Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[owl hoots]
[woodpecker]
[loudspeaker announcement in German]
[sombre music]
[men shouting]
[distant gunfire]
[wind howls]
[church bell]
On Saturday, July the 15th, 1944, Anne writes,
"Dearest Kitty,
it is utterly impossible for me to build my life
on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death.
I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness.
I hear the approaching thunder
that one day will destroy us too.
I feel the suffering of millions.
And yet, when I look up at the sky,
I somehow feel that everything will change for the better,
that this cruelty too will end,
that peace and tranquillity will return once more.
In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals.
Perhaps the day will come
when I'll be able to realize them.
Yours, Anne Marie Frank."
[sombre music]
[Helen] When this picture was taken,
Anne, a Jewish girl of almost 13,
was unaware of what she was going to be faced with.
[gulls calling]
She did not know that she would be spending
two years of her life in hiding in this house in Amsterdam,
hardly able to see the sky or breath the air,
deprived of her freedom.
She will hide here, together with her family,
to escape from the Nazis.
[men shouting]
Here, she will be scared, but she will live, grow,
and write a diary
to an imaginary friend by the name of Kitty.
[soft piano music]
[church bell]
Wednesday, April the 5th, 1944.
"My dearest Kitty,
[sighs] I need to have something besides a husband and children
to devote myself to.
I don't want to have lived in vain like most people.
I want to be useful,
or bring enjoyment to all people,
even those I've never met.
I want to go on living, even after my death."
On August the 4th, 1944,
she is arrested and deported.
She disappeared,
along with one million and a half
other kids and teens like her.
[soft piano music]
[orchestral music]
[Helen] Anne knew this evil.
Nobody can ever forget it,
because it keeps on digging within the survivors.
Even within those children,
who, unlike Anne, are still alive,
and are now the last witnesses of the Shoah.
[in Italian] [woman] I'm visualizing
the gates being fully opened,
the noise of those iron gates,
and endless queues of people
marching in to take a shower, and never coming out,
which is what happened to us later.
[in French] [woman] We heard the noise of batons.
We heard the smashing of batons.
They would hit us and we were told,
"You enter through the door and exit from the chimney."
[in Czech] [woman] Cattle wagons remind me
of when we stood in them. We travelled in them.
Those memories are always with me.
[woman] [in Italian] The colours I see if I close my eyes
are the white of the snow, and the white of the corpses.
Flames from the chimney, snow,
cold...
and loneliness.
[suspenseful music]
[Helen] An officer of the SS,
together with some Dutch policemen,
climbed up the shelter's stairs.
They discovered the secret behind the thin barrier
that for two years
had protected Anne's underground life,
shared with father Otto, mother Edith, sister Margot,
Auguste and Hermann van Pels,
their 16 year old son, Peter,
and Fritz Pfeffer.
It is still unknown
whether they had all been betrayed.
They just had time to grab what they could in a hurry
before being taken away.
Anne's diary was left on the floor.
[music continues]
-[bicycle bell] -[big band music]
[man singing]
She was still free when on her 13th birthday
Anne had received a diary as a birthday present,
a light blue shirt, a puzzle, a pot of cream, some flowers,
and two peonies.
It was June the 12th, 1942.
Anne started to write her diary and decided to give it a name.
Saturday, June the 20th, 1942.
"To enhance the image of this long-awaited friend
in my imagination,
I don't want to jot down the facts in this diary
the way most people would do,
but I want the diary to be my friend,
and I'm going to call this friend Kitty."
Kitty is a mirror,
a double, a cure for the soul.
She is her comfort, outburst and consolation.
A way of saying
that the price you pay for the evil you went through
won't be too high.
That everything can be told to an imaginary friend,
the first reader of the many that Anne dreams
of having one day,
when everything is going to be over.
[tense music]
In Bergen-Belsen,
there was no time to say goodbye.
The mark of the camp was typhus,
and the epidemic was spread by lice,
and ended up making people dumb and ghastly,
waiting for their end.
At first, Anne and Margot with their parents were sent
to the Westerbork transit camp in Eastern Holland.
When they arrived, more than 100,000 Jews
had already been deported.
The Franks' final destination was Auschwitz in Poland.
Later on, the two sisters ended up in Bergen-Belsen in Germany,
where they died of typhus in February 1945.
Margot first, followed by Anne.
The SS guards in Bergen-Belsen
were just a little older than the two Frank sisters.
They were young girls who became torturers,
and the most ferocious was Irma Grese.
She would later be sentenced to death
in a trial against a group of SS officers,
held by the same British forces who freed the camp
on April the 15th, 1945.
The Germans who lived near the camps
were forced by the soldiers who liberated the camps
to enter and watch
what they had always pretended not to know.
The SS guards in Bergen-Belsen
were forced by the British soldiers
to pick up their victims' corpses
with their bare hands,
and throw them in the common graves.
Here 23,200 people are buried.
No one knows where the two sisters are buried.
They ended up, like other victims,
in common graves.
[mournful piano music]
What remains of them is their names on a black stone.
[train rumbling]
[man] When you went on the train to Auschwitz,
for six or seven days,
sat in their own urine and faeces.
No food to eat, in darkness,
and in stink and in smell,
so by the time they arrived in Auschwitz,
they look like garbage,
and we have no problem with garbage
with throwing it out.
If they look like shit,
we have no problem flushing it down the toilet.
