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Secret
Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers During WWII,
a Documentary Written and Co-Produced by Toby Appleton Perl
’80, to Open in New York on May 16th For Its U.S. Theatrical
Premiere
 New
York, NY, April 28-- Secret Lives: Hidden Children &
Their Rescuers During WWII, a documentary written and
co-produced by alumna Toby Appleton Perl ’80, will open
at the Quad Cinema in New York on May 16th for its U.S. theatrical
premiere. Previously screened at film festivals in New York,
Aspen, Seattle and North Carolina, the film will open in Los
Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Denver in the
coming months and will be shown on HBO/Cinemax in the fall.
The film tells the story of a small number of Jewish children
who were saved from the Nazis by non-Jews who, at great risk
to their own lives, did everything from bringing Jewish children
into their families under false identities to securing hiding
places in closets, attics or hastily-dug bunkers.
Perl was approached to work on the project by the film’s
Academy-Award winning director Aviva Slesin. It was a topic
close to both of them: Perl is the daughter of two Holocaust
survivors and Slesin was herself a hidden child. Slesin was
nine months old when she was smuggled out of a Lithuanian
ghetto and hidden by a Christian couple for two-and-a-half
years until her mother, the only member of her family to survive
the Holocaust, returned from a concentration camp to be reunited
with her.
"Each succeeding generation - the children of survivors,
the grandchildren - is a little farther removed from the dead.
But the reverberations from that time continue to resound,"
Perl said.
Perl and Slesin started with research to locate the former
hidden children, rescuers and parents. They developed a series
of specific questions to ask the subjects, resulting in hours
and hours of interview footage. Working from those interviews,
Perl edited the film together, filling in the gaps in the
narratives and providing the necessary historical context.
"We did not interview historians. We didn’t want
experts. We wanted the stories of children, rescuers and parents
themselves," Perl said.
Previous to working on Secret Lives, Perl co-produced
Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans, an
independent documentary that was broadcast nationally in April
2002 on PBS. Perl was also previously a staff producer for
Colossal Pictures, a special effects and animation company.
A Political Science-turned-Art History major while at Barnard,
Perl entered the film world from an indirect route. She began
her career doing work in political media consulting, doing
research for candidates’ campaigns and working on their
commercials.
"From working on commercials, I found that I was much
more interested in working with everyday people and their
issues than politicians per se. That led to an interest in
documentary filmmaking."
Perl’s smaller film projects include researching and
producing a number of independent educational shorts and series
on topics ranging from democracy to AIDS.
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