I met Aviva Kempner years ago in her Washington, DC home, when she had already made documentaries for over 20 years. When we met again, about two weeks ago, at Lincoln Center’s Library for the Performing Arts, she was still making them. She was researching archival...
The Ciesla FOundation Presents:
A Pocketful of Miracles:
A Tale of Two Siblings
a film by Aviva Kempner,
edited by Lucia Fox-Shapiro
In A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings, filmmaker and Berlin born Aviva Kempner chronicles her mother Hanka and uncle Dudek Ciesla’s lives before and during World War II .
From their idyllic Jewish upbringing in Poland through their survival of the Holocaust to their tearful reunion after the war, this moving documentary follows the incredible story of these loving siblings and the incredible lives they built in America as painter Helen Ciesla Covensky and businessman and philanthropist David Chase.
The film had its world premiere on May 21 at the JxJ DC Jewish Film and Music Festival, held at the Edlavitch DCJCC where it won the Audience Prize for Best Documentary.
A Pocketful of Miracles had its European premiere at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival in June 2023 with director and producer Aviva Kempner and editor Lucia Fox-Shapiro in attendance. Started in 1995, it is the largest Jewish Film Festival in Germany. This was an extra special event for Aviva to return to the place of her birth – as the first Jewish-American child born in Berlin – to show this intimate film about her family. Additionally, her first film Partisans of Vilna had its world premiere in Berlin.
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From Top to Bottom:
1. David Chase and Helen Ciesla Covensky in 1945
2. Helen’s Wedding in February 1946
3. David and Helen in front of one of Helen’s paintings
A Tale of Two Siblings
Through their captivating Shoah Foundation testimonies from 1997 along with family archives, the documentary tells both siblings’ harrowing story of surviving the Holocaust, and their amazing reunion. After being raised in a loving, educated, and cultured household in Sosnowiec, Poland, their idyllic childhood was shattered by the German occupation of Upper Silesia. While the rest of the family was sent to Auschwitz, Hanka escaped her occupied hometown posing as Helena Matusik, a Polish Catholic, since her fair features hid her Jewish identity. She worked in an ammunition barrel factory near Stuttgart, Germany, with other young Polish women.
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Top Left: Dudek Ciesla
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Bottom Left: Hanka Ciesla
Captured Reunion
Upon finding out his sister is alive, David traveled from Feldafing Displaced Persons camp to the Schlachtensee camp where Helen was working as an UNRRA employee, the United Nations Relief Rehabilitation Association.
Director Aviva Kempner’s father, Harold Kempner (born Chaim Pokempner in Ponevezh, Lithuania) who immigrated to Pittsburgh in the 1920s, had previously served as a U.S. Army war correspondent in the Pacific. Because he was multilingual, he was sent to Berlin after the war’s end, traveling to Displaced Person camps to capture the lives of Holocaust survivors. When he visited Schlachtensee, a Jewish DP camp in the American sector of Berlin, he met Helen and David and published the story of the siblings’ reunion in The Grooper, the weekly newspaper from the Office of Military Government for Germany.
Case study
Journalism in WWII
This film covers an intimate timeline of the happenings of WWII both inside concentration camps and out. Using newsreels, archival footage, photographs, newspaper headlines, and radio broadcasts, this film could not be complete without the work of military journalists, like Harold Kempner, who captured this crucial moment in history.
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Contact The Ciesla Foundation
Based in Washington, D.C., The Ciesla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization founded in 1979 by filmmaker Aviva Kempner. Ciesla’s documentary films have received numerous honors and awards including top honors from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, a George Peabody Award, and the CINE Golden Eagle Award.
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