Night Will Fall Page #4

I'm at present in Belsen camp

doing guard duty

over the SS men.

The things in this camp

are beyond describing.

When you actually see

them for yourself,

you know what you're

fighting for here.

Pictures in the paper

cannot describe it at all.

The things they have

committed, well,

nobody'd think they

were human at all.

We actually know now

what has been going on

in these camps,

and I know personally

what I'm fighting for.

Once Bernstein's documentary

proposal had been approved

by both British

and American governments,

he hired perhaps the best known

film editor in London...

Stewart McAllister.

Together, they began to

assemble the army film footage

now arriving in the edit rooms.

The deadline for completion

of the film was set

at just 3 months.

The news from Bergen-Belsen

was not entirely a surprise

to the British government.

Soviet intelligence

had reported uncovering

concentration camps in Poland

as early as July 1944,

but as the Soviets had a record

of falsifying atrocity reports,

the Allies ignored

the information.

Now in the light

of Bergen-Belsen,

the British reconsidered,

and Bernstein broadened

the scope of his film

to include footage

from the Soviet camps.

The Soviets discovered

few living inmates at Majdanek.

In the face

of the advancing troops,

the Germans had begun emptying

the camps in Poland,

sending prisoners

westwards to camps,

including Bergen-Belsen.

The evidence filmed

in Poland became part

of Bernstein's documentary.

Prisoners paid

their own fares to Majdanek.

They thought they were

going to new homes,

and so they brought

their most precious

portable possessions.

They say dead men's boots

bring bad luck.

What of dead children's toys?

Their mothers carried

scissors perhaps.

The scissors are here.

The mothers, no,

but here in this room

is part of them.

Nothing material

could be wasted.

These packages

contain human hair,

carefully sorted and weighed.

Nothing was wasted.

Even the teeth were taken

out of their mouths,

byproducts of the system.

Toothbrushes,

nail brushes...

shoe brushes...

shaving brushes.

If one man in 10

wears spectacles,

how many does

this heap represent?

All these things belonged

to men and women

and children like ourselves,

quite ordinary people

from all parts of the world.

The Soviet forces carried

on through the Polish winter

to liberate another,

larger camp...

Auschwitz.

I stood there maybe 30 minutes.

It was snowing heavily,

I couldn't see,

and at a distance,

I saw lots of people,

and they were all

wrapping themselves

in white camouflage raincoats.

They were smiling

from ear to ear,

and they didn't look like

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