A BLIND HERO

Otto Weidt manages to keep his employees – most of them Jewish and most of them blind – from the clutches of the Nazis. When his secretary is deported to Auschwitz, he embarks on a journey to free her.

This docudrama tells of “unsung Schindler” Otto Weidt, who saved Jews from the Nazi death camps. In the 1940s, Berlin brush and broom manufacturer Otto Weidt uses cunning and payoffs to save his staff, most of them Jewish and most of them blind, from the clutches of the Gestapo. When his secretary Alice Licht is deported to Auschwitz, Weidt, nearly blind himself, sets off almost immediately in an attempt to persuade the authorities to free her and her family. But by then Alice has been transferred to another camp and the rest of her family murdered in the gas chambers. He manages to contact her while she is still being held by the Nazis. He arranges a safe house near the camp and plans her escape. But although he succeeds in freeing Alice, his love for her remains unrequited. The story relies almost exclusively on the eyewitness accounts and memories of Inge Deutschkron, the celebrated 92-year-old German-Jewish writer whom Weidt also saved from the Nazis.