Read an interview with producer and director Menachem Daum about his film HIDING AND SEEKING: FAITH AND TOLERANCE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST, which will air August 30 on the PBS program POV:

When you went to Poland, what were you seeking? And did you find it?

I've always felt that I have some connection to Poland. There's some sort of mystical connection I have to this place. I had a sense that we had some sort of unfinished business, that we had some sort of mission. I knew that my father-in-law and his two brothers had been hidden [during the Holocaust]. I knew that they hadn't been in touch with the rescuers all those years. We went to Poland in the hope that, besides this being just simply a family heritage tour, we might be fortunate enough to make contact with those rescuers. We were really skating on thin ice, because it's been 60 years, and people move and die and get sick. The fact that we were able to track them down and still find them, the rescuers, to me was amazing. Had we come a year or two later. ... Mr. Mucha passed away a few months ago, and Mrs. Mucha, his wife, is in very poor health. We came literally at the last moment and, to me, I felt we were led there in some way to finish, perhaps, what the previous generation didn't or couldn't.

The premise of the film, really, is that I have a problem with the insularity that my Orthodox sons have chosen, which is much more insular than the way I grew up. We had some connection to the outside world. When I was growing up, even though I went to yeshivas, we did read Dick and Jane and Spot and Sally, and we knew that they weren't Jewish but they were human beings; they existed out there. When I graduated high school it was okay to go to college in the evening and have some exposure to secular studies, as long as you continued your religious education. When my sons graduated high school, by that time it was no longer acceptable to continue college at all, even after a day of yeshiva study. Now my grandchildren don't even read about Dick and Jane anymore. They have books about Chaim and Moshe. Their sense of connection to the rest of the world is being gravely diminished just over these past two or three generations.

My kids were balking at the idea of going to Poland, but I told them they would be able to visit the gravesites of the great Talmudists and sages whose commentaries they studied all day. That was something that interested them. I was hoping that perhaps if we could find some example of exemplary behavior by a Pole even during the darkest days of the Holocaust, when any act of decency could be punishable by death and it was still possible to find Poles who would risk their lives to do the right thing -- I thought that was a critical lesson for them to learn to show that everybody is capable of choosing goodness. There are no people who are incorrigible or beyond redemption. Everyone has the potential to choose to do the right thing. I hope some of that filtered through.

The rescuers did a good thing, but would it make a difference if they had ambiguous motives?

It wasn't 100 percent clear to me what their motives were. My father-in law is very clear. I asked him, "Did they do this for money or because they were decent people?" He said, "They were decent people." But in a part of the interview that you don't see, he also told me the story about how the Germans came into the barn looking and almost, almost -- if they would have looked down, they just almost were found out. After the Germans left, my father-in-law was sure the farmer was going to kick them out, but the farmer called them out of their hiding place and said, "Dzieci, I want to speak to you." "Dzieci" means children, and it became clear to me that whatever the initial expectation or hope of the farmer -- he never verbally asked, there was never a quid pro quo that, "I'll put you up if you do this that or the other thing" -- when my father-in-law was telling me this story, I realized that over time, these three boys had become like his sons. He had one daughter and now these three boys, [and] he had become vested in them. It's clear to me that he figured it might end in a week or two, it was a short duration kind of thing; but as time went on he became invested in their survival, and perhaps he even had to make sure they survived because, maybe, he was afraid if they got caught he would be implicated. You know, life is ambiguous. I'm not quite sure what his initial motivations or impulses were. Unfortunately, they are not alive anymore. It was Mrs. Mucha's parents who made the decision to take them in. I believe that by their actions and words they showed that they had made a commitment to save these three boys, no matter what.

How do you view the religious insularity you mentioned, the exclusion by some religions of the wider world? Is it a means of protection?

To me, the insularity is really a sign of weakness. It's a sign of fearfulness. We don't want to deal with the contradictions, the questions, the incongruities an encounter with modernity and with others is going to raise. We'd rather avoid the contact and live in our own little self-contained world that minimizes the possibility of raising questions. One of the ways not just Orthodox Jews but other people who think they have an absolute monopoly on truth and God's love, I guess, do this is by positioning themselves as possessing in some way a truth and a goodness and a moral superiority that is not shared with others; therefore, we want to avoid contact with others because we don't want to become influenced by them or tempted to follow in their ways. There is this diminution of the other. Insularity in and of itself doesn't have to mean demeaning the other, but there's a danger that when you keep yourself protected from contact with the other you will also begin to fail to see that you and they are made of the same stuff and come from the same places.