The Story Unfolds
Dorien Styven Long Interview: Jewish Deportees
When we film interviews we always shoot too much. You go with a plan but you want to leave space for surprises to come up and, on the practical side, shoot enough material to make the edit work. We're sharing Rob's complete interviews in Belgium both to let you into the process of selecting and refining, and because there is interesting material here for anyone who wants to go deeper.
Rob and Dorien discuss other deportees but we decided to stick with the story of one man, Mozes Sand, because it felt stronger, more streamlined and about right for the length of the film. Let us know your thoughts when you see it. Would you have done anything differently?
Dorien Styven Long Interview: Personal Accounts
At the Kazerne Dossin Museum in Belgium, Dorien shared several diary excerpt with Rob but we focused on the account from Mozes Sand. There were many other Jewish men deported for forced labour to northern France and you can hear learn about their experiences in their own words here.
Veerle Vanden Daelen Interview: Jewish Deportees
At the Kazerne Dossin Museum, Rob also interviewed curator Veerle Vanden Daelen. We opted not to include this in the film for the purposes of streamlining, but there is lots of interesting material here for anyone who would like to learn more about the story and the museum's work to bring their stories to light.
Mechelen Transit Camp
In our first film, Rob visits the Kazerne Dossin museum in Antwerp, known officially as SS-Sammellager Mecheln - 'SS Assembly Camp Mechelen' - during Nazi occupation. It served as a gathering point to process Belgian Jews and Romani before deporting them to concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe.
Antwerp Pogrom 1941
In April 1941, a public screening of 'Der Ewige Jude' (The Eternal Jew') in Antwerp triggered a violent, state-sanctioned anti-Jewish riot. A mob armed with iron bars and other weapons marched on the Jewish quarter, looted and smashed windows of Jewish-owned shops and restaurants and harassed residents. They then set fire to two synagogues, burned Torah scrolls and prayer books in the street and attacked the home of the city's chief rabbi. The high rate of Jewish mortality and deportation in Antwerp has been partly attributed to the anti-Semitism and collaboration highlighted by this event.
The images here are from a Nazi propaganda film showing the looting and plundering of the of the Antwerp synagogue.
Fritz Todt and Albert Speer
The story of the Atlantic Wall is also the story of Organisation Todt, which Hitler called the 'greatest construction organisation of all time'. It was a vast Nazi engineering and building concern that exploited millions of slave labourers from occupied countries during WWII. Pictured here in the first two portrait photos is the organisation's founder, Fritz Todt, creator of Germany's first motorway network, appointed Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production. When he died in a mysterious plane crash in 1942, Albert Speer, pictured in the second two photographs, succeeded him.
Archive usually eats up a significant proportion of a film's budget so at the moment we're working hard to source images we can use for free.
Fritz Todt archive images:
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-146-01 / Röhn / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-146-02 / Röhn / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE
Albert Speer archive images:
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1979-026-22 / Hoffmann / CC BY-SA 3.0
Bundesarchiv, Bild, 146-1922-093-13A / Hubmann / CC BY-SA 3.0