I didn’t expect The Ring to feel so personal the first time I watched it. I thought I was prepared. I knew the subject. I knew my own family’s history. But as the story unfolded, I felt something familiar rise—an old, unplaceable ache. Recognition. The kind that settles in the body before it reaches language.
The film follows a son returning to Budapest, drawn back by an object—a ring—and by the unanswered questions it carries. As I watched, I realized I wasn’t just observing his search. I was feeling my own.
My grandparents’ story, too, begins as a love story. Ordinary. Intimate. Interrupted. My grandfather, László Braun, was a Hungarian Jew taken in 1943 to the Bor copper mines in Serbia as a forced laborer. He was enslaved by the Nazis, separated from his pregnant wife, Elizabeth, and murdered during a death march in 1944. He never met his daughter, my mother, Ágika.
In The Ring, a gold band becomes a literal and symbolic lifeline, passed through time. In my family, that role is played by five fragile postcards my grandfather sent from Bor. They were written under censorship, careful in their wording, restrained in what they could say. Still, longing presses through them, for home, for his wife, for the life he feared he might never return to. Like the ring in the film, the postcards carry an implicit request: remember me; tell what happened.
What struck me most while watching The Ring was how grief moves through generations. Loss becomes atmospheric. You breathe it in without realizing.
That sense of inheritance is what compelled me, years earlier, to return to Budapest, much like Arnon, the film’s protagonist, played by Adir Miller in an autobiographical telling of his own family’s story. In 1996, I traveled there with my mother and my grandmother. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the significance of what we were doing. I understand it now.
Walking through Budapest with them was grounding in a way I still struggle to describe. My grandmother pointed to buildings, streets, routes—places where Jews were forced into yellow-star houses, marched through the city into the ghetto, or narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Arrow Cross like Miller’s mother did.
My mother stood in the city where she had survived as an infant, and I was there as the third generation, trying to hold it all. Survival and loss, continuity and rupture.
History, I learned then, is not abstract. It happens in real places, to real people. The streets remain. The buildings endure. And so does the echo.
In my family, survival came at a cost that was never fully articulated. My grandmother lived, but something essential closed inside her. A wall went up that never entirely came down. My mother grew up without a father she never had the chance to miss in the usual way. And I grew up with absence as a presence. Something unnamed, but always there.
Like Arnon in The Ring, I wasn’t searching only for facts. I was searching for emotional truth, for an understanding of how my family’s story shaped who I am, as a second- and third-generation descendant of survivors. The past was not behind me. It was within me.
That is why screening The Ring on Holocaust Remembrance Day feels so necessary. This day is not only about remembering what was lost. It is about examining how it was lost. How hatred became normalized, how rights were eroded incrementally, how silence enabled violence.
One of the most dangerous myths today is that “this could never happen again.” At a moment when antisemitism is resurging openly, stories like this matter as lived realities passed down through families like mine. Memory is not optional. It is a responsibility.
I hope people will come to see The Ring not only because it is a Holocaust film, but because it is a love story. It asks us to consider what we inherit, and what we choose to do with it.
Watching this film together is a collective act of witnessing. I’ll be staying after the screening for a Q&A, and I hope you’ll join. Not just to watch, but to reflect, to ask, and to sit with what this story asks of all of us.
Some stories do not end. They wait. And when we are ready, they ask to be told.