David Cesarani

The truth about the Auschwitz death camp was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Third Reich. Prisoners who tried to escape were killed in public as an example to other inmates. Very few ever made it out alive. Escape From Auschwitz tells the incredible story of two young Slovak Jews, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who managed to escape, determined to tell the world about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis at the camp, which resulted in the saving of thousands of lives.

On the 29th September 1945, the incomplete rough cut of a brilliant documentary about concentration camps was viewed at the MOI in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had led a small team – which included Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock – to complete the film from hours of shocking footage. Unfortunately, this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into acceptance of Allied occupation had missed its moment. Even in its incomplete form (available since 1984) the film was immensely powerful, generating an awed hush among audiences. But now, complete to six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version produced by IWM, is being compared with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).

Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman, the last two survivors of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, recount the horrors they experienced during the war and talk about their lives after their escape in a prisoner uprising in 1943. Willenberg would go on to become a hero of the 1944 Warsaw uprising while Taigman would be called as a witness during the infamous trial of Adolf Eichmann.