The “Second Life” of the Theresienstadt Films after the Second World War

Author
Eva Strusková
Abstract
Films shot in the ghetto of Theresienstadt between 1942 and 1945 were long considered lost. Several fragments were found and to this day remain scattered in European and Israeli archives. The results of historical research over decades and other newly revealed facts enable us now for the first time to reconstruct how different film fragments made their way into international archives after 1945. Recently found documents in the Archive of Security Services (former archive of the StB) in Prague became a new source of information about the production and later use of the propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet / Theresienstadt. A Documentary Film about the Jewish Settlement (1944-45). They are connected with a Prague trial in the mid-1960s relating to the illegal transfer of fragments of this film to West Germany. Based on archival studies this article reconstructs the post-war history of the film materials from the Theresienstadt ghetto, which has become a prime source for studying the Holocaust. The study contains two tables tracing the “second life” of the film materials in different archives.
Keywords
Irena Dodalová; Kurt Gerron; Karel Pečený; Michael Bornkamp; Přemysl Schönbach; Prague; Ghetto Theresienstadt; Security Services Archive (former StB Archive); Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet; Holocaust film studies; film archives.
Section-numbering-depth
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Filming in Prague and Theresienstadt during November and December 1942

The filming in Theresienstadt during 1944 - 1945

The Discovery of the Fragment of the Film Theresienstadt, and the Trial of Michael Bornkamp and Přemysl Schönbach

Conclusion

Bio

Bibliography

Filmography

Suggested Citation

The Nazis attempted three film projects in the Theresienstadt ghetto. It is now evident that none succeeded. After the Second World War the films vanished and it was widely believed that they had been destroyed. The film fragments were stored in different archives under different titles.1The story of the film productions in the Theresienstadt ghetto was, for many years, retained only in the collective memory of ghetto survivors.

This essay attempts to summarize the fate of each of these film projects, based on past research undertaken by Karel Margry (1992, 1997), the Czech National Film Archive (NFA) and other researchers. The first part of the article will document what is known about the movement of these film materials to various film archives.2 The second part draws on information gleaned from the investigative files of the Czechoslovak State Security apparatus from 1965 to 1967 and discusses the circumstances surrounding a fragment from a film of the Aktualita film production company, which was in the possession of the Czech technician Přemysl Schönbach after 1945 and was “discovered” in Prague in 1964.

Filming in Prague and Theresienstadt during November and December 1942

In late 1942 a report about the journey of a Jewish family to a ghetto was filmed on locations in Prague and the Theresienstadt ghetto. At the end of 1942 a work print was hastily dispatched to Berlin, but it has probably not survived (Margry 1999; Eva Strusková 2009a, 2009b, 2011, and 2013).

Unlike in other ghettos, SS cameramen in Prague and Theresienstadt used Jews not only as extras, but also as technical assistants who often even took charge of principal tasks. And it so happened that some Jews in the ghetto were (perhaps secretly) occasionally behind the camera, and the work print was produced in Theresienstadt. These facts, in turn, enabled Irena Dodalová – who thanks to her experience as a filmmaker was designated as both editor and production manager – to smuggle the outtakes out of the editing room in boxes and to hide them in the ghetto.3 These outtakes were, apparently, transported to Switzerland in February 1945. In April 1945, in a letter to her husband in the USA, Irena Dodalová mentioned that she “smuggled many shots out of Theresienstadt” (Dodalová 1946). For a long time historians believed that these Theresienstadt “kassibers” were merely some fabricated story.4 But then some film fragments were to resurface in post-1968 Prague. Their transfer from Switzerland was undertaken by Artur Radvanský of the Jewish Community who then handed them to two young Jewish filmmakers, Lubor Dohnal and Zeno Dostál.5 They believed that the material represented surplus footage from the later film by Kurt Gerron, and had the footage transferred to non-flammable film stock. When the screenwriter Dohnal subsequently left the country for West Germany, he took this print with him. After 1989, these outtakes were once again returned to Prague. The footage made it clear that these were in fact the edited cuts (probably only a part of them) from 1942. Dohnal’s print contributed to an understanding of the role the Jewish crew and Irena Dodalová, the ghetto´s Drawing room (Kreslírna) and the circumstances of the shoot. 6

The unfinished film is believed to be lost, but there is one circumstance which remains unclear.

