Event Details
Presented in commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Weber Siblings’ arrival in America!
***Now streaming on Netflix***
UnBroken is the true story of the seven Weber siblings, ages 6 to 18, who evaded capture and death and ultimately escaped Nazi Germany following their mother’s incarceration and murder at Auschwitz. Hidden in a laundry hut by a German farmer, the children spent two years on their own in war-torn Germany, emboldened by their father’s mandate that they always stay together. Separated from their father, the siblings were forced to declare themselves orphans in order to escape to a new life in America. That salvation would become what finally tore them apart. They would not be reunited for another 40 years.
Directed by Beth Lane, daughter of the youngest Weber sibling, the film builds its story from the voices of the surviving siblings themselves, recorded in their eighties and nineties, alongside Lane’s own journey retracing the family’s path across Germany. She walks the roads they walked. She stands in the village where they hid. She asks the questions her family spent a lifetime learning not to ask. The result is a work of deep personal excavation that also functions as a piece of historical urgency. The film won Best Documentary Premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival, became Oscar-qualified in February 2025, and has been seen by more than 1.5 million viewers since its Netflix debut on Yom HaShoah.
Legendary film critic and former co-host of At the Movies with Roger Ebert, Richard Roeper will lead a conversation with Holocaust Survivor Ginger Lane, the youngest of the Weber siblings whose story anchors the film, and her daughters, Jen Lane Landolt, Executive Producer and Treasurer of the Weber Family Arts Foundation, and the film’s Director, Producer and Writer, and President of The Weber Family Arts Foundation, Beth Lane, marking the anniversary of the siblings' arrival and resettlement in the United States. After emigrating in 1946, Alfons, Senta, Ruth, Judith, Renee, Gertrude, and Bela Weber established their lives in Hyde Park on Chicago's South Side, with the sponsorship of the Chicago Jewish Children's Bureau.
Free to the public.
Reservations required.