The Memory Thief 2007

Lukas Mark Webber is a young tollbooth operator who lives a quiet, almost solitary life. He has little in the way of a social circle and spends much of his free time visiting his catatonic mother in a hospital. His routine is disrupted when a tollbooth customer tosses him a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, an act that triggers a charged encounter with a Holocaust survivor, Zvi Allan Rich. The next day, that same survivor hands Lukas a videotape containing his testimony from the concentration camps, a gift that matters more than Lukas initially realizes. While scrolling through the newspaper and spotting the survivor’s obituary, Lukas becomes hooked on the idea of the man’s life and decides to attend the funeral.

At the funeral, Lukas is confronted by Mira Rachel Miner, a young medical student whose father is also a camp survivor. They clash over Lukas’s presence at the service, yet he stubbornly insists on sharing the witness tape with her. Their early exchange hints at a shift in Lukas’s life, as Mira questions his fixation with Holocaust memories given that he is not Jewish. She asks about his own childhood, and Lukas reveals that he cannot recall any good memory from those years, a confession that underscores a deep-seated emptiness beneath his outward curiosity.

Back home, Lukas begins working for a Holocaust foundation that records interviews with survivors. What starts as a professional role quickly spirals into obsession. He hoards tapes, often watching several on different screens at once, and he begins to dress the part of his fixation—wearing a yellow star, plastering his walls with camp imagery, and even buying lottery tickets that reference tattooed identification numbers from the camps. He writes lengthy letters to Horowitz, the filmmaker who has covered Holocaust stories, and he gives a pink triangle to his transgender coworker Dominique, a gesture that underscores the intensity and estrangement of his behavior. The foundation eventually fires him after he pushes an interview through before he is properly trained. The emotional weight of the memories he is chasing proves unbearable for Mira’s father, who records an interview but then takes his own life, a tragedy that leaves Mira blaming Lukas and marks a devastating turning point for both of them.

After this, Lukas’s fixation erupts into unchecked pursuit. He buys his own camera and roams the streets, shoving the camera in strangers’ faces and asking if they are Jewish, insisting that they are lucky to be alive. He presses for a lane change at his tollbooth, demanding that all German cars use a different lane, a compulsive act that leads to his dismissal. Convinced that he himself is the last Holocaust survivor, he shaves his head, tattoos an identification number on his arm, and seeks out a confrontation with neo-Nazi skinheads—an encounter in which he is beaten. A woman in the hospital bed next to his mother confronts him, accusing him of not being her son; he offers no denial, a moment that shatters his pretenses. In a symbolic fall from grace, he gives away his shoes to a coworker and dons a makeshift concentration camp prisoner uniform, setting off on what he calls a death march as the line between memory, obsession, and identity blurs beyond repair.