Life
What They Found review: Sam Mendes presents the proof of Bergen-Belsen
The intention to counter Holocaust denial is achieved in the director’s first documentary
April 9, 2025 14:19
By John Nathan
1 min read
The intention to counter Holocaust denial is achieved in the director’s first documentary
April 9, 2025 14:19By John Nathan
Star ratings do not suit some works. This is one. Sam Mendes’ first documentary is compiled from archive stored at the Imperial War Museum and shot by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) at Bergen-Belsen just after the camp was liberated almost exactly 80 years ago.
It shows in mute, visual plain-speak what the Germans did to those deemed unworthy of the right to life, most of them Jews but also other groups such as the Roma. Though the 40-minute film does not shirk from showing in detail the horror, it begins gently enough thanks to some unexpected footage Mendes and his editor Andy Warboys found in the museum’s vaults.
People behind barbed wire at Bergen-Belsen Photograph: Imperial War MuseumBBC/Imperial War Museums
It contained interviews with two of the AFPU’s camera operators, Sergeant Mike Lewis and Sergeant Bill Lawrie. The conversations were conducted by the museum’s former director Kay Gladstone. Overlaying the footage with these voices is a master stroke. Lewis, it turns out, was Jewish and Gladstone takes time to establish his interviewee’s experience of being a London Jew born just after the First World War and living during the time of Oswald Mosley.
A group of women at Bergen-Belsen Photograph: Imperial War MuseumsBBC/Imperial War Museums
The declared intention of the film, to counter Holocaust denial with the black and white evidence of countless people hollowed by starvation, is surely achieved. The deep pits into which corpses are dropped like litter never leave the mind. But nothing shocks more than the appearance of the well-fed Germans whose easy arrogance says so much about the oppressors’ barbarity.
The documentary was first broadcast five days ahead of the first airing of The Film, Martin Jameson’s Radio 4 play about the filming of Belsen, on April 12. Strange that it makes no mention of the play’s key figure, Sidney Bernstein, who oversaw the filming. Still, the result is not only superbly put together, it serves as irrefutable proof of what took place.
What They Found
BBC iPlayer
