"Fifty years after the end of the war, with a despicable form of revisionism creeping out in the open, I felt it was high time to tell the story of the concentration camp survivors and tackle it, while it was still time, from a conniving, intimate viewpoint, that of a son and his mother. My mother, who acts out her own story here, talks about survival, the very taboo of survival. "How could I have survived ?" could have been the film's title. For some time now, the Shoah has been reduced to the status of a pure concept. I've deliberately gone against narrowly commemorative logic and trusted in film's power of representation. I wanted the survivors to be the living subjects of their own story. For some people, concentration camp survivors should be like the living dead of the archive footage. This fiction work where everything is true, this documentary where everything is staged, transgresses that unbearable rule. These Jews have been through hell, have resuscitated from among the dead and have returned to life. And I believe this lust for life to be the best possible personal revenge on the Nazi genocide. This film is above all a hymn to life that springs from the saddest song of death."
(Charles Najman)