We Dared to Write — A New Kind of Holocaust Film Premieres July 23

They were teenagers. Jewish. Trapped in a world collapsing around them. And they wrote.

On July 23, Project Witness premieres its most daring and emotionally resonant work to date: We Dared to Write, a visually striking animated documentary that redefines how Holocaust stories are told—and who gets to tell them.

At the heart of the film are five teenage diarists whose words survived even when many of them did not: Moshe Flinker, Ruthka Lieblich, Rywka Lipszyc, Yitskhok Rudashevski, and Anita Budding Meyer. Each is brought to life through intimate animated storytelling drawn from their own writings. One of them, Anita, is still alive. Her story begins in 3D animation and transitions to live action, where she speaks directly to the camera—bridging the past and present in a way no animation alone could.

Following her is the story of Peter Feigl, another living diarist whose wartime journal, kept while in hiding, captures the precariousness of survival and the search for identity. Peter appears in live action, offering not only testimony, but reflection—from a boy who once hid his Judaism to a man who now reclaims it publicly.

This is not a documentary about the Holocaust. It is a documentary told by those who lived it—in real time, in their own words, before the world understood what was happening.

The Writers Behind the Words

Each of the five animated diarists offers a distinct lens into the Holocaust experience:

• Moshe Flinker, a philosophical Orthodox teen who wrote from Nazi-occupied Belgium, seeking divine meaning in a crumbling world.
• Ruthka Lieblich, a gifted Polish writer whose diary blends poetic longing with searing observation from within the ghetto.
• Rywka Lipszyc, a quietly powerful teen from the Łódź Ghetto, whose diary—found decades after her death—reclaims a voice nearly lost.
• Yitskhok Rudashevski, a literary prodigy in the Vilna Ghetto who documented not only survival, but culture, theater, and thought.
• Anita Budding Meyer, hidden as a child in Amsterdam, who lived to tell the story herself—starting in animated form and continuing in real life, her voice steady, present, and unflinching.
• Peter Feigl, a teenager on the run in Vichy France, his journal is both a record and a reckoning—a search for belonging written in exile. Today, Peter shares his story with grace and clarity, lending the film a deeply human close.

A Structure of Memory, A New Language of Film

We Dared to Write is structured as a cycle of stories—each diarist introduced by a stylized spinning globe, where drops of black ink become writing and writing becomes witness. The film uses claymation-inspired 3D animation to portray the diarists with textured realism: not as symbols, but as real teenagers, animated with care, lit with warmth, and grounded in historical detail.

Each diarist’s story stands alone, yet flows into the next, culminating in a seamless transition from animated Anita to live-action Anita, and then to Peter’s closing reflections.

Interwoven throughout are live-action interviews with leading historians and educators—Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Dr. Ruth Lichtenstein, Alexandra Zapruder, Dr. Beth Cohen, Morgan Blum Schneider, and others—who frame each diarist’s testimony within larger historical currents without ever speaking over them.

It’s cinematic. It’s intimate. It’s deeply respectful of its source: teenage words, written under impossible conditions, never intended to last—and yet, here they are.

The Premiere and Beyond

The world premiere of We Dared to Write takes place on July 23, with tri-state screenings to follow throughout the summer. In fall and winter, the film will tour institutions across North America—museums, schools, synagogues, universities—bringing its unique blend of animation and testimony to audiences everywhere.

This is not simply a Holocaust film. It is an invitation to listen—to the young people who documented the truth when the world tried to bury it.

Because they wrote.

And because they are still here to remind us why it matters.