War is discordance, severance, and destruction. Yet in this havoc, powerful bonds do form.

There are a number of documentary filmmakers exploring the unforeseen unions fostered as a result of war. Three such stories captured my attention: a group of mostly octogenarian Holocaust survivors reinvent family in their Catskill bungalow colony; homosexual Arabs and Jews find unity in a divided Israel; and a friendship between a grandchild of European Jews and a grandchild of a Nazi grows as they explore their families’ history.

The film Four Seasons Lodge, directed by New York Times journalist Andrew Jacobs, who discovered the lodge back in 2005, follows a group of Holocaust survivors through their Catskills bungalow colony during what was thought to be their final summer upstate.

Although some may call this a Holocaust film, it is not. Four Seasons Lodge is a poignant and even humorous documentary capturing survivors six decades removed from the genocide that robbed them of their families. When the survivors came to America, they discovered the Catskills and years later, when they purchased Four Seasons, the lodgers transformed forty acres of forest into more than just a bungalow colony; they renewed their Jewish family.

Jacobs told me he did not want to make another Holocaust film. “I wanted it to focus on their current lives as they lived them…because they don’t live their lives like victims.”

This documentary, full of flirty, whimsical, and somber moments, cannot, however, escape the concentration camps. To not capture the Holocaust would be like trying to record a basketball game without filming the baskets. The Holocaust is embedded in the Four Seasons. At the cards table, the camera reveals the survivors’ hands, but viewers are undoubtedly lost in the green numbers tattooed to those pale forearms. Concentration camp stories are told and then casually interrupted by questions about cards in play. One lodger is introduced as the man Mengele experimented on. Later, as the men stand around in fancy suits before the evening services and festivities, that same resident recounts being forced to pull gold teeth from corpses. But the lodgers cope with their pasts as they find comfort in their fellow survivors.

Some of the aging, infirm residents — like the lovable ninety-one year old Aron Adelman who seems cured of his ailments when he tells the camera “last night I danced” — deteriorated with the lodge. The fresh mountain air and the friendships, however, revitalized most. A pair of widows at the colony found something stronger than marriage in companionship. Two others lodgers, having lost their spouses, married one another. The survivors danced together, helped each other up steps, laughed with each other as they assembled in a huddle of lawn chairs, and worked together to stop the sale of their “paradise.”

“For them it was like being back home,” Gisele Weiss explained to me at a panel discussion for the film. Ms. Weiss’s mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, spent many summers at various colonies in the Catskills. Her final season was spent at the Four Seasons Lodge, the summer before Jacobs filmed. “These were people that [my mother] shared beds with in the concentration camps.”

“They were at their best there,” Jacobs said. “They didn’t have to explain the number on their arms or why they didn’t go to school. They had an unspoken understanding of the traumas.”

These relationships were the only silver linings to emerge from the greyest of times.

In a second film, war is not a thing of the past, but an ever-present tragedy. City of Borders, which was featured in the Other Israel Film Festival last week, is shot in Jerusalem, a city besieged with fighting and divided by religion, politics, and walls. Though there is friction between Jews and Arabs, one issue brings the religious fanatics of these groups together: their disgust of homosexuals.

In this daring documentary, director Yun Suh, takes the audience into Jerusalem’s only gay bar, Shushan. From the outside, Shushan is an unspectacular, yellowing façade, but inside it is a riveting cultural phenomenon harboring a community of Arabs and Jews who, in the outside world, are taught to hate each other. Inside the bar, they dance, form friendships, and discover peace in a city divided by war, in a city where religious extremists see homosexuality as a crime.

Throw them in jail, a man from Ramallah says. “We have to hate them,” a Palestinian girl claims. There’s even footage of the 2005 Jerusalem Pride Parade, when an ultra-orthodox man had tried to stab gay marchers.

“Jerusalem is really a city of borders,” says Sa’ar Netanel, Jerusalem’s first openly gay city council member and the owner of Shushan. “There is a border between east and west, between Jews and Palestinians, between secular and ultra-orthodox, between straight and gay.” But in Shushan borders dissolve. There are gun-toting Jewish soldiers dancing with Palestinians who have snuck across the border to connect as human beings.

“It’s very hard to be gay in Ramallah,” Boody, a devout, gay Muslim from Ramallah, states as the camera captures him in daily prayer. His alter ego — Ms. Haifa — is the “first drag queen of Palestine.” Boody explains that “Nobody is out and nobody wants to be out.” In order to have community, he is forced to illegally sneak out from the West Bank (where neighbors have threatened his life) and into Jerusalem (where neighbors have built separation walls and installed razor wire) to find acceptance at Shushan.

The film finds its voice in the unions the patrons of Shushan managed to form.

Samira, a Palestinian nurse, who dates Ravit, a Jewish doctor, describes how their relationship erodes Israeli-Palestinian taboos: Samira’s mother is horrified that her daughter is dating a woman, Ravit’s mother cannot fathom how her daughter can find love with a Palestinian. But Samira jokes: her mother had always wanted her to date a doctor.

Adam, a gay Israeli settler, is speaking to the camera when his dog slips under the fence. “[Dogs] don’t know borders,” he says as his own life is full of borders: religious, physical, and social ones.

“I gave people hope that Jerusalem can be different,” Sa’ar says at the end of the film. The bonds Shushan built are as strong as the fervor that keeps the city divided. Therefore, we’re left to wonder, which will crumble first, the unity or the borders?

In a third film, The Descendants Project, which has yet-to-be-released, offers a glimpse of what the bonds between history’s scripted enemies looks like. It is a documentary where two best friends from Seattle — one the granddaughter of European Jews, the other the granddaughter of a Nazi — go back to Poland and Germany to trace their heritage. Their friendship is not troubled by relationships to victims and perpetrators; instead it grows as the two women explore and remember the tragic fate of one’s people and the tragic choices of the other’s. It is the story of an unexpected friendship, ironically strengthened by the aftermath of genocide.

I have yet to view the Descendants Project, but I can relate to the search for answers and the discovery of unlikely bonds. When I traveled through Poland and Germany, the countries where nearly all of my family was murdered, I sought to understand the Holocaust and those responsible. As I investigated the places they suffered, I began to write my grandparents’ story; but I couldn’t have accomplished this without the people I met on this journey — Poles and Germans who extended compassionate hands, as if trying to rectify the sorrow brought about by their ancestors.

Though these films introduce audiences to profound stories, hopefully we’ll have a future where we won’t need to produce these types of documentaries. I’d like to imagine a future where relationships are not the consequences of war but a replacement for them.