BOOKLIST
American Library Association

January 1 & 15, 2003

This riveting program documents the Nazi extermination camps and personalizes both liberators and survivors, who reveal shocking details. The nightmarish experiences of the concentration camps are brought vividly to life thorough historic correspondence, newspaper clippings, photographs, and personal accounts. American soldiers were note ordered to liberate the camps but claim they came across them unexpectedly and were totally unprepared for what they found - ovens smoking with burning flesh, carts overflowing with emaciated dead bodies, and piles of shoes, clothing, and human remains. The graphic historic photographs and death-camp footage vividly contrast with film clips depicting community life in Europe prior to the 1939 Nazi invasion. Personal reports from those who experienced the horrors tell the same story. This painful, revealing documentary fully conveys Nazi brutality. Appropriate for both high-school students and adult viewers. Includes discussion guide. - Carol Holzberg

VIDEO LIBRARIAN
The Video Review Magazine for Libraries

September / October 2002

***In the final days of WWII, as American soldiers fought their way across Europe toward the final Nazi stronghold of Berlin, they stumbled - almost by accident - across Nazi work camps, a euphemism for slave labor and death camps populated by Jews, gypsies, and other undesirables. Liberating the death camps was a mission the GIs neither trained for nor expected. Drawing on a combination of old newsreels and first person accounts, Bearing Witness, hosted by newsman Morton Dean, offers up a tribute to the citizen soldiers, some little older than boys, who were both liberators and witnesses to Hitler's final solution. Infantrymen, nurses, and combat photographers are still haunted by the scenes of horror (when the GIs arrived, the ovens were still smoking, and men, women and children were dying of disease and starvation at the rate of 300 per day) they encountered over a half century ago. Surviving prisoners remember the many small acts of kindness shown them by the Americans, while soldiers recall the incomprehensibility of the single-minded viciousness heaped on helpless prisoners, particularly children. Today, these elderly witnesses to genocide are compelled to pass on the horrors of what they saw to future generations. As one man put it someone has to remember what happened there. While this brief documentary features many graphic and disturbing images, this is still suitable for high school audiences and above. Recommended. (S. Rees.)

LIBRARY JOURNAL
August 2002

Powerful, moving, and at times horrific, this documentary features firsthand accounts of the Holocaust set against the backdrop of film footage and still pictures shot in and around the camps. The film begins with Szmulek Rosental, a Polish Jew who was sent to the damps at age nine. Rosental reminisces about his family before the war and describes his life in the camps. The film continues with comments from a number of Americans who came into contact with the camps toward the end of World War II. Unprepared for what they found, the Americans could not believe the inhumane conditions and cruel treatment that the inmates suffered. Many are still haunted by the memory of hundreds of people described as walking skeletons and piles of bodies and ash from the ovens. One of the most touching moments involves military photographer Joe Hanson, who took a picture of a group of survivors at Dachau as they cheered their American liberators. Much later, he met one of the people in the picture: Szmulek Rosental, then 14 years old. Rosental recalled his conflicting feelings as he stood at the fence that day: love for the liberators and sorrow that the liberation came too late for his family. The images in this film may be disturbing to some viewers. Highly recommended for high school and college audiences.

Karen Plummer
University of Akron Library