Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home

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Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home is a United States documentary by Ethan Bensinger. It follows the last generation of Holocaust survivors and refugees through the Selfhelp Home in Chicago, a small community that has provided a home to more than 1,000 Jewish survivors and émigrés since World War II.

The film is based on interviews with about 30 people; today only about a dozen are alive, most in their 90s or older. They share memories of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, and tell stories of finding refuge in England through the Kindertransport, escaping to the United States and Shanghai, living in hiding in France, and deportation to camps such as Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. It also follows their postwar lives as they built new lives in Chicago.

Historians, including Christopher Browning, serve as the narrators. Refuge premiered in June 2012 at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Illinois, and has been shown widely in the Jewish community and at schools, libraries, and theaters around the United States.

Interviews conducted for the film are archived at Selfhelp Home, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

Selfhelp began in 1936 in New York City to help Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi regime. A Chicago sister organization opened after Kristallnacht, providing housing, food, English classes, and job placement to displaced Jewish émigrés and later to Holocaust survivors. In 1950, Selfhelp opened a residential home that has housed more than 1,000 refugees and survivors.