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As Amber Maze stood in front of a tall white building in Prague just over two years ago, she texted a friend a photo with the message: “Guess where I am?”<\/p>\n Frank Grunwald, who then lived in Geist, immediately called her. He told her how his father, a physician, kept an office on the first level of that building and that their family’s apartment was on the second. He recalled how, as young boys, he and his brother would stand on the balcony, giggling and dropping water balloons on passers-by and how their dad reprimanded them.<\/p>\n Maze heard laughter in Grunwald’s voice as he related a flood of memories from the happy part of his childhood \u2014 before the Nazis took Czechoslovakia in 1939, before the Grunwald family was forced from their home into the Theresienstadt ghetto-labor camp. Maze and her colleague Philip Paluso planned to incorporate many of those stories into their then-in-progress documentary about how Grunwald survived the Holocaust.<\/p>\n Before Maze and Grunwald got off the phone on that June day, she asked about his recent doctor’s appointment. Grunwald told her he’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer.<\/p>\n “It was very surreal for me to be standing in front of his home and to be hit with the reality that I’m probably not going to have my friend for much longer,” said Maze, producer and co-writer of the documentary.<\/p>\n Two months later, on Aug. 30, 2023, Grunwald died at age 90<\/a> before Maze and Paluso finished their documentary. That film, “Sweet Lorraine in Auschwitz<\/a>,” will hold its world premiere Oct. 12 at the Heartland International Film Festival<\/a>, telling the story of how Grunwald survived the Holocaust.<\/p>\n Before the Nazis seized their home, Kurt and Vilma Grunwald were accomplished classical pianists who played Chopin so well it was “like listening to a live concert,” their son Frank Grunwald says in the documentary. Frank and his brother John loved American jazz, which they played on the accordion and piano, respectively, after hearing Irving Berlin and Eubie Blake on recordings. Frank’s favorite was Cliff Burwell’s “Sweet Lorraine.”<\/p>\n “That family was very close-knit, and music was the thread that connected them in addition to family love,” said Paluso, the film’s director, co-writer and cinematographer.<\/p>\n‘Music was the thread that connected’ the Grunwald family<\/h2>\n