'Compartmentalization' is a type of psychological defense mechanism where a person has very conflicting values and/or behaviors and keeps them separate in their mind in order to avoid discomfort. An example would be a man who beats his wife and kids and yet otherwise appears to be a pillar of the community. While the term is never used in "The Flat", compartmentalization is a HUGE theme throughout this very unusual film.

Aron Goldfinger made this documentary (using simple equipment) about his grandparents. It seemed when his grandmother died in her late 90s, the family began taking all of the old woman's things out of the apartment she had shared with her husband for many years in Tel Aviv, Isreal. During this process, something very strange turned up--a collection of photos and correspondences between the grandparents (the Tuchlers) and the von Mildensteins back in Germany. What made this so strange? Well, the Tuchlers were Jews who left Germany to avoid the Holocaust and Mr. von Mildenstein was a high Nazi official! In fact, although his own family today didn't know it (they thought he was a reporter), von Mildenstein actually hired Adolf Eichmann (one of the major architects of the 'final solution') and later worked for Josef Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry--and yet, as I said above, the Tuchlers and von Mildensteins remained friends and even visited each other in the years AFTER WWII! Yet, Mrs. Tuchler's own mother was killed by the Nazis! Wild, weird and a bit sad---this is a very unusual film that will pique your curiosity. Overall, a very intriguing little film indeed!

Arnon Goldfinger's most recent documentary The Flat (best documentary awards at the Jerusalem and Haifa film festivals) starts as a typical family story. A few weeks after the director's grandmother dies the family starts looking into the things accumulated in her Tel Aviv flat. The apartment is full of objects gathered through a full life, and as it gradually empties and light starts penetrating the shady corners, details from a hidden past start to emerge. As many other immigrants coming from Europe Gerda and Kurt Tuchler had gathered not only things from a past time and an old country, but also photos and documents of a life that brought them from the Berlin between the two wars to Palestine which was to become the State of Israel. Soon we learn that the Tuchlers seemed to be the kind of immigrants who kept not only memories and nostalgia, but a strong attraction and relationship with the old country. An intriguing story completely unknown to the third generation starts to uncover from the drawers and boxes left in the flat – photos, letters, newspapers from Nazi Germany and one of the strangest coins that ever existed, with a Magen David on one side and a swastika on the other. The Tuchlers were friends with a family of high Nazi dignitaries named von Mildenstein, they traveled with them to Palestine after the Nazis came to power and before settling here definitively, and the trip was described in details by Leopold von Mildenstein in the German press of the time under the title 'A Nazi travels to Palestine'. Despite the fact that the story was researched and mentioned in the German and Israeli press after the war, the family knows close to nothing about it. The film describes the process of gradual discovery which is not void of surprises, as they soon learn that the Tuchlers and the Mildensteins continued their friendly relations after the war, despite the fact that von Mildenstein seemed to have been quite an important figure in the Nazi regime, and related to the fate of the Jews (he was the one who recruited Eichman and preceded him in the position of responsible of the Jewish affairs). How much the Tuchlers knew about the activities of their German friend during the war and what these really were remains in part a mystery.

The film focuses on the process of gradual discovery which is for the author-director a trip in the past of his own family, a trip which will take him to Germany, to Berlin where he discovers remote relatives still living in the same area where his grandparents lived and to a series of meetings with the daughter of the Mildensteins. Dialogs between German and Jewish families who lived through the war and between their descendants are never easy, and they say a lot about how people who lived through the period relate to history, how they cope with the horrors of the war and of the Holocaust and how they passed these feelings to the coming generations. A strong similarity soon emerges, as in both families, the German one and the Jewish one, the same rule of silence seems to have been enforced, the past was kept secret and almost nothing told to the next generation. The children were raised not to ask questions, and their lives were completely disconnected from the history of their families. During Goldfinger's inquiry and film making both families are up for painful revelations and none of the second generation is really prepared to cope with role played by the high German functionary in the Nazi regime, or with the fate of the Jewish grand-grandmother left behind in Berlin and murdered in the Holocaust. It is the third generation (of the director) who is destined to ask the questions and get part of the answers. The mystery of the Tuchlers is not fully revealed and will probably never be completely. In one of the final scenes of the film the director and his mother are looking under a pouring rain for the grave of the grand-grandfather in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. They cannot find it, the place where it should be is covered by vegetation. The physical link with the past has completely vanished. The spiritual link of the old generation who could not tear themselves from the cultural and mentality relation with the old Europe even after the horrors of the Holocaust is the troubling secret investigated and revealed in part by this documentary.

The death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II is a well known fact. What is less known and generally not talked about is that there were Jews who, for whatever reason, collaborated with the Nazis. Though Jews were forbidden to join the Nazi Party, some were members of the ghetto police that helped round up Jews for deportation, some were known as Judenrats who, under Nazi orders, compiled a list of other Jews to be deported. Others edited pro-Nazi anti-Semitic magazines, turned in fugitive Jews hiding under false identities, or were informers and Kapos who served as Nazi enforcers in the concentration camps.

The issue of possible Jewish collaboration comes up in Amon Goldfinger's award-winning documentary The Flat, a story of three generations of Jews seeking to come to terms with uncomfortable events in their family history. A short time after their 98-year-old grandmother dies in Tel Aviv, the son Amon, who is also the writer and director of the film, together with his mother Hannah begin the process of going through mountains of the grandmother's accumulated belongings including books, clothes, antiques, letters, and photos. It is readily apparent that the grandparents, Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, who came to Palestine from Germany at the beginning of the war, retained a strong identity with the old country.

"They never leave their homeland behind," Amon remarks, noticing that Gerda's books are all in German and that neither of his grandparents ever learned Hebrew. He also discovers a strange two-sided coin that has a Star of David on one side, and a Nazi swastika on the other side. In looking through piles of letters, Amon is baffled by finding a Nazi propaganda newspaper, Der Angriff, containing an article titled "A Nazi in Palestine," showing pictures of his grandparents accompanied by SS member Baron von Mildenstein, and his wife during a trip to Palestine in 1934. After more searching, Amon finds that other letters and photos reveal that the Tuchlers maintained a friendship with the Mildensteins during and even after the war, even though Gerda's mother had been killed at Theresienstadt.

Mother and son travel to Berlin to meet with their remaining relatives and try to make some sense of the relationship their grandparents had with the von Mildensteins. They also travel to Wuppertal, Germany to engage in conversation with the Mildenstein's daughter Edda. In the beginning, the discussion is friendly but becomes more and more uncomfortable as Edda repeatedly denies that her father was ever a Nazi official. Unwilling or unable to confront deeply unpleasant truths, Hannah insists that she knows nothing about her parent's friendship with the Mildensteins, had never asked about it, and that children in her day were brought up to not ask any questions.

Though the truth is incomplete and still uncertain in its scope and detail, both Edda and Hannah remain in denial that anything out of the ordinary took place, unwilling to confront troubling aspects of the Jewish past. The Flat is short on dramatics but it serves as a potent reminder that, as author Andrew Sullivan has said, "When there's a challenge to our established world-view, whether from the absurd, the unexpected, the unpalatable, the confusing or the unknown, we experience a psychological force pushing back, trying to re-assert the things we feel are safe, comfortable, and familiar," or as Matthew Henry put it, "None are so blind as those who will not see."