Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing,

and graphic archive footage and eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust

which some viewers may find disturbing

SWITCH SNAPS

FILM REEL PUTTERS

Army Film Unit cameraman, Mike Lewis. Reel one.

Mike, could you tell me, please, how you joined the Army Film Unit?

Well, it seemed that I might have come at the right time.

Because they were trying to get members of the Parachute Regiment

to join the Army Film Unit.

And I said, well, I had some knowledge of photography,

a bit more training, I could adapt myself to filming.

But at least the main part of it, jumping from a plane,

he didn't have to worry about!

Erm, and so being at Pinewood Studios was a new beginning.

It was... There's so many things to know about.

I was given a small 35mm camera with a single lens.

It was just a metal box, basically,

which took 100ft of spool-loaded 35mm of black and white film.

Very noisy, uncertain in its running, so I found.

What was your most notable filming experience in the campaign?

Uh, I was asked...

Erm...

I say "asked" - ordered. It was the Army...

..to go on the next operation,

which was the Rhine operation in Germany.

And I was to join the Army Film Unit in Germany,

on the ground.

We didn't know quite how we were going to be used, but, uh...

..I never did know.

Um, you never really know what really is happening

in a war, generally.

Um, in fact, always.

You only know what's happening immediately around you.

It may be that the battle you're in, the fight you're in,

maybe in the scale of war is very small, but not to you.

It's always the biggest and worst war that anybody's ever been in.

Can you explain?

Well, war is mostly experienced in one's feelings...

..and how exposed and vulnerable one feels.

I remember on that journey over,

trying to sort my thoughts out.

What had happened and who was left

of those I had started out with.

It's, um, the great big uncertainty of it,

that every day that you're in it,

would you survive?

Would you survive the next day?

So there's always this terrible possibility that next week

or next day would never come, or the future would never happen.

But you are sustained by a belief that what you're doing

is the right thing.

Otherwise, weapons are just wood and metal in your hands.

I suppose it sounds pretty daft to say it, but I can recall

in those days I had, without questioning it,

this idea of a country.

Fairness, justice, integrity.

And bit by bit, I found that this wasn't true in my own experiences.

Could you briefly describe your background?

Yes. Uh...

I was born in London at the end of the First World War.

Of Jewish parentage,

who had emigrated from Poland

and had received what was customary at that time,

um, an elementary education.

I always wanted to go in for what was considered

loosely art work. Painting, drawing.

Did your parents encourage your artistic aspirations?

No. Being of workable age by that time,

she thought I ought to go out to work.

And so I did.

One always encountered hostility from people as I grew up,

because they were aware that I was Jewish.

Do you remember the Mosley marches?

Yes. Uh, I remember that.

I could not, like most English Jews, really believe this of England.

But the world began to assume a shape more real

than those things we were taught about it.

It's not something I care to speak about,

because the experience really is, um...

..was painful.

Terribly painful.

We land in Germany.

I could see these planes black through the trees,

desperately holding their courses, then bursting into flames.

They were brave in the air. They were coming in so low.

One of the few times in the war I nearly wept, I really did.

To see those DCs and Lancasters going through the black trees.

And all for what?

By that time, Germany was in retreat.

And, as we went through it,

we met refugees fleeing on the way.

I felt sorry for them. It was a terrible sight.

It's one of the things that's stuck with me.

All the grief that had been caused everywhere.

The cities smashed by air raids to such an extent

that you could only see where the streets were,

or had been, because the rubble there was least highest.

We'd been going weeks, and it seemed, I can't remember,

in fact, the world seemed far away, England.

And we had reached a little town

called Celle - C-E-L-L-E.

There was a...

I was joined by another sergeant of the Parachute Regiment

who'd joined the AFPU. His name was Lawrie, I think.

I'd only been a very amateur photographer prior to the war.

Very keen, but very amateur.

Um...

There was quite a tremendous battle round about Celle to begin with.

