THE STORY BEHIND HABERMANN

1937, a small village in Sudetenland. The Saw Mill owner Habermann is the biggest employer in his village. He employs Germans and Czechs alike and is deeply attached to the country where both nationalities lived for centuries. He becomes married to Jana, a young and beautiful Czech woman, who is half Jewish. Although Habermann is not interested in politics or ideology, he and his family will be steamrolled by the insanity of World War II…

History of Czechoslovakia and Germany: Two communities with a common past Sudetenland is an area of Bohemia in the Czech Republic adjacent to the German border, allocated to the new state of Czechoslovakia after World War I. The Sudetenland later became a major source of contention between Germany and Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 participants at the Munich Agreement, yielding to Adolf Hitler, transferred it to Germany. Six months after this agreement, Hitler invaded rest of Czechoslovakia. Shortly after the annexation of the Sudetenland, the Jews living therewere widely persecuted. As elsewhere in Germany, many synagogues were set on fire and numerous leading Jews were sent to concentration camps. In later years, the Nazis transported up to 300,000 Czech and Slovak Jews to concentration camps where 90% of them were killed or died. After World War II the Sudetenland was restored to Czechoslovakia, which expelled two and a half million of the German inhabitants and repopulated the area with Czechs.