He shaves his head and gets an identification number tattooed on his arm. He comes to believe that he himself is the last Holocaust survivor.

He demands that all German cars use a different lane at his tollbooth. Lukas buys his own camera and wanders the streets pushing the camera in people's faces, asking them if they are Jewish, and telling them that they are lucky to be alive. Mira blames Lukas for her father's death, and Lukas is devastated. The burden of recalling the memories is too much for Mira's father, who kills himself. The Holocaust foundation fires Lukas for doing an interview before he is trained.

Eventually he persuades Mira's father to record an interview. He gives a pink triangle to his transgender co-worker, Dominique. He writes long letters to the filmmaker Horowitz, who has made a movie about the Holocaust. He wears a yellow star, plasters his wall with pictures from holocaust camps, and buys lottery tickets based on the interviewees tattooed identification numbers from the camps. He hoards interview tapes, watching several simultaneously on different television sets. At this point, Lukas's behavior becomes obsessive. Lukas gets a job working for the Holocaust organization that makes the interview tapes with the survivors. She asks him about his own childhood, and Lukas replies that he cannot remember one good memory from his own childhood. She agrees, but is upset by his obsession with holocaust memories, especially since he is not Jewish. While visiting his mother in the hospital, he again meets the medical student Mira, whose father is also a camp survivor. He is confronted by Mira, a young medical student, for attending a funeral without knowing the deceased. Watching the tape, Lukas becomes captivated, not less so when he spots the old man's obituary in the newspaper, and decides to attend the funeral. The next day the old man gives him a videotape containing his testimony from the concentration camps. One day, one of the tollbooth customers tosses him a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf, and Lukas reads it, prompting a Holocaust survivor to berate Lukas as he drives through Lukas's booth. He does not have much of a social life and spends much of his free time visiting his catatonic mother in the hospital. Lukas is a young man who works as a tollbooth operator. Critical reviews of the film were generally favourable. The film, which was Kofman’s feature debut as a feature director, was shot on DV. The film chronicles the experiences of a young man who becomes involved in documenting the experiences of survivors of the Holocaust, as his commitment turns into obsession and madness. It was written and directed by Gil Kofman and features Mark Webber and Rachel Miner in the leading roles. The Memory Thief is a 2007 American independent drama film.

Memory thief meaning