What a mother!” says one of the survivors in the Holocaust documentary “No Place on Earth.” Part of a two-family group that survived underground for a year and a half until the Russians defeated the Nazis, this mother, along with uncles and brothers, were extraordinarily resilient. Pure chance also plays its part, which is one of the still scary musings to take from the history of the Holocaust.
Moving at a swift 80 minutes, “No Place on Earth” begins in modern times with Chris Nicola, an amateur spelunker and New Yorker, traveling to the Ukraine to search for his Eastern Orthodox heritage and take in some of the world’s largest gypsum caves. Inside these deep, deep caves accessible through tiny crevices and crawl spaces he finds traces of human habitation from decades, but not centuries, past: pieces of metal, shoes, names written on walls. Nobody in these backwater villages wants to talk, but he soon hears rumors of the “Jews in the cave” from World War II.