“The most satisfactory dramas have proven to be real life stories. Whatever we may fictionalize can never be as real as if created from the course of life. It needs to be handled most respectfully and conveyed most faithfully.” ? Jiri Chlumsky Based on Martin Friedmann-Petrasek’s autobiography, [Broken Promise] looks at one of the world’s defining historical events ? The Holocaust ? through the eyes of a young, carefree, football-loving Slovakian boy as he morphs into a mature, fighting realist. Bouncing from one death camp to another during WWII, Martin comes of age under a cloud of hatred and violence often finding the same predicament where he expected safe haven. By illustrating Martin’s repeated confrontations with dangerous anti-Semitism, director Jiri Chlumsky makes poignant statements about the arbitrary nature of life in both peace and wartime, and the agony of denying one’s identity in order to merely survive. Ultimately a Jewish story, the film nonetheless resonates for the knowledge that persecution of this kind persists today.