An exploration of the relationship between objective history and personal memory, HOUSE OF THE WORLD examines the Holocaust through the eyes of survivors and their descendants. This film establishes important links between photographs and tombstones, parents and children, ephemeral and solid efforts to grasp at continuity in the face of devastation.

Tracing the history of an old family photograph, the filmmaker, Esther Podemski, travels to Poland with a group of her parents' contemporaries. Fifty years after surviving the Holocaust, the elders return to their hometown, Poddebice, to conduct a memorial service in the Jewish graveyard. They find an empty field, marked by a lone tablet, the only testament to the history of this place to survive the wartime desecration.

In the nearby city of Lodz, we meet Layb Pradskier, custodian of the immense, crumbling Jewish cemetery. Here we discover that all that remains of the once several hundred thousand strong Jewish population of Lodz is a handful of aging Holocaust survivors. Lodz, and indeed all of Poland, exemplifies the success of the Holocaust; Poland is all but totally cleansed of Jews.

A montage of historical images, snapshots, and archival music, together with new location footage, HOUSE OF THE WORLD moves between personal accounts of Jewish Poland and historic events. Assuming the audience's familiarity with the horrors of the period, the film focuses on the lasting repercussions of the genocide. There are no didactic pronouncements, rather an acknowledgment that these survivors have absorbed the trauma and achieved a psychological distance.

As the story ends, the narrator realizes that by coming to the graveyard in Poddebice to memorialize the dead, she is repeating her own father's first act after he was freed from Auschwitz in 1945. It was he who constructed the monument in the cemetery. In her father's photographed face, as in the faces of other survivors, there is recognition, a memory, a wisdom that carries across the generations. There is, even in the absence of a home for the dead, a homecoming, a HOUSE OF THE WORLD.

"Spellbinding! This film shows how the Judaic injunction to remember the past and care for the graves of one's ancestors remains an imperative even today."—Library Journal

"Highly Recommended! Powerful! Using stylized archival footage, sparing interviews, and a smooth montage, this elegy for Polish Jews encourages viewers to 'inhabit' the stories eloquently told here."—Booklist

"A very powerful, yet understated film... providing essential focus to the value of memory. HOUSE OF THE WORLD can be used effectively in college-level classes about the Holocaust, Jewish Studies, and Psychology... Highly Recommended!" —Educational Media Reviews Online