Walking through the forest where their father, Joseph Fisher, was liberated from the concentration camp Gusen II, four siblings sit on a bench as they try to piece together and comprehend their father's life in the camps and after his liberation. Gideon Fisher reflects that the beautiful and horrible scenery of the forest, where hundreds of prisoners once flocked to freedom, is an experience "meant to crush your soul completely."

Chronicling a journey for understanding, the documentary Six Million and One follows four Israeli siblings as they travel to and tour the concentration camp in which their father was imprisoned during World War II.

On Thursday evening, the Wasserman Cinematheque held a screening of the documentary, directed by David Fisher. The film, sponsored by the Lew and Edie Wasserman Fund and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, was followed by a question-and-answer session with Fisher.

In the film, the Fishers take a physical and emotional journey as they walk down the street that once was the main road between the bunkers, tour the tunnels where the prisoners worked creating airplane parts, walk down into the quarries where they mined for granite and finally end up outside the home where their father went directly after liberation.

The film uses very intimate camera work in order to make the viewer feel as if he or she is there seeing the camps and experiencing the awe and horror. For example, the film uses close-up shots of the family's dynamic in their private discussions and zooms in on certain shots, such as images of Fisher's feet as he walks through the camps. This front-row seat provides a devastating but enlightening view for the audience.

Although the images and memories presented in the film are heartbreaking, the film skillfully links together tragedy and comedy in the siblings' shared discussions, laughter, quarrels and tears. At one extremely intense point while the siblings are touring the dismal tunnel where the airplanes were created, one of David's siblings, Estee Fisher, breaks down and says that she doesn't want to see it, blaming David for bringing his siblings to see the camps on a vacation, of all things. At the end of the scene, however, the discussion turns lighthearted as the siblings start to laugh and tease each other as they try to decide who got the most attention as a child.

Periodically, the film would cut to scenes of a woman reading a numbered list of "Causes for Death" in a somber voice, staring straight at the camera. "Hanged," "Accident (casualty)," "Shot" and "Suicide" were just some of the horrible examples that she read of what must have been written down on a log, recording how people died in the camps. These moments were some of the most intense and devastating as prisoners' deaths were put into plain sight for the audience, anonymously and numbered.

As a unique facet to the film, Fisher actually interviewed American soldiers who were involved in liberating the camps. In the question-and-answer session, Fisher noted that the American soldiers were able to tell him "what [his] father couldn't have told [him]." It would have been too hard to tell. Even for the American soldiers, it seemed excruciatingly difficult to recall and recount what happened on that day. Many said that they would never be able to forget the what they saw.

Six Million and One is an incredibly enlightening film as it shares individual stories of the prisoners in concentration camps. But uniquely, the film also depicts the toll taken on the second-generation survivors, people whose parents were victims of the Holocaust.

In the question-and-answer session, Fisher described Six Million and One as a "film about normality"-a film about mourning and remembering the past while moving forward and living life afterward.