Belzec - On DVD Tuesday!

Hello everyone! My name is Ben, and it is my pleasure to announce the newest release from Menemsha Films, available this Tuesday on DVD: Belzec!

Belzec is a heart-wrenching documentary which sheds light on a heretofore forgotten aspect of the Holocaust: the death camp in Belzec, Poland. By interviewing locals who witnessed the horrors firsthand and the only known living survivor of the camp, a woman who was hidden under a pile of wood for years as a young girl, the film juxtaposes these memories with the site of the camp today: an empty wooded field, no trace left by the Nazis except the ground bone and ashes mixed with the dirt.

The film's synopsis:

The horrifically efficient Nazi death camp, Belzec, was in operation for less than one year, but witnessed the murder of at least 600,000 Jews. Once the Soviet counterattacks began, the S.S. eliminated all traces of the camp, and the name Belzec faded from the collective conscience. Conceived of by Executive Producer Claude Lanzman as the last chapter to his epic Shoah, helmer Guillaume Moscovitz has created a chilling account that's as much about remembrance as it is about the past.

The film was also reviewed in Variety, by Jay Weissberg.

"This contrast between the tree-covered plain and the death buried just below the surface is what intrigues Moscovitz. Much of the handsomely lensed docu is composed of interviews with locals, people who remember seeing the trains pulling up (the camp was built just 1,500 feet from the town's railroad station), hearing the screams, and, of course, smelling the foul air of burning corpses.

It's refreshing to finally hear villagers who don't claim to have been ignorant of what went on inside the barbed wire fences, although a few don't seem especially traumatized by what was happening in their backyard.

The only Jewish survivors of Belzec were those men forced to usher the prisoners into the gas chambers and later transport the bodies to the pits. Moscovitz makes superb use of their chilling written testimonies.

But even more devastating is listening to the sole living Jewish witness, Braha Rauffman. As a 7-year-old, she was hidden by a villager for 20 months, in a makeshift hole covered with firewood that didn't even allow her space to fully stretch her legs. Her testimony, almost unbearable to hear, contrasts sharply with the more generic recollections of the townspeople."

You can buy the DVD here: Menemsha Store

For more information on Belzec and many other quality films from Menemsha, visit our website! Menemsha Films