I’m not going to die, Harry de Winter facetimes his brother Micha from a hospital bed. It is the beginning of October 2022, and the brothers have just started to travel together the road that their father Max de Winter walked, at the end of May 1945. From the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, he went on foot to Havelberg. A journey of 100 kilometers. That seems like a manageable distance, but not if you’re 25 and weigh 35 kilos, like their father. At Havelberg he crossed the river Elbe and was received by the American army on the other side and eventually returned home.
The journey of 100 kilometers is also too far for Harry de Winter, who was already seriously ill last year. He has to miss the last days of their nine-day hike. The Elbe doesn’t make it to Harry. From the hospital he calls his brother Micha. Pneumonia. The chemotherapy for his asbestos cancer has weakened him too much. Don’t cry, he scoffs at his brother. “I’m not going to die.” Not yet. He passed away last Tuesday, aged 73. His death was the reason for the EO to make the film Baby brother about their hike to the front and to broadcast it on Thursday. On 3 May, the original date, Natascha van Weezel’s film will be broadcast again.
Only when the De Winter parents have passed away does their history come to life for the brothers. For Micha, the youngest even more so, it seems, than for the two years older Harry. When they cleaned up their parental home, the tangible memories were found about which the parents did not or hardly spoke to them. A chest full of (farewell) letters, documents, photos of a past gone and of loved ones who never returned, and a map on which their father has written the road he traveled with it. It is Micha’s idea to walk that road again together. It is also Micah’s voice that we hear as the narrator in the film. He had wanted to start the journey in Sachsenhausen, he says. “But my little brother didn’t want that.”
Looking to the future
Harry believes their parents survived their past so well because they didn’t look back. “They looked to the future.” Does Micha remember the time he proposed to his father to go to Auschwitz? And what their father said then? “Have you gone mad? I’ve been there before.” Micah’s face remains neutral with this rejection. Hard to read if he’s hurt by his brother’s words, or if he understands better than anyone that that brother of his is just shouting out his own fears.
There seems to be some friction between the brothers. Harry the well-known television producer, who became a well-known Dutchman even when he played music program Winter guests presented. Micha the scientist and professor of pedagogy. “When I was interviewed in the Chinese news, I got an audience share that you would never get. Two billion.” The rivalry subsides as they progress on their journey into the past. The ‘brother’ as a form of address gradually changes into ‘little brother’. And on day five, if Micha has been to Sachsenhausen and has seen their father’s name and date of birth in the records, Harry is willing to admit that he never dared to go there. “I have always had a balance limit.” He says that at the time he was asked by the American director Steven Spielberg to help record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors on film. “I refused. I was afraid to cross that line and freak out.”
Harry is willing to visit the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. He leans against one of the many concrete blocks and notices that the memorial does not affect him much from the outside. “But on the inside, yes.” His brother must have at least suspected that.