Director: Peter Bebjak Cast: Noel Czuczor, Peter Ondrejicka, Jan Nedbal, John Hannah Original title: The Auschwitz Report Country: Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany Year: 2020 Release date: 3-19-2021 Genre: Drama Script: Alfred Wetzler (Book) Photography: Martin Ziaran Synopsis: It tells the true story of Freddy and Walér, two young Slovak Jews, who were deported to Auschwitz in 1942. On April 10, 1944, after a year of meticulous planning, they manage to escape in the hope that their testimony about the genocide will help save many lives. As the comrades they have left behind stand brave and firm against the Nazi officers, they embark on a journey back to Slovakia full of dangers and difficulties. Gaunt and injured, they endure numerous obstacles along their way, but none greater than realizing that their tale seems too heartbreaking to be true.
For those who do not want to remember the past, and are condemning us all.
The Slovakian Peter Bebjak has managed to film one of the key stories about the Nazi concentration camps to, after a canonical presentation of the horror, flee the barracks and focus on a less explored element: how difficult it was to believe the victims before 45 .
Selected to represent Slovakia at the Oscars, its cold and grim footage traps us in the terrible and well-known Auschwitz-Birkenau, showing some of its atrocities in the foreground before detaching from the clichés to finally focus on the escape of the authors of the Vrba-Wetzler report, essential to explain what happened there and constant memory of the famous quote by George Santayana that heads the title. And it is that, no matter how established Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg is in the collective imagination, and no matter how much Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog weighs in the bowels, the poignant epilogue of The Auschwitz Report puts in value its existence in the stormy 21st century.
