One thing I learn from Hannukah is how quickly everything can change, can flip from day to day.  Look at this picture, for instance:

These are German-Jewish soldiers from World War I celebrating the holiday.  There were about 100,000 Jewish soldiers serving in Germany then.  12,000 died for their country.  

The guy I’m researching whose portrait will be in this exhibit of the work of Shalom Sebba was one of them. 

Kurt Gerron.  

He was wounded twice in WWI and returned to serve, finishing his medical degree in between.  But right after the war he decided he could cure more people through entertainment and comedy than medicine.  After 94 odd movies he was involved in, and countless plays and caberets, the Nazis caught up with him and he ended up in Auschwitz after having been forced to make a propaganda film about Thereisenstadt.    

When I first started looking him up, there were a number of films, photographs and recordings of his on youtube, but recently as I tried to put together a little monograph in Hebrew to fit in with the exhibit, I couldn’t find usable works.  Everything that was left was copyrighted, and I had to use material I had from previous lectures and articles.  The monograph is out but I now wonder whether i should have done it in English for a wider audience.