The Holocaust Experience (2002)

How, sixty years after the Second World War, do we keep the memory of the Holocaust alive? This is the central question in the documentary The Holocaust Experience, that moved between two extremes: the sober, eloquent ruins of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the hyper-realistic holocaust museums in America.

In the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in Poland, a bitter battle is being fought out with time. One by one, the concrete poles are being restored that surrounded the prisoners during the war: five thousand poles with barbed wire. "Everything here should stay the way it was," one of the workmen says dutifully. That turns out to be an impossible goal. Some places in the camp, where the greatest horrors took place, are already overgrown with weeds. At the same time, there is another dilemma: where does the camp end and the ordinary world start? What should be protected and preserved and what shouldn't?
While Auschwitz wrestles with its mortality, the virtual Auschwitz in the American holocaust museums are all the rage. Visitors to the Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles who take a Holocaust day out can, at the end of the day, enter a mock gas chamber. The Americans also use authentic material. Cases and striped prisoner's suits and even a complete shed have been transported from Europe to America and are meticulously conserved and put on show. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. has even imported the cut hair of people who were gassed from Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the exhibition faced moral objections.
This documentary investigates how the memory of the Holocaust is kept alive on both sides of the Atlantic. Both human effort and impotence are tangible in preserving this part of history for later generations.

This is a co-production between Selfmade Films, IKON (The Netherlands) and VRT/Canvas (Belgium). This production came about with the support of the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund and The CoBO Fund.