To survive the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust, then five-year-old Marian Marzynski lived as a Jewish boy hidden by Christians. In Never Forget to Lie, Marian, now a filmmaker, returns to Warsaw to explore his wartime childhood and capture the experiences of other child survivors, exploring their feelings about Poland, the Catholic Church, and the ramifications of living with identities forged under circumstances where survival was based on the ability to lie.

In the summer of 1942, the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto was in progress. A child, Marian spent his days in the attic of a woodworking shop run by his father until the German owner informed them that the work permit temporarily protecting Marian’s father from deportation would no longer cover his family. With no other options, Marian’s parents smuggled him through the ghetto wall to the Christian side of Warsaw.

Marian and his mother survived the Holocaust, but his father and most of his relatives did not. After the war, many Holocaust survivors left Poland, but Marian and his mother stayed among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, where she remarried. Marian became a filmmaker and a television personality struggling to maintain his integrity under the Communist censorship, but in the late 1960s, during an anti-Semitic campaign launched by the government, he was deemed unpatriotic and had to run again. He became a political refugee to the United States where he continued making films.

In Never Forget to Lie Marian returns to the story of his past, and to the frightened five-year-old boy who was forced to lie to survive.