Nachrichten aus dem Untergrund

"Nachrichten aus dem Untergrund" (News from the Underground) is one of those films you may unfortunately never see if you don't live in a big city with a (Jewish) film festival. An old-fashioned talking heads documentary, "Nachrichten" has an intensity few films of this genre achieve.

"Nachrichten" consists of interviews with three men who tried during the second world war to move the Western allies to do something to prevent the massacre of the European Jewry - Jan Karski, courier for the Polish government in exile, Gerhart Riegner, head of the European Jewish Council in Switzerland and Rudolf Vrba, escapee from Auschwitz. Karski, who was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto by the Jewish resistance so that he could bring an eye-witness acount to the west, gives an unforgettable account of his attempts to move President Roosevelt to action.

The filmmakers choice not to include images of the holocaust was a very conscious one. "There are no images illustrating history. We assumed that the majority of holocaust footage was filmed for propaganda purposes (Warsaw Ghetto) or that scenes were staged after the liberation." This decision works very well within the film as it puts the viewer in the position of the men these men were trying to convince - Without "evidence", how can one believe what is being told? What is the basis of historic truth? And it raises a very modern question - How will we pass this history on, once all of the eyewitnesses have gone?