It's a hard thing to confess, but for years I struggled to make an emotional connection to the victims of the Holocaust. Maybe it was self-protection, but the horrors felt too distant to comprehend. Sheldon Lazarus felt the same. For both of us, the 1993 film Schindler’s List was a turning point. “Afterwards, I stood in stunned silence, in tears,” he recalls. The emotional connection had been made. And the image that lingered was the little girl in red, the only splash of colour in Steven Spielberg’s black-and-white film.
Twenty-five years later, his 14-year-old daughter was studying the Shoah at school. He picked up her text book and realised that all the photographs in it were black and white. “It was hard for her to feel a connection.” Around the same time, Peter Jackson’s colourised documentary about the First World War had been released. Lazarus wondered why archive film of the Holocaust hadn’t been similarly updated. He had a conversation with someone high up in French television, and asked the question. “He told me ‘Because the French aren’t ready for it.’ I thought, well, we’re ready for it!”
So started the project to colourise footage of Auschwitz, which has led to a film — Auschwitz Untold in Colour — made by Fulwell73 where Lazarus is development producer.
The effect is extraordinary. The distancing effect of monochrome is lifted, and you can far more easily imagine yourself among the thronging crowd arriving at the death camp. It is chilling, compelling and extremely powerful. As well as the footage, the film features interviews with 16 survivors from Poland, France, the US and the UK. They include a Romany Holocaust survivor and a resistance fighter from Lithuania. In the UK it will screen on More4 and in the US on the History Channel.
For Neil Grant, executive director, the potential appeal to young people was key. Formerly a politics teacher at JFS, the BAFTA-award-winning film-maker says, “If ever there was a way to bring a younger generation to material which is not being taught as it should be, this is it.” The rise of antisemitism in modern times makes the film all the more relevant, he believes. He also worked on the BBC’s Panorama programme on Labour antisemitism. “This, for me, joins it all up. We must make sure that no one ever forgets.”
He points out that one of the survivors they interview lives in Pittsburgh and was in the Tree of Life Synagogue when it was attacked in 2018. “He is a double survivor. His experience links the past and the present.” Both men stress the importance of viewing the Holocaust as part of contemporary politics. “This is not history,” says Lazarus. “When I saw some of the test footage when it was first colourised, I worried, is it too real? But it was real. It happened in colour. It is not history. It is real.”
For him, the most extraordinary footage is not that taken within Auschwitz, but the films showing Jewish life outside the camps, in ghettoes and before. Seeing black-and-white images can create a “fog” which shields us from fully accepting that these were people just like us, he says. They worked carefully with the survivors to make sure that nothing was crass or sensationalised. “We were very sensitive to the fact that we had a duty of care to the survivors. Their memories are in colour, of course.”
For Lazarus, the impact in his own documentary of the images came home to him this week as he davened in shul in Hendon on Tuesday, a day after the first colourised pictures were printed in a newspaper. A man alongside him thanked him for making the film, and added that he recognised someone in one of the pictures — his wife’s father.
“My goodness, I was so moved by it. I thought we are doing the right thing.”
Episode 1 of Auschwitz Untold in Colour is on More4 on January 26 at 9pm, with Episode 2 at the same time on January 27.