[Helen] If Anne had survived, she would be 90 now.
Maybe her gaze and her face would be similar
to those of these women,
who are still proud of having survived and having made it.
[in French] [Sarah] I do not feel hatred.
Actually, I learned to love people.
But I hate the Nazis.
I shall never forgive them
for what they have done to the children
who were sent to the gas chambers.
BORN NOVEMBER TH 16TH, 1939 DEPORTED MAY THE 3RD, 1944
[in French] My children are my revenge against the Nazis,
and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren
are my way of taking the mickey out of them.
For many, these memories were made of secrets,
long silences, or half words
needed to protect those who came after
from memories that were perhaps too savage.
And yet those memories were passed on
to their children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren,
as if each generation needed to find a new voice.
It was very difficult for me, as a little girl,
to understand something that happened to so many people,
my grandparents included.
And then we were told the story of Anne Frank,
and suddenly, there was this little girl
who I could see myself through her,
and suddenly the story became too real, I think,
and I just got too scared.
[Helen] Arianna's tragedy,
who survived four concentration camps,
has now become a permanent mark on Lorenzo's forearm.
[man] [in Italian] I decided to get her tattoo on me
after reading her book.
I felt very, very close to the story,
and also physically connected
to what happened to my grandmother.
[lively melody]
[Helen] And the voices of her family members
who disappeared in the camps
are now to be found in Francesca's music.
[in Italian] I am Jewish, my mother is Jewish, my father is Catholic.
More than 40 relatives of mine
never came back from the camps.
I believe that growing up with this awareness
has always been at the base of who I am.
I remember having a terrible crisis in primary school
when I began to study history at seven years old.
I realized that this matter concerned me and my family
and the extent of what human beings could do.
Had I been born 65 years earlier
I probably would have been one of the victims.
-[sombre music] -[birdsong]
[in French] [Sarah] Everything can help you survive.
Reciting all the poems you know,
exchanging cooking recipes,
singing Edith Piaf's songs.
[sings "Le Disque Usé" by Edith Piaf]
[stirring orchestral music]
[in French] Italians sang "Mamma" and cried,
cried while singing,
but it was nice.
[man singing "Mamma"]
[in French] [Sarah] This was resistance.
[Helen] Sarah was arrested during the largest raid
on French soil on the 16th and 17th of July, 1942.
Thousands of Jews were locked up in the Paris Winter Velodrome.
Yet Sarah managed to escape from there.
She lived in hiding with her mother
in the capital city for two years.
Later on, like it happened to Anne,
she was also arrested.
Anne was 15, and she was one year older.
[Sarah] [in French] One day a friend of my mother told me,
"Do you know that in my shack there
is a Dutch girl called Anne?"
The girl was standing at the front door.
She overheard what my friend said and smiled at me.
She turned her head like this and smiled briefly and timidly.
She was already very thin,
but she had this truly adorable smile.
INDIFFERENCE
[in Italian] [man] The disaster in Bergen-Belsen
begins with the evacuations of the camps in the East,
particularly the Auschwitz Birkenau camps.
Beginning in November 1944,
thousands of people arrive in a situation where typhus,
from a certain point of view, has the same function of the gas chambers.
Because people die, and die in a terrible state.
So the only thing that the Nazis are left to do is dig common graves,
which they have the prisoners themselves dig.
They throw in the corpses without even needing to dispose of them.
[church bells]
[Helen] Today, the rooms of the secret house
on Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam are empty,
to honour the six million victims of the Nazis.
Anne's father, the only survivor
of the eight people who were hidden here,
wanted them empty.
Yet we are in Anne's room as it was in 1942,
with the traces of her life.
Saturday, July the 11th, 1942.
"Dearest Kitty,
the Annex is an ideal place to hide in.
It may be damp and lopsided,
but there's probably not a more comfortable hiding place
in all of Amsterdam.
No, in all of Holland."
Her teenager's room was shared for two years
with one of the guests in the house, Mr. Pfeffer,
a dentist, well into his 50s,
with whom she never got along well.
Two beds facing each other, and a desk.
All you have are the walls for your dreams.
Deanne Durbin, Ginger Rogers and Greta Garbo in Ninotchka,
and the German movie star Heinz Rühmann, Ray Milland,
and then Anne's other passion,
Sonja Henie, an ice-skating world champion from Norway.
Fragments of other people's lives
to give a flair to her own.
Anne looks at clothes and hairdos.
There is a picture of the Dutch Royal family,
and the face of young Elizabeth, the future Queen of England.
A minuscule world,
yet it's been her entire world since July the 6th, 1942,
the day the Frank family went into their secret hiding place.
The Franks, originally from Frankfurt,
left Germany in 1933,
the year Hitler came to power.
However, the atmosphere for both local and migrant Jews
in Holland had become tough.
[muted male voices]
Later on came the first deportations
and racial laws.
[speaking in German]
[Helen] In 1939, Hitler had already declared his proposal
of the annihilation of all the Jews of Europe.
And on January the 20th, 1942,
during the Wannsee Conference in Berlin,
high-ranking Nazi and German government officials
initiated what they called
the "final solution of the Jewish question."
[sombre music]
[Michael] What makes the Shoah distinct from other genocides
is, number one,
the perpetrator is the most advanced society
in Western civilization,
who uses all of the tools of that civilization
in order to destroy.
