Special to the JTA the Horrors of Auschwitz

“The Liberation of Auschwitz, ” a documentation of the camp’s liberation by the Soviet Army, presents rare footage that was kept for 40 years in Soviet archives and presumed lost. The hour-long film, which uses images shot by a Russian cameraman from the time of liberation, January 27, 1945, until evacuation two months later, is premiering commercially here at the Film Forum on August 13.

In an interview incorporated into the newly produced film, the cameraman, Alexander Vorontsov, says Auschwitz was “far more terrible than anything I’d ever filmed,” and the Soviet camera crew had no idea what they would find there. “Time has no power to heal these memories,” he says. “What I saw and filmed in the camp was more horrifying than anything else I experienced in the war.”

“The Liberation of Auschwitz” was directed and produced by West German filmmakers Irmagard and Bengt von zur Muhlen. Vorontsov gave them the original footage when they interviewed him in Moscow last year, they told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

An 18-minute film of Vorontsov’s footage was made by the Soviet government for use at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals, but experts in the West had presumed all other film shot by the Soviets at Auschwitz had been lost. Vorontsov, reportedly the last surviving cameraman who was present at the liberation of Auschwitz, had this footage in his private archives, the von zur Muhlens said.

HARROWING DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

Vorontsov’s documentary evidence of Nazi brutality is harrowing, including skeletal corpses of babies who had died of starvation, and close – ups of victims of savage “medical experiments. Women survivors lie in tiers of bunks in a roofless hut, with snow piling up around them. Twins who were the subjects of Dr. Josef Mengele’s genetic experiments are shown leaving the camp at the time of evacuation.

One of these twins, Marc Berkowitz, now of Rockland County, New York, was almost 13 when the Soviet Army arrived. He had been brought to Auschwitz about two weeks earlier, on a forced march from the outer area of Birkenau, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. For same 10 – 14 days, the camp in mates had been left unsupervised and unfed.

He recalls the moment when the Russian troops arrived: he had found some dried beans and was trying to cook them in a pail near the gate. When he saw the Soviet tanks, he stopped cooking and opened the gate.

One soldier, perhaps a Czech, was wearing a Mogen David on a necklace, Berkowitz says. This, for him, was the significant symbol of his rescue. While waiting for possible liberation, he and his friends had discussed their hope of celebrating the forthcoming holiday of Purim, he recalls. They had survived the worst Haman of all, and wanted to properly mark their salvation, he says.

None of Vorontsov’s silent footage gives a glimpse of the dreams of Berkowitz and other inmates. His images are of the stark, inhuman reality of Auschwitz. Unlike film crews accompanying the Western Allied armies, Vorontsov had only a hand-operated 35-millimeter camera with no sound facilities. The von zur Muhlens have left the most shocking footage unedited, with neither sound nor background music.

The enormity of the Auschwitz-Birkenau operation, and its profitability for the Nazis, is apparent. As the camera pans over piles of shoes, hair false teeth, eyeglasses, shaving and tooth brushes, even prayer shawls, the narration records the volume of each commodity shipped back to the Third Reich for profitable utilization. Slave labor for I.G. Farben was an integral part of the mammoth complex, as aerial and other shots illustrate.

Much of the film shows the work of the Soviet commission that gathered evidence for the Nuremberg trials. Medical experts are shown examining victims of sadistic experiments, and the narration describes diagnoses. Escorted by former prisoners, the commission views the punishment block and gallows.

Four young Jewish women were hanged there only days before the Soviet Army reached Auschwitz, according to the narration. Their “crime” was the smuggling of explosives from a weapons factory attached to the camp.

Some 7,000 survivors were at Auschwitz when the Soviet Army arrived. The film records them as too exhausted and demoralized to show any emotion when the Soviets entered the camp. Vorontsov points out, in contrast, some staged and then discarded footage that depicts” joyful survivors” welcoming the Red Army.

“The Liberation of Auschwitz” will have a two week run at the Film Forum. A non-commercial 16-millimeter version is being distributed by the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University.