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Eighty years ago this week, the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz was liberated, and the full extent of the atrocities committed there was revealed. At the time, 1.1 million people had been killed there, and 7,000 remained there—mostly people of Jewish descent, but also Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and people of other nationalities. It’s a complicated memoriam, as the last survivors reach old age and Jewish identity is perhaps now more politicized than ever. Meanwhile, the horrors of Auschwitz and the Holocaust have receded from memory for many and been diluted in a haze of disinformation and continuing Holocaust denial.
Here, some Peabody-recognized ways to remember and to learn more about what happened at Auschwitz and during the dark period of the Holocaust.
‘Holocaust’
Starring Meryl Streep and James Woods, this 1978 miniseries ran on NBC in the United States and gained international acclaim. Although it’s not currently available to stream, this Peabody-winner emphasized the war crimes committed by the Nazis to a worldwide audience and brought the word “holocaust” into common parlance. No previous scripted narratives had informed mainstream U.S. audiences about the horrifying events at the extermination camps, focusing on everyday victims. There is perhaps no better example of the power of television to dramatize the impact of real-life events on regular citizens.
‘I Have a Message for You’
In just 12-minutes, this Peabody-nominated New York Times documentary tells an extraordinary story of survival, charting one woman’s daring escape from a train headed for Auschwitz even though it meant leaving her dying father behind. Twenty years later, she received a life-changing message from a stranger. At 92, she shares her experience here, with great humor, wit, and wisdom, as well as a few emotional plot twists.
Where to Watch: YouTube
This 2014 film chronicles the making of a lost 1945 documentary showing the carnage discovered at the concentration camps as they were liberated. German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was sponsored by the British government and produced by future media executive Sidney Bernstein with help from Alfred Hitchcock. (This recalls similar American efforts to document World War II with professional filmmakers’ help, as shown in the excellent book and documentary series Five Came Back.) Though the British government originally supported the filmmaking effort, the work was shelved and remained archived before being recovered in 2014. Night Will Fall walks through how the original film was made, why it was shelved, and how it was rediscovered, and it includes 12 minutes of the original’s harrowing footage. The result is a meta-commentary on not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but also the importance of documentation—even, and especially, of the grimmest kind.
Where to Watch: AppleTV+
Claude Lanzmann‘s epic masterpiece of documentary filmmaking serves as a crucial historical monument, sharing nine hours worth of the experiences of survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, from interviews collected over a period of 11 years. To those who would deny that the Holocaust happened, the work makes a resounding, devastating, and thorough rebuttal. It examines what went on at Auschwitz, as well as in the Chelmno extermination camp, Treblinka, and the Warsaw ghetto through interviews with escapees, people who worked in incinerators and gas chambers, villagers who witnessed the trains full of prisoners arriving at the camps, and many more. The film paints as thorough a picture as possible of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, but also the complicity of regular citizens necessary for such mass mobilizations to occur. .
Where to Watch: Amazon Prime
Peabody Conversation
Director André Singer explains, “The title of the film, Night Will Fall came from the script of the original film … If you do not learn the lesson that these pictures teach, in the film, night will fall. It sort of leaves us with the feeling of, let’s hope that we’ve learned something from it.”