A Holocaust survivor recognized himself and his brother as children in a screenshot from a recently released documentary.
The image is deceptively cheerful.
Taken in April 1945, it shows a dozen or so children smiling through a barbed wire fence. They are prisoners at Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi Germany concentration camp, and they have just been liberated.
Yehuda Danzig, 82, recognized two boys in the picture after it was recently published in the Times of Israel. One was him at the age of 11. The other was his brother Michael, who was 12 at the time.
It was the first and only photo he’d seen of himself as a prisoner.
“I started to cry,” says the soft-spoken Danzig. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Danzig had been in the kitchen reading the newspaper on his tablet when the black-and-white still frame caught his eye. It was taken from the Holocaust documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, shot at 14 different camps and sites of atrocities in Austria, Germany and Poland, including Auschwitz, after the fall of Hitler.
Though parts of the footage have been shown over the years, the film, directed with the help of Alfred Hitchcock, wasn’t completed until 2014, after the British Imperial War Museums took over its restoration.
Danzig refuses to watch it, but says its existence validates the nightmare he suffered through.
Read more:
www.thestar.com/life/2015/06/...