Secondly, Germany kept records.
So it's the most documented genocide in history.
Thirdly, only Germany had the idea
"We're going to eliminate the Jews everywhere."
It involved 22 countries.
It evolved over 12 years,
in which the killing took place in four.
Not in anger,
but in a systematic program of annihilation.
[Helen] It was summertime when Arianna was arrested.
Just when Anne was rejoicing for the landing in Normandy,
and the coup of a group of German soldiers
against Hitler.
Anne was optimistic, and believed that by October
she would be sitting at her school desk again.
She felt her freedom was approaching.
Instead, Arianna, who had already lost hers,
found herself face to face with Irma,
that same good-looking woman
who was wearing a spotless uniform
and was holding a gun in her hand.
Arianna was only 11 years old.
[in Italian] I sort of ran for a short distance
and then, almost in front of my block, I slowed down,
because I saw coming towards me
three or four well-dressed Nazis.
Irma Grese was behind me.
And they were all in love with her.
Like children do, I suddenly turned around, just because I was curious,
and Irma Grese had a gun pointed at me.
That was the only time I realized I could die.
[church bells]
If you are not alone, it's often easier to survive.
If you have a sister close to you who can help you.
A mother ready to swap her own life with a ladleful of soup.
A friend who teaches you how to steal a piece of bread
from the pocket of somebody who's dying.
In the camp, this was no sin.
In the camp, one needed to grow up quickly,
to learn discipline, to survive by being selfish and brutal.
Yet often you would survive by mere chance.
I remember that this one person came,
he might have been Mengele,
and asked us if we wanted to go see mum.
[Helen] Joseph Mengele,
nicknamed Doctor Death in Auschwitz,
was in charge of the children,
mostly experimenting on twins.
Andra and Tatiana were four and six years old,
and one day they were lined up outside a barrack.
They were sisters, but they had been mistaken for twins.
That is why they were still alive.
Their cousin, Sergio, was also standing in the same queue.
[in Italian] [Andra] A hack doctor from Neuengamme
who had carried out some experiments
on tuberculosis and lymph glands on some adults
thought to experiment on children too,
and asked Mengele for these children.
[Helen] One of the guardians who had become attached to them
had warned them.
"When they tell you to take a step forward,
if you want to see your mum, don't do it!"
[Andra] [in Italian] We warned Sergio not to step forward,
but he did not listen to us.
And 20 children,
ten males and ten females stepped forward.
[Tatiana] [in Italian] To think that he left believing that he was going
to meet his mum,
and instead, walked to his death on his seventh birthday,
still feels like such
a burden on my heart. It's indescribable.
[Michael] Why the Jews?
Hitler was trying to create the master race,
and he believed, essentially,
in the world in which the powerful rule,
and if they do not rule, they are weakened.
[Helen] For months, Otto Frank had been preparing
a hiding place
in the back of his pectin and spices factory.
[man] Otto Frank tried several times to get a visa
for the family and himself to leave the Netherlands,
for example, for the U.S., but it never worked out.
So on July 5th, 1942,
Margot got a call
to go to the work camp in Germany.
If you don't go within two, three days
to the police station to present yourself,
they would pick you up.
[Helen] Anne and her parents run without suitcases.
They were wearing a yellow star on their chests,
their stigma of infamy.
[man] On the one hand,
we have an embarrassing figure
of 75% of the Jewish population of the Netherlands
that was deported and killed.
By far the highest percentage of any Western European country.
But we're also the country and the city
where public transport
and striking in February 1941,
because what was done
to the Jewish population of Amsterdam.
One single example
you could find nowhere in Europe,
as a sign of resistance
from incredibly brave, ordinary people.
[Helen] Once the Nazis decided
to physically eliminate the Jews,
they designed camps
exclusively built for extermination
for all those living in Eastern European ghettos.
[Marcello] [in Italian] Jews in Western Europe were faced
with a different situation.
Here, there are too few Jews to set up ghettos, like in the East.
Therefore, the Nazis work out a different strategy.
They organize raids based on the cooperation of local people.
At this point, they built transit camps.
The final destination is just one camp.
A place created to kill the Jews
and have a small minority of them work,
as if to grant them an extension to just delay their death.
The only other people who occasionally are mixed with them
are the Sinti and Roma.
[train horn]
[geese honking]
[Helen] Outside, Europe is burning.
But news of starvation, war and raids
reach the people in the house,
who are living a slow-paced and muffled life.
Anne tells Kitty how she manages to kill off boredom,
endless hours,
and having to live together with the others,
as well as her little jealousies with her sister
and her rows with her mum.
Monday, September 28th, 1942.
"Dearest Kitty,
they criticize everything, and I mean everything, about me.
My behaviour, my personality, my manners, every inch of me,
from head to toe and back again,
is the subject of gossip and debate."
It is said that to grow up,
one must kill one's father and mother.
Anne does it, like all her peers do.
She rebels, she refuses and she criticizes.
She is also sweet, ironic, and funny.
[woman] [in French] She is a very smart teenager, a very lively girl,
curious about the world,
full of ambition, feelings, love, full of imagination.
The situation of confinement, in which she finds herself,
develops her intelligence and ability to think.
[Helen] She glows with happiness
for a pair of red shoes that she got from Miep,
one of the four employees who works for her father, Otto,
and helped the people in the hideout to survive.
It is Miep who will save and preserve the girl's diary
after her arrest.
