Shoah

Time          Phrase  

00:00:00   Making this film was a long and difficult battle. I could not have waged it without the support and the faith of a number of men and women, some of whom are now gone. This film is theirs as well.

00:00:14   I thank the members of my crew, those men and women who took part in the campaigns of research, reporting, filming. Especially Irène Steinfeldt-Lévi and Corinne Coulmas, who seconded me, even risking their personal safety in times of danger. And Ziva Postec, who worked beside me day after day for five years, on the editing of the film.

00:00:28   My gratitude also goes to Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Contemporary Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Raül Hilberg, Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont in Burlington (U.S.A.)

00:00:56   The story begins in the present at Chelmno, on the N#arew River, in Poland. Fifty miles northwest of Lodz, in the heart of a region that once had a large Jewish population, Chelmno was the place in Poland where Jews were first exterminated by gas. Extermination began on December 7, 1941.

00:01:15   At Chelmno 400 000 Jews were murdered in two separate periods : December 1941 - spring 1943 : June 1944 - January 1945. But the way in which death was administrated remained the same throughout : the gas vans.

00:01:34   Of the 400 000 men, women and children who went there, only two came out alive : Mordechai Podchlebnik and Simon Srebnik. Srebnik, a survivor of the last period, was a boy of thirteen when he was sent to Chelmno.

00:01:53   His father had been killed before his eyes in the ghetto in Lodz ; his mother died in a gas van in Chelmno. The SS placed him in one of the « Jewish work details », assigned to maintaining the extermination camps and that were in turn slated for death...

00:02:12   With the ankles in chain, like all his companions, the boy shuffled through the village of Chelmno each day. That he was kept alive longer than the others, he owed to his extreme agility, which made him the winner of jumping contests and speed races that the SS organized for the chained prisoners.

00:02:31   And, also, to his melodious voice : several times a week, when the rabbits kept in hutches by the SS needed fodder., young Srebnik rowed up the Narew, Chelmno's river, under guard, in a flat-bottomed boat, to the alfalfa fields at the edge of the village. He sang Polish folk tunes and in return the guard taught him Prussian military songs.

00:02:50   Everyone ln Chelmno knew him. The PoIish farm foIk and German civillan as weII, since this PoIish province was annexed to the Reich after the falI of Warsaw, germanized and renamed WartheIand. Chelmno was changed to Kulmhof, Lodz to Litzmannstadt, Kolo to Warthbrücken, etc... German coIonlsts had settIed every where in Wartheland, and there was even a German grade school in Chelmno itseIf.

00:03:09   During the night of January 18, 1945, two days before Soviet troops arrived, the Nazis killed all the remaining Jews in the « work details » with a bullet in the head. Simon Srebnik was among those executed. But the bullet missed his vital brain centers. When he came to, he crawled into a pigsty.

00:03:28   A polish farmer found him there. The boy was treated and healed by a Soviet Army doctor. A few months later Simon left for Tel Aviv along with other survivors of the death camps. I found him in lsrael and persuaded him to return to Chelmno with me. He was then forty-seven years old.

00:04:08   ''A little white house...''

00:04:12   ''Lingers in my memory...''

00:04:15   ''Of that little white house...''

00:04:18   ''l dream each night...''

00:05:08   He was 13 1/2 years old. He had a lovely singing voice

00:05:12   and we heard him.

00:05:48   When l heard him again, my heart beat faster,

00:05:51   because what happened here... was a murder.

00:05:55   l really re-lived what happened.

00:06:58   lt's hard to recognize, but it was here.

00:07:07   They burned people here.

00:07:09   A lot of people were burnt here.

00:07:22   Yes, this is the place.

00:07:59   No one ever left here again.

00:08:10   The gas vans came in here...

00:08:13   There were two huge ovens,

00:08:18   and afterward, the bodies were thrown

00:08:24   into these ovens, and the flames reached to the sky.