Filmmakers uncover unknown labor camp

DANIEL KURTZMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Viewing the black-and-white footage, Ulrich Teschner, a German filmmaker, was astonished by what he saw. For 25 minutes, images moved across the screen vividly depicting life inside a Nazi forced labor camp.

Jews are seen being deported from Dresden, Germany and arriving at the camp. A doctor looks on as men, women and children stand naked before him awaiting inspection and delousing. A Gestapo commissar points to a kitchen facility and piles of coal that will provide a source of heat for the barracks, apparently attempting to show how good these workers have it.

They are scenes from a Nazi propaganda film taken at Hellerberg, a labor camp northwest of Dresden that Teschner describes as a cross between Terezienstadt and a Schindler work camp.

It is a small corner of the Holocaust forgotten by history, brought to light by the flicker of age-old images.

"At first we didn't know what we could do with the film. We didn't just want to show the film as it was because it wouldn't be understood, especially by young people," said Teschner who, together with his wife, Ingrid Silverman, is making a documentary film about Hellerberg. "We didn't want this to be seen as just another black-and-white war movie. Those are people on the screen: Who are they? We wanted to put names to faces."

Difficult task ahead
The two non-Jewish Berliners, both 57, have begun the difficult task of piecing together the camp's history and trying to track down survivors. They spoke in an interview during a recent trip to Washington, where they scoured records at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Their research has also led them to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, a research center for the history of German-speaking Jewry, and will shortly take them to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Hellerberg was far from extraordinary. More than 10,000 such labor camps peppered the landscape of Nazi-occupied Europe. Most have been catalogued. But some, like Hellerberg, which was only in operation a short time, have escaped history's eye.

The camp was run by a subsidiary of the German camera manufacturer Zeiss-Ikon, one of whose employees made the film for the Nazis, then kept it hidden for decades before turning it over to a retired Dresden cameraman named Ernst Hirsch. Hirsch restored the film and gave it to Teschner.

The labor camp's primary function centered on munitions production. About 300 Jewish workers passed through the camp between November 1942 and March 1943 before being deported to Auschwitz.

At war's end, there were 10 survivors. So far, Teschner and Silverman have tracked down three, one of whom agreed to be interviewed for the film. They continue to search for more.

For the German filmmakers, the motivating force behind the project is rather uncomplicated.

"It's a part of history, a part of German history, and it has to be told," said Silverman, a schoolteacher who taught in California for several years before returning to her native Germany. "It has to be related to other people."