Devising how to depict a documentary about the artistic process undergone by a woman that was unknown, who was sent to the extermination camp in Auschwitz where she wrote a poetry book requires a perspective that encompasses a number of artistic parameters but also some ethical standards.

Given that the main character of this story is not amongst us anymore, we will need to understand her psyche, embark with her on an imaginary journey across the places she went through, visit the scenes that are still standing but look quite differently from when she saw them. This is a research process, a journey that poses no threat to us under current circumstances.

Therefore, we will need to interview different people to tell us who Sara was: close relatives, her daughter Ibi in Budapest and her grandchildren.

bi, who is now 94, lived this entire process with her mother and tells us about her experience. What they went through, the uncertainty of not knowing whether they would ever see the rest of their family again, her eldest sister, her father; whether they would ever go back to Hungary; whether they would survive forced labor, hunger, cold.

Sara’s grandson, Jorge Hartmann, tells the story of his grandmother, his mother and his aunt. He explains that during a visit to Budapest, his aunt Ibi gave him an old notebook: the original KRANKENBUCH. He then retells the transcription, translation and publishing process of such treasure.

We will also talk to some experts who will give us an idea of how Europe looked like back in the day. We have to understand the interesting story of Hungary back in 1944, with the Head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department, Adolf Eichmann, and his time in Argentina after the war. In addition, at that time, there were many foreign diplomats in Hungary that saved more than 10,000 Jews because a number of international ghettos were under the jurisdiction of other countries. Some of these prominent people are Ángel Sanz-Briz from Spain, Giorgio Perlasca from Italy, Raoul Wallenberg from Sweden, Carlos Branquinho from Portugal and Carl Lutz with Friedrich Born from Switzerland.

A psychology expert will explain how a human being’s inner strength works in order for art to prevail over the world’s barbaric acts.

A holocaust expert tells us about the many Jewish writers that wrote about Auschwitz and stresses the relevance of Sara’s Notebook as being the only one written inside a concentration camp during the war.

The film will showcase different artistic angles (discussed in detail under Artistic Proposal), namely: interviews to relatives and experts filmed in 4K; these interviews will focus on micro gestures and on the story that the interviewee retells; inserts in black and white from real holocaust survivors reciting Sara’s poems; archive material in a cartoon format that will be realistic but very poetical, and finally, images of the cities and concentration camps filled with beauty, slow motion and overhead cameras.

The editing process will dynamically combine these different visual segments, merging an overhead take of the currently empty and almost wrecked Auschwitz with a similar cartoon image of the concentration camp in 1944, when it was known as the death row, crowded with prisoners, Nazi officers and gas chambers in operation. The same resource will be used to combine Budapest in our days with the Budapest of the Second World War.

The idea is that the survivors reciting poems and field experts and relatives that will be interviewed come from many parts of the world, in order to show survivors that currently live in different countries and speak different languages but have a shared past with Sara as survivors of such atrocity.

Experts will also add an element of universality and authenticity to the story.