Auschwitz in Bergen-Belsen: the Figure of the Witness and Cinematographic Discourses on Concentration Camps in the Immediate Post-War 7, 1945-1948

Abstract

aper studies the role played by the witness in the first cinematic representations of concentration and extermination camps. It focuses on the testimonies gathered by two different figures that become, in turn, two points of view of the happenings: the vision of the one who lived through it (superstes), as is the case with Wanda Jakubowska Director, and the vision of the one who was present as a third party (testis), the cameramen who filmed the liberation of the camps. On the very threshold of this vision of horror, from fiction to the documentary, both forms of testimony came into being as perspectives that doubt the representation of the evidence shown as an inconceivable reality. Then, after the montage, the internalization by the spectator becomes inseparable from the representation and the imagery of a vision of the world that went beyond the figure that films. And that view of the world was the hell of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, model camps –in the West and in the East– from which the first memories began to be constructed based on the earliest reports of the crimes of Nazism, conditioned by the legal and political interpretations of the happenings. Only fiction was able to show the specificity reserved to the Jewish people: the difference between the concentration and the extermination camps.