In a letter the Austrian archivist Peter A. Schauer informed Eva Strusková that after the Second World War he saw the edited 1942 reportage in Prague.7 His account of the story of the film corresponded with the account given by Hans Hofer (1965), who was a member of Dodalová’s crew. The likely veracity of Schauer’s account is enhanced by the fact that Brichta, an eminent Czech pre-war documentary filmmaker, cameraman and founder of the Technical Museum in Prague, had a personal stake in this footage: his wife had been sent to Theresienstadt and he himself had been sent to a concentration camp. If Brichta managed to acquire this footage in some way or another, it might still have been destroyed in the 1950s, when – according to witnesses – some nitrate prints were destroyed in the Prague Film Archives, i.e. Filmotéka.

The 1942 film shoot was also documented on 16mm by one of the Nazi cameramen, Olaf Sigismund. It is not clear what purpose this documentation was to serve. This footage resurfaced in Poland in the early 1970s. Obviously, a number of questions relating to these film recordings remain unanswered.

Movements of the footage.

The filming in Theresienstadt during 1944 - 1945

A reading of a copy of the script by Jindřich Weil reveals that the idea behind the new full-length propaganda film – to portray the idyllic life in a “beautified” ghetto – surfaced around the time when preparations were being made for the so-called “beautification” (“Verschönerung”) of Theresienstadt scheduled for the autumn of 1943, prior to a visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross.8 This filming was ordered by Hans Günther in his capacity as head of the Zentralamt für die Regelung der Judenfrage in Böhmen und Mähren, and made in cooperation with the Czech film production company Aktualita.

The “second” shoot took place in Theresienstadt in January 1944 in order to record the arrival of a convoy from the Netherlands.9 According to Aktualita cameraman Ivan Frič, it was a sort of test rehearsal (a “Probefilm”) preceding the actual production of the feature-length propaganda film at the end of summer 1944. According to Frič, the material that Aktualita dispatched to Berlin was subsequently destroyed.10

Portrait of operator Ivan Frič. Courtesy Ivan Frič Archive, published on the DVD Truth and Lies 2013.

The Aktualita crew then visited Theresienstadt in August and September 1944, and again in January or February 1945 to record the music for the film. The circumstances behind the film production and the role of Kurt Gerron are a worthy subject for research in their own right. It is certain that Aktualita did not finish their work until March 1945, and it was only in April that Karel Pečený, the head of the Aktualita film company, submitted all film materials to Hans Günther. It is not clear how many prints were then made. In the 1960s, operator Čeněk Zahradníček claimed that only one print was made, but according to Karel Pečený and Ivan Frič (who worked on it as operator and editor), there were two or three prints.11 What became of the film materials that Pečený gave to Günther remains a mystery.

The following hypothesis seems likely: the Aktualita newsreel company collaborated very closely with Favoritfilm, the film laboratory which produced newsreel prints for the whole country.

Operator Čeněk Zahradníček during the Nuremberg trials. Courtesy Pavel Vrbata Archive, published on the DVD Truth and Lies 2013

According to Antonín Vlas (the owner of Favoritfilm) upon the recommendation of Pečený SS officers deposited about 25 crates of film footage in his warehouse in Prague Holešovice immediately prior to the Prague uprising . Shortly afterwards, on May 7 1945, the warehouse was destroyed by incendiary grenades. Antonín Vlas naturally blamed Karel Pečený for the disaster.12 It is possible that Pečený might in fact have believed that Favoritfilm, of all places, would be the safest place to preserve the Theresienstadt film footage.13 We do not know who issued the order to destroy the Favoritfilm warehouse – whether it was Günther or not, nor indeed do we know what the crates contained. There are also other possibilities for how the Theresienstadt films and film materials (negative, sound negative, rushes etc.) may have been lost.

However, let us return to the verifiable facts. After the Second World War, a fragment of the Aktualita footage containing the opening sequence of the film was found by the former Theresienstadt prisoner Jiří Lauscher, as part of his work for the Centre for Collection of Documents relating to the Holocaust (Dokumentační akce). The footage was found in the basement of the former Gestapo building in the Prague quarter of Střešovice (Fragment I). He took several photos of the footage before the film was sent to Haifa.14 In his statement Lauscher did not provide the exact date of his find.15 We do not know where and how the film was stored in Israel, all that is certain is that in 1987, by a series of lucky coincidences, the film was discovered and identified by Regina Mihel Friedman. According to Friedman (1988), the film was found in the Yad Vashem Archive and was labelled under the title The Town the Führer Gave to the Jews. Fragment I in Figure 2:

Movements of the footage (1944-1945). Fragment 1 and Fragment 2.

