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MAKING THE FILMS

Initially I was driven by a desire to find out what happened to my family during WWII, and in particular to my Grandfather. He was carted off already in 1939 to Nisko in Poland, in Adolf Eichmann's first deportation scheme. I greatly loved and admired my Grandfather but he died before he could tell me his story. As I was reconstructing his fate and the history of the camp where he had been taken, I kept coming across many other obscure places of Jewish suffering that were not even listed in encyclopedias and literature on the Holocaust. What started as a personal quest then developed into a decade of researching, photographing, collecting archival material, editing and producing of the Forgotten Transports series.

For the final six hours of the four part film series (4x90 minutes), about 400 hours of raw footage were collected: Interviews with survivors were recorded in about twenty countries on five continents, as well interviews with "bystanders" and even "perpetrators" (though I chose not to use these in the films, nor additional location footage). The visual material was collected in about thirty countries.

The witness accounts recall the experience of Jews deported from Bohemia, Moravia and Central Europe to virtually unknown camps and ghettos in Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and the Lublin region in eastern Poland. The names of camps where hundreds to tens of thousands of people perished - like Maly Trostinec, Jägala, Kalevi Liiva, Ereda, Lagedi, Salaspils, Kaiserwald, Zamosc or Sawin - are virtually unknown, since there was almost no one left to tell the story. The survival chances in these places were extremely low. Out of dozens of thousands, fewer than three hundred Czech Jews emerged from these camps alive. The total number of Jews from other countries who survived similar death transports was even lower (the fact can be attributed largely to Czech Jews' ability to understand both German and Eastern European Slavic languages, an important prerequisite for enduring in the East).

Finding the few remaining eyewitnesses was a most arduous task. The search for people's memories commenced with wartime deportation lists and post-war Jewish community records. Most Jews left Czechoslovakia after 1945, many adopted new surnames or changed them through matrimony. Jewish communities were contacted; newspaper advertisements posted; marriage, birth and death registers studied; survivor organizations and community centres contacted; police files perused; I looked through phone books of dozens of countries, dialling hundreds of people of a given name.

In the end I managed to trace the fate of basically all Czech survivors of transports to Latvia, Belarus, Estonia and eastern Poland and after often lengthy period of persuasion, sometimes lasting up to two years, I convinced the still living to share their experiences. Many spoke about their past for the very first time, and only to me. I am honored I can consider them my friends now. Often it was only through our footage that children of men and women with the most uncommon of recollections at last learned of their parent's wartime fate. Dispersed all over the world, traumatized and with experiences exceptionally unusual and rare, most of the people I talked to were never contacted by or chose to evade interviewing programs organized by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and various Holocaust museums. Many confessed to a subjective suspicion that since they had not been inmates of "better-known camps", they were not listened to, had no one to share past with and their experience was somehow deemed less worthy, even by fellow survivors. Unfortunately, since my interviews with them were conducted, more than three quarters have died. Their recollections in my films thus remain as the only existing, unique testaments to what happened to people swept by the "forgotten transports".

Conscious of the inadequacies of human memory, I exerted much effort to "check" each interview using all sources of information available. Overall, I found the testimonies of survivors from the under-researched places exceptionally accurate. For a single person who lived out of a transport of a thousand, there isn't anyone to confabulate reminiscences with - it is salient how pristine and uncorrupted by other accounts they remain. Memory of these men and women simply could not suffer from integration of post-survival knowledge acquired from books, documentaries and people as no such readily accessible materials exist and there are virtually no fellow survivors. They could tell only what they remembered.

Naturally, the process of interviewing was preceded and accompanied by hundreds of hours of archival research. One has to remember that when I began my work, there were almost no written studies on these camps and ghettos. For the film to raise qualified questions and draw correct conclusions on the historical context beyond knowledge of individual witnesses, tens of thousands of pages of documents in many world archives had to be inspected and scrutinized.

Told only through the eyes and words of the survivors themselves, there is no commentary, no present-day and make-believe footage, only true, time and place precise images, as I set out to collect such material as to be able to depict almost every detail mentioned by the witnesses. Behind each of the authentic photos used, there is much travel, many meetings and hundreds of phone calls. I believe there is a visual record of almost anything, however little of this evidence is held in public archives and therefore I put great emphasis on pursuing images in private possession. The extremely time exacting effort was rewarded by obtaining snapshots taken by Polish or German supervisors at slave labor works or pictures unearthed in garages of children of the former SS men.

