Eight years prior to the Oct. 7, 2023 antisemitic attack by Hamas and other Gazans on the Nova Concert in Israel, Berkeley-based filmmaker Yoav Potash had begun researching and filming a different story about antisemitism. It explored the nature of the antisemitism engulfing Poland leading up to, during, and after World War II. Potash’s documentary, “Among Neighbors” explores the fraught relations between Christian and Jewish neighbors in a small Polish shtetl, where the Nazi occupiers were not the only purveyors of antisemitic attacks on the town’s Jews. A young Christian girl, Pelagia Radecka, witnesses the murder of a Jewish family whose son, her friend, managed to escape the slaughter. What happens when 70 years later, the filmmakers learn that the girl-now-woman of 80, wants to reveal what she saw?
On Oct. 15, 2025, Toba Singer sat down at Berkeley’s Strawberry Park Hidden Café with filmmaker Yoav Potash to discuss his making of “Among Neighbors,” a film that takes a giant step beyond the boundaries of the traditional Holocaust documentary.
Toba Singer: You majored in English. What moved you to navigate in the direction of showing not telling?
Yoav Potash: I’ve had a storyteller’s inclination and desire to tell stories since I was a little kid, and that gift. I remember being encouraged by my teachers and classmates at a stage when we were making little booklets, bits of fiction with construction paper, and our writing and drawings. I had a fan club in third grade, so my interest carried over to studying English and then Creative Writing when I was in college. It was rooted in a longstanding fascination with stories and movies as a storytelling form. When I was an English major, I found my way into film, not a large leap in some ways because it’s just a different storytelling form. In other ways, it’s a huge leap because you suddenly have to collaborate rather than work on your own. You work with all kinds of technology that’s continually evolving. Telling a story, literally becomes a production, and figuratively, is a major production.
At the same time, I’m still a writer at heart, and this film gave me a chance to express that creative writing side because it’s not a traditional documentary. Every animated shot first existed as a sentence or a paragraph that I wrote to try to describe what we wanted to do. And because I embraced the magical realism, the animations were not simply a reenactment tool. They were my creative way of putting you inside the memories of the person being interviewed. How do we find a visual metaphor for what this person is talking about, searching for how to create a visual metaphor for what the interviewee —either an eyewitness or a Holocaust survivor—was saying, and so it became a collaborative creative writing process with them. For example, when Yakov recalls how, in his words, his mother kept his baby brother very close under her wings, I knew, OK, let’s write that as a visual metaphor that we can return to throughout the film. Any moment of intense separation or reunion between mother and children will have wings. How to use the wings became a creative writing exercise for me.
TS: Your previous projects focused on stories that were here in the United States. What was it like to take on a subject that is not only international in scope but rooted in three different countries, where you worked with creatives in two additional countries, and the project took 10 years to complete? What keeps you in harness, knowing that those central to the story are reaching the end point in their lives?
YP: Two of the biggest challenges were that it unfolded over a decade from first setting foot in Poland to returning to Poland 10 years later for the film’s world premiere, and that about half the film is in Polish, and I had to work with translators wrangling with Polish. What kept me going was my belief in the story and how captivated I was by it. I just trusted that. If it spoke to me deeply, then eventually, when people finally get to see it after a decade, it will do the same to them. And then finally, there’s the mental trick that we artists play on ourselves. We convince ourselves when we start that it’s only going to take one year, and then a year later, we’re convincing ourselves it’s only going to take one more year. And then after five years, you think that the finish line is just around the corner. And of course, I did that with no idea I would be embarking on a 1000-year adventure until I found myself at the end of that road.
TS: How did you assemble the translation and transcription teams?
YP: That part wasn’t hard: just finding individuals who are fluent in both English and Polish who care enough about this story and have enough familiarity with the history to do a good job. There is a significant number of Poles who care about their nation’s Jewish past who work in that area, either as historians or genealogists.
TS: Describe the temptations or problems you resolved so intriguingly and seamlessly by integrating the element of animation? Talk about finding and engaging with animation artists from Spain, Mexico, and Poland to bring the animation into harmony with the other media, and any lessons for future work in that.
