through.

- I didn't learn about the Holocaust till much later in life, probably when I was in what we now call middle school, because at the time, parents didn't think it was a good idea to talk to their kids about the Holocaust.

It would be too traumatic, too upsetting.

Even as an adult, I didn't know all the details till my father, not till age 60, was he able to talk about it in public.

The rabbi who started the Holocaust Center, Rabbi Rosensweig, of blessed memory, he persuaded some of the survivors to talk.

My father was one of the first, and my father started speaking at the Holocaust Center, and it was very cathartic for him, and it really became his life's work.

- [Narrator] Offen has been sharing her father's story since he first opened up about it.

Her father passed away in 2012, but it wasn't until 2021 when Offen officially started speaking at the Zekelman Holocaust Center.

The museum estimates there are approximately 400 to 450 first generation Holocaust survivors still alive in Michigan today.

Earlier this year, second and third generations gathered at the museum for a special workshop led by writer and performer David Labi, learning new ways to carry their relative stories forward for generations to come.

- I felt like this was a good opportunity to work with people on the stories they tell themselves about their parents and grandparents.

So I offered this to the Secondment Holocaust Center as a workshop, working with second generation and third generation children of survivors, looking at different ways that they can approach the stories of their ancestors.

- This workshop, the minute I saw it come through in my email, I instantly signed up because look, I've done a lot of storytelling.

Everybody's stories can get better.

How do you connect with people in your audience?

You need to have your story resonate with them.

- I feel a responsibility to work with people, to listen to people, to engage with their stories after they've heard mine.

My father was born in Tripoli, Libya in 1938, and he was taken by the Nazis with his mother and his sister in 1943.

The thing is, he had a British passport, so from his father.

His father was put in prison by the fascist authorities, and he would eventually catch typhus and die.

But because of the British passport, my father and his mother and his sister, they had value, they had perceived value for the Nazis, and they were taken across the sea with a small group of Jews.

It's a story not many people know about, actually.

So he was only four years old when he went into the concentration camp.

So he had very little memory of the details of what had happened to him.

- [Narrator] After his father's death, Labi felt a deep need to better understand the man he lost.

He began reaching out to those who knew his father, who saw different sides of him, hoping their memories might fill in the gaps and offer a fuller picture than what he had as his son.

- For me, growing up, my father was like a symbol, but talking to his best friend, his sister, and all of these interviews contributed to being able to think about my father in a different way and change my conception of him completely.

- [Narrator] He gathered those words and turned his father's story into a one man stage show called "Pieces of a Man."

- This is a story about me and my father, Musci Marcello Labi, known to most people as Marcello, and known to us as Ab, Hebrew for Father.

I had intended it as a podcast project, then it became a kind of book idea, then it became a film idea, and then finally it became a stage show.

I went to Israel twice.

I went to Rome, I went to London.

I spoke with family and friends.

And as I got a fuller picture of my father's life, I started to realize that with my wondering, adventuring, self-destructive behavior that me and my father weren't so different after all.

My show "Pieces of a Man," it's about my father's legacy as a Holocaust survivor.

And I felt that I had to tell the story publicly, because I believe that it has a universal aspect to it, that in a way, not just for Holocaust survivors or for people who've experienced something like that, everybody has complex relationships with their parents.

My friends all thought he was a mafia boss.

You can see why.

He had this big belly, a goatee beard, he smoked these huge cigars, and his manly eruptions could be heard from miles around the house.

Some of his burps were picked up by Japanese seismologists.

(audience laughs) Telling the story as a comedy, it makes it accessible to more people so people can come and they can engage with the topics, and without perhaps being frightened off by the heavy heaviness of the topic matter.

- [Narrator] Using humor to tell such a painful story deeply moved workshop participant Jeffrey Cymerint.

It offered a new lens to reflect on his own father's experience as a Holocaust survivor.

- I liked the way he presented his story.

He wanted to interject humor to keep the audience participation going.

- And I was originally incorporating my father at the beginning of the show.

You know, doing his kind of belly, his slow walk around, and his burping.

- That's the bigger thing I got from the workshop, is how to make it compelling and keep the audience's attention.

- [Narrator] Like others, Cymerint learned more from his father as time passed.

- It was brought up in phases almost.

So there were times where he wouldn't talk about it.

As he got older, he would talk about it more than when I was younger.

So we would walk, he would talk, or he would tell me something I didn't hear before, and then it just, it hit me.

But he'd say to me on some of these walks, he'd go, "Jeffrey, you could write a story about my life."

So I am, my father was a Holocaust survivor, and from Ostrava to then Stella Visa, Poland, Germany invaded Poland, started the war.

And after that they were moved to, they were, they were moved out to the Stella Visa Ghetto, which was an, it was a chemical and pharmaceutical plant.

And him and his brothers worked at the plant with my grandfather.

And what they did is they created opioids, but instead of testing 'em on, on animals, they tested 'em on the Jews in the camp.

They were there from 39 to 41.

41, they closed down the camp, and then he was taken by cattle car to Auschwitz.

My aunt at that point, Paula, she had a 4-year-old baby boy.

They miraculously made it to Auschwitz.

And they were separated at that point.

And my aunt was holding onto the baby.

They were trying to take the baby away from my aunt, and she was holding on the baby with all her might, and she didn't see the other car come and shoot 'em both.

After that, my grandmother, grandfather, and the youngest uncle I had, Morris, were told to take a refreshing shower, which killed them.

- [Narrator] Cymerint explains, telling his father's story was something that had to happen.

- I knew I had to do it, like I had to say it.

I had to tell people.

What I want other generations of my family to remember is the kind of person he was, what he went through, what he went through, and how he treated people, with kindness and respect.

- Following the war, many Holocaust survivors found ways to move to the United States, and Michigan became a new home for thousands.

The Zekelman Holocaust Center's Director of Education Katie Chaka Parks said about 4,000 Holocaust survivors settled in the state.

- Many Holocaust survivors are drawn, or were drawn to Michigan because the industry, because they had family members here.

For so many after the Holocaust, a third uncle twice removed, anybody that was family was somebody that you were going to try to become in contact with.

- My uncle's family was here, my uncle Simon, Aunt Lucia, my cousin Johnny, though, they were here, he was born in '51, I think in Germany, and they came here.

And then my dad met him here in '56, married, met my mom in '58, got married in '58, lived 47 years.

That's how my father got here.

But I had like a fairytale childhood.

You know, there was a great neighborhood, great kids.

I'm still friends with the kids that I grew up with.

It was a wonderful childhood.

And in that part of it, you know, didn't necessarily make it less wonderful.

I was able to do stuff with my father that he never did.

My dad didn't have a bar mitzva 'cause the war.

So he had it with me.

- Often explains how her family also ended up in Michigan.

- But before the war, my father remembered that his grandmother used to write letters to cousins in Detroit asking for help.

Well, after the war, they were in London and they thought they were trying to think of the name, they weren't sure, and they sent a letter to and put on it, Hirschman, that was the name they remembered, Detroit, Michigan.

That's it.

And they just put the letter in the mail.

And about a month later, the cousins that were in Detroit somehow got the letter, sent them back a letter asking for more details.

And they connected like that.

And they said, if you come to Detroit, you'll have a family.

You'll have all the food you want and please come.

And I think I'm here because of salami, but it was a wonderful family of cousins who were so welcoming.