Each small detail mentioned by the witnesses is painstakingly documented, not only depicting their words, but also confirming them. We can thus recognize their faces on photos and footage from the given time and place, as well as the events they describe. (It was also very touching to see the remaining survivors watch the films and themselves on pictures they had never known existed, recognize their long perished friends, boyfriends who did not make it out alive.)

The meticulousness paid to locating photos in private holdings was also applied to images in film and photo archives. Major archives in the West and little visited and researched collections in Eastern Europe, as well as the files held in KGB were examined to find the film fragments to illustrate particular events.

Among my goals was also not to ascribe the witnesses the role of mere commentators of history. Instead of dealing with millions of faceless victims the films concentrate on gripping stories of individual human beings. The narrative is pieced together from narrow personal viewpoints, telling the big story "from the bottom up", through the words of the people "on the ground". Throughout the film we see events with their eyes and our camera focuses on what they themselves observed. Thus we find little use of footage of Adolf Hitler and the top Nazi dignitaries, as they played no part in the immediate lives of the people we give voice to. They did not attend mass rallies or military parades and were banished from cinemas with Goebbels' or Goering's speeches on newsreels. The deportees recall their immediate surroundings and people they had firsthand interaction with.

Each of the four films describes one geographic destination where deportation trains were dispatched to and focuses on a particular ?mode? of survival, on one way people adjusted to their situation. We generally associate the "survival story" with striped uniforms and "phone numbers to heaven" tattooed onto forearms. My films document other, "untold" stories of the Holocaust. Each film is designed to stand on its own and can be screened independently of others. However, when seen consecutively, a certain overarching idea becomes apparent, allowing the viewer to compare the individual survival strategies, reactions and the difficult choices faced by people exposed to ultimate violence.

The film about deportations to Estonia describes a fascinating story of a group of women and girls who -thanks to their youthful naivety and constant mutual help - managed to pass through the Holocaust while remaining largely oblivious to the genocide raging around them. The segment about Belarus is devoted to resistance and armed struggle by Jewish escapees from camps, about people who were being killed but also killed. Latvia describes the effort to preserve a semblance of normal life in the ghetto in Riga. Young people fell in love and organized parties (under the penalty of death), children attended school but on the way to it had to pass under the gallows - all the while contrasting this "normality" with the cut-throat egoism of men forced to fight for survival in the nearby Salaspils death camp. The documentary about eastern Poland is concerned with the psyche of people permanently on the run, constantly in hiding, who had to continually feign and change identities - with a great deal of ingenuity and much humor. And so while the film on transports to Poland is really a story of the inner loneliness of individuals who joke to survive, "Latvia" is a story of families, "Estonia" of women and "Belarus" of men.

I hope that together these narrow perspectives, private experiences and impressions form into a new, surprising picture of the Holocaust "as we don't know it". And though the stories of these men and women unfold on the background of the greatest genocide in the history of mankind, survival is never possible without belief in living, humor and optimism. My films are, I believe, foremost a life-affirming tribute to human spirit. 

Lukas Pribyl

 
 