Were you ever in any danger yourself?

Oh, it's difficult to say whether it was dangerous,

or you were very lucky or...

I don't think I looked at it that way at all.

It was a case of, if something spectacular was happening,

it was very difficult to know what was spectacular.

Uh, troops marching along the road looked for...

On the screen, must have looked exactly as if they had been

going out for a picnic.

But it wasn't a picnic.

In a silent black and white film, you don't see or hear the bullets.

You don't get the atmosphere.

It was very difficult to decide yourself whether you were doing

something stupid, or being very brave.

I met Mike Lewis,

and we were merely going into the town to take over the town.

It was when that happened,

we discovered these people,

these, um, prisoners.

But at that time, we were completely ignorant

of why they were in prison or anything.

Presumably slave labour for the German war machine.

But some of these people had already escaped,

if that's the word to use.

And they were just wandering about in the streets.

Uh...

But at that time there were a lot of rumours going on,

and the horror of what was happening inside Germany was only beginning.

By this time, Germany was collapsing

and they were only too willing to put their hands up.

You had this staff car with a white flag telling us

that there was a typhus hospital ahead of us,

and would we be willing to call a halt to any actual battles

until this area was taken over in case of escapees into Europe

and the ravage that would take place?

As far as I know, we believed this story,

and we set sail that evening to have a look

at this typhus hospital, under a white flag.

The Army had told them the Germans had a camp ahead,

what they called with political prisoners,

and they wanted to hand this over to us.

And would we go and cover it?

Well, we thought political prisoners seemed a bit vague,

and it seemed rather dull, but it seemed safer

than continuing following the front up.

And...we drove up in a jeep,

through pine woods, to a wired gate.

And, erm...

..that place was Belsen.

You heard stories, uh, what had happened abroad

to Jewish people.

But Belsen...

..Belsen was something different.

There were people standing behind the wire.

They were not political prisoners.

This was a concentration camp.

And their faces, when they saw us.

They had heard that we were coming.

And I said I was Jewish.

And one of them said in a voice of wonder,

"YOU are? And you are free?"

And we drove inside.

The number of dead which were lying everywhere...

The massive scale of what had happened to people...

There was a stench of death,

and the death of all human dignity and hope.

I think I was too - perhaps we all were -

too overwhelmed by feelings to think clearly about it.

We went in that first evening where we saw these...

..these half dead people walking about, glazed eyes.

And there was people from everywhere.

Gypsies, Poles.

And not necessarily Jewish people.

They were just people.

They were...

Well, I say people.

What we saw weren't people.

They were what was left of people.

Shells. Absolutely...

..dead. There was hopelessness.

Despair.

Like the end had come.

And nobody could do anything about it.

And I don't think any of us realised what was happening to us.

And it was getting too dark for filming and we returned to...

about six, ten miles back to the road we had come up.

We decided to stay there and go in the next morning.

We... nobody...

I didn't know what was happening to the rest of them,

but I remember that night trying to sleep

and being completely unable to sleep.

You couldn't say it was fear.

It was...

..just...

..something terribly wrong.

There was a kind of...

..terrible horror, I can't explain it.

But we all obviously were lying there,

full of thoughts or full of feelings,

but never discussed them with each other.

When we'd went back in the following morning,

when we did get back to Belsen the following morning,

I think it was even worse.

The people in the camp, uh...

It's hard to gauge their attitude, their belief,

their...their feelings.

They had lost so much, and been through so many horrors.

I did not speak to them,

yet if one could converse with them because of the language problem,

because what does one say to people who have been through hell?

And probably that hell will continue,

even though they have survived the camp.

And so I was busy filming, and I was glad of that,

filming every day.

There were wooden towers, watchtowers, dotted around the camp.

And I'd climbed up the wooden steps to take a picture.

It was a different planet.

A different earth, a hell.

Although I'd seen the terrible things in war,

to have treated ordinary people like this,

how could it be?