Shortly after the Second World War, near the town of Mšeno, a seventeen-year old boy named Přemysl Schönbach discovered another part of the film (Fragment II), only to be identified many years later in 1964. The route which this fragment took to Filmotéka and then to West Germany will be traced in greater detail in the subsequent part of the article.

Karel Margry (2011: 160) has described the discovery of the sound tape in Prague in 1997 containing a speech of Paul Eppstein, the second Jewish Elder of Theresienstadt, as a miracle. This important part of the film, now including Fragment I, is preserved in the archive of Yad Vashem.16

During the Aktualita film production, film frames and other fragments were smuggled out by the above-mentioned cameraman and editor – Ivan Frič. A 1960s investigation – of which more will be said later – revealed that Frič gave the box containing this secretly transferred footage to the former Aktualita cameraman Zahradníček after the Second World War. Zahradníček did not deny this, but no longer remembered what he did with this material. This footage has vanished. Therefore, the only material surviving from Frič´s collection are the photographs of the production which he kept at his own house over the ensuing years.

The Discovery of the Fragment of the Film Theresienstadt, and the Trial of Michael Bornkamp and Přemysl Schönbach

There are a number of differing accounts of the discovery of the film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet produced by the Aktualita production company and later often referred to as The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, acquired by Filmotéka in 1964. The discovery of an investigative file opened by the Czech Ministry of the Interior and the court’s documents give us a fairly reliable idea of what happened. 17

First, let me provide a brief summary of the investigation. In 1965, the Ministry of the Interior launched an investigation into the various transactions around the film entitled Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet and for the violation of a regulation regarding the circulation of goods with foreign countries. A criminal prosecution was brought against the Czechoslovak citizens Přemysl Schönbach and Ronald Kraus, as well as the West German journalist Michael Bornkamp (in absentia).

The case rested on the fact that in Autumn 1964 Přemysl Schönbach, a technician employed by Czechoslovak Radio, lent a nitrate copy of the fragment of the Theresienstadt film to Paul Michael Zeising-Bornkamp, of Baden-Baden, to make a copy. The German citizen used the copy of the film from Prague to make a compilation film for television. The film was presented at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1965, under the title So schön war es in Terezin (Kurt Gerron, Michael Bornkamp, 1965, FRG).

More than twenty witnesses were called to give evidence and provide testimony. The trial closed at the beginning of 1967. Bornkamp, represented in absentia by a Czech defence counsel, was sentenced to three years imprisonment for the financial loss which Czechoslovakia had suffered due to his publishing of the footage abroad.18 Přemysl Schönbach received a suspended sentence, and the charges against Kraus were dropped.19 The whole proceedings were held in secret, without any publicity.

In order to understand what transpired in Prague, we must be aware of the atmosphere of the time when this whole affair took place. In the first place, the mere existence of a Nazi film, which moreover had remained for years in private ownership of Přemysl Schönbach, was problematic. According to the Beneš Decrees of August 1945 which concerned the nationalisation of the film industry, all films were to belong to the State, and private owners had the duty to hand over all films to the State archives. Contacts made by Czech citizens with foreigners from the West, and West Germany in particular, were subject to surveillance by the secret police. Bornkamp would travel to Prague on short-term tourist visas, and apparently was also worried about the secret police. This is attested to by the fact that he paid the advance money to Schönbach in a public toilet.

Schönbach’s story began in May or June 1945, when he found a fragment (Fragment II) of the film in Mšeno, near the town of Mělník north of Prague. When he screened the film privately in the presence of people in the local cinema, he realized that it was a Nazi film made in Theresienstadt, which was located not far away. He then kept the film for years. When the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war was approaching in 1965, Schönbach, who was then working as a technician at Czechoslovak Radio and was an amateur film enthusiast, decided with a friend to make a film about the Theresienstadt ghetto, using the found footage. Schönbach’s friend was the amateur filmmaker Rudolf Mihle.20 As amateurs Schönbach and Mihle had no access to 35mm film technology so they asked a friend at FAMU (Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts), Zdeněk Hnilica, to view the film at an editing table. It was there that the film was “discovered” in April 1964, by Vladimír Kressl, a lecturer at FAMU.

Kressl realised that this was a lost film made in Theresienstadt, and attempted to identify it. To this end, he met with the conductor Karel Ančerl and also with Karel Pečený. At this point, the young historian Zdeněk Štábla arranged to have the nitrate copy transferred and backed up by making a dupe negative and print. The film was deposited in the film archive (Filmotéka) in Spring 1964.21 As the subsequent criminal investigation was to show, this took place without the knowledge of the head of the film archive, who was apparently a fine violinist and a perfectly nice gentleman, but a rather indifferent archivist.

