'snow from yesterday'), Hebrew: היה שלום פטר שווארץ (Farewell Peter Schwarz)) is a 2014 German–Israeli documentary film by Yael Reuveny, in her directorial debut.

[1][3][4] Separated before the war, Reuveny's great-uncle Feivush "Feiv'ke" Schwarz and his sister Michla, both Lithuanian Jews, had agreed to meet at the train station in Łódź, Poland, if they survived.

Feiv'ke settled near the concentration camp he had been held in, in what later became East Germany, and raised a family as well, but never identified as a Jew, taking the name Peter for himself.

Footage showing her on a tram in wintry surroundings gradually reveals, along with her narration, that she lives in Germany, which she admits is an unusual choice.

Her father Shauli is of Iraqi-Jewish background, while her mother Etty is the daughter of Michla Schwarz, a Lithuanian Jew who immigrated to Israel after surviving the concentration camps.

But when it came time to take her to the station, the same stranger told her that Feiv'ke had been among refugees killed the night before by Polish nationalists resentful of the influx in the aftermath of the war.

He returned to Schlieben, where he had been held in a satellite camp of Buchenwald after it was liberated by the Red Army in the last months of the war, and began settling there.

Reuveny travels there, visits his grave and interviews friends and family members, some of whom live in the former camp's barracks, repurposed as housing.

She had her daughter read it and, after comprehending that her brother may have lived out his life in East Germany, asked if he had at least married a Jewish woman.

Uwe Schwarz tells Reuveny about his life growing up, recalling how his father became very angry one day when he and his siblings went into the nearby woods and played around some ruins of the camp.

[3] Reuveny was finishing her studies at Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film and Television School[5] in 2005 when she went to Germany on vacation.

But as she began considering his story, she realized "that in a way [my grandmother]'s choices were just as strange as his," since while she left the place where her family suffered, in Israel she was surrounded by other survivors who "reflected her pain."

"[5] Reuveny says that ultimately Farewell Herr Schwarz is not about the Holocaust or even her grandmother and great-uncle, "but about us, their children and grandchildren."

She went to Schlieben and a made a half-hour short documentary, Tales of the Defeated, which won several awards and received some notice on its 2009 release.

For the interview segments, she told cinematographer Andreas Köhler, who used only available light, to include subjects' surroundings in a "very static" way that evoked portraits.

She resisted at first, believing Etty would make a difficult subject and little of use would come from the shoot, a perception that persisted when she actually did sit down at the family home in Petah Tikva and filmed her conversation with her mother.

[4] The film was released in Germany on April 10, 2014, under the title Schnee von gestern, an idiomatic expression meaning "yesterday's snow" (English: Water under the bridge.

Frankfurter Rundschau called it "a thoughtful documentary that takes the time necessary to dismantle the myths and track their impact.

"[11] "This film would be the ideal theater of tomorrow," wrote Andreas Platthaus in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who called it a masterpiece.

[14] "[It] defines what a good Holocaust documentary should be, but only rarely is—a question without definitive answers, sustained by informed conjecture and with due diligence to collateral emotional wreckage," she wrote.

"[3] Jordan Hoffman, who had interviewed Reuveny for The Times of Israel prior to the film's release, praised its technique in his review for the New York Daily News.

"[15] However, for The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck, those interviews that Köhler had so carefully staged were a detriment, making the film "static at times".

He nevertheless found the film as a whole "an endlessly intriguing, and resonant, true-life family mystery", with its narrative shortcomings forgivable in light of its subject.

"While viewers will no doubt be left frustrated by the lack of neat resolutions, it's a vivid reminder of the messy aftereffects that inevitably resulted from the horrific events.

"[16] In The New York Times, Jeanne Catsoulis suggested that Reuveny's lack of inquisitiveness in some areas was partly to blame for that inconclusiveness, however.

"[6] Slant Magazine's Wes Greene was the least impressed with the film of the 11 reviewers aggregated by Metacritic,[14] giving it only three and a half out of five stars.