About Suzanne and Oskar
Suzanne Rico: journalist and podcaster
- Suzanne met Oskar while producing the podcast The Man Who Calculated Death, about her grandfather, Nazi aeronautical engineer Robert Lusser.
Oskar Jakob: retired plumber and Holocaust survivor
- Oskar had no idea what to expect when Suzanne interviewed him, but he did not trust her. "I thought she might have some residue from the Nazi era," he says.
About the Documentary
"Oskar and Suzanne" is a full length documentary that unfolds at the intersection of two lives shaped by the same war, but from opposite sides of history.
Suzanne Rico is an American journalist whose family legacy is rooted in World War II Germany. Her grandfather, Robert Lusser, was a brilliant aeronautical engineer and lead designer of the V-1 flying bomb, the world’s first cruise missile. Within her family, Lusser was remembered as a gifted engineer and pioneer of flight who later contributed to the American space program. What remained unspoken was the human cost of his work during the Third Reich.
While producing her award-winning podcast The Man Who Calculated Death (an investigation into her mother’s childhood and her grandfather’s life in Germany) Suzanne uncovered long-buried truths that led her to Oskar Jakob, a Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Romania. In 1944, forty members of Oskar’s family were murdered at Auschwitz. Oskar survived only by lying to the Nazis about his age. Then just thirteen, he was deported to Germany’s only underground concentration camp, Mittelbau-Dora, where he was forced to assemble flying bombs—the very weapons Suzanne’s grandfather designed.
Their first meeting in 2021 carries a heavy weight. Suzanne introduces herself not only as a journalist, but as the descendant of an engineer whose invention not only killed 10,000 people, but was built on the backs of slave laborers like Oskar. Expecting anger or rejection, she instead encounters something unexpected: Oskar welcomes her and insists she carries a responsibility to tell his story and confront her own. An unlikely friendship begins.
Guided by Oskar’s memories (and sustained by daily video calls) Suzanne travels across Europe to find where the Jakob and Lusser histories intersect. In Oskar’s childhood village in Romania where he was snatched in 1944, and at the abandoned synagogue where he once worshiped, she’s confronted by the near-total erasure of Jewish life in Transylvania. After surveying Romania’s Cehie Ghetto, where Oskar’s family was held before deportation, Suzanne must tell her friend there is no memorial here—his particular trauma remains an unremembered footnote of history.
The journey continues to Peenemünde, the Nazi military research base where the V-1 was tested, as Suzanne searches for the understanding of how technical brilliance became entangled with moral collapse.
The film’s emotional center, however, unfolds in the tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora. As Oskar guides Suzanne through the space where nearly 20,000 prisoners died, Suzanne reflects on the human cost of her grandfather’s work not as abstraction, but through the experience and memories of her friend. “What do I do with this history?” she asks a young German guide while standing in Chamber 44, where V-1s were assembled. “You show it,” the guide replies softly.
The film culminates at the German home of Suzanne’s aunt, where Suzanne examines what she calls the “Box of Dishonor”: artifacts of her grandfather’s life and weapons work. When she discovers that his Nazi medals and honors have been quietly removed, Suzanne realizes that reckoning with this past remains deeply contested—even within her own family.
As Suzanne and Oskar nurture their friendship, they confront the limits of apology and forgiveness, and Suzanne admits to feeling a collision of pride and shame embedded in her legacy. When she asks Oskar whether he believes a person can be both brilliant and complicit, his unexpected answer proves to be a lesson in humanity. This documentary is not about closure but a dialogue about memory, accountability, and trust. And that’s how the film ends, with Oskar still bearing witness and Suzanne transformed—carrying forward a story that is no longer inherited, but lived.