For Vladimír Kressl, an assistant professor at FAMU, the discovery was the opportunity of his life. He made an arrangement with the Studio of Documentary Films (Studio dokumentárních filmů) that he would use the footage to make a compilation film from it. At the same time, he organized a screening of the film, with the presence of the press as well as survivors and the staff of local Jewish institutions. In June of that year, Kressl (1964) gave an interview to the Večerní Praha daily newspaper. The Czech Press Agency (ČTK) likewise published news of the discovery of the film.

In the meantime, the amateur filmmakers urged Kressl to return the print. They realized they now had a competitor, so they wished to complete their film as soon as possible. They went to Theresienstadt where they shot extensive footage.

When Schönbach finally retrieved (after a very unpleasant reminder) his nitrate copy in June, he had the film transferred to 16mm. This was arranged through the Amateurs’ Club of the Czechoslovak Radio. Unfortunately, the print thus made was faulty.

Meanwhile, Michael Bornkamp had arrived in Prague. The West German journalist had already acquired in Prague a copy of the screenplay written by the Jewish prisoner Jindřich Weil, who had not survived the Second World War.22 This time he wanted to acquire the Theresienstadt film itself after having obtained some information about this new “discovery”. He only succeeded in meeting Schönbach during his next visit to Prague, in the late summer of 1964, after a Kafkaesque uphill struggle with a variety of local Jewish and film institutions. He convinced Schönbach to lend him the film in order to copy it for the local television station. Schönbach was worried that he might get into trouble and they thus agreed that he would lend Bornkamp the film, but that Bornkamp would return the nitrate print. Bornkamp drafted a contract on behalf of the Stern broadcaster in Hamburg offering Schönbach approximately 6300 Crowns for his services, or roughly two months’ wages. Schönbach signed the contract, but fearful of the consequences, destroyed it immediately after the meeting took place.23

Bornkamp first screened the film in the home of the Czech film collector Milan Volf, and then took the nitrate print with him to West Germany, returning about a month and a half later to Prague. At this point Schönbach was able to take his print back to the film laboratories, where the staff this time produced a better quality 16mm copy and a dupe negative, free of charge (investigators found it very unusual that somebody would do this work without being paid).

At the end of 1964 Bornkamp sent a number of his Prague partners a letter notifying them that he had used the fragment, accompanied by the subsequent material shot in Theresienstadt, to make a television film entitled So schön war es in Terezin and that he had acquired international copyright for the film. In this context Bornkamp implied that he also claimed copyright for the Theresienstadt film itself.24 This probably provoked Vladimír Kressl to report the whole affair to the Ministry of the Interior, who had monitored Bornkamp’s travels in the country.

We have no direct access to these letters. Zdeněk Hnilica said during questioning that he received the information from Mrs. Kresslová who said that her ​​husband had received a letter from Bornkamp, “who told him that he had obtained the copyright to the film about the Theresienstadt ghetto, and that in the case that Prof. Kressl would want to use this material, he must ask him for prior permission.”25 The Theresienstadt film fragment in the FRG, which acted as a legal representative of the former Reich, had been considered as its asset. This opinion is reflected in the letter of Bornkamp to the Czech filmmaker František Blízek26 or in the letter of Transit-Filmvertrieb GmbH, a copy of which was part of the court file.27The representatives on the Czech side felt that this approach was not acceptable.

When Bornkamp’s film So schön war es in Terezin was shown at the Oberhausen Film Festival in February 1965, the screening was followed by a Q&A. The documents of the case include a transcript of this event. What is interesting for the present discussion is that Bornkamp claimed that he had accessed three different scripts of the Theresienstadt films. Unfortunately it is not clear from the documents what versions of the screenplays these were.

The FAMU assistant professor Vladimír Kressl used the footage to make a film titled Město darované which was finished in June 1965. This film is still included in screenings dedicated to Theresienstadt in the Ghetto Museum in Terezín to this day.

In 1965 Czechoslovak Television produced an hour-long programme for young viewers entitled Inquisitive Camera – one edition of the programme featured the people involved in finding the film footage. This TV programme exists in the collection in the Terezín Memorial, but unfortunately it is without a dialogue track.28

After many years it is instructive to trace how the various accounts of the discovery of the film change over time. The film amateurs embellished their version with a story about a fire in a mobile cinema. An entirely new version was given by Vladimír Kressl in the above-cited Večerní Praha article. Instead of Schönbach, he mentions an unknown student at FAMU as the person responsible for finding the footage. In this version, the student is said to have found the film accidentally, while renovating a family home near Mšeno. Apparently, Kressl found this version of events more politically correct. Despite repeated questioning, Schönbach himself remembered no details of his discovery of the film.