YP: Finding the animation and building those teams—it was a challenge to use animation that was very respectful of the history and the fact that this is a true story. People love the animation in this film and applaud it. And yet, I think, the animation could have easily gone wrong, depending on how the audience felt about it. It could have been taken as “They had cartoons in a Holocaust story!” I could see immediately how that could be viewed as offensive.
TS: Do you mean in the way that some thought that “Life is Beautiful” shouldn’t have had its comic moments?
YP: Yes. And you wouldn’t want to do anything silly. With the animators, I emphasized that we wanted to use a pretty realistic style in how they drew humans. We especially didn’t want cartoonish faces or anything like that. And then we found other techniques such as keeping most of the animation in black and white so that it would cut well with archival footage from the time period, referencing or in some cases integrating that footage in a strong way. It was all hand-drawn, hand-shaded, and painted. It took some searching to find animators who could handle the workload. The film is 60% animation, relying on hundreds of shots and a lot of care put into each one. When I was experimenting with adding animation as a test, one person was creating it, and he did a good enough job that we were able to show it to a test audience here in Berkeley. They loved it, and so I kept charging ahead. But that poor guy was soon in way over his head and had to step back. And then I had to find studios to work with. We assembled two international teams. That’s where the five countries come in, with one team in Poland animating Pelagia’s story, which was appropriate because she is Polish. They could interpret every nuance of her references, history, and language. And then for Yakov’s story, I first found an individual in Spain. The animator in Spain was feeling overwhelmed. Luckily, I was then able to find Voxel, an animation company based in Mexico that could work with him and offer more labor support.
TS: So, the joint teams not only pulled it together, but pulled it off!
YP: Yes, and with me directing them from here. So many people have worked on this film, and I pushed them all, and maybe a little bit past what they felt was their limit.
TS: How did that work, long distance?
YP: I give a lot of notes and am picky. When I’m sent a rough animation, I might respond saying, “OK, this is good, but we want to lift her head a little differently than how it’s drawn here,” and maybe make my own doodle to show what I mean.
TS: So you were not only directing the film, but the animation as well?
YP: Absolutely, every frame of it, to where I drove some people a little nuts. Nobody jumped off a bridge, and I think everyone is proud of what we accomplished. We wanted this to be the story of something coming together. What I wanted to do differently was to approach the subject with a new story to tell, a different story in a different telling. I recognize that all audiences have some resistance to seeing a “Holocaust” film that we all feel—Jewish and non-Jewish—we have seen enough of to understand the suffering, and don’t want to go through the pain of watching a certain type of horrific footage. I felt such resistance or reluctance. But when I visited this town and found out that Holocaust survivors were murdered there six months after World War II was over, during what was vaunted as peacetime, that landed totally differently for me because it’s really not a Holocaust story anymore. That’s a post-Holocaust story. It’s something else that shifts, not only the time frame of what we’re talking about, but poses the question, “Who’s responsible?” It was not the Germans at that point; it was people whom the victims knew from even before the war. That was shocking to me and felt like a significant enough difference. It merited exploration and was an aspect of this history that I had not seen in other films. I had not seen films that shifted the focus from what the Germans did to the Jews to what the relationships were between Poles and Jews before the war, during the war, and after the war had ended.
TS: And, as it turns out, Poland is not the only place where those relations followed that trajectory. So the viewer is forced to ask, “What’s this all about if there aren’t any Germans?”
YP: When you have neighbors of two different faiths living side by side, there can be a mix of good relations, bad relations, or no relations. And then sometimes, historical circumstances create an opportunity for one side to dominate or expel the other. That can become a deadly.
