A Pair Descended From 'Hidden Child' Mothers Come Together for Holocaust Documentary

The director, Marc Smolowitz, and star, Alix Wall, of the feature documentary The Lonely Child are bonded together in a number of powerful ways.

They both attended UC Santa Cruz, where they originally met. And they are both children of Holocaust survivors whose mothers were a so-called "hidden child," smuggled away during World War II to a different, safe circumstance in order to survive.

When their 109-minute feature documentary premieres July 18th at the Castro Theatre as part of the 2026 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, there will be couple more strong bonds at play. Smolowitz, a prolific producer and director of independent film, got his first job out of college with the festival. And in 2018, as a filmmaker-in-resident at San Francisco's Jewish Institute, the organization that puts on the festival, he worked on the early stages of The Lonely Child.

Wall's mother (Sarah Wall) was born in 1939 in Vilna or what is now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Her grandfather was murdered by the Nazis in 1941 and two years later, as her hidden-child mother was being raised by a Catholic nanny, her grandmother (Rachela Melezin) had a romantic relationship with poet Shmerke Kaczerginski. It was Kaczerginski who penned Yiddish holocaust lullaby "Dos Elnte Kind" about the separation of Wall's grandmother and mother-child, creating a song that would become an anthem for many others over the years.

Wall holding a picture of Kaczerginski (13th Gen)

Meanwhile, when Smolowitz was attending UC Santa Cruz, his thesis film was also about his Holocaust hidden mother. "Little did we know that the screening of that film would be the inciting event for Alix and I to come together to make The Lonely Child," Smolowitz shared on Instagram. "We went back to UCSC to do a final round of B-roll filming to mark this moment."

Wall, a lifelong journalist, told J-The Jewish News of Northern California, a publication for whom she writes, that all credit goes to Smolowitz for keeping their film project going through tough times. They secured grants from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and Jewish Story Partners, and are also currently in the process of trying to retroactively raise a remaining $20,000 with help from the National Center for Jewish Film.

It is bound to be an emotional time for both the filmmakers and audiences when The Lonely Child premieres July 18th and encore-screens July 29th at the Piedmont Theatre. "It's not an exaggeration to say that The Lonely Child might never have existed without the inspiration I found in the many deeply personal Jewish documentaries I encountered at San Francisco's Jewish Film Festival over the years," Wall revealed to J. "Watching filmmakers investigate their own family histories helped me imagine that I might someday do the same."

[San Francisco Jewish Film Festival: The Lonely Child ]