This year marks a number of very special anniversaries related to the Holocaust: in particular, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last January and this week of Belsen, two

of the most infamous Nazi camps. Earlier this month BBC2 and BBC iPlayer showed two powerful new documentaries marking these events, _The Road to Auschwitz _(a BBC2/PBS co-production) which

despite its title is mainly about different phases of the Holocaust and was presented by the historian Simon Schama. Though it ends with Auschwitz, it is also about the “Shoah of Bullets” in

Lithuania, the Warsaw Ghetto, the first news of the Shoah by Gas in Chelmno and the persecution of Dutch Jews. The second documentary, _What They Found_ (BBC iPlayer) is very different.

the best-known historians of his generation. Born in February 1945, just after the liberation of Auschwitz, he has recently celebrated his 80th birthday. Schama has written almost twenty

books, the first of which was published in 1977. His works include two books on _The Story of the Jews_. The second stops in 1900. In an article for _The Financial Times, _accompanying the

first showing of his new documentary _The Road to Auschwitz_ (April 7, BBC; subsequently shown on BBC iPlayer; and about to be shown on PBS in America on April 22), he addressed this issue.

“How, then, to account for my absence from all this…?” Why was he so reluctant to engage with the history of the Holocaust, when he has written on so many other subjects, from the French

Revolution and the Rothschilds to Rembrandt and three volumes on _A History of Britain_? Was it because he “wanted to heed” the words of the historian Salo Baron against turning the Jewish

past into a “lachrymose history”, merely “a highway to the Holocaust”? Was it just too dark, too unbearable? And why did he overcome this reluctance now? He wanted, he writes in the _FT_,

“to honour the many writers and imagemakers who, accepting their own eclipse, refused to resign their witness to oblivion”. Perhaps the most powerful moments in his hour-long documentary,

produced by Jyoti Mehta and directed by Hugo MacGregor for Oxford Films, one of our leading independent production companies, do just this. Schama honours the courage of Szlama Ber Winer,

who escaped from Chelmno, and walked to Warsaw to tell the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto what he had seen in one of the first death camps: the gassing of the Jews. He pays tribute to Emanuel

Ringelblum, who together with others in the Warsaw Ghetto (they called themselves, _Oyneg Shabbos_, Sabbath Delight) tried to preserve a record of what they had seen in the Warsaw Ghetto

before its total destruction. He tells the story of a Jewish woman who drew as many of the people in the Warsaw Ghetto she could before she was sent to Treblinka. He describes the courage of

some members of the _Sonderkommandos_ who risked their lives to take photographs of the crematoria at Auschwitz: in particular Zalman Gradowski, one of them, who wrote a secret diary about

his experiences which he buried so it might one day be discovered as evidence of what he had witnessed. Schama pays tribute to the courage of these extraordinary people. It is deeply moving,

with extraordinary footage of the Warsaw Ghetto and powerful accounts of the Holocaust in Lithuania, Holland and Poland. _What They Found_ is a much shorter documentary, just 36 minutes,

directed by Sam Mendes, produced by Simon and Jonathan Chinn and Gary Aung, and shown on BBC iPlayer. It draws on two extraordinary items held by the archives of The Imperial War Museum:

35mm film, shot by Sgt Mike Lewis and Sgt Bill Lawrie of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, mostly after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945; and audio interviews given

by the two cameramen in the 1980s. Their words spoken years later are the only sounds we hear. Lewis was the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants, while Lawrie was Scottish. The famous footage

shows thousands of naked corpses piled up and later thrown into huge pits by German prisoners of war, male and female. The contrast between the survivors, the staring, weeping Jewish

prisoners, ”half-dead people walking about, glazed eyes”, in Laurie’s words, and the Germans, stony-faced, unrepentant, unmoved, is astonishing. “It was a different planet, a different

earth, a hell,” says Laurie. He says later, “They just gripped your hand and looked at you. And that was enough.” There is no commentary, not even the famous words of Richard Dimbleby, first

broadcast on BBC Radio on 19 April 1945, a few days before much of this footage was shot. They include this passage: “The dead and dying lay side by side. In the gloom I passed over more

and more corpses until I heard a voice that rose gently above the moans. I found the girl. She was a living skeleton, it was impossible to determine her age, because there was practically no

hair on her head, her face resembled a sheet of yellow parchment with two eye holes (…) one of the women, in despair, threw herself at a British soldier who was on guard duty (…) she begged

him to give her some milk for the tiny baby she was holding in her arms (…) and when the soldier began to uncover the bundle to see the baby, he found that it had been dead for days.” It is

fascinating to contrast the posh, clipped tones of Dimbleby, eloquent, graphic, trying to convey the horror of what he is seeing, with the restraint of Lewis and Laurie, thoroughly decent

and humane, trying to make sense of something that their lives had never prepared them for. Martin Jameson’s Radio 4 drama, _The Film_, nearly an hour long, was broadcast on 12 April. It

tells the story of the filming of Belsen from a very different angle and focuses on the friendship of Sidney Bernstein (played by Henry Goodman) and Alfred Hitchcock (played by Jeremy

Swift). Bernstein, himself Jewish, had witnessed the horrors of Belsen and enlisted the help of Hitchcock to make a documentary out of the 75,000 feet of film shot by Lewis and Laurie, so

that no one would forget the horrors of what had happened there. Both men were completely shaken by what they saw. They then approached Richard Crossman, an academic and later a leading

politician, to write the commentary. Crossman had been one of the first to enter Dachau after it was liberated. In one of the most interesting scenes in the play, Hitchcock tells Bernstein

how he wants to structure the documentary. This film is not going to be how it was. It will use the footage artistically, to tell a story. But the climax of Jameson’s play comes in the last

ten minutes. First, Bernstein tells the incredulous Hitchcock, “we have been told to keep quiet about the Jews”. He goes on: “There must be no special pleading on behalf of the Jews…There’s

a feeling that we shouldn’t let anyone think we fought this war for the Jews.” Worse is to come when Bernstein is summoned to see Mrs. Haig, a senior official, who tells him that the film

won’t be shown at all. “The landscape in Europe is changing,” she tells him. The powers that be don’t want to dwell on German war guilt. Britain and America need the Germans on their side

against Stalin. At the end of the play we are told that the film shot by Lewis and Laurie gathered dust for decades in the archives of the Imperial War Museum and appeared in various

versions from the 1980s until Mendes’s documentary. Hitchcock returns to Hollywood where he is joined by Bernstein, who returns to Britain to found Granada TV. None of this is mentioned by

Mendes. I don’t wish to be unfair to Simon Schama or to Dimbleby, Lewis and Laurie, or to Martin Jameson, who has written more than a hundred radio dramas for the BBC. But the images of the

Warsaw Ghetto and Belsen in the two documentaries, and the stories of Ringelblum, Winer and Gradowski, are more powerful than any of their words. We owe a debt of thanks to Schama and

Sergeants Lewis and Laurie, to those who made _The Film_, but also to the archivists and curators at The Imperial War Museum and numerous other film and stills archives. Above all, we owe a

debt to the courage of the Jews who knew they were about to be killed but wanted to leave words and images, so that future generations would know what had been done to their people. A

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