LOCALadk Magazine

Above: A vision of survival and resilience, Vladimir Munk stands beneath the entrance gate to Auschwitz which reads "Arbiet Macht Frei" ("Work Will Set You Free"). Below: Paul Fred- erick films Vladimir Munk and Julie Canepa during his visit to Auschwitz, a cattle car once used to transport victims to Auschwitz in the background. ibly moving place to be. This sense of dread hangs over the place and you're taking that in, but you're also dealing with the end goal of making this docu- mentary when all is said and done. You have to think about the job," Frederick said. "But it was late January and it was muddy. Very muddy. And we get back to the hotel, and there's mud every- where, all over our shoes especially. When I was washing the mud off of my shoes, that was when I broke down. I realized this isn't just mud. These are the ashes of a million people. And these shoes…I was walking on that. And then just all the stress of the day and just everything — Vladimir's story, where we were, the magnitude of it all — I broke down. It just stays with you. That place just stays with you. I don't think I can ever forget it." Names upon the wall: a visit to Prague Not long after being liberated from Auschwitz at the age of 20, Munk left to study science in Prague for fifteen years, prompting Frederick and Carlin to visit Prague before returning to New York. "We visited a synagogue in Prague with Vladimir's parents' names on the walls. It has the names of all known victims of the Holocaust from the Czech Republic," Frederick said. But when he and Carlin entered the synagogue, there were so many names etched into the walls, Frederick be- gan to think that the names of all 6.1 million Jews murdered in the Holo- caust were in front of his eyes. "I asked someone working there how many names were on the walls, and they told me 'Almost 78,000.' And that was when that number of 6.1 million became tan- gible. It is just such a massive number that your brain can't wrap itself around what that means. We realized you would need 78 more synagogues with 78,000 names to capture all of them. It's mind-blowing." Prague would serve to give new life to Munk as he earned a masters in chemical engineering from the Czech Technical University in 1950 before getting his doctorate in microbiology and chemistry only a few years later. His continued work would result in over thirty patents, and in 1968, he was

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