Tracing the history of an old family photograph, the filmmaker, Esther Podemski, travels to Poland with a group of her parents' contemporaries. Fifty years after surviving the Holocaust, the elders return to their hometown, Poddebice, to conduct a memorial service in the Jewish graveyard. They find an empty field, marked by a lone tablet, the only testament to the history of this place to survive the wartime desecration.

In the nearby city of Lodz , we meet Layb Pradskier, custodian of the immense, crumbling Jewish cemetery. Here we discover that all that remains of the once several hundred thousand strong Jewish population of Lodz is a handful of aging Holocaust survivors. Lodz , and indeed all of Poland , exemplifies the success of the Holocaust; Poland is all but totally cleansed of Jews.

A montage of historical images, snapshots, and archival music, together with new location footage, House of the World moves between personal accounts of Jewish Poland and historic events.

About the Director

Esther Podemski produced and directed House of the World , a documentary film about the aftermath of the Holocaust. Shot in Poland, the film premiered at Lincoln Center in 1999. Since then, it has been screened in Europe, traveled throughout the United States with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival , and screened at the LA International Jewish Film Festival and numerous colleges. As a painter, Esther Podemski has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in public and private collections. She won a painting fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts and twice participated in the Yaddo residency program. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the Parsons School of Design in New York and visual arts at Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently working on a new documentary project that explores the region of Tuscany as witnessed by two individuals: a sharecropper and a priest ministering to women working as sex slaves.