Rating: 7.8/10
Runtime: 300 min
Language: Czech,Hungarian,Polish,Russian,Spanish,English with English sub
Country: USA | Argentina | Czech Republic | Hungary | Poland | Russia
Color: Black and White | Color
Director: Pavel Chukhraj (segment "Children from the Abyss")
Vojtech Jasny (segment "Hell on Earth")
Marcel Lozinski (segment "I Remember")
Luis Puenzo (segment "Some Who Lived")
János Szász (segment "Eyes of the Holocaust")
Cast:
Jack Fuchs ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Liza Zajak-Novera ... Herself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Robert Lamberg ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Benjamin Mehl ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Alejandro Horvath ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Mira Kniazniew-Stupnik ... Herself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Pedro Boschan ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Eugenia Unger ... Herself (segment "Some Who Lived")
David Galante ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Victor Oppel ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Moises Borowicz ... Himself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Valeria Wollstein-Cohn ... Herself (segment "Some Who Lived")
Kati Sabella ... Little Girl (segment "Eyes of the Holocaust")
László Kiss ... Himself (segment "Eyes of the Holocaust")
Judith Yagoda ... Herself (segment "Eyes of the Holocaust")
Produced by
John Ballon .... co-producer
James Moll .... producer
Christopher Pavlick .... co-producer
Steven Spielberg .... executive producer
Original Music by
Andrés Goldstein
Daniel Tarrab
Film Editing by
Hugo Primero
Other crew
Andrzej Wajda .... consultant: directing
Description:
Plot Synopsis
While making Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg realised that the survivors of the Holocaust were a precious resource in themselves, and that their experiences needed to be preserved in some form. In 1994 he established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organisation whose charter was to record on video the testimonies of 50,000 Holocaust survivors for posterity, as a teaching resource as well as an historical one. To date some 52,000 testimonies have been recorded in 57 countries around the world.
To increase awareness of the Holocaust and to use the material they had collected in a positive way, the Foundation commissioned a series of five films from international film-makers. The charter for each of these directors was to produce an hour-long documentary using pre-recorded testimonies to show the impact of the Holocaust on citizen of their countries.
There is already a sea of material available on the Holocaust in film, video and print. An Israeli Foreign Minister is reported to have said "there's no business like Shoah business". To capture attention these days, any new material needs to be controversial, different or of very high quality. These documentaries are not especially controversial, and some are somewhat uneven and not as good as they should have been. The material presented is interesting and eye-opening. The one issue I have is that because of the nature of the project, all of the testimonies are accepted at face value without any critical appraisal. The testimonies were recorded over 50 years after the events described, and the memories of the survivors may be faulty, confused or the events embroidered unintentionally over the passing years. These testimonies need to be seen as merely one element of the history of the Holocaust, in combination with the documentary, visual, physical and forensic evidence available, as well as eyewitness accounts from the time.
The contributions from Poland, Russia and the former Czech Republic are the best of the bunch here. All of these films contain graphic and confronting material.
algunos que vivieron / Some Who Lived (55:29)
The first film in the set is by the Argentinian director Luis Puenzo, whose film The Official Story won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1985. That film was an examination of the impact of the military junta on the lives of an upper middle class family. In Some Who Lived, Puenzo takes a chronological approach to the testimonies of a number of Holocaust survivors who end up in Argentina, a country that also harboured fugitive Nazis. Archival footage is used to illustrate the film so that it is not just a series of talking heads, but it comes across as being just another Holocaust documentary, and Puenzo's attempts to draw parallels with the Argentinean regime of Juan Perón come across as clumsy.
A Holocaust Szemei / Eyes of the Holocaust (56:56)
The parents of Hungarian director Janos Szasz were Holocaust survivors themselves. His film has an awkward framing device of a girl reading from a dictionary of Holocaust-related terms. Hungary was an ally of Germany during World War II, and while Jews were discriminated against by the Hungarian regime, the mass killings did not begin until the Germans entered Hungary in 1943 while retreating from defeat in the Soviet Union. The survivors here describe the slow erosion of their lives followed by panic when the Nazis took over and attempted to liquidate the Hungarian population.
Children From the Abyss (56:04)
Russian director Pavel Chukraj effectively shows the horror of the Nazi invasion of Russia, with the mass killings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen after the Wehrmacht had moved further into the country. Rather than deport the Jews to concentration camps, the SS forced them to dig mass graves and simply shot or burned them on the spot. At Babi Yar, the Germans reduced the population of 150,000 Jews from Kiev down to 20 within a matter of months. Chukraj uses the testimonies of survivors who were children at the time of the atrocities, some of whom managed to survive the Babi Yar massacre, and this film is one of the best in this series.
Pamiêtam / I Remember (58:08)
This film is by the veteran Polish director Andrzej Wajda whose credentials include several war-themed films and Korsczak, the true story of a orphanage director who went with the children in his orphanage to the gas chamber. Unlike the other films in this series, Wajda does not use archival footage at all. This film is in black and white and Wajda counterpoints the testimonies with images of young people taking part in the annual March of the Years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz (Oswiecim). Instead of short extracts from multiple testimonies, Wajda uses the stories of only four survivors, who describe their stories in detail. Most remarkable of these are David Efrati, whose tales of survival after escaping from the Warsaw ghetto are extraordinary, and Henryk Mandelbaum, who was forced to work in the crematorium in Auschwitz.
Peklo na Zemi / Hell On Earth (56:13)
The Czech director Vojtech Jasny saw his father deported to Auschwitz. He became a partisan and fought against the Germans until the liberation. This film tells of inhabitants of the model camp built at Terezin (Theresienstadt), at least some of whom was enlisted to help bury the victims of the massacre at nearby Lidice.
This is a two disc set with the first three films on disc one. Annoyingly, there are no chapter cues within each film.
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