Imagine everything that is dear to you in life has been lost. Imagine your world destroyed. And imagine if you can find the strength to move ahead. In 2011 the Austrian director Paul Rosdy released his film The Last Jew from Drohobych. The documentary chronicles the astonishing path of one man’s journey through the treacherous history of Eastern Europe. Alfred Schreyer was born in 1922 in Drohobych, a thriving town then in Poland, and now in Western Ukraine. His mother Leontina was a pharmacist. His father Benno had a doctorate from the University of Zurich and was a chief chemist at an oil refinery. Both were very musical and Alfred learned to play the cello. Later, in high school, Alfred was a student of the world-renowned writer and painter Bruno Schulz. Just like Alfred, Bruno Schulz spent most of his life in Drohobych. Schulz’s acclaimed books, The Street of Crocodiles and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, both now translated into many languages, can still be felt and seen on every street corner in Drohobych. The outbreak of the Second World War however turned Drohobych upside down. Yet life continued. Alfred graduated from high school in 1940, during […]
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