“We wanted to speak, to finally be heard. No sooner had we begun to tell than we were suffocating. To ourselves, what we had to say then began to seem unimaginable to us. writes Robert Antelme, survivor of a Nazi camp, in The humankind.
It is this unthinkable that William Karel lets us hear and see in The Diaspora of Ashes, a raw collection, without commentary, of texts by victims and executioners of the Holocaust, anonymous or famous. Author of fifteen films on the Jewish question – against oblivion, Album(s) d’Auschwitz, To the last: the destruction of the Jews of Europe… –, this great documentary filmmaker in his 80s felt the need to put on soundtrack and film the words and images entrusted to him during his research.
Rare testimonials
“I regretted not having used many documents that I kept on my computer”, he confided last May, when France Culture broadcast The Diaspora of Ashes. A two-hour audio documentary of rare power, woven from the testimonies of camp prisoners or SS soldiers read without pathos by six voices, including two residents of the Comédie-Française (Elsa Lepoivre and Denis Podalydès).
On the occasion of the commemoration of the liberation of the concentration camps, LCP is offering a one-hour television version. The testimonials, chilling or cynical, resonate with Nazi propaganda images, static shots of Auschwitz, horrific drawings of places of extermination or photos of bags of hair leaving for the manufacture of slippers in Germany…
→ PORTRAIT. Documentary filmmaker William Karel, investigator of reality
William Karel feared that images would erode the power of the words read. It is not so. If the documentary appeals less to the imagination than its sound version, it shows with the same force the effectiveness of the enterprise of dehumanization and exaltation of hatred that leads to the “unimaginable”.