Postponement - Documentary scenes from a Jewish transit camp
Postponement - Documentary Scenes from a Jewish Transit Camp is an essay film about the persecution of the Jews / Shoah , which was directed by Harun Farocki in 2007. However, the film is based on the material of the concentration camp prisoner Rudolf Breslauer , who in 1944 had to make recordings for the SS about the life of the prisoners in the German transit camp Westerbork . In 1944, on behalf of the camp commandant Gemmeker, Breslauer made a film about the concentration camp assembly camp for several months - probably for information for official visitors to one of the two central concentration camp assembly camps set up by the occupiers in the Netherlands. The 90 minutes of the recovered film material remained uncut fragments at the time.
In the opinion of many critics, in contrast to the film scenes from the Theresienstadt “ghetto” that were shot during the same phase of the Second World War and the Shoah, they lack direct propaganda intent. The soundless images are extraordinary, including probably the only film recording of the start of a deportation train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .
One of the received subtitles that was intended for the film was: The same image over and over for two years: TRANSPORT . The cameraman Breslauer and his family were deported to Auschwitz in September 1944 and murdered there.
literature
- Sven Kramer : Repeated reading. HF's reading of the film documents from the Westerbork camp in "Aufschub". In: Dsb. (Ed.): Transformations of violence in film. About Leni Riefenstahl , Jean Améry , David Cronenberg , Atom Egoyan , Chris Marker , Alexander Kluge , Farocki . Deep Focus series, 20th Bertz + Fischer Verlag , Berlin 2014, ISBN 9783865053237 , pp. 142–167.