Anne studies, reads voraciously, and her mood often changes.
One moment she is being ironical about the bruises
on the foreheads of the members of her family who can't get used
to the size of their revolving door,
while the next minute,
she gets desperate for the future of her people.
[Yves] I see her through the words of her text.
In some parts, she is a young, funny girl to me,
in some parts of the text, she is a girl
which I would never have had as a friend in class.
In some parts, I'm impressed how she is describing
her environment, but also the political situation
and she has an understanding of what's going on in society.
So this view from the hiding place,
from the Annex, into the world, I am quite impressed.
[Helen] Friday, October the 9th, 1942.
"Dearest Kitty,
Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances
are being taken away in droves.
The Gestapo is treating them very roughly
and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork.
The people are given almost nothing to eat,
much less to drink,
as water is available only one hour a day,
and there's only one toilet and sink
for several thousand people.
If it's that bad in Holland,
what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places
where the Germans are sending them?
We must assume that most of them are being murdered.
The English radio says they are being gassed.
Perhaps that's the quickest way to die.
I feel terrible."
[train screeches]
Anne and her family will leave Westerbork
on the last convoy going to Auschwitz
on September the 3rd, 1944.
[melancholy music]
[Andra] [in Italian] I remember that we used to play with snowballs.
But we were always surrounded by death.
Because in the camp, among the barracks
there were heaps of corpses.
To see these corpses
that they tried to push inside this barrack
had become normal to us.
JEW
[Helen] When the police knocked on Helga's door
it was December the 4th, 1941.
Outside, the Moldova ran silently.
It was already dark.
For the Jews in Prague,
the curfew began a few hours before.
Yet in her home, there was great turmoil.
People were getting ready to leave.
Transport orders always came at night.
Helga was 12, like Anne.
Both were victims of the racial laws.
They had already been expelled from school,
and Anne had to leave her Montessori institute.
[Helga] [in Czech] I did my first drawing in Terezín
of children making a snowman.
Of course, it was very far from being the real thing,
because in Terezín we couldn't do this.
It was, rather, a memory of my childhood.
In one way or another, I was able to give it secretly
to my dad, and he said to me, "Draw what you see."
So I started to draw my daily life in Terezín.
And so this snowman was my first drawing in Terezín,
but also the last drawing of mine as a little girl.
[Arianna] [in Italian] They had us play round and round.
We had to sing this song, in German...
[speaking in German]
"Show your feet, show your shoes."
My feet were already aching,
and I didn't have shoes. I had only one with no sole.
And it bothered me to sing in German and do a merry-go-round.
Also because my mother was standing outside,
maybe waiting for her meal.
The kapo whipped me so much,
because she kept yelling at me, "Sing, sing and turn around."
I had bruises all over my legs, because those witches
had rubber lashes
with an iron wire inside.
I would have loved to play,
but not in that camp.
[in French] [Sarah] We used to play with lice.
I feel like scratching my head when I think about it.
There were maybe five or six of us. Each of us took her lice,
we put them five centimetres from the hem of a dress.
The one which reached the hem was the winner.
There was nothing to win, but it was a game.
Thursday, November the 19th, 1942.
"Dearest Kitty,
It's like the slave hunts of the olden days.
I don't mean to make light of this,
it's much too tragic for that.
In the evenings when it's dark,
I often see long lines of good, innocent people,
accompanied by crying children,
walking on and on,
ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them
until they nearly drop.
No one is spared."
I think the moral perspective,
and the moral lesson from this history
is very much about those moments
when you see people making choices,
making the choice to help,
making the choice to collaborate, to perpetrate,
but most people didn't make any choice at all.
[stirring orchestral music]
[radio announcement in Dutch]
[Helen] At night, the house guests
used to listen to Radio Orange,
the BBC's radio broadcast
from the exiled Dutch Government.
Holding their breath,
they followed the progress after the landing in Normandy.
And Otto hung a map on the wall
where every victory is marked with a pin.
Next to it, there are the signs of life.
The marks his daughters' height.
Thirteen centimetres in two years for Anne,
one centimetre for Margot.
[in Italian] I began to find ways of building barriers
to shield me through art.
Adorno said that after Auschwitz poetry can no longer exist.
Actually, I believe that it is perhaps the opposite.
What that creation of beauty, art, music,
gives to human beings
is the only answer to the horror that is human history.
[lively melody]
[in French] [Nathalie] We, who have been in charge
of survivors and their families for the last 30 years,
have seen an element
which can also be seen in the fourth generation.
What is it?
It's the dead from the Shoah.
The dead of Shoah ask for revenge.
It is a burden for their descendants.
It is a mission. The dead of the Shoah say,
"Avenge us even though we are dead.
Say I am the son or daughter of such and such, Jewish,
destroy what the Nazis did to us,
say Kaddish for us."
[man sings the Kaddish]
[Helen] The Mourner's Kaddish
is one of the oldest Jewish prayers.
These are the words that accompany every Jew who dies.
Yet in the concentration camp,
the words of mourning,
also for those who no longer believed in God,
became meaningless.
[singing ends]
[Helen] Now their graves are these walls
with their names on,
repainted with a care not to let them fade away.
In all Shoah memorials,
people come to fill in a gap,
and to find their legacy.
[man singing in Hebrew]
[in French] [man] My grandfather died in the camp.
My father was deported.
