«When we were at the camp, for each of us, it was important to hope, to think that some would return and testify. » The words of Simone Veil (1927-2017) express the ambition of these five new documentaries recounting the deportation to Auschwitz through the voices and faces of those who suffered it. The former minister and first president of the European Parliament, who chaired the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah from 2001 to 2007, was at the origin of a vast collection of testimonies, which make it possible to hear from these survivors while Only a handful remain today.
Forty-four survivors of the death camps among 110 other witnesses, Righteous or Hidden Children, went in 2006 to a studio at the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) to have these major interviews filmed. Nearly twenty years later, director Catherine Bernstein has constructed a story of the Nazi concentration camp horror by giving voice to these survivors who saw the Soviets open the doors of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
Archival images of the Nazis and the Allies
Famous like Simone Veil, Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Gabriel Bénichou or unknown, they were young people from all the countries of occupied Europe. They all have a number tattooed on their forearm. Facing the camera, they speak courageously, in their own name but also in the name of their murdered loved ones. Their moving, sometimes unbearable words are delivered with impressive dignity.
Historian Tal Bruttmann participated in this documentary, which follows a chronological narrative from the happy pre-war times to the persecution, deportation, camp, extermination, liberation and life after . Carried by chilling archive images filmed and photographed by the Nazis and the Allies, this masterful work responds with sensitivity as well as rigor to the demand for transmission and memory.
