Channel 4 (UK) Documentaries

Warsaw Ghetto: The Unfinished Film (2010x24)

Air date: Oct 30, 2010

The Warsaw Ghetto housed 440,000 Polish Jews and Roma during World War II. Typhus, starvation and random murders killed over 100,000 of the ghetto's residents even before the Nazis began the massive deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. Yet the Nazis created a mysterious propaganda film that juxtaposed meticulously staged scenes of Jews enjoying a life of luxury in the ghetto with other, chilling images that required no staging at all. After the war, filmmakers and museums - unaware of the deception - used images from the film as objective illustrations of life in the ghetto, which subsequently became engraved as historical truth. With contributions from ghetto survivors and one of the German cameramen, Warsaw Ghetto: The Unfinished Film reveals how the Nazis used the ghetto as a film set, the inhabitants as actors and the decaying bodies as exhibits, and examines how far we can trust historic images. The narration is mostly in English but it also includes Polish and Deutsch as well.