KRANKENBUCH is a documentary that tells the story of Sara Goldman and the book she wrote while being a prisoner at the Nazis’ camps Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.

In 1944, the Nazis were losing the war but they invaded Hungary. Almost all Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.

Sara traveled with her husband Joszef and her youngest daughter Ibi on a train from Hungary to Auschwitz.

Shortly after they arrived, Joszef was killed in the gas chambers. Sara took care of their little daughter in the worst ever concentration camp.

While the obvious thing would have been to steal something that would help one stay alive for another day, Sara decided to steal a notebook of sick prisoners (KRANKENBUCH) from a German nurse and an old pencil that she used to write poetry and a diary while held captive. Being caught would have been life threatening.

What makes a person write poetry just steps away from their death? What drives an artist to create without any hopes for their work to see the light of day? Needless to say, there was no hope for fame or money. Is this the purest form of art? The documentary would aim at shedding some light on these questions based on the comments of the interviewees.

On a trip to his homeland Budapest, Jorge Hartmann, Sara’s grandson, received an old notebook from his aunt Ibi: the original KRANKENBUCH. He knew that his grandmother, his aunt and his mother had survived the war, but he was not aware that Sara, his grandmother, had written a book during the holocaust.

A few years later, the notebook would see the light of day as a published book.