Mosaic Film “The Search”

Released in 1948, “THE SEARCH” was directed by Fred Zinnemann, and starred Montgomery Clift in one of his first major roles.  Zinnemann was himself from a German Jewish family and was forced to leave Germany years before as a young man. He made the SEARCH, in recognition of his lost youth and innocence. Making this film was a risk as it was released just at a time when Hollywood and the average filmgoer were beginning to come to terms with the true horrors and barbarity of the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust. This little known black & white classic looks at the aftermath of the War and the Holocaust through the eyes of an innocent child and his GI friend, leaving us with a sense of hope.  It tells the moving story of one silent nine-year-old Czech boy, a survivor of Auschwitz, who flees a refugee centre in immediate post war Germany.  He is found and taken in by an American GI (Clift). At the same time, the boy’s mother, the sole surviving member of his family, is searching the refugee centres (UNRRA) for her son. Time, distance and the massive numbers of refugee children are factors hampering the reunion of mother and son.