Festival Films A-Z

Be??ec

Production

Jean Bigot
VLR Productions /
Compagnie des Phares e Balises
55 bis, rue de Lyon
75012 Paris
Tel.: +33 1 44 75 11 33
Fax: +33 1 44 75 11 35
E-Mail: info@phares-balises.fr
Internet:
www.phares-balises.fr

Camera

Guillaume Schiffman, Stéphane Massis

Cut

Lise Beaulieu

Worldsales

Films Distribution
34, rue du Louvre
75001 Paris
Frankreich
Tel.: +33 1 53 10 33 99
Fax: +33 1 53 10 33 98
E-Mail: info@filmsdistribution.com

(Belzec)
F 2005, Regie: Guillaume Moscovitz, OmeU, 100 min.

Synopsis

BelzecVery few people know of the existence of the Be??ec extermination camp. This shocking truth made us realise that we had to make this film. The Be??ec extermination camp has sunk into oblivion, blotted out from our memory, from our very history.

Everyone has heard of Auschwitz and Treblinka: there were survivors who came back from these camps and testified. Apart from Rudolf Reder, who passed away in the late Sixties, and Chaïm Hirszman, who was assassinated in Lublin after World War II, no one returned from Be??ec to testify. All evidence that the Germans had exterminated Europe\'s Jews was got rid of in a deliberate manner which proved to very efficient at Be??ec.

The industrialised mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis amounted to more than killing -- it also required the destruction of all proof of this killing. Corpses were destroyed, and thus bodies, names and places were literally erased. What today is called \'revisionism\' was, from the very beginning, an integral part of the Nazi murders. Obliterating the evidence of extermination was an essential part of the scheme to annihilate the Jews. Nothing was supposed to remain to bear witness to what had taken place.

This campaign of obliteration continued after the war. When the Communists came to power, the history of the camp was soon instrumentalised to symbolise Communist victory over fascism. Two decades after the war ended, a monument was erected in Be??ec in honour of the martyrs of Hitlerism, who had died in their fight against fascism. This completely disregarded some 600,000 men, women and children who were murdered because they were Jews. This campaign of obliteration still continues today and the Polish authorities have been less than eager to construct a new memorial to the Jews who were murdered at Be??ec.
Guillaume Moscovitz

Dates

1603.10.200711:00Festsaal
8308.10.200719:00Kommkino