I believe that this trauma can be passed on, definitely.
I passed it on to my daughters.
Although I believe that probably more than a trauma,
I have passed on a story, a legacy and a responsibility,
I created a magazine online.
It's called Jewpop, and to my surprise,
the most read stories are about Shoah.
[soft violin and piano music]
[Helen] Fanny is four years old in 1942,
when her mother found a nanny for her in Sucy-en-Brie,
close to Grenoble.
She was there, hidden to escape the persecution.
Now she lives in Israel,
and she came to Paris to the Memorial of the Shoah
accompanied by three of her ten grandchildren.
[in French] [Fanny] I am a hidden girl,
a bearer of remembrance
of my grandfather who died from starvation in the Łódź Ghetto,
of my father deported on board of Convoy number four and who returned,
of my husband's father who was savagely murdered
and drowned by the kapos in Auschwitz.
When I speak about the Shoah, I may even make children laugh.
"Madame," they tell me,
"you are telling us about the Shoah, and yet we are not frightened."
I am not doing it to frighten you.
I am telling you all this, because you too can tell others
that this is no fiction, there is no legend here,
it is the truth.
We saw the pictures on the walls,
and saw all of these people died,
and they were in your family,
but we did not know how this is part of us.
And I think it was only when I moved away from it,
literally, to a different country,
and I grow up and I had a family on my own
that we started to find language,
and we started to actually just talk to each other.
And then these stories felt real for the first time,
and they weren't so overwhelming,
because it wasn't this six million,
it was my grandmother, and her father and his sister.
They were real people.
It was a lot to take in, as a young child.
And now that I am 30,
I'm able to decide for myself
how I would like to actively take part
in the remembrance of this.
And this seemed like a great step to come with her
and to see and to be with her.
She doesn't take things for granted,
and that's what we have learned from her.
[in French] With Omer, who was a soldier,
we entered in Auschwitz carrying the Israeli flag
and we left Auschwitz carrying the Israeli flag.
[Helen] For many years, the survivors have been silent.
Trauma, shame, the fear have not to being believed.
[Alain] [in French] I believe that there is nothing more terrible
than wanting to tell something like the survivors went through
and have someone who says to you,
"Okay, but you are not the only one who suffered."
[Nathalie] [in French] There are people who are 70 years old
who have decided to participate in our meetings only today.
They say, "At last, I emerge from anonymity
and I become Jewish once again."
My children were raised Catholic, my husband is Catholic,
but now we don't need to hide anymore.
I need to meet other Jews and to say I'm Jewish.
[Helen] Monday evening, November the 8th, 1943.
"Dearest Kitty,
I see the eight of us in the Annex
as if we were a patch of blue sky
surrounded by menacing black clouds.
The perfectly round spot which we're standing on
is still safe,
but the clouds are moving in on us,
and the ring between us and the approaching danger
is being pulled tighter and tighter.
We're surrounded by darkness and danger,
and in our desperate search for a way out,
we keep bumping into each other.
We look at the fighting down below
and the peace and beauty up above.
In the meantime, we've been cut off
by the dark mass of clouds,
that we can go neither up nor down.
It looms before us like an impenetrable wall,
trying to crush us, but not yet able to.
I can only cry out and implore, 'Oh, ring, ring, open wide
and let us out!'"
[gulls calling]
[Helen] After the war,
the Holocaust remained in the background,
as if it were one of the many crimes by the Nazis.
It was only during Adolf Eichmann's trial
that began on April the 11th, 1961, in Jerusalem,
that silence was broken.
Not only standing before the jury
was one of the leading people who was responsible
for what had happened during the deportations
and extermination of the Jews,
but this was also the first time
that the story of a genocide was being told.
It's during the trial that the victims came to the fore.
[speaking in German]
[sobbing]
[Helen] The voices of the 111 witnesses,
after 15 years of silence,
day in and day out,
turn into memories and accusations.
[in Italian] [Laura] I was born in 1961,
during the Eichmann's trial.
I was born 20 days late.
And many years afterwards, I came to know that this delay
was due to the fear that my mother had of bearing children.
Therefore, I sense that I had always known it.
I remember the stories she told me when I was just a very, very little girl
I remember weird answers from Mum,
like when I needed something, she would typically answer:
"Do as if you were all alone in the world."
She raised us with great autonomy.
[Helen] In order to retrieve her mother's past,
Laura had to take a distance from it.
She then went to live in Paris,
and took on a psychological exercise on herself.
She never talked about it to her kids
and let Arianna do it when they became teenagers.
[Lorenzo] [in Italian] The tattoo has to do with identity.
I could not tell whether this identity may mean
that I missed having some of my family members
whom I never met.
First I talked about it with grandma,
since she really was the only one
whose opinion counted for me.
At the beginning she said "no" right away.
A protective "no." I think she was afraid
that something similar could happen,
but now I think she is rather proud about it.
[in Italian] What hurt me the most is knowing she was alone on the way back.
The terrible pain of returning without her family.
Because this is a loneliness that can't be filled.
It is a loneliness... and maybe we, her children,
also feel a little responsible for it.
That's it.
[choked laugh] I'm getting emotional.
A son or a daughter is there on the front row.
A baby born from a survivor,
and without a specific job aimed at clearing up history,
his or her mission is to fill up what can never be filled.
What can you fill up after the camps?
I do not believe that she's ever come out of the camps.
