Stark Reality

What is remarkable about “Witness: Voices From the Holocaust” (KCET, May 1, 10 p.m.) is the timing. The widely acclaimed documentary consists solely of the video testimony of 19 survivors recorded in the late 1970s.

Gleaned from the oral histories of the Yale archives, the oldest in this country, the interviews occurred long before such testimony was commonplace, before movies like “Schindler’s List” and projects such as Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation turned survivors into celebrities. The subjects are not in their 70’s or 80’s but are closer to midlife, each referred to only by a first name and a last initial. Many are speaking of their ordeal for the first time, often on grainy or flickering video.

“It’s a spontaneous return of memory,” says producer-director Joshua M. Greene, 49, of New York. “The words haven’t yet become familiar over many retellings, and there is a grasping for phrases to describe the indescribable.”

One man struggles to compose himself as he recounts how the Nazis ordered his family to undress, then tortured everyone with matches.

Jacob K. of Zwolen, Poland, can barely speak as he describes the blond little girl he encountered at the brink of a mass grave. A Nazi gave her an apple, asked her name, then shot her. “The bullet went through her hair, and … the child screamed,” Jacob recalls. Then he shot her again. The child fell dead to the ground, and the apple rolled away. And we buried her with the … others.”

A small, bald man, wearing what appears to be a polyester suit and tie, asks the videographer to turn off the camera after he admits that he behaved ruthlessly to survive the camps. “I trained myself to be very brutal,” he says, after he has given the cameraman permission to continue. “I sometimes think that I was made too inhuman, because I didn’t care about anybody else.”

“Witness” began as a fundraising project for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, which urgently needed money to restore its oldest footage. Greene, a filmmaker with family ties to the archive, thought a documentary was a good idea. “Movies of this type get on TV,” he said. Perhaps the publicity could help raise funds for the preservation project.

Greene and his co-producer/director, Shiva Kumar, were an unlikely pair to attempt a Holocaust documentary. Both are directors of children’s films who met, some years ago, while taping a production of Indian stories for children. Kumar is an Indian-born non-Jew; Greene, raised by Jewish leftist musicians on the Lower East Side, studied in ashrams and earned the Hindu equivalent of a doctorate in theology. He is now a Brahmin priest who also celebrates Jewish holidays.

Because the Shoah was unfamiliar territory for the producers, they screened 600 hours of video testimony and several dozen Holocaust-themed films before completing “Witness.” The documentary, which went on to win awards up and down the festival circuit, weaves the oral histories in chronological order, without a narrator. The film is meant as an antidote to the feature films that “serve up the Shoah neatly packaged for popular comsumption,” Greene says.

“After liberation of the death camps, black-and-white did not turn to color, nor did the survivors link arms and walk over a hill singing Israeli songs, as occurred in ‘Schindler’s List,'” he suggests. “Nor did young boys ride triumphantly atop Allied tanks, escaping miraculously from concentration camps to be joyfully reunited with their mothers, as in ‘Life is Beautiful.’ That’s entertainment, not history. ‘Witness’ helps to balance the scale.”