'Big Sonia' Film Screening

For years, Sonia Warshawski has been an inspirational public speaker at schools and prisons, where her stories of surviving the Holocaust as a teenager have inspired countless people who once felt their own traumas would leave them broken forever.

When Sonia is served an eviction notice for her iconic tailor shop (in a mall scheduled for demolition), she’s confronted with an agonizing decision: either open a new shop or retire.

Ironically, Sonia’s shop is the last open business in an otherwise desolate Kansas City mall, but it contains enough color and liveliness to make up for the entire empty complex.

For a woman who admits she stays busy “to keep the dark parts away,” facing retirement dredges up fears she’d long forgot she had, and her horrific past resurfaces. Big Sonia explores what it means to be a survivor and how inter-generational trauma affects families and generations.

Filmmaker and granddaughter, Leah Warshawski, describes Big Sonia as a story about humanity: our human potential to overcome even the worst of the world’s sins and atrocities with compassion and understanding.

“It’s a tale about survival, but not only the heroic kind—the kind that is forced upon victims of genocide.  It’s also about the everyday acts of survival we all undertake just to be human, to overlook slights: to rise above bigotry, ignorance and self-doubt; to push for forgiveness even when our instincts urge retribution or bitterness.  When we premiered the film in 2016, we had no way of knowing then that the themes of our film would find new relevance. The real lesson of Big Sonia is that we’ve all got the capacity to combat the worst of humanity.”

Regina Kort, Sonia’s daughter, and SuEllen Fried, an adviser to the film will join us for a Q and A following the film.  Regina coordinates Sonia’s many speaking engagements. Together, it is their hope to tell her story so that it is not forgotten and so that the atrocities of the Holocaust never happen again.

SuEllen Fried is a social activist in the fields of mental health, child abuse prevention, and bullying/peer abuse. She has co-authored three books on the topic of bullying and worked with over 75,000 students, parents, educators in 37 states. In 1982 she co-founded Reaching Out From Within, a self-help program for incarcerated men and women.

The event is hosted and sponsored by Colorado College Hillel and The Greenberg Center for Learning and Tolerance in partnership with Temple Shalom and First Christian Church.

The Sponsors will host a reception following the Q and A.