TS: Then the question poses itself of whether Jews are defined by a faith alone, or by the place history has determined that they occupy in class society, ever shifting according to what strictly defined role social classes force them to play. It’s less about what religion they practice than it is the conditions that confer the social standing that places them between a rock and a hard place. So you were trying to work with this community in an integrated way to explore the different responses that surfaced: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
YP: A theme that runs through the film is to view history in a warts-and-all way rather than cherry-pick which parts of it make our nation or people look good, while ignoring the rest. Another element in that theme is that these particular histories are complex. We tend to like nice, simple stories where this person was a hero, they saved their Jewish neighbors, but in a story like Yakov’s, we find a Polish family who kept him hidden. In that sense, we see them as heroic. They risked their own lives to save his life, but kept him in a wooden box for two years, with no sunlight and so little food that the so-called care he received ended up physically crippling him. They placed him in such cramped conditions for two years that the way they saved his life was inhumane. And, they were doing it for money. They weren’t doing it for humanitarian reasons. They were doing it because they were being paid. So, you stop and ask, “Were these people heroic or were they taking advantage of people in a time of dire need to feather their own nest? The truth lies somewhere in between.
TS: What’s interesting to me is that Yakov’s circumstances were not too much of a leap from today’s foster parenting, where a couple is paid to take in foster children, and it comes to light that there is abuse. Then they are released to the streets at 18 with no orientation whatsoever except that life is precarious. |
YP: There’s an impulse to think, oh, a foster parent. How heroic, how selfless! They’re getting paid.
TS: In the “good” column, you have the principal protagonist, Yanek, who has had a survival manifesto written into his bones, but the resonance of his determination, reflected in others, inspired an enormous generosity of spirit under circumstances intended to result in the opposite. Can you speak about those who rose to meet and surpass what they and your team hoped they would accomplish as they assumed their roles in the project?
YP: I’ve heard many stories of Holocaust survivors returning to their old neighborhood towns, only to find that in the immediate aftermath of the war, their return provoked a reaction among those who had been their lifelong neighbors, which almost made it seem that they had seen a ghost walking toward them. Many of them carried a picture they’d painted in their minds of all the Jewish neighbors who were dead, exterminated by the Germans. So, when one, two, or three managed to survive and come back, they were at a loss to react. Even the good-hearted among the local non-Jewish population felt as if these were The Walking Dead, and it threw them for a loop. The best-intentioned could take a deep breath, get over their bewilderment, and hit upon a nice gesture, such as asking, “Are you hungry?” Many, it seems, remained stuck in feeling overwhelmed by what they saw. In the case of others, their thoughts immediately sped from astonishment to fear as they considered who was living in that Jewish person’s house now, or that Jewish family’s other property, and what would happen now? That reaction made many feel threatened or worse. Some who had been their friends before the war and were aware of what the less-compassionate neighbors were saying and doing, warned them, “You’d best leave because if you stay, someone’s going to kill you.” It’s a horrible thing to say, but also truthful, and was kind of a favor to those who could hear and heed it, because some heard it, but some did not. They were murdered. Others were not warned and simply killed.
TS: Pelagia Radecka found her courage. It would have been foolish for her to act on impulse and reveal her plan while the thugs who were threatening returning Jews were still in play. It would have been premature and it would have been reckless. On the other hand, feeling compelled to act, the challenge becomes knowing the right time to do so. Once the men who had been threatening and killing had died, she seized the moment and did what her conscience dictated, putting her whole heart into it.
YP: Pelagia is a woman who experienced intense trauma in her own right, when as a 15-year-old, she witnessed the murders of a Jewish family that she cared deeply about. She wished she’d had some way to aid or protect them, but was powerless to stop armed young men from killing them. Despite that, I’m sure she felt guilt and profound remorse connected to that moment in her personal history, and carried that trauma throughout her life. She had a gut instinct that if the boy survived, he would want to know what she saw and that her testimony would be important to him. She needed to know for herself because she could never be at peace not knowing if he had made it out alive, after surviving what she had witnessed.
She didn’t know where he was, and for all she knew, he could have been killed the following day by those people or someone else. All her life, she had been searching for him in a quiet, unobtrusive way. She did not want the killers to get wind of what she was up to. So it wasn’t until she was 85 years old, 70 years after witnessing the murderers, and after those who committed them had passed away, that she could come forward to tell her story, no holds barred. Fortunately for me, her hair was on fire to tell it. We had nearly finished the movie, and so it meant going back to square one, and that was the big second rebirth, because the first was in the very beginning, when I traveled to the town, ostensibly to film a ceremony at the cemetery with the Friedmans. I began talking to the old people, and found out about the murders directly from them, and realized that this town has a dark secret. What an important story! That’s what got me over that first hump of reluctance to tell “another” Holocaust story.
