Russian film shows Auschwitz horror

Press, 17 January 1986, Page 6

Russian film shows Auschwitz horror

NZPA-Reuter Bonn Two West German filmmakers yesterday presented recently discovered film clips of the Auschwitz concentration camp which had lain in the archives of a Soviet cameraman for 40 years.

The 11 minutes of silent film, taken by Alexander Vorontsov after Soviet troops liberated the Nazi death camp in January, 1945, includes shots of children staring fearfully at their rescuers and scenes of mass graves found by the Russians.

The film-makers, Irmgard and Bengt von zur Muehlen, said that Mr Vorontsov gave them the film, never before shown in public, when they interviewed him in Moscow during a hunt for missing film of Auschwitz.

The scenes from the extermination camp were interspersed with a filmed interview of the cameraman, who told the couple he had still not overcome the horror of entering the camp. Mr Vorontsov said the

liberators were greeted with fear rather than jubilation as the inmates, weakened by starvation and disease, at first thought they were a Nazi execution squad. The film, shown at a press preview in Bonn, will be given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Foundation. About 60 minutes of film was shot by the Russians in Auschwitz between its liberation on January 27 and its evacuation two months later.

Among the most harrowing passages are those showing the corpses of babies that had starved to death and the victims of medical experiments done by the camp doctor, Josef Mengele, and his aides.

Other shots from the camp include women lying in tiers of bunks in a roofless prison hut and piles of shoes, hair and false teeth taken from Jews and other inmates sent to the gas chambers.

About 7000 prisoners were in Auschwitz when the Soviet forces arrived at the

camp, located in what is now southern Poland. Mr Vorontsov’s film shows that some weeks after they freed the camp the Soviet authorities restaged the liberation for the benefit of the cameras, this time showing jubilant inmates rushing through the gate to embrace the Russian troops. The scene had never been used. Some of the most moving passages include studies of the haggard and empty faces of prisoners and shots of half-burnt corpses in the ruined crematorium. “What I saw and filmed in the camp was more horrifying than anything else I experienced in the war,” Mr Vorontsov told the filmmakers. “Time has no power to heal these memories”. The West Germans said the Soviet authorities had _ given them freedom to use the film as they wished. Excerpts will be shown on German television later this month and the Holocaust Foundation will present a 60-minute documentary in March.