FORGOTTEN TRANSPORTS PROJECT

Most documentaries about the Holocaust focus on a few notorious camps, with familiar newsreel footage and bald commentary to fill in the historical background. Forgotten Transports, a major series of four 90-minute films, offers something powerfully and challengingly different.

It is not just that the tragic events depicted are almost unknown, even to specialist historians. Just as significant is the way they have been recreated. Instead of a detached outsider’s narrative, each film is built from the gripping stories of individual survivors, seen through their own eyes and told entirely in their own words.

While they speak only of what they experienced themselves, their impressions weave together to form a poignant picture of ordinary individuals caught up in an era of atrocity and terrible violence. Every detail of what they describe is illustrated and confirmed through contemporary photographs and other visual material, most of it previously unseen, meticulously sourced everywhere from official archives to the garages of former SS men.

The result calls into question much of what we think we know about the Holocaust. But it also reveals the range of strategies which enabled at least some people to stay alive. Nothing can detract from the suffering the films depict. Yet there is also something thrilling about the sight of a handful of now elderly people who defied all the Nazis’ attempts to destroy them and are still here to tell their tale.

In historical terms, Forgotten Transports breaks major new ground. Each of the films is based on the experience of Jews deported to virtually unknown camps and ghettos - in Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and the Lublin region of eastern Poland. Almost all were sent to places where thousands or even tens of thousands of people perished. But names like Ereda, Maly Trostinec, Salaspils and Sawin hardly feature in standard histories of the Holocaust, since virtually no one was left after the war to describe what happened there.

Fewer than three hundred Czech Jews out of tens of thousands survived these ghastly transports. The young director Lukas Pribyl, whose own family was devastated by the Holocaust, has spent eight years researching, photographing and collecting archive material to document exactly what happened to them. After a sometimes lengthy period of persuasion, he convinced almost all of those who were still alive to share their experiences, mostly for the first time (many had not told even their families and close friends). The process generated more than 260 hours of interviews, collected in about twenty countries on three continents. It is this wealth of unique first-hand accounts which underpins the whole series.

Each film tells the story of the people deported to a particular destination. But each also illuminates a different mode of survival.

In Estonia, a group of women and girls – largely thanks to their youthful naivety and constant mutual support – managed to live through the genocide raging all around them almost by refusing to acknowledge its existence. In Belarus, by contrast, resistance and armed struggle by escapees from the camps represented the only realistic means of staying alive.

Some of the Jews deported to Latvia tried to preserve a semblance of “normal family life” in the Riga ghetto, even if it meant that children had to pass the gallows on their way to an improvised school. Finally, the documentary on eastern Poland explores the psychological tactics of people on the run, alone, constantly in hiding, continually required to invent or change their identities.

Though each of the four films can stand on its own, they are also far more than the sum of their parts. Not only do they restore a neglected chapter to its rightful place in the history of the Holocaust. They also illuminate the range of tactics adopted by people exposed to the extremes of persecution and terror. In different places, those who survived had to rely on everything from ruthless self-reliance to family loyalty and distinctively male or female forms of solidarity. Compelling, moving and sometimes harrowing, Forgotten Transports throws new light onthe events of the 1940s. It also reveals much about the sheer lust for life of human beings everywhere.