There is a part of her that remained in the camps.
[Helen] The little blond girl in the picture is Arianna.
Here she is photographed during the day
she and her seven brothers were christened
on May the 5th, 1935.
Her father is Jewish,
while her mother is Christian Catholic.
For the Nazis, the Szörényis were a so-called mix.
Yet nine of them ended up in the camps.
Arianna and her brother, Alessandro,
survived the extermination.
[in Italian] We were forced to load the corpses.
Two girls had to hold the arms, and two girls had to hold the legs
Yet four of us were not strong enough.
So we had to drag those corpses along.
Until one day, one of the Nazis realised
that we could not do it and beat us.
He punished us, made us stand for hours holding a stone in our hand,
just to show that they were stronger,
and we absolutely had to do what they wanted.
Outside, it is a tragedy for all.
Friday, January the 13th, 1943.
"I could spend hours telling you about the suffering
war has brought,
but I'd only make myself more miserable.
All we can do is wait, as calmly as possible,
for it to end.
Jews and Christians alike are waiting.
The whole world is waiting,
and many are waiting for death."
[Michael] When you arrived at Auschwitz,
it was virtually impossible to make sense of it.
In the words of Primo Levi, "Here is no why,
and if there is no why, then you cannot make sense
of what you're seeing."
[in French] My number is 7142.
[she repeats the number in German]
Once in my grave, the worms will eat it off me,
but for the time being, this is my mark,
a mark of life, and I'll keep it.
[Tatiana] [in Italian] My mother had a very bright intuition,
which later turned out to be useful to reunite our family.
She always reminded us of our name, surname
and that we were from Italy.
Andra and Tatiana are left alone
immediately after the tattoo.
But sometimes their mother manages to visit them in secret.
Imprisonment, fatigue, and daily deprivations
have already transformed her.
[Tatiana] [in Italian] We didn't dare step closer to her,
because we were probably frightened.
She wasn't any longer our beautiful mum.
She was incredibly thin.
The fact that we didn't want to hug her
came back to my mind
when I found myself holding my eldest son, Stefano,
and my thought went to my mum, in those days,
and to how much we must have made her suffer.
And it's precisely the thought of her mother
that kept Arianna alive,
who, in Auschwitz, was separated from her mother
and five sisters.
[Arianna] [in Italian] Sometimes mum was able to come to visit me
and when one afternoon I saw her I said to her,
"I want to give you something nice."
And I gave her a square of butter
and two boiled potatoes.
And then I ran away to cry.
My sister said to me, "If we see you cry again
through the barbed wire,
I will never take mum to see you again."
From that moment on I tried to become stronger and smarter.
I mean, I pretended not to cry.
[laughs]
But I always kept something aside for my mum.
[Helen] Two hundred and thirty thousand children and teenagers
were deported to Auschwitz.
Only 700 were found alive
when the Soviets arrived on January the 27th, 1945.
Anne's generation was devastated.
"Dear Kitty,
believe me, if you've been shut up for a year and a half,
it can get to be too much for you sometimes.
But feelings can't be ignored,
no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.
Oh, I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle,
look at the world, feel young,
and know that I'm free."
Anne's optimism and that of thousands of other teenagers
had continued to fuel the illusion
of possible freedom.
Girls like her, like Sarah, in the Drancy camp in France,
wanted to believe in the future at all costs.
[sombre music]
"Tell Jean that we are leaving but we shall return,
tell Louis that we do not know where they are taking us,
but we should see each other again."
The words of hope flew from the huge Drancy tenements,
the transit camp,
from which at least 700,000 French Jews went through.
A ticket, a cry for help that those who were inside
were trying to get to France and their relatives.
A letter, like the one still in Sarah's hands,
written by her mother, Marie, one day before their departure
on the sealed convoy that will take them to Auschwitz.
[soft piano music]
[man] [in French] All the people who were confined in Drancy
knew that they were going to be taken eastward on a convoy,
they didn't know where,
and they started to say, "We are going to Pitchipoi."
Pitchipoi is a mythical place, undefinable.
[Helen] There were 2,000 kilometres
between Drancy and Auschwitz.
This was the death corridor for the French Jews.
[Simon] [in French] Together with my friend, photographer Jean Francois Lami,
we wanted to make the same death journey.
When you approach Eastern Germany, or Poland,
it seems you are going back in history.
If we talk about traces or marks left behind until now,
there are places with graffiti, with Nazi symbols.
It's really upsetting to still see the marks of hatred.
We said to ourselves it wasn't possible
for this form of hatred to still be there now.
It's not possible for this barbarism to still exist today.
[emotive music]
[in Czech] [Helga] We see the Neo-Nazis,
we see attacks, anti-Semitism, racism,
and all this actually tells me
that nothing was learnt from what happened.
[man] [in French] With the actual situation in France I'm afraid.
With certain movements and rallies,
we are seeing a very fast rise in racism.
[in French] I say to young people, "We are the last witnesses
and you are my witnesses, you must close the door
to deniers and Neo-Nazis,
because there are many of them everywhere."
[Michael] We have a rise of anti-Semitism in a climate
that allows for the expression of hatred.
And now you have a combination of that,
the internet offers you a megaphone,
and social media offers you a community of fellow haters,
and that's a dangerous part of our phenomenon today.
[Helen] What images remain of Anne are many photographs
and just one video.
