What People Are Saying about “Never Forget to Lie”

Marzynski retraces his early years, chronicling his parents’ secular lives in prewar Warsaw, their confinement in the ghetto, his escape to the Aryan side of the wall, and his journey to the Catholic orphanage where he embraced life as a dutiful altar boy. With an artful, empathic hand, he tells the stories of other survivors as well, capturing their childhood memories as they grapple with the trauma and loss of their early lives. There are uplifting scenes, too, of Jewish culture and heritage being celebrated in the streets of Krakow. – Penny Schwartz, JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

I’ve never seen anything so raw and unnerving as the riveting description in the courtyard and passageway of the woman who acted out her story as her 11-year old self and pleaded for her life from a German soldier. The camerawork is unflinching and at the same time unobtrusive in the face of such emotional devastation. -Ed Horn, cinematographer.

Marzynski brings his heroes to staircases, yards, and basements of buildings in the Warsaw ghetto, where they recognize places from which they fled. He follows them while telling his own story of escape, because he is one of them. On the building walls there are silhouettes of mothers and fathers, who they saw for the last time. This is their catharsis: a return to their childhood. – Wilchelm Dichter, writer.

Those who were saved from destruction, for many years forced themselves to forget the past in order to be able to live. Marzynski, who worked for a long time as a documentary film maker, himself a survivor, knows how to pull out the stories of others of his generation. -Tadeusz Lubelski, film scholar.

Marzynski is one of the greatest American documentary filmmakers yet to be discovered by the public. – Gerald Perry, film critic & historian.