"A monumental quartet of films… seminal documentation of a little-known piece of WWII history..."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"For years no documentary depicting the Nazi persecution of Jews during WWII created such a buzz..."
Irena Zemanová, HOSPODÁŘSKÉ NOVINY, February 9, 2010
"...the most important enterprise in Czech documentary film of recent years."
Irena Hejdová, TÝDEN, January 25, 2010
"The four part series...which aspires to become one of the greatest Czech documentary events of the recent years, cannot but be compared with Claude Lanzmann's renowned film Shoah."
Aleš Borovan, E15, January 28, 2010
"...Forgotten Transports stand out from the multitude of Holocaust documentaries..."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"The films...expand our understanding of the Holocaust like no films since the classic Shoah."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"The Forgotten Transports project of Lukas Pribyl shines a powerful and enlightening spotlight on a virtually unknown chapter of the Holocaust..."
Efraim Zuroff, director of Simon Wiesenthal Center Jerusalem, December 28, 2010
"One would think that by now there are very few stories left untold from the Shoah. But 'Forgotten Transports' touches on new ground, both in content and form."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"That...the series, makes such a fresh and powerful impression owes much to Pribyl's painstaking methodology."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"All archive material - moving or still images, much of it I guess shown for the first time - are connected to the places, events and time that the storytellers refer to."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"We see images we have thought cannot exist..."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"Over 10 years and visits to 30 countries, [Pribyl] hunted down photographs of SS camp commanders and snapshots taken by local residents and workers who might have encountered inmates, sometimes trading bottles of vodka for the artifacts"
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"...[Pribyl] would conduct hundreds of interviews and sift through thousands of hours of film footage and photographs to document the story... "
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"The creation of the four films in the Forgotten Transports project deserves its own film. "
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Pribyl has found material that will be unfamiliar to almost any viewer, no small achievement in an age in which Holocaust documentaries are plentiful."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"Forgotten transports prove that even sixty-five years after the war, not everything has been revealed."
Irena Zemanová, HOSPODÁŘSKÉ NOVINY, February 9, 2010
"These are without doubt the best-documented Holocaust films I have seen. "
Zuzana Justman, EMMY winner, February 21, 2010
"The impression conveyed is that a photographer was along for the nightmare ride of the Czech Jews."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"It is about Czech Jews but the stories have a universal appeal."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Pribyl has done a magnificent job of research and filmmaking."
Efraim Zuroff, director of Simon Wiesenthal Center Jerusalem, December 28, 2010
"...an entrancing film both in content and form..."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"...skillfully edited images and testimonies form a powerful documentary, all the more effectively suggestive through its beautifully minimalist music..."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"Superbly crafted, Lukas Pribyl's landmark series contains extraordinary stories...as well as a profusion of striking newly-discovered footage and stills. "
Zuzana Justman, EMMY winner, February 21, 2010
"The four films ... are brilliantly conceived."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"It is a summary of archetypal stories about exceptional and often random miracle of survival."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"The films weave several strands in an approach echoing the chapter structure of Joyce's 'Ulysses'."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"Pribyl's series is breathtaking, no matter where it is screened. It is a project that stands its ground among the very best that has been filmed about the Holocaust."
Darina Křivánková, TÝDEN, July 17, 2009
"What an achievement! I don't recall when was the last time that I witnessed so captivating a historical documentary..."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Lukas Pribyl's films are as suspenseful as they are important..."
Zuzana Justman, EMMY winner, February 21, 2010
"Lukas Pribyl's documentary contains tremendous power."
Jakub Leníček, CZECH RADIO, December 12, 2009
"The films result in fantastic narratives that overshadow the most suspenseful of thrillers."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"Unlike typical Holocaust docus, his films don't catalogue Nazi crimes, dwelling on how many people perished where... "
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"By shifting focus from the evils of Nazism to questions of survival, life, death, love, family and treason, the portraits and the historical narrative also become much more human - and thus more understandable and horrible."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"...each of the four films takes the viewer on a journey...Or to be more precise: the survivors take the viewer with their personal stories, told in shocking and moving detail, but also with humor."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Told in their own words, without commentary, these survival stories run the gamut, from a forbidden love affair to a survivor's participation in the Sobibor uprising."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"By focusing on the survivors alone, Pribyl shifts the discourse in his four films to the extraordinary circumstances and sheer ferocious will to live that made survival possible. "
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"...the films are a celebration of life that finds its way through the worst of hell."
Naďa Klevisová, HOSPODÁŘSKÉ NOVINY, March 26, 2010
"Each film ... depicts a different mode of survival."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"...the four films that are as different as the fates [of the survivors] were different, sometimes very hard to watch and listen to, sometimes you smile."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"...the helmer formed relationships with the survivors, sometimes taking up to two years to persuade them to participate."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"...almost all of the interview subjects are telling their stories for the first time."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"Most of the subjects had never spoken of their wartime experiences before, not even to their own children."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"Forgotten Transports move far beyond the traditional depictions of the Holocaust; far from the overarching historical portrait of Nazi leadership in Berlin, and far from Auschwitz."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"Lukas Pribyl did more than track down survivors or burrow through film archives and deportation records."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"Instead, his work speaks about universals such as life, death, family, love and betrayal, while documenting distinct modes of survival in places including Latvia, Estonia and Belarus, as well as Poland."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"The human spirit is amazing. And that spirit is the true subject of Forgotten Transports. "
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"The films...capture eruptions of human quirkiness - sometimes generous, sometimes cruel - that bring the Holocaust down to an earthly level."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"...multihypenate Lukas Pribyl, focuses on the difficult choices made by individuals escaping Nazi ghettos, labor and death camps..."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"Sensitive approach, honest work, great emotional charge and unbelievable vitality of people who passed through hell but did not lose insight and optimism - these are elements that make Forgotten transports one of the most impressive documentaries"
Jakub Leníček, CZECH RADIO, December 12, 2009