“When I was six years old, I was very angry at my mother and father. Why? Because I’m lonesome. I cannot talk.” Looking back on her childhood, Ingelore Herz Honigstein focuses again and again on her efforts to communicate. Born in 1924, in Kuppenheim, Germany, she remembers her parents were slow to recognize that she was deaf. An ear specialist confirmed this truth, she says, as an animated graph with colored lines illustrates her decreasing ability. “Of course, my mother was depressed by this still,”” she recalls. “She would not admit I was deaf.” A medical form declares her condition, and the scene cuts to an image of Ingelore’s hands on a window, evoking her sense of isolation and frustration at the time.

Now, Ingelore describes those feelings for her son, Frank Stiefel, also director of the documentary named for her. Premiering on HBO on 8 May, Mother’s Day, Ingelore is at once a loving portrait of a lovely, warm, and remarkably resilient individual and also a story of harrowing complexities, an ongoing series of hardships and opportunities. She recalls each step in a manner that’s at once matter of fact and sensational. She was sent to a foster home, she says plainly, and oh yes, she adds, her foster father was a speech therapist. She was unable to respond to his instruction, she recalls, because her “voice-box was paralyzed.” And then, a reenactment illustrates, “the teacher hit my back.” The child on screen, appearing in shadows and a circa-1930s costume, exhales suddenly. “It woke me up!” Ingelore narrates, her voice rising. “Yes, very good.” 

Learning to communicate, to express herself, was only the beginning of Ingelore’s new life. At the Heidelberg School for the Deaf, she learned to speak and read, surrounded by other students like her. “I was so happy,” she says now, “Because I’m not lonely.” But it wasn’t long before she was also exposed to what others were saying. A sequence of snapshots—Ingelore smiling, the school’s exterior—gives way to archival footage of soldiers marching feet and swastikas on soldiers’ arms.

“Everyone wore uniforms,” Ingelore remembers. And, she emphasizes, everyone was repeating the word, “Heil! Heil! Heil!” Other children, she says, chased her and pulled her hair and spit on her. When she asked them why, they called her “Jude.” Her principal only confused her more when he told her that she’d better go home, and not complete school. It was only then that she learned she was Jewish.

As it essentially illustrates Ingelore’s storytelling, episode by episode, the film doesn’t explore the psychological nuances of her discovery. But it does hint at the trauma she must have felt, on learning the irrational basis and forms of anti-Semitism, as well as the awful effects. When she arrived home, she discovers her father “went to Dachau.” Again, the film doesn’t explain how she came to know what this meant, but cuts to a scene set in present day, when Ingelore returns by train to Kuppenheim: no one in the film remarks on the swastikas recently spray-painted in the train cars or on walls she passes, but the images are surely haunting, as well as appalling. In town, she visits her family’s hardware store, now replaced by an upscale hair salon, where the owner reads the card she writes to tell who she is and then nods, kindly but also not especially attentively. Inside, she meets a client, a woman old enough to appreciate her story: they hold hands and look closely at one another, an exchange both brief and utterly moving, before the camera cuts back to the salon’s owner, blow-drying someone else’s hair.

Such moments underscore Ingelore‘s point, that communication—so various and ever shifting—conveys and also shapes experience. Again and again, Ingelore struggles to feel connected, “not alone.” When she recalls the night she was raped by German soldiers, the changing rhythms of her voice express her fear and abjection—still—and make the reenactment, a girl running from two men in uniforms, unnecessary. When she and her parents at last escape Germany in 1940, the film offers shots of the Statue of Liberty as well as a ship coming into New York, but her voice tells you everything you need to know: “America! America! Everybody cry, cry, and hug, hug!” she remembers, “And we knew we were free.”

It’s not a little striking that Ingelore’s journey to freedom entails still more dreadful episodes, including an illegal abortion. When she finds she’s pregnant following the rape, an American doctor agrees to help her, and he and his wife care for her over two days in his office. The film shows close-ups of bottles in his cabinet (as she describes her intention to poison herself if she must), as well as a woman’s feet arranged into stirrups and an actor’s face looming over the camera, the doctor at once supportive and frightening. “I feel much better,” she sums up, when it’s over.

Ingelore goes on to report her contentment afterward, her marriage to a man she met once in Germany and now rediscovers America (“We became madly in love”), and her devotion to her two sons. And much like the horrors she endured, she tells this story plainly, as a series of events must speak for themselves. As much as the film might be understood as a paean to Ingelore’s strength and survival, her compassion and generosity of spirit, it is also, repeatedly, a story of communication. Telling her story, Ingelore shares herself, again.