Four Seasons Lodge

Four Seasons Lodge is a documentary film about a group of elderly Holocaust survivors who meet each summer at the modest bungalow colony they own in the Catskills. The film documents the 26^th summer they spend together, a few years before the colony was sold in 2009. We saw it, appropriately enough, on the eve of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Most of the residents, the youngest of whom were in their early eighties when the film was shot, came from Poland. Many of the couples met in America after their spouses had been killed in Europe. With few if any relatives in America, they sought each other out, and these friends became a substitute family that together bought the colony, where they repair each summer. They need not talk with each other about their suffering during the Holocaust because it’s a shared experience and taken for granted. It’s only the filmmaker’s probing that elicits stories about that past, and not all residents were willing to provide them.

Photographs of the residents as they appeared in Europe or in their first years in America show them with the beauty of youth. We see them a generation later, this time in home movies, when they first entered the colony. So we observe stages in their development, from youth to old age, when they are by now, naturally enough, bent, wrinkled, flabby, and often sick.

Yet we watch a resident in his eighties crawl through a first-floor window to make a repair. We see another climb a ladder to saw off the branch of a fallen tree. We watch residents driving large mobile machines to cut the grass. The residents dance together, sing together, play cards together, and laugh together. What’s striking about them is their unquenchable zest for life. Perhaps their escape from Europe increased their appetite for life. Perhaps it was this appetite that helped some of them survive in the first place.

One by one they’re losing their fellow residents. Some no longer have the strength to participate in communal care-taking duties. Some are too sick to leave their winter homes. Others die. Perhaps their awareness of the brevity of the life left to them and the suddenness with which it can be taken away has increased their love of life. Whatever the reason and in spite of the disabilities of old age - the lessening of strength, energy, mental capacity, and health - their enthusiasm for the everyday pleasures of being alive appears undiminished. '”Life is not easy,” remarks one of the residents, “ but it can be beautiful, even when it's not easy.” May that be a mantra for all of us.