This tale of two British army sergeants who filmed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp uses their profoundly disturbing footage. It’s TV that could alter your whole world view
What They Found, the first documentary by the film and theatre director Sam Mendes, is a short, stark shock. The film straightforwardly combines two precious artefacts held at the Imperial War Museum in London: 35mm film, shot by Sgt Mike Lewis and Sgt Bill Lawrie of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, before and during the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near the town of Celle in northern Germany in April 1945; and audio interviews given by the cameramen in the 1980s. Lewis and Lawrie did not record sound when they visited Belsen; the words they spoke years later are the only sounds we hear.
Lewis and Lawrie do not arrive at Belsen until almost halfway through the film’s 36-minute running time. First, laid over generic archive footage, we hear how they came to be army photographers, and we get a flavour of their prewar civilian life. This is particularly pertinent in the case of Lewis, a son of Jewish immigrants from Poland who looked on in dismay in 1936 as fascists held rallies in his parents’ adopted home country. “I could not, like most English Jews, really believe this of England,” he says. “But the world began to assume a shape more real than those things we were taught about it.”
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