There were considerable disagreements between the defence and prosecution in their appraisal of the value of the film fragment. Bornkamp stressed its incompleteness, while the Czech authorities emphasised its cultural, political, and historical value.29 Bornkamp questioned the legitimacy of the Czechoslovak State to claim property of the Third Reich. The Czech authorities, on the other hand, deemed that since the film originated at the time of the Nazi Occupation, it was thus war property subject to confiscation and that the Czechoslovak State Film Archive had an unlimited right to use it, corresponding with article 6 of the Agreement on Reparations with Germany, No. 150/1948 Sb. By publishing the fragment of the film, Bornkamp had effectively made it impossible for the Czech state to gain commercial benefit from the film.

The appeal proceedings reduced Bornkamp’s sentence by a year, but the judgment and conviction nonetheless remained in effect. The remaining penalties for Schönbach and Bornkamp were annulled in a general pardon in May 1968.30

Conclusion

The filming which took place in the ghetto Theresienstadt had an impact on the lives of all who were forced to participate in it, both Jewish prisoners and the filmmakers of the Aktualita production company.

The film about Theresienstadt became one of the main arguments in the trial of Karel Pečený after the Second World War. When the journal of the Jewish community reported on the trial in 1947, the article appeared under the title “Terezínský film je věčnou ostudou” (“The Theresienstadt Film is an Undying Shame”). For a long time there was a sense that everyone who had been made to participate was somehow guilty. The article also documented the attitude of some inmates and historians towards Irena Dodalová, Kurt Gerron, Jo Spier and other people who took part in the filming. The sense of guilt and embarrassment, the trauma around the film shoot and the staged film still linger today. The scandal of the 1960s represented another intrusion into the lives of all those who had to submit to a number of further interrogations.31 Thus the amateur film by Schönbach and Mihle dedicated to Theresienstadt was never made.

As we have already noted, not one of the Nazi projects achieved its original purpose. The existence of the film outtakes hidden by Irena Dodalová as well as the photographs of Frič are testimony of an effort to actively resist the Nazi plans for the film of 1942. These efforts involved considerable risk and a great deal of personal danger. Similarly, Karel Pečený also undertook great risks by continuing to postpone the completion of the film about the ghetto until the very end of March 1945, i.e. until a time when SS Sturmbannführer Hans Günther was no longer able to use the film, since at this point it was already clear that it merely represented the falsification of the reality of the ghetto and that many of the actors and members of the Jewish crew involved were already dead.

The history of filming in Theresienstadt has not lost its relevance and importance today. A substantial effort is still required to bring together all film materials and main documents and, with international cooperation, publish them on DVD. We believe that some new documents and some new facts could be discovered during this work. A scientific edition of the archive fragments could create a new basis for studying this issue in the context of SHOAH, film history and media communication.

Bio

Eva Strusková

struskova@email.cz

Eva Strusková is a film historian, film critic and archivist. After studying at Charles University in Prague (PhD) she worked on film and film history in various positions and institutions (at the Central Film Rental Institute, Czechoslovak Broadcasting, and the National Film Archive). In the nineties she began to work on oral history as a curator of the Collection of Sound documents at the National Film Archive. She has published on various aspects of Czech cinema and is author of the book: The Dodals. Pioneers of Czech Animated film. Recently she has been researching film in the Theresienstadt ghetto publishing her findings in the Journal of Film Preservation (“Ghetto Theresienstadt 1942. The Message of the Film Fragments”) and in an edited volume titled Der Letzte der Ungerechten. Der “Judenälteste” Benjamin Murmelstein in Filmen 1942 - 1975 (“Film Ghetto Theresienstadt. Die Suche nach Zusammenhängen”). With Jana Šplíchalová she co-curated the exhibition “Truth and Lies. Filming in the Terezín Ghetto, 1942-45” in Prague (2013) and in Terezín (2014).

Bibliography

Dodalová, Irena. 1946. “Letter to Karel Dodal from Les Avants.” In The Black Book.The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People, edited by Jewish Black Book Committee, 292–97. New York.

