«Von Auschwitz nach Beverly Hills»

One year before the end of the Second World War, 16-year-old Marton Stark was deported from the ghetto in Budapest to a concentration camp. He survives, more dead than alive. Marked by typhus and tuberculosis, he comes to Davos to recover, to the Jewish sanatorium Etania.

Elise Welti, an office worker for the Red Cross, takes care of his mental well-being. At her suggestion, Stark wrote his concentration camp diary. Elise Welti is Heinz Bachmann's great-aunt.

In the 1940s, Davos was a cosmopolitan place. In the middle of the 19th century, it was discovered and promoted by German physicians as a climatic health resort. In and immediately after the Second World War, 15 percent of the population is therefore of German descent. The population mix at the time seems slightly surreal: Nazis live next to wounded Allied soldiers as well as Jewish and other war refugees.
Heinz Bachmann from Winterthur finds the diary of the Romanian Jew Marton Stark in his mother's estate. It is a harrowing document of his time in German concentration camps. Bachmann embarks on a search for him for several years and finds him in the USA.
The encounter with Heinz Bachmann is gratifying for Marton Stark, as he holds his notes in his hands again after decades and they give him back a piece of long-suppressed, traumatic life story.