The third rebirth came three years later, exactly a year after beginning my Polish adventure. That’s when Pelagia Radecka and I crossed paths for the first time, one year after I began filming. When she found out that the killers had passed away, she came out with the story she’d kept to herself for a lifetime. It was what made me take the big decision to use animation because her memories were so specific and so vivid. I realized that using only archival footage, her interview, and mood shots of the town as it looks today, wasn’t going to get the audience all the way into her stories of sneaking into the Jewish ghetto during the war, so that her mother could barter with the starving Jews in the ghetto so that she could try to check on Yannick, the boy that she knew and cared so much about and had a crush on. Look at all that was at work here.
TS: And what was at work when she decides to hold off until the thug guys are dead, without knowing when and if they were going to die in her lifetime? Her hedging her bets could be interpreted to mean she was a coward and should have just ignored them and plowed ahead with her story. It adds to her authority as a witness, as a credible person, so serious about this that she thought out the reveal so carefully. She proceeded in a way that would offered the best chance of a victory or at least predicted better odds for one.
YP: Those killers did threaten her directly. She took their threats very seriously, and even the passage of time didn’t change her expectation about how they might respond if they found out she’d been talking about the crimes that she witnessed.
TS: What were the on-the-ground strategies you invoked to deal with that first challenge of the telling? The Friedmans had been chased out of town when they visited in 2004, warned that their family history research was off-limits.
YP: The Friedmans’ visit was nine years before I got involved. They traveled there as do many Jews who visit Poland to retrace family roots, as a Jewish heritage tour. In this case, it was Anita’s father’s town. They had gone there for Anita’s son Aaron, on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah, to learn about the grandfather he had never met, who had grown up there. They wanted to get a sense of this town, but very quickly were identified as Jews and though they were rudely forced to leave, they made a decision: We’re not going to let them do that to us again, and we are going to keep coming back. They left in that moment because of the individuals threatening them with increased violence, but they uncovered a way to keep coming back. They partly found it by building alliances with other people in Poland who work in the area of Jewish history and research, who came to the town with them, and also by learning who in the town is friendly enough to accompany them. They began to enjoy coming back and did so again and again. They demonstrated no interest in reclaiming property lost to their family. They weren’t there to make wild accusations. They just wanted acknowledgment of what had gone missing from their connection to this place.
TS: So, they pretty much had to read the room and take it as far as they could, at the same time explaining and educating. Nothing wrong with that!
YP: No, nothing wrong with that, at all.
TS: But you and the crew arrived when the legislation stating that Poland bears no responsibility for its collaboration with the German occupation had been passed, correct?
YP: No, the legislation was passed in 2018. I began filming in 2014. So, I was in the middle of making the film when the bill became law, and what it did for us was turn up the heat on the story we already knew. There was pressure on Pelagia. For decades, there had been pressure on her for to remain silent because the killers were still alive. That pressure continued even after they passed away. It took the form of an unspoken social code that nobody talks about this because it reflects badly on the town and the country, but at that point, she was willing to defy that code and tell the story. The government attempted to impose conditions that would send her to prison simply for revealing what she knew, telling the truth. With her and others like her, you have a ticking clock. She’s 85 when she begins to tell the story, and so who knows how long she has to finish it and for someone to care about, uplift, and share it? So, what the government did in 2018 became highly controversial. It only served to make this film and this particular story all the more vital.
TS: How did you maneuver around the obstacles, governmental and extra-legal?
YP: The advantage, when it takes so many years to make a film, is that most people don’t hear about it until you’re done. During the years in production, all people noticed was that this Jewish guy kept coming back with a camera. They didn’t know much about the specific story. There’s nothing to seize upon to prove that he has to be arrested because of such-and-such a clip, because nothing gets released until you’re finally done.
