Letters to an Alien

Hannah wants to fit in at school, but she hates her looks and her name, and she definitely feels uncomfortable being Jewish. To top it off, Hannah's parents have "sentenced" her to spending time with her grandfather, Pops, in the hope that she will learn more about her Jewish heritage. But Hannah has no interest in Jewish history, and Pops is reluctant to talk about his past. When Hannah inquires about the numbers tattooed on his arm, Pops quickly dismisses her. Instead, Pops makes Hannah sit still for hours while he painstakingly paints her portrait. Aliens arrive on earth to investigate and they uncover Pops' secret: he survived life in the camps and cannot confront his own painful memories of the Holocaust. To help Hannah understand her heritage, the aliens take her back in time to Poland in 1943, where she sees the world through the eyes of her great-aunt Hannah. Only then is she able to fully understand the magnitude of the Holocaust and Pops' desire to preserve the past through his paintings. The aliens make their final transmission back to their home planet on the information they have gathered about human beings and about the foreign concept of "hate."