Anne is leaning over the window of her home in Amsterdam
where the Franks used to live before hiding.
Beneath her are two newlyweds.
Her neighbour is getting married.
Someone indoors calls her, and she turns and smiles.
And then she goes back to watch what's happening outdoors.
[in French] Anne Frank, in spite of herself,
has become the icon of the Shoah.
It is true that Anne Frank is being used by people
who are clearly anti-Semitic or racist.
We saw that in some Italian stadiums.
I believe that her iconic status is behind it.
If you have to hurt someone, be evil,
you have to find very strong words, and strong pictures.
And what's more powerful than Anne Frank's face to say
it's nothing, what happened never really existed
and this is just a face.
[Helen] A face photographed dozens of times.
Shots of cosy family moments, of her father's sweetness.
They stop abruptly when Anne is almost 13,
when the Franks go underground.
From that moment, Anne's face disappears.
The words of her diary remain a powerful legacy.
Wednesday, February the 23rd, 1944.
"My dearest Kitty,
but I also looked out of the open window,
letting my eyes roam over a large part of Amsterdam,
over the rooftops and onto the horizon,
a strip of blue so pale, it was almost invisible.
As long as this exists, I thought,
this sunshine and this cloudless sky,
and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?"
Peter van Pels was 16 years old when he arrived in the hideout
with his mother and father.
At the beginning, for Anne,
Peter was only a "rather shy and boring beanpole."
Now, almost two years have gone by.
She had her first period
and was discovering her sexuality.
In her diary, now,
"Peter is a nice and darling boy."
He is someone she can hug and talk to for hours
secretly in the attic, under a piece of sky.
Sunday, April the 16th, 1944.
"My dearest Kitty,
remember yesterday's date,
since, ah, it was a red letter day for me.
Isn't it an important day for every girl
when she gets her first kiss?
Well then, it's no less important to me."
It's Peter who takes the initiative,
even though he has a clumsy approach,
which end up in a kiss which lands half on her cheek
and half on her ear.
And then Anne writes,
"Oh, it was so wonderful.
[stutters] I could hardly talk, my pleasure was too intense.
He caressed my cheek and arm, a bit clumsily,
and he played with my hair.
Most of the time our heads were touching.
I can't tell you, Kitty, the feeling that ran through me.
I was... [sighs]
...too happy for words,
and I think he was, too."
Twelve days later, there's a real kiss,
and Anne takes the lead.
Friday, April the 28th, 1944.
"Dearest Kitty, he came over to me,
and I threw my arms around his neck,
and I kissed him on his left cheek.
I was about to kiss him on the other cheek
when my mouth met his,
and we pressed our lips together.
In a daze, we embraced, over and over again,
never to stop." [sighs deeply]
[sighs]
[in Czech] Anne and I were born on the same year, 1929.
We were 14,
and we experienced our first love.
Anne Frank talks about it in her diary.
And I mention it in my diary.
I had my first love there, in Terezín.
I had hidden two of Otto's shirts.
I do not know why I had them for years.
I kept them as a memory.
I know he was in Dachau,
and he died a few days after the liberation.
[soft guitar music]
[Helen] Helga has a house full of butterflies
in memory of a poem she heard in the camp,
recited by her friend, Hanush.
The poem said, "There are no butterflies,
no more butterflies in Terezín."
Helga's drawings made her endure all this,
as much as writing helped Anne.
[Francesca] [in Italian] I remember I once read the story
of a cellist.
She says she survived, she remained sane,
because she kept on thinking about music.
She played over and over in her mind.
Thinking about a musician
who held onto her whole repertoire,
to all the music she knew, really touched me.
[Helen] Terezín was the largest ghetto
when Czechoslovakia was occupied,
but it was also the anteroom to the extermination camps.
From all the occupied countries, the Nazis sent there
the war heroes, the leading intellectuals,
the scholars, the musicians, the actors...
whoever was famous, Jews and mixed Jews.
[in Italian] The Nazis wanted to show to the world
that while the Germans are at war or under bombardment,
the Jews live with no fears in a fortress city
where they can go as far as organizing cultural events
and they show these Jews who seem to be living in heaven.
[singing a lively tune]
[drum roll]
[applause]
[Marcello] [in Italian] And they even arrange to shoot a movie.
The Führer
gifts a city to the Jews.
They also organize
a visit by the Red Cross,
which sadly will endorse this big hoax,
this gigantic camouflage.
[Helen] When Helga was moved to Auschwitz,
her uncle took her drawings and put them behind a wall.
They were spared.
No filming or pictures were allowed in the camps.
Yet some small traces of daily life there
cropped up now and then,
like these pictures, taken in Terezín by a worker
who was called from outside the camp to dig a ditch.
[soft orchestral music]
These pictures feature a girl
who's taking her sheep to pasture.
The girl is Doris Grozdanovičová.
This was her duty in the camp.
She is now 93 and lives in Prague.
In her home, she keeps more than 1,000 plush sheep.
They are all gifts from all over the world.
[in Czech] My mother died there at 50
and she was ill.
My grandma died two weeks after arriving.
As for my father,
I knew that he was deported,
but I always hoped that he would come back.
I never saw him again.
[Helen] Come hell or high water,
Doris keeps making her pilgrimage every week
to Terezín and tells her story.
A story of rebellion and courage.
[in Czech] [Doris] I can only visualize Terezín
with my eyes as a young girl.