The terrible discovery came to me one night in a sort of revelation,

a flash of lightning, because it penetrated these terrible scenes

that made me think.

All the stories I had heard about the persecution of people

from my mother and father, here they were, true.

But this was on a scale that it had to be organised.

It had to be done...

Could only be done with a modern administrative service.

It had to be planned and worked for.

It was a sort of death by administration.

Impersonal.

And then, were the Germans alone to blame?

Why were not the railway lines to the camps bombed?

Where were the religious institutions of the world?

They knew what was going on.

We had heard rumours, we had known.

And surely these people would have known better

than us ordinary people.

And they had been silent.

Your first reaction was to give them something.

Cigarettes.

Chocolate, biscuits.

But it soon became apparent that that was wrong,

because they were being violently ill.

I don't know whether you... We ourselves withdrew

into another...

..space, time, existence.

But you could never associate what you were seeing

with your own life, if you know what I mean.

This was something completely separate.

It was another world.

Uh...

I don't think if we...

If you had become too involved, I think you would probably

have gone mad.

The fact that this had to be recorded somehow...

..uh, I suppose that did help.

We had to be deloused every day to get into the camp.

Rehabilitation started almost immediately.

The British medical staff had the unenviable task

of deciding who was worth the effort, and who wasn't.

Everybody was worth the effort.

I'm not saying that it was done that way.

Everybody was scrubbed, carbolic cleaned.

Uh, but eventually it had to come down to where was the line

to be drawn?

And there was no time to waste.

There was literally...

Days made a difference to some of these people.

It was conveyor belt medical treatment.

The nurses were washing, bathing and cleaning people

that hadn't been washed and bathed for weeks,

and had been living worse than animals.

There was no chatter going on all the time.

It was a very quiet, silent business.

Once they became used to us,

I'm saying "they" as if there was something different.

Once the people in the camp became used to us being there,

and they realised that we were, uh, a liberation unit

rather than a different kind of oppressor,

it was, uh, it wasn't unusual for somebody to grab your hand

and hold on to it.

They didn't say anything.

They didn't. They...they couldn't.

They may well have been saying, thinking something,

but in the most cases, they just grabbed your hand

and looked at you,

and that was enough.

The contrast was between the arrogance of the German troops

in the camp,

and the absolute desperate, hopelessness of the situation,

the people that they were controlling.

They, well, they were finished.

And these people...

They could...they didn't think there was anything

peculiarly wrong with what was happening.

They had excuses.

But I felt terrible anger,

when you just wanted to hit it.

They were so...

..for the first two or three days, very arrogant.

Before they started having to bury their dead.

As the days went on...

..the bodies, they were dummies.

They were dolls. They were...

You lost contact, and reality went.

Right?

TRANSLATED:

Righto.

Today is the 24th of April, 1945.

My name is Gunner Illingworth, and I live at Cheshire.

I am at present in Belsen camp doing guard duty over the SS men.

The things in this camp are beyond describing.

When you actually see them for yourself,

you know what you're fighting for here.

A picture in the paper cannot describe it at all.

The things they have committed,

well, nobody'd think they were human at all.

We actually know now what has been going on in these camps,

and I know personally what I am fighting for.

I wasn't aware of it at first in the camp.

In fact, I'm not sure when it came to me.

Looking back on it, that I knew that the camera had, in a sense,

pushed the reality of the sights away from me

and protected me from it.

How could you, looking at all this death...

..um, keep going?

None of the terrible things that came to me,

I had to do an awful lot of thinking when I was in Belsen,

one of the discoveries I made was, why in Germany?

What was there about the Germans that made them do this?

And the discovery came to me.

It was a horrifying discovery.

Not only the Germans, any race was capable of it.

Anybody, given the circumstances of Germany, could achieve this.

It's something I'd rather not think about.

But now I know, after all these years,

that it's something that will never leave me.

From that day onwards, it had altered everything

that I had seen life as.

Thank you very much.