Memory of the Camps

[StevePulaski]

Memory of the Camps (1984)
Directed by: Sidney Bernstein

Rating: ★★★
NOTE: The PBS "Frontline" documentary Memory of the Camps was recently reedited and reworked from a 60 minutes, made-for-TV documentary into a theatrically released, 75 minute long film known as German Concentration Camps Factual Survey in 2017. This is a review of the original, 1984 "Frontline" documentary, now available on DVD and intermittently aired on PBS.

In 1945, British and American film crews traveled to Germany to film footage of Nazi concentration camps for a documentary. The film, which was overseen by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, never materialized, and after one modest test screening, laid dormant as a collection of film reels in the Imperial War Museum. Roughly forty years later, PBS got a hold of the footage for their "Frontline" documentary series, pieced the rough cuts together, and added narration over the film, which was shelved before the filmmakers even had time to configure or create a soundtrack.

As a result, the documentary - known as Memory of the Camps - doesn't flow as cohesively as it probably would have if the project came to materialize, but that's hardly worth mentioning. In a shivering sixty minutes, the film compiles clips, stray audio, and tidbit interviews mostly from Belsen Concentration Camp. It's something of a clinical documentary that's pure showcase, mostly of the mass dehumanization that took place during this time, with no discernible filmmaking style that isn't direct and to the point. For most of the movie, we witness a tangled mess of bloodied bodies and starved individuals with bulging rib-cages, pelvic bones, and actual pressure sores on their skin from the weight of bones pressing against their flesh.

It's an ugly scene, but I'd argue a necessary one. I recall first learning about the Holocaust in the fifth grade, and during that year, I can't recall us talking about anything that wasn't Adolf Hitler, World War II, or Holocaust-related when it was time for social studies class. To young children, it's hard to communicate the impact and sheer scope of Hitler's atrocities, and I believe the massive era that was World War II, specifically the Holocaust, doesn't become something one can grasp until they get older. Due to its straight-forward, unambiguous nature, Memory of the Camps very much feels like a visualized textbook, only with more haunting images and instances that will register far beyond the impact of conventional grade-school literature.

I suspect that even movie fans like myself who often feel as if they've seen everything to the point where nothing can shock, startle, or discomfort them will be put in total silence upon seeing numerous corpses and lifeless carcasses hoarded into a pit where even more bodies lie motionless. The visuals of Memory of the Camps are so strong that they almost carry their own transcendent weight; at some points, you can almost smell the decomposing bodies, and even if you do, it's undoubtedly even more horrid than what you can imagine.

Hundreds of children under the age of twelve were said to be rescued from Belsen, Auschwitz, and other concentration camps. "Where are their parents?," the narrator asks, voicing the audience's internalized question, while showing these smiling children. Immediately following the narrator's rhetorical is a shot of Nazi officers dragging dead Jews by the ankles through fields. "Here, perhaps." Another scene showing bodies in a pit and more being stacked on top of one another. "Or maybe here." The narrator speaks of the children, saying that commodities and occurrences we take for granted each and every day - such as clean, dry clothes and those "hellos" and kind remarks from strangers - were "strange, undreamed of, mysterious things" to the children of Belsen and other death camps.

Memory of the Camps echoes a bit of Topaz, a short film of the same year, that shows rare footage of imprisoned Japanese and Japanese-American people inside an internment camp at the height of World War II. It carries the same raw, emotional weight, and mirrors the similarly odd release pattern (Topaz was shot illegally and distributed very amateurishly). It's also a bit of a reminder the impact and reality behind an event that gets prolifically thrown around without the gravity and detail that it deserves. Like many things that are necessary to view, it's uncomfortable, but for a documentary, you can't get much more authentic than watching scores of people die of starvation and be so carelessly disposed of before your very eyes.

Directed by: Sidney Bernstein.