I was there for almost three and a half years
and I celebrated four birthdays there.
I was 16, 17, 18, and 19,
and I was unable to experience what living free meant.
[children singing]
[in Czech] [Doris] There is an anthem of Terezín
written by Karel Švenk.
I'll quote it for you.
"Everything goes if one wants
United we'll hold our hands
And on the ruins of the ghetto We shall laugh"
Poor Karel Švenk didn't laugh at all,
since he died during the death march.
[bright music]
[Helen] In the spring of 1944,
while Doris was left alone in Terezín,
Anne is editing her diary.
She is making corrections, and she rewrites it.
She heard on the radio
that the Minister of Education of the Netherlands,
who was exiled in London,
promised that all testimonies
of the sufferings of the Dutch people
would be published,
once the war would come to an end.
Anne believes that she can turn her work,
which was made of several notebooks,
into an actual novel,
and she already has a title in mind.
Het Achterhuis, the Dutch for "Back House."
[soft orchestral music]
This is the title that Otto Frank kept in 1947,
when, after much inner turmoil,
he decided to publish the diary.
Anne, she wrote, "If God let live me
I want to work for mankind.
So you see, I have a certain task."
[Yves] Otto Frank, when he learnt that the diary
is becoming a success,
he immediately said this is not my success,
this is the success of my daughter,
and he wanted to fight against discrimination,
against anti-Semitism, in the meaning of the diary,
but also in his own experience as a survivor.
[in German] As a German,
I have thought a lot about whether I should
have felt guilty or not.
I think I have the responsibility
to give back to the men who lost their humanity here,
and to fight so that their faces are not forgotten.
[in German] These destinies remind me that today
there is a lot of suffering in the world,
that so many children and adults still suffer in war zones,
and I find this inconceivable.
[woman] It is so easy to become a target of hate
when you're different.
How can we make sure that we defend human rights,
that we make sure that things that happened
here in Bergen-Belsen don't happen again.
[in German] [man] There are still people today
who are considered worthless, expelled, killed and exiled,
simply because they are not understood.
[Yves] I wouldn't compare a historical situation
between today and the past,
but what I would compare is the situation of refugees.
People who are running away from war,
from death, from threat.
It is not depending if they are running away from the Nazis
or from anybody else.
It's still children are in need,
it's still children are refugees,
the same way Margot and Anne and all of their friends
were threatened at that time.
[Tatiana] [in Italian] We tell our story to young people,
and we have always done it,
so that the memory of the Holocaust is not lost.
But today, this is beginning to feel like a duty,
because there are too many people
who do not accept those who are different
and are looking for a better life here,
and end up drowning in our seas.
[Helen] Tuesday, June the 6th, 1944.
"Oh, Kitty, the best part about the invasion
is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way."
[explosions]
That day, June the 6th, 1944,
Anne was excited, and like an actual reporter,
she follows the war bulletins.
Yet the closer the end of the conflict,
the faster the extermination machine runs.
Sarah, the sisters Andra and Tatiana,
and also Arianna,
had already been deported to Auschwitz,
while Helga was in the concentration camp
in Freiberg.
[soft piano music]
[soft orchestral music]
[Ronald] If you visit the Anne Frank House,
you will visit an empty house.
And it's an emptiness that in a way
serves as a mirror to us.
We look into the mirror and we say, "This was us.
This was us, this was done by human beings.
Maybe not even very specific human beings,
maybe very much human beings like...
like us."
[music continues]
[Michael] Anne Frank, what would she have been?
What would she have written about the world
in which she witnessed, what she witnessed?
And you say to yourself,
imagine the talent that Germany destroyed
by destroying all of these Jewish children.
When you destroy children,
you destroy infinite possibility.
Saturday, July the 15th, 1944.
"Dearest Kitty,
it's difficult in times like these.
Ideals, dreams and cherished hopes
rise within us,
only to be crushed by grim reality.
It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals.
They seem so absurd and impractical.
Yet I cling to them,
because I still believe, in spite of everything,
that people are truly good at heart."
Anne does not know it, but the summer of 1944
will be her last.
On June the 12th,
she celebrates her 15th birthday.
Tuesday, August the 1st, 1944.
"Dearest Kitty,
as I've told you many times, I'm split in two.
One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness,
my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all,
my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things.
By that, I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations,
a kiss, an embrace, a saucy joke.
This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one,
which is much purer, deeper and finer."
And again on Tuesday, August the 1st, 1944,
she writes,
"When everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross,
and then sad,
and finally end up turning my heart inside out,
the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside,
and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be,
and what I could be if...
if only there were no other people in the world.
Yours, Anne Marie Frank."
These are Anne's last words written in her diary.
Three days later,
the Nazis came and took her away,
and her room remained empty and silent.
For more than 70 years,
Anne's words have made millions of young people
suddenly grow up.
They learnt not to give up.
Anne, such a lively girl,
became the symbol of the horror of the 20th century.
What happened later
is told by Helga, Andra, Tatiana, Sarah and Arianna.
Parallel lives that never cross,
and yet are so close to almost touch each other.
They pass the baton to new generations,
dreaming of the future.
Anne refused to stop remembering and hoping.
Inside the cover of the diary, Anne wrote,
[in French] "Sois gentil et tiens courage"
"Be kind and have courage."
[soft piano music]
[music continues]