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In one of many hardest sequences to take a look at in “From Where They Stood” (it’s additionally one of many hardest to look away from), we see 4 pictures taken contained in the Buchenwald focus camp by Alberto Errera, a Jew from Greece who was a member of the Sonderkommando — the inmates who have been allowed to dwell, at the very least for a time, as a result of they agreed to be a part of the grisliest work element. There has by no means been a identified {photograph} that exists of what went on contained in the fuel chambers. However Errera got here shut by taking a number of clandestine pictures from the fuel chambers, giving us a window into what occurred earlier than and after.
One in all his photographs reveals a gaggle of ladies prisoners, a number of of them bare, in opposition to a woodland setting; they assume they’re about to take a bathe, which is the lie that was instructed to prisoners to get them to enter the fuel chambers. There are additionally two pictures of the Sonderkommando — the one two in existence — that present a number of of them strolling amongst a sea of corpses, which they’ve simply dragged out of the fuel chambers. The eeriest factor concerning the photograph is that smoke rises throughout them. The crematorium wasn’t functioning that day, and their job was to set hearth to the corpses within the open air.
As we watch and pay attention, a small staff of European Holocaust historians touch upon these pictures, attempting to pinpoint, as a lot as potential, what’s occurring in them. Why do the Sonderkommando merely appear like males at work? As a result of they’ve completed this many occasions. Is among the nude girls holding a new child? The {photograph} is simply too grainy for us to make that out, but it surely appears to be like, terrifyingly, as if she is perhaps. Like so many visible information of the focus camps, these pictures hang-out us as a result of they sit on the fault line between life and annihilation.
A decade after the tip of World Battle II, the French director Alain Resnais made “Night time and Fog” (1956), a 32-minute documentary about what went on within the Nazi loss of life camps, and for many people it stays the definitive report of that profound horror. Resnais contrasted black-and-white footage shot within the camps — to today, it stays essentially the most graphic footage of these occasions most of us have ever seen — with scenes shot in coloration, usually on the similar places, 10 years later, to create a dialectical tableau of the previous embedded within the current.
In “From The place They Stood,” the director, Christophe Cognet, employs an analogous technique, although the place Resnais took half an hour of display time to etch the Holocaust into our souls, this film, with its round spirals of discuss (the commenters chew over what’s taking place in every {photograph} in a method that’s usually revealing however, every now and then, merely very French), takes two hours to perform one thing that’s much less elemental.
But the film, in its barely tutorial method, is a meditation that heightens our notion. The photographic report of the Nazi period has typically made it appear as if it actually existed in black-and-white. Right here, seeing the camps at the moment in gentle autumnal colours, bathed within the sounds of wind and birdsong, we’re achingly conscious that that is, the truth is, what it was like — not a monochromatic hell however a imaginative and prescient of nature perverted. Cognet and his staff created unfavourable blow-up transparencies of most of the pictures on glass, and as they poise them in opposition to the equivalent places, we really feel eerily transported. In a single uniquely disturbing set of pictures, taken by Joanna Szydlowska in 1944, a number of girls prisoners show their wounds. They have been victims of Nazi “medical experiments” (one had her legs shortened), they usually appear to stare at us throughout time.
The final word horror of what went on within the camps stays out of attain — a actuality inconceivable for any prisoner to have captured, and possibly too unfathomable to be considered. And it lends a thriller to those pictures that’s distinctive within the twentieth century. However “From The place They Stood” additionally captures the life inherent in the truth that these pictures exist. The prisoners who snapped them took nice dangers to steal and smuggle cameras, and to cover the rolls of movie after they have been shot. They did it as a type of resistance: a testomony to what went on within the camps, which in some circumstances, as within the 7 pictures taken by Wenzel Polak, quantity to an astonishing undercutting of victimization mythology — we see photographs of Polak and several other compatriots, smiling and hanging poses of informal energy. The commenters make the purpose that if it weren’t for the striped uniforms, you’d by no means guess that these folks have been in a focus camp. They appear like they don’t belong there. Which raises the query: Why would we have a look at anybody and assume in any other case?
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