I’ve seen too much. What do I have to fear now?” – Pelagia Radecka, in ‘Among Neighbors’
The old woman shuffled along the dusty roads of the small town, leaning on her cane. She was followed by a film crew, with cameras rolling, and also by the chief rabbi of Poland and his staff, intent on revealing where bodies were buried. The memories that haunted her belonged to another time, but the silence surrounding them was very much alive.
For award-winning documentarist Yoav Potash, whose previous film Crime After Crime had premiered at Sundance and earned over a dozen awards, this moment, seemingly simple yet unbearably charged, became the turning point of a project he hadn’t intended to begin.
In 2014, he arrived in Poland to document a modest ceremony in a forgotten town. But what he left with was a profound mystery; a story that would take nearly a decade to unravel, a story of post-war violence.
The result is Among Neighbors, a documentary that unfurls like a whisper, gradually swelling into a powerful reckoning. What began with the rededication of a Jewish cemetery, in the small shtetl of Gniewoszów, evolved into something much darker and far-reaching: a story of love, silence, betrayal, and memory; about what it means to coexist and what happens when neighbors turn away. Above all, Among Neighbors is a film about how stories survive, and how, sometimes, the truth must be dragged into the light.
The story’s spark ignited with Dr. Anita Friedman, president of the Koret Foundation and a leader in Holocaust education in California, whose family hailed from Gniewoszów. In this once-thriving town, before the war Jews made up more than two-thirds of the population.
After the Holocaust, however, not just the people, but the very memory that they ever existed there, was obliterated. As part of her tireless efforts to restore Jewish heritage in Poland, Friedman helped orchestrate the rededication of Gniewoszów’s neglected Jewish cemetery.
“It was supposed to be a moment of dignity,” she recalls. “But what we found there… it was much more complicated.”
She contacted Potash, inviting him to document the ceremony. Potash relates: “I told Anita: ‘If you are schlepping me all the way to Poland, let me stay a few extra days and talk to people. Maybe there’s more to capture.’”
And there was.
Potash began filming interviews with elderly locals, the remaining voices from a town where all Jewish life had been decimated. Some spoke hesitantly, their words vague and evasive, while others shut down entirely.
But then, about a year after Potash’s initial visit to Gniewoszów, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw contacted him. They had received a letter from a woman who said she had lived in Gniewoszów and witnessed the murders of Jews after the war. This woman, Pelagia, expressing a desperate need to tell her story, stood out.
In the film, she lingers in the doorway, suspended between the darkness of her past and the light of an uncertain future. And her voice, once silenced by fear, soon becomes the heart of the film.
Wait, where's the town?
AS POTASH painstakingly pieced together testimonies, he realized that, visually, what was missing wasn’t just the absence of living witnesses, but the absence of the town itself. “There was so little left,” he says. “No footage, no surviving landmarks. Just memories, fading fast.”
To address this challenge, Potash and his team employed animation. It allowed the filmmakers to access Pelagia’s interior world and visualize her experiences. “Her story was so specific and so visual that I felt you need to give the audience a way to kind of follow it. We needed a visual to really help us feel it with her and go into her story,” Potash explains.
Initially, one animator was hired, but the project grew, requiring a team of 40 animators across four countries. Two teams were created: one in Poland for Pelagia’s story, and others in Spain, Mexico, and the United States for Ya’acov’s. “It was this way that allows one of us to relate to the story,” Potash says.
Then, one afternoon, flipping through the cemetery rededication program, Potash discovered a painting by Harry Lieberman, a Jewish folk artist born in Gniewoszów, who painted vibrant, surreal depictions of the Jewish life he had known there.
“He started painting in his eighties,” Potash says. “He had gone to a senior center to play chess, but no one was there. So he wandered into the art room. That’s where it all began.”
Lieberman’s vivid works, which gained him some artistic reputation, became a revelation to Potash. They brought the lost world of the shtetl to life in color, telling stories of joy, sorrow, love, and survival from a time almost erased. They mirrored the fragments of memory that Potash was uncovering, piecing together the broken past.
Then, serendipity struck. Lieberman’s granddaughters told Potash about a cousin, Ya’acov Goldstein, a survivor from Gniewoszów. “I couldn’t believe it,” Potash says. “He wasn’t just related to Lieberman. He was the story.”
Ya’acov had survived the war hidden by a family that was paid to shelter him in a cramped space, where he couldn’t stand. “He was kept like an animal,” Potash relates. “And yet, what saved him wasn’t just food or shelter; it was stories.”
Every day, a young girl would bring him books, his mental escape. “He told me that reading kept him sane,” Potash says. “It took him somewhere else. As a filmmaker, that hit me like lightning.” Ya’acov’s experience underscored the profound human need for stories, even in unimaginable isolation and fear.
Ya’acov’s testimony joined Pelagia’s to form the emotional heart of the film, a complex journey through suffering and survival. As Potash learned, it wasn’t just Nazi cruelty that shaped his story, but also the complicity of some non-Jewish residents who chose to look away, and the complex motivations of those who offered help, sometimes with conditions.
AMONG NEIGHBORS is more than a documentary; it’s a painful reckoning with history, grappling with the silence that follows violence. It’s a film about the hidden cruelties that continued long after the war ended, and the courage required to confront those truths, even when it feels like ripping open old wounds.
The silence in Gniewoszów, born of fear and perhaps denial, allowed these post-war atrocities to remain buried for decades, compounding the initial trauma with abandonment and injustice for the few who returned or remembered.
“I didn’t want to make a standard documentary,” Friedman says. “I wanted something beautiful, something magical. Because that’s how you reach young people – and their hearts.” Her vision was to create a film that transcended dry historical facts and connected with audiences emotionally, fostering empathy.
Ultimately, the stories in Among Neighbors speak to the human tendency to look away, to stay silent, and to live in the shadows. But they also speak to the power of memory, our responsibility to bear witness, and to carry these stories forward, ensuring that the experiences of people like Pelagia and Ya’acov are never forgotten.
As Potash reflects: “Making a documentary like this is like chasing butterflies. You don’t always know where to stand. You just hope that, if you wait long enough, the truth will come to you.” The process demanded patient observation, building trust, and allowing the story to unfold organically, even down unexpected and painful paths.
In a world that often forgets, the voices of Pelagia Radecka and Ya’acov Goldstein, preserved through this film, are a testament to the horror, pain, and courage that continue to echo. The silence may have lasted for decades, but it has been broken, ensuring that the truth – however painful – can never be silenced again.
“You haven’t heard this story,” Potash says. “But once you do, you can’t ‘unhear’ it.”
Pelagia said, “I’ve kept this in my heart for too long. I had to let it out.”
Now, through this film, she has. And we – all of us – are her neighbors.
The film will be broadcast on YesDocu and STING+ starting on Wednesday, following the official commemoration ceremony broadcast. It will also be screened at the cinematheques in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Israel Museum, and Lev Cinema in Ra’anana during the week.