Picking Up the Pieces

Picking Up the Pieces: A Tale of Two Siblings’ Survival, Love and Achievements focuses on the World War II stories of director Aviva Kempner’s mother, Hanka Ciesla, who passed as a Polish Catholic within Germany, and uncle, Dudek Ciesla, who survived Auschwitz, Picking Up the Pieces: A Tale of Two Siblings’ Survival, Love and Achievements is a family memoir.  The documentary will trace the idyllic, pre-war life of their Jewish-Polish family in Soseniewc, Poland and show how they survived their harrowing wartime experiences, found one another after liberation in Berlin, and achieved their respective success stories upon reaching the shores of America. This intimate documentary will also include the story of Kempner’s father, Harold Kempner, an immigrant to America who captured many of the post-Holocaust stories in Berlin after the war’s end as a military government journalist.