In a time when East Central Europe was shrouded under a black cloud of hate and betrayal, an epic love story flourished within the turbulent times of the Second World War. This is the backdrop for director Susan M. Papp’s latest documentary, Outcasts: A Love Story. Based on her book published earlier this year, Outcasts chronicles the meeting, courtship and unrequited love of a Christian man and a Jewish woman, Tibor Schroeder and Hedy Weisz.

In the small town of Nagyszollos, Ukraine, a region falling within the borders of Hungary up until the First World War, Tibor and Hedy’s relationship — which began when Hedy was hired as Tibor’s secretary — defied Hungary’s defamation of race laws and practices of the time. Nevertheless, the pair agreed to marry and the union was consented to by both families, outraging local communities.

“Everybody knows that when you fall passionately, madly in love with someone you can’t help yourself,” explains Papp. “He didn’t care about the local conventions, he didn’t care about the laws and he flouted them to a certain degree because he knew he had some protection through their wealth and his father’s influence.”

Shortly thereafter, Nazi Germany invaded the region, tearing the young couple apart. Hedy and her family were herded into the ghettos of Nagyszollos, and Tibor, the son of a colonel and a reservist in the Hungarian army, bravely devised a plan to help his fiancée escape before the Jews were sent into concentration camps.

When the Hungarian army was ordered to leave Nagyszollos by train, Tibor built a secret compartment for Hedy to hide in on an ammunition car. But after only one night of hiding, Hedy, unable to desert her family, returned to the ghetto forcing Tibor to leave the region without her.

“One of the difficulties was trying to climb into his mind and figure out what he was thinking and how he went about it because [there were] a lot of the things she wasn’t privy to because she was in the ghetto already,” explains Papp. “He died in ’82, but he had copious letters, diaries. He kept everything. It was like he was getting this story ready for me.”

Explaining the unknown was just one of the many obstacles in making the film. The 300-page companion book, already a condensed version of the complexities of Central Europe and the Second World War, had to be cut down to only one hour of viewing time. “It’s always difficult to condense a book into a film, especially when you’ve written the book and you know how important certain parts are,” says Papp. “A book has so many more layers than a film. A film can tell stories with just a simple picture.”

With so much of the story ending up on the cutting room floor and neither Tibor or Hedy appearing in the documentary (Papp felt Hedy’s reticence would weaken an otherwise strong and confident character), Papp’s resolve to tell the couple’s story is a testament to the importance of the message behind it.

“The story of these two families intertwining, their interrelationships, their courage, their faith in the goodness of human beings – I hope that it will definitely be a beacon of light for people to see that there is good in this world. It’s not just all depressing.”

”It’s a quintessentially Canadian story, too,” observes Papp. “A lot of people in Canada come from places that nobody’s heard of and they come with incredibly passionate and sad, tragic stories and they build new lives for themselves in this country.”

The tragedy of Tibor and Hedy’s story is exemplified not only by their horrific experiences in POW and concentration camps, but by their inability to pick up where their relationship left off after reuniting in Canada 23 years later. “She had just gone through too much to be able to share that with someone who didn’t have a clue what she had gone through,” explains Papp. “You grow apart.”

Hedy and Tibor might not have made their way back to each other before dying of cancer in 1982, but Papp insists love was able to overcome that period’s hate and intolerance  and their romance is an example of this. “Whether there’s a horrible war, whether or not there’s all this horribleness going on around you, you can still manage to maintain your humanity.”

Outcasts: A Love Story premières Sunday, Nov. 15, 9 p.m. ET, OMNI

Thoughts? szolis@tvguide.ca

 

 

Whether it’s reality or scripted TV, Stephanie firmly believes the most important element to any series is a sordid romantic story arc.— Grey’s Anatomy’s MerDer, Laguna Beach/The Hills’ Lauren and Jason, The Office’s PB & J, and General Hospital’s Spoily, to name a few. The more dysfunctional a couple is, the better.

A proud single gal with an obsession for everything New York, Stephanie is one relocation away from living out her dream as a Carrie Bradshaw impostor. In the meantime, her weekly column scrutinizes the most explosive couples, crushes and relationship catastrophes to unfold on the small screen.

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