Broken Silence (2002)

While making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg realised that the survivors of the Holocaust were a precious resource in themselves, and that their experiences needed to be preserved in some form. In 1994 he established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organisation whose charter was to record on video the testimonies of 50,000 Holocaust survivors for posterity, as a teaching resource as well as an historical one. To date some 52,000 testimonies have been recorded in 57 countries around the world. To increase awareness of the Holocaust and to use the material they had collected in a positive way, the Foundation commissioned a series of five films from international film-makers. The charter for each of these directors was to produce an hour-long documentary using pre-recorded testimonies to show the impact of the Holocaust on citizen of their countries. There is already a sea of material available on the Holocaust in film, video and print. An Israeli Foreign Minister is reported to have said “there’s no business like Shoah business”. To capture attention these days, any new material needs to be controversial, different or of very high quality. These documentaries are not especially controversial, and some are somewhat uneven and not as good as they should have been. The material presented is interesting and eye-opening. The one issue I have is that because of the nature of the project, all of the testimonies are accepted at face value without any critical appraisal. The testimonies were recorded over 50 years after the events described, and the memories of the survivors may be faulty, confused or the events embroidered unintentionally over the passing years. These testimonies need to be seen as merely one element of the history of the Holocaust, in combination with the documentary, visual, physical and forensic evidence available, as well as eyewitness accounts from the time. The contributions from Poland, Russia and the former Czech Republic are the best of the bunch here. All of these films contain graphic and confronting material.