The Poet
Yisrael Sobol
A dreamer who wants out of the ghetto, out of his history, out of his own skin. His gift for words will be used to save lives, and to cost them.
Casting TBA
The Story
Every generation has to fight for the dream.
Kfar Aza, Israel. October 7, 2023.
A young soldier walks through the smoking ruins of his grandmother's house. Toys still lie on the lawns where children left them the night before. In the wreckage, he finds a scorched photograph from 1942: three adults and a baby, long gone, whose names he has half-forgotten.
He looks closer. And the photograph begins to sing.
Warsaw, 1942. Anywhere but here.
Four hundred thousand Jews are sealed behind a ten-foot wall. Yisrael Sobol is a poet with a Polish face and a head full of Shakespeare. He smuggles bread past the guards for his sister Miriam and her baby, and dreams of a world with no walls where he can simply write.
Then the Nazis' own man in the ghetto, Adam Czerniaków, the gentle head of the Jewish Council, offers him a job. Write something that gives people hope. Posters on every wall. Words so beautiful that thousands will walk calmly to the trains.
Yisrael has never been better at anything.
Will you bow, or will you stand?
The truth comes home.
When his brother Berl staggers back through the dark with a word no one in the ghetto has yet heard, Treblinka, Yisrael learns what his poetry has done. In a basement across the ghetto, a young commander named Mordechai Anielewicz and a fearless woman named Malka have been gathering a handful of pistols and an impossible idea: that dying is not the only choice left to a people marked for death.
Yisrael takes off his hat. And everything he thought he wanted begins to change.
A love story inside a last stand.
We Will Rise follows the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising through the eyes of the people who lived it: the poet and the fighter who fall in love with no future to promise each other, the leader who made the unforgivable choice, the sister who would give anything for her child, and the commander who understood that honor is the one thing they cannot take.
It is a story of fear and faith, betrayal and courage, and the stubborn, singing refusal to be erased. It is told, like so many Jewish stories, in the only language big enough to hold it.
Song.