Oskar and Suzanne

Oskar and Suzanne Logline: When a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor entrusts his story to the granddaughter of a Nazi weapons inventor, an unlikely friendship forces both to confront inherited guilt, moral responsibility, and whether reconciliation is possible across the deepest wounds of history.

Summary: Oskar and Suzanne explores the emotional and historical terrain that emerges when personal inheritance collides with collective atrocity. The film interrogates how individuals reckon with histories they did not choose but nonetheless carry, and what responsibility, if any, is owed across generations.
The documentary unfolds at the intersection of two lives bound by World War II from opposing sides: Suzanne Rico, descendant of a top Nazi weapons engineer, and Oskar Jakob, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who was forced to build the weapon Suzanne’s grandfather designed. Through their unlikely friendship, the film examines questions of complicity, memory, forgiveness, and the uneasy coexistence of pride and shame within families and nations alike.
Oskar and Suzanne comes at an urgent moment. As Holocaust survivors die, firsthand testimony dies too. Simultaneously, historical amnesia and political extremism are resurging. The film addresses what happens when difficult histories are sanitized, minimized, or quietly erased: Suzanne’s discovery that Nazi memorabilia belonging to her grandfather has been deliberately removed from her family archive becomes emblematic of a broader discomfort with confronting the past.
The relationship between Oskar and Suzanne raises profound questions: What does an apology mean when the harm cannot be undone? Is forgiveness possible across such an asymmetry of suffering? And what obligations do descendants of perpetrators have to those who endured the consequences?