SPELL YOUR NAME

A fundamental principle of remembrance of the Holocaust is to give back names to the victims instead of keeping them at anonymous distance among “six million murdered Jews”. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin works along such lines, as does likewise this documentary co-produced by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. The motto of the film is delivered by words from Job 1.16: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Working in the Ukraine between 1994 and 1998, director Sergej Bukovskij visited former prisoners and also people who saved others from persecution. He asked them to talk about their experiences, their friends and relatives – directly into the camera and with no dramatisation, much like Claude Lanzmann did in his groundbreaking SHOAH. And he asks them to spell their names so that viewers will remember them: Antonina Fedoruk, Leonid Serebriakov and Irina Maksimova. His witnesses deliver graphic and detailed descriptions of their experiences, of their life before persecution began. These accounts are intercut with still lifes, landscape details, or sepia-tinged footage of a couple who declined to speak before the camera. On a different filmic plane, Bukovskij reflects upon his own role as a documentary filmmaker, and lets the four young female students who transcribe the interviews talk about their relationship to what they saw and heard. What emerges is the distance the young generation feels to events of more than sixty years ago. It is more confirmation of the importance of passing down these accounts: so that the murdering cannot happen again.