Director's Statement

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Few films have explored the horrors of Bełżec, the Nazi death camp. It’s not hard to recognize why: there were only two survivors to relate what had happened inside. A half million Jews of Galicia perished at the camp from March to December 1942. But it’s not only the lack of survivor’s accounts that has limited the capacity to tell the story. Unlike Auschwitz, where the Nazi authorities kept detailed records, there is little official documentation of the atrocities at Bełżec. It’s as if the entire world of the Jewish Galicia simply vanished.

We are trying to shine a light into the darkness of Bełżec, not through the personal testimonies of survivors, but by reconstructing the fragments my family left behind: a karczma that has fallen in ruins, an orchard reverting back into wilderness, a country estate house now converted into a modern trucking center, a railway siding in Dębica that has been paved over, and a small patch of sloping land in Bełżec where unfathomable crimes took place.
 

 

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