Drubek, Natascha. 2012. “The Exploited Recordings. German and Czech Voices in the Film ‘Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet’ (1944-5).” In Electrified Voices. Medial, Socio-Historical and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer, edited by Dmitri Zakharine and Nils Meise, 249–79. Göttingen. goo.gl/j1F0cw

Friedman, Regina Mihel. 1988. “‘Theresienstadt’. The Film about the Town Which the Fuehrer Donated to the Jews.” In Remembering for the Future. The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary Word. Oxford.

Hofer, Hans. 1965. “The Film about Terezín. A Belated Reportage.” In Terezin, edited by František Ehrmann, Otta Heitlinger, and Rudolf Iltis. Prague: Council of Jewish Communities in the Czech Lands.

Kraus, František. 1960. “Das Drehbuch des Goebbels´schen Ghetto-‘Dokumentarfilms’ gefunden.” Aufbau und Frieden. Das Blatt der deutschen Werktätigen in der Tschechoslowakei, February 16.

Kressl, Vladimir. 1964. “Cenný dokument o Terezíně nalezen!” Večerní Praha, June 11.

Margry, Karel. 1992. “‘Theresienstadt’ (1944–1945). The Nazi Propaganda Film Depicting the Concentration Camp as Paradise.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12 (2): 145-62.

Margry, Karel. 1996. “Das Konzentrationslager als Idylle. ‘ Theresienstadt’. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet.” In Auschwitz. Geschichte, Rezeption und Wirkung, edited by Fritz Bauer Institut, 319-51. Frankfurt am Main.

Margry, Karel. 1999. “The First Theresienstadt Film (1942).” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19 (3): 309–37.

Margry, Karel. 2011. “Benjamin Murmelstein und der Nazi-Propagandafilm Theresienstadt von 1944.” In “Der Letzte der Ungerechten”. Der Judenälteste Benjamin Murmelstein in Filmen 1942-1975, edited by Ronny Loewy and Katharina Rauschenberger, 159–72. Frankfurt am Main. goo.gl/MfmlGS

Strusková, Eva. 2009a. “Film Ghetto-Theresienstadt 1942. Poselství Filmových Výstřižků.” Iluminace 1 (21): 5–36.

Strusková, Eva. 2009b. “Ghetto Theresienstadt 1942. The Message of the Film Fragments.” Journal of Film Preservation 79-80: 59–79. goo.gl/KF4vEs

Strusková, Eva. 2011. “Film Ghetto Theresienstadt. Die Suche nach Zusammenhängen.” In “Der Letzte der Ungerechten”. Der Judenälteste Benjamin Murmelstein in Filmen 1942-1975, edited by Ronny Loewy and Katharina Rauschenberger, 125–58. Frankfurt am Main. goo.gl/e1RCuV

Strusková, Eva. 2013. The Dodals. Pioneers of Czech Animated Film. Translated by Lucie Vidmar. Prague.

Strusková, Eva, Jana Šplíchalová, and Tomáš Fedorovič. 2013. Texts, commentaries, biographies in DVD Truth and Lies 2013. goo.gl/UxTTC4

T., H. 1947. “Terezínský film je věčnou ostudou.” Věstník židovské obce náboženské v Praze.

Filmography

Bornkamp, Michael. 1965. So schön war es in Terezin. RIVA Filmgesellschaft; Bornkamp Documentary Films.

Dodalová, Irena, under the supervision of SS-Obersturmführer Herbert Otto. 1942. Ghetto Theresienstadt. [unfinished].

Gerron, Kurt, and Karel Pečený under the supervision of SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Günther: 1945. Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet / Theresienstadt. A Documentary Film about the Jewish Settlement. Aktualita.

Kressl, Vladimír. 1965. Město darované / The Town that was a Gift. Krátký film.

DVD Truth and Lies 2013: Pravda a lež: filmování v ghettu Terezín 1942-1945 = Truth and Lies: Filming in the Terezín Ghetto, 1942-1945 = Wahrheit und Lüge: Dreharbeiten im Ghetto Theresienstadt 1942-1945. Praha: Židovské muzeum v Praze, Národní filmový archiv, 2013. 1 DVD-ROM [Vydáno u příležitosti stejnojmenné výstavy, 29.8.2013-23.2.2014, Židovské muzeum v Praze, Galerie Roberta Guttmanna]

Suggested Citation

Strusková, Eva. 2016. “‘The Second Life’ of the Theresienstadt films after the Second World War.” Ghetto Films and their Afterlife (ed. by Natascha Drubek). Special Double Issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 2-3. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2016.0002.28

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms.