a heartbreaking document
"A Visitor From the Living" is an hour-long film about the 1944 Red Cross visit to the artificially presented Theresienstadt ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic. Despite its still-appalling conditions (starvation, severe crowding, deportations to the extermination camps), "Theresienstadt was created [by the Nazis] to be shown" as a "model" to deceive international observers, with the prisoners acting as rehearsed under threat of death, and the observers shown false, newly-built (and soon demolished) facilities instead of the real ones. The full film is free to stream on the US Holocaust Museum website. Mostly footage of a single interview with the visitor, but occasionally we see some images of a drive through the town, decades later, as the interview audio continues running over it. Near the end, the interviewer becomes more pointed about the realities that were hidden, that succeeded at generating the falsely positive report. "The overcrowding was so severe that to prepare for your visit, 5,000 were deported to Auschwitz and immediately gassed, so it would be less crowded and make a better impression."
It ends with this story (1:03 of the video). They have been discussing Paul Eppstein, the leader of the ghetto at the time of the visit:
Lanzmann (director/interviewer): They killed him exactly three months after your visit. The deportations to Auschwitz had started again, Theresienstadt's greatest fear. The ghetto was in panic. He made the following speech... I'll read an excerpt, roughly translated...
"Theresienstadt will only survive by radically mobilizing itself for work." They thought working would save them. "No talk, only work. No speculation. We are on a ship trying to come ashore, but the harbor is blocked by mines." This was in September 1944. They had news of the events in the outside world.
"Only the captain of the ship knows the narrow passage leading to safe harbor. He must ignore deceptive lights and signals arriving from the coast. The vessel must stay where it is and await orders. You must trust your leaders who do all that is humanly possible to assure the security of our existence. Let's start the New Year..."--The Jewish New Year, in September--"Let's start the New Year seriously and confidently, with the firm intention of holding out and doing our duty."
They killed him a few days later, in the Small Fortress, in the "Kleine Festung," they put a bullet in his head. It's a heartbreaking document.