TS: Are you saying that discretion was the better part of valor under such conditions?
YP: I suppose so, but it’s just a practical consequence of what it’s like when you take five or ten years to make something. It’s very different from a print reporter who interviews someone, and within days, the reaction is immediate.
TS: What were the epiphanies? What were the returns that you hadn’t thought much about during the process? After all was said and done, what emerged from you?
YP: One thing I found through making this film was that it put me back in touch with a latent curiosity and affection that I had for what I consider The Lost World of Jewish Life, the particularities of being Jewish in a small town in Eastern Europe. It’s something many Jews have a nostalgia for, yet it’s strange to have a nostalgia for something you never actually experienced. Through our culture, that nostalgia comes into its own because we better understand that a play like “Fiddler on the Roof,” for example, is rooted not only in Sholem Aleichem’s lovely stories, but in a lived history, during which our great grandparents and great-great grandparents lived a life very much like what he writes about. It survives in the Yiddish expressions and words that we still use to this day, and that we’ve now infused into US culture. Words like “shlep” and “kvetch” are part of our lexicon because those were the words that we used in these little towns when we lived in them.
I’ve learned about myself through feedback from others. Making this film reawakened my curiosity and an affection for that era and lifestyle. It inspired me to want to use at least the first act of this film to make viewers aware, or remind them, that for hundreds of years, Poland, not Israel, not America, not New York City, not LA, and not Miami Beach, was the center of the Jewish world. Poland was where Jewish culture was being cultivated, where great rabbis wrote their tractates, debated, and Jewish law was written that determined and codified cultural practices. Poland was where Jewish arts, poetry, and literature were evolving, despite the Holocaust. The utter decimation of Jewish life in Poland and in Eastern Europe, we shouldn’t forget was also the decimation of centuries of a Jewish experience in those places, and if anything, that it was so annihilated, makes it all the more important to remember that period previous to its destruction and honor, celebrate, and acknowledge it as a substantial part of who we are. If we forget the centuries of a culturally enriching Jewish life, then, in a way, we do let Hitler win.
TS: Yes, and if Jewish life in Poland is lost to us, we are left with the thinnest ever volume of the Holocaust story to pass on. Given what you say about the gravitas of what developed in Polish Jewish culture, your approach to building the crew, artistic and technical, deserves special approbation. Would you describe how you went about assembling the team?
YP: Anytime I was in Poland, I needed to work with Polish colleagues, at first. It was quite minimal in the sense that I thought, well, I can operate the camera and run the sound equipment, and all I need is someone to help me with the language and to get around. But as the film became more complex, I began working with slightly larger crews. Because as producer, director, and editor, I was tracking many elements, I recognized that it would be valuable to let more people contribute and work with the team on the ground there. I met and collaborated with a variety of wonderful Polish cinematographers and other artists who, at least for part of this project, were also defying the Polish law and taking some risks. Once we were producing animation, those collaborations multiplied because every single shot in the animation is touched by a minimum of half a dozen people, with someone working on the rough animation, someone doing the final, someone doing the shading, someone creating the background, and someone putting it all together. It just kept growing, and I’m thankful for every single person who worked on this film or is now working on distribution and promotion. The layers expand outward as we add people.
TS: You’ve made several films, but in this one, there was the language to take into account, complicated by the, shall we call them, “extenuating circumstances”? Given the charged atmosphere, was it more difficult compared to earlier projects, to place your confidence in delegating authority?
YP: That’s one of the hardest things, to find that in yourself. I was always directing, giving instructions and notes, and feedback on work in progress, as well as the scenes that had been shot. Even if we couldn’t change them, giving the crew notes, such as “Next time, can you try to film it in this or that way?” There’s also the control I have over the filming and editing. Even if some footage didn’t quite put the focus where I had hoped, I could try to find bits and pieces that leaned in that direction and use those more than others. It’s a very iterative process when it’s something that’s 10 years in the making. The advantage of taking 10 years is you get more bites at the apple, more chances to return to the town again. Still, I had to trust my collaborators and give guidance. It becomes a balance of guidance and trust.
