As a curriculum vitae.
I was born on November 22, 1947 in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania, where Magyars was born but which was annexed to Romania in 1918 by the Treaty of Versailles. During the Second World War, part of this territory was again annexed to Hungary and the mass deportation of Jews in 1944 constituted a deep and lasting trauma in our consciences also in the years following the war.
Two of my uncles came back from Auschwitz, in snatches I learned things, but in my family as well as outside it was silence that was the rule. Nothing was done to know the sides of history or to promote a process of appeasement. For a long time I was overwhelmed by a confused feeling, of shame and mixed revolt.
For a long time, I deliberately stayed away from this phenomenon, all of whose customary appointments, even today, are partially or totally incorrect:
"Holocaust", "Shoah" and many others such as "The destruction of European Jews".
Trying to get involved after a long gestation, through an aesthetic and ethical gesture at the same time, by placing myself in both the field of objective knowledge and the plastic exercise specific to the cinematograph, was for me the object of a quest over four decades. Quest for meaning that led me to carry out a number of works, not all of which are dedicated to the search for a possible outcome of this original cataclysm that has imposed itself on me over the past fourteen years.
Today it seems to me that we had to wait for the age of a certain wisdom of cells, to reach an uncertain knowledge of finitude to address such a huge subject which resists the understanding of humans, resists "re-presentations".
When I was born, my mother, who was not deported, had enough milk to breastfeed several babies whose mothers, returnees from there, were in a dry place. I wish I could do the same.
Emil Weiss
