After uncovering her Jewish family’s names in a German novel, a filmmaker returns to her ancestral rural town. Immersed with contemporary high school students, she discovers how Nazi-era laws erased lives who thrived there for generations—exposing how nations collapse not always in chaos, but through silence and compliance.
SYNOPSIS
In the rural German town of Ellwangen, high school students in 2000 were challenged by their teacher to find out who were the last Jews to go to their school. Their discovery of Erich Levi — one of the last Jewish students — inspired a novel that, years later, would cross continents and time to reach me. When I opened that book in 2016 and saw the names of my own relatives woven into its pages, fiction and family collided.
The film unfolds on two interwoven threads. One follows those earlier students who, during a time when Germany’s democracy felt secure and the return of fascism seemed unthinkable, investigated their town’s forgotten Jewish past. The other follows me and a new generation of students, twenty-five years later, as we reopen the same archives together. Across decades, our shared search uncovers what happened to the Jews, the disabled, political dissenters and LGBTQ+ individuals, who were forced to flee or deported to their deaths — and what these stories reveal about how democracy unravels.
As we dig deeper, we piece together how Ellwangen’s once-thriving cattle trade — built on trust between Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors — was quietly dismantled through propaganda and exclusion. The students and I trace these micro-histories, one document and one memory at a time, uncovering how small shifts in language and law can destroy livelihoods and relationships.
Through the voices of students, teachers, historians, and artist Gunter Demnig — whose Stolpersteine memorials keep these names alive — And Then One Day explores how truth and memory are never static. By focusing on one small town and one family, the film reveals how the smallest details can expose the largest lessons — and how the echoes of the 1930s still reverberate, quietly but unmistakably, in our world today.
Director Statement
This film found me.
In 2016, while reading a German novel translated into English, I felt a jolt—the names of my own relatives appeared in its pages. Written by a teacher from the small southern town of Ellwangen, it told of a 12-year-old Jewish boy growing up as the Nazis rose to power. With each new law and rumor, his world shrank until his, my, family was forced to flee.
I soon learned the boy was based on my cousin, Erich Levi. After escaping Germany, Erich joined the U.S. Army and, in 1946, returned to Ellwangen, where he had fought nearby, to help arrest former Nazis. He made them restore the Jewish cemetery where our ancestors are buried. His return shifted the balance; he came not for revenge, but to confront what had been done and ensure remembrance.
My search for answers led me to Ellwangen with a film crew. The people I met didn’t know my family personally, but many had grown up with their stories. What began as a personal investigation became a collaboration with local students, who are now exploring this same history.
I couldn’t ignore the parallels between then and now—propaganda, division, and the quiet normalization of cruelty.
And Then One Day… is about small moments that reveal how societies unravel. When Nazis forced my family’s cattle into the river, it seemed minor—but such humiliations are where it begins.
This film is not only about remembrance. It is about responsibility.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director/Producer Carole Blueweiss
Carole directed, produced, and wrote Center of the Universe—a short piece about a controversial sculpture—and co-produced and co-wrote Behind the Picket Fence, a cinéma vérité feature exploring domestic violence through the voices of survivors for American public television. She also co-produced the award-winning documentary This Might Hurt, which investigates the mind-body connection and chronic pain. Carole is also a physical therapist, passionate photographer, and host of the podcast Wisdom Shared.
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