Among them was Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 89, who recalled the day British troops arrived at Belsen-Bergen.
Singer tracked down and interviewed survivors who appeared in the original footage. Now, 70 years on, director and anthropologist André Singer has made a documentary called Night Will Fall, to be screened on Channel 4 later this month, telling the extraordinary story of filming the camps and the fate of Bernstein’s project.Ī US combat cameraman, featured in Night Will Fall. “If one man in 10 wears spectacles,” we are asked, “how many does this heap represent?” “Even teeth were taken out of their mouth.” Bernstein’s film then cuts to a large pile of spectacles. Collected from the murdered, it would have been carefully sorted and weighed. In one piece of film, from Majdanek concentration camp, we see huge bags containing human hair.
As well as the dead, the footage showed starved survivors and human remains in ovens. As they worked, reels of film kept arriving, sent by British, American and Soviet combat and newsreel cameramen from 11 camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.
They set to work on a documentary entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. Photograph: Peter Stackpole/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Imagesīernstein assembled a remarkable team, including the future Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman, who wrote the film’s lyrical script, and Alfred Hitchcock, who flew in from Hollywood to advise Bernstein on its structure.