(Jewish Group) Using previously unknown photographs, a new Holocaust documentary demands to be seen

[Behind the Aegis]

Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” is not another Holocaust documentary. It is an extraordinary, wholly unfamiliar, unprecedented film centering on largely unknown and clandestinely shot photographs taken by a handful of prisoners in five Nazi concentration camps: Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Ravensbrück from the spring of 1943 until the autumn of 1944.

Taking pictures was an act of rebellion and insurgency, whether the inmate was shooting the “brothel,” where female inmates serviced the SS, or the facility where medical experimentation occurred, or even a fellow inmate — if caught these photographers would have been shot on the spot. But they were determined to leave a record of what they had witnessed and experienced.

These photos are clearly a world apart from Nazi propaganda shots, but they also differ from the ones taken by allied forces at the end of the war, who viewed what they saw through a horrified and empathic prism. The fundamental difference is that here the photographers, and often their subjects, who may or may not have known they were being photographed, were prisoners like they were. Within these parameters there was mutual understanding and a shared experience.

The photos were either smuggled out or hidden and retrieved only after the war. Cognet, who has explored Holocaust art in his previous films, uses the shots to retrace the photographers’ footsteps on what remains of the camps in a quest to unearth the circumstances and the personal stories in front of and behind the lens. The film combines historical analysis, archeology and plain old detective work. There is no archival footage or interviews with survivors, just the photos, the filmmaker and the scholars.

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