User Reviews

When you mention the Holocaust, people tend to remember the death camps, like Auschwitz. Some even remember the ghettos in Lodz and Warsaw, Poland. Very few seem to recall the mass executions that occurred during the German invasion of Russia, like in Babi Yar.

This documentary series lays out the gruesome details from eyewitness accounts of the atrocities committed in the name of Nazi Germany. In many instances, the local police, or politsai, were the perpetrators, operating under orders from the Eitsanzgruppen-SS. There were countless men, women and children killed, burned and/or buried in mass graves, some open pits on the edge of town. This is the oft-forgotten early horror of the Jewish Holocaust.

In "Children from the Abyss" (my favorite of the 5-part series), survivors who were aged 5 – 14 during the 1941 Holocaust in Russia, tell their harrowing stories of their escape from mass execution and resistance. Some of them fought as partisans against the Nazis. All of them are emotionally scarred from watching their parents shot and their siblings brutally murdered, then piled into mass graves.

I was moved to tears by several of the eyewitness accounts, especially those of the men who, at times, could not speak of the atrocities they witnessed.

submitted by chris http://holokauston.wordpress.com

This collection of five different films, each directed by a different director from a different country, offers an eloquent and unforgettable series of interviews with Holocaust survivors, many of them children during the 1940s. In watching these films, one gets the impression that this is a generation of people whose recollections will vanish with them once their lives are over. It feels like a great privilege to hear them speak - even though for many, the words are almost unbearable and the memories too painful to relive. One gets the feeling that some of these recollections have been kept locked in and unspoken for decades. And that this is perhaps a final chance for their release. There is perhaps no way to communicate the tragedy of an event such as the Holocaust unless it is refracted into small slivers of individual lives that touch our sensibilities and make us think and count our blessings.

None of us can imagine the horrors these people witnessed - and the sense of their survival having been a miracle shines through their pain. The fact that they were children or teen-agers at the time makes one marvel at human resilience. It seems incomprehensible that a girl could have crawled out from underneath a pile of bodies in a pit and survived to speak to us today of her experiences and fear.

Yes, it is difficult to watch and it is definitely a humbling experience. Recommended viewing for all adults.