The Lonely Child

Synopsis

THE LONELY CHILD is a feature documentary that tells the story of a little-known Yiddish lullaby “Dos Elnte Kind” written inside the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust. Almost 80 years later, the daughter of the girl in the song — Alix Wall — goes on a quest to find those keeping the song alive today, inviting musicians from around the world to perform their own interpretations of it. Through conversations and performance, the lullaby serves as a vehicle to explore themes of inherited memory and trauma, music and art as resistance, and the song’s surprising relevance today as we are losing the last living Holocaust Survivors. What starts as a personal family story of discovery about Holocaust resistance becomes a large-scale music film that brings together artists and thinkers from different parts of the world around common themes. 

Shmerke Kaczerginski — the writer of “Dos Elnte Kind” — was a poet and partisan in Vilna who wrote the lyrics to some 230 songs. As members of the Yiddish cultural scene in Vilna, he and Alix’s grandmother, Rachela Pupko-Krinsky, were among those handpicked by the Nazis to sort through Jewish objects for their planned “Museum of an Extinct Race.” Often called “The Paper Brigade,” they are lesser-known heroes in Holocaust history who saved precious Yiddish manuscripts by hiding them under floorboards of the YIVO and smuggling them back into the ghetto.

It was against this gruesome backdrop that Kaczerginski and Pupko-Krinsky fell in love, inspiring him to write “Dos Elnte Kind” about Rachela’s hidden daughter, Sarah, or Sorele, in 1943. Our film about this lullaby starts with this story and contemplates the contemporary power and reach of one song written from that horrific time. 

About the Director

Marc Smolowitz is a multi-award-winning director, producer, and executive producer who has been significantly involved in 50+ successful independent films. The combined footprint of his works has touched 250+ film festivals & markets on 5 continents, yielding substantial worldwide sales to theatrical, television, and VOD outlets, notable box office receipts, and numerous awards and nominations. His credits include films that have screened at top-tier festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Venice, Tribeca, Locarno, Chicago, Palm Springs, SF FILM, AFI Docs, IDFA, DOC NYC, CPH: DOX, Tokyo, Melbourne, Viennale, Jerusalem, among others. In 2009, Marc founded 13th Gen, an S.F.-based company that works with a dynamic range of independent film partners globally to oversee the financing, production, post-production, marketing, sales, and distribution efforts of a vibrant portfolio of films and filmmakers. The company has successfully advanced Marc’s career-long focus on powerful social issue filmmaking across all genres. In 2016, he received one of the prestigious Gotham Fellowships to attend the Cannes Film Festival’s Producers Network marking him as one of the USA’s most influential independent film producers.  

About the Writer/Producer

Alix Wall is an award-winning Oakland-based journalist who is a regular contributor to the New York Times Vows column, the Jewish press, and media about food and culture. In recent years, she won three first place awards in the American Jewish Press Association’s Rockower Awards; her latest in a long list of AJPA awards dating back to 1997. She has also been recognized by the San Francisco Press Club and New California Media Awards. As a contributing editor to J., The Jewish News of Northern California, she writes a monthly column about interesting Jews in the food world as well as other features. She is also a regular contributor to The San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeleyside, The Forward and Edible East Bay. Alix is also the founder of the Illuminoshi: The Not-So-Secret Society of Bay Area Jewish Food Professionals, a networking group for Jews who work in the food industry. Alix is part of the Next Generations Speaker’s Bureau of the Holocaust Center of Northern California, for which she shares her family’s Holocaust story with students. Alix is on the advisory board of Eden Village West, a Jewish farm-to-table summer camp, served on the executive committee of the Hazon Food Conferences for two years, and on the program board of the Berkeley Jewish Music Festival for four years. 

Artistic Statement

In the coming decade or so, the last living Holocaust Survivor will take his or her final breath. From there, something very substantial around the public’s overall understanding of the Holocaust will undoubtedly change. When there are no more people still alive to testify to their actual lived experience of unimaginable genocide, a huge change to our cultural knowledge of these concepts is inevitable. What does it mean when something so powerful moves on to become only memory and only history? To be sure, we can choose to mark this moment in powerful ways. What if a simple, little-known lullaby in Yiddish from that time were to become the vehicle to mark that moment? What if our children’s song — one that is already finding new life in this contemporary moment — became a dynamic way of extending our understanding of past atrocities to the next generation who must continue to contemplate genocide in a world without survivors? 

We believe that music can help with that transition, and as it happens, lullabies are a universal trope worldwide. They are sung to children across every culture, every nation, every race, every religion. With this documentary, our goal is to empower “Dos Elnte Kind” to be that lullaby. For it to become a creative and musical vehicle for this exploration, as we offer it up to musicians both Jewish and non-Jewish working across a range of musical genres: Jewish, Arab, German, Polish and other talents from every age group. At a deeper human level, we are interested in highlighting that “Dos Elnte Kind” is also about “the child living through atrocity.” Alix’s mother in the lullaby can become a symbol for every child who is suffering in the world right now…that Ukrainian or Syrian child living through war; the African child who has been orphaned to HIV/AIDS; the child in any part of the world who has lost a parent Covid; that migrant child in America who is being held at the border whose parents have been deported. 

Festivals, Screenings, & Awards

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2026
– World Premiere