Witnesses to the Age of Shoah. Documentary

The “Witnesses to the Age” project is a collection of interviews with people who experienced life under 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Now is our last chance to speak with those who remember World War II – sadly, within the next several years they’ll no longer be with us. Our recordings make up the Pilecki Institute’s vast archive of oral history. We publish fragments of the interviews on our YouTube channel. On the 77th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we would like to present a documentary produced by the Pilecki Institute’s Film Projects Team and the National Audiovisual Institute [Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny (FINA)].

WITNESSES TO THE AGE OF SHOAH
[Original Polish title: ŚWIADKOWIE EPOKI: CZAS ZAGŁADY]

The film consists of several stories told by our guests – Holocaust witnesses who recall the events that took place in Warsaw and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Put together, their individual memories tell a larger story, which fully conveys the tragic fate of Jews in German-occupied Poland. Their harrowing experiences are presented in an exceptionally raw and powerful way, as the interviews are combined with dramatic archival footage from the collection of the film’s co-producer, the National Audiovisual Institute in Poland. Instead of attempting to show the full story of the Holocaust, in “Witnesses to the Age of Shoah” we aim to give a voice to those who experienced this unimaginable horror first hand.

After the Germans entered Warsaw, the situation of Jewish residents began to steadily deteriorate. Jews were victims of harassment, plunder, dehumanization and humiliation. In 1940, they were confined in a special Jewish district (ghetto), many of them died of starvation and diseases, or were ruthlessly killed by Germans. Poles who tried to help their Jewish friends and neighbors were risking their lives, as aiding Jews was punishable by death. The liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto began with deportations of Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered on a mass scale in gas chambers. On 19 April 1943, the small remaining population of the ghetto decided to die fighting and instigated an uprising which was doomed to fail. The Jewish district of Warsaw soon ceased to exist. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jews were being murdered daily in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, the surviving prisoners of this “Hell on Earth” recall these horrific events.

The film “Witnesses to the Age of Shoah” first premiered on 25 January 2020 at Kinoteka in Warsaw, during the event entitled “Pamięć na pokolenia” [Generations of memory] – a screening of films on the subject of the Holocaust.


The film uses fragments of the piece
"Lone Harvest"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...