I have long lived with the awareness that there are some, many even, who believe that the world would be a better place if I were not in it. Who I am is irrelevant. My accomplishments matter not. It doesn't matter if I contribute to making the world a better place, a goal each and every single day of my life. 

The mere fact that I live with significant disabilities is enough, and I've heard this time and again, to warrant my non-existence. 

It is from this frame of reference that I approach a film such as Matthias Ramon Jaklitsch's profoundly affecting feature documentary centered around the life of Erich Finsches, a Holocaust survivor whose portrayal here is both richly human and often quite humorous. He's curmudgeonly I suppose you could say, though it's more in a powerful sense that one gets the idea that this is how life and trauma, surviving and remembering have created him. Leben und Überleben is based on over six years of collected materials by Jaklitsch, whose presence figures into the cinematic equation here and the film is better off for it. Having supported Erich on his various travels, Jaklitsch captures Finsches's unique personality, a quietly human presence who continues, at the age of 97-years-old, to live a life message both profoundly simple and immensely complex - "never again." 

I must admit that I hesitated to begin this review with any reference to self, my own life experiences not even on the radar for what Finsches himself has experienced. And yet, Finsches himself seems acutely aware that ensuring never again means refusing inhumanity in all its expressions and openly and passionately fighting against it. While my own experiences with eugenics pale when compared to the hatred experienced by Finsches and millions of others, it is also known that the disabled were also victims of the Holocaust and in my own lifetime institutionalized eugenics is alive and well here in the United States. 

Leben und Überleben is so profoundly impactful because of its relational intimacy and telling not just of Erich's story but of his relationship to the filmmaker. Finsches has a quiet resilience about him, an awareness that his survival was about luck as anything he in particular did. He refuses to toss aside this luck, sharing his memories for the cause of a better world and to damn well fight against the inhumanity he experienced so that others won't experience it. 

The film takes through Erich's life and his youth during Nazi persecution - these things we expect. However, it's his relationship with Jaklitsch that fascinates and his often brief interactions with others for whom even a basic question like "How did you survive?" seems to open channels previously closed. 

Leben und Überleben had its world premiere at the Black Forest Film Festival and its Austrian premiere at THIS HUMAN WORLD Festival in December 2025. There are upcoming screenings at Jewish Film Festival Vienna in April of this year followed by August's Buenos Aires International Film Festival. Produced by Johannes Grenzfurthner, Leben und Überleben is a film one doesn't easily shake precisely because Jaklitsch avoids playing for drama and instead trusts the brilliance of Finsches's story and his own ability to tell it. The end result is a feature documentary that both honors Finsches's life and feels incredibly relevant to our times. 

Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic