Mark Reviews Movies: THE AUSCHWITZ REPORT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 23, 2021

Inspired by a true story, The Auschwitz Report unfolds in three distinct and varying passages. The first tells of and shows the horror of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The second follows the trials and exhaustion of a daring escape from that place, and the third might be the most disturbing of the sections, even though it involves no death, violence, injury, or hardship.

The true story, from the book Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol by Alfred Wetzler, resulted in the first eyewitness accounts of the systematic murder of Jews and other groups deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis in their concentration and death camps. Wetzler is one of the two protagonists here, and the other is Rudolf Vrba. Both men were Slovak Jews, enlisted as scribes for the camp.

Essentially, they kept a running total of the dead in the camp—by disease, malnourishment, and exhaustion, but also from the meticulous reports of those prisoners who were forced to work the camp's gas chambers and crematoriums. The Nazis wanted and needed these numbers documented, for reasons that must have been as cold and calculating as ensuring that their program of ethnic cleansing was working as they believed necessary. In theory, those physical records, in addition to the testimonies of Wetzler and Vrba (not to mention other prisoners who escaped and put together that first report), should have put some direct action in motion to end the Nazis' mass murder.

The war in Europe was still ongoing. The camps were killing more and more people, and that brutal process would only increase as Germany's fate in the conflict became more obvious. It could have ended sooner. It should have ended sooner and saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives in the process. If devastating bombings were to be the answer, the Wetzler in this film assures people that the prisoners would prefer that chance—and the camp's destruction—over the certainty of death promised by the Nazis.

An early image of co-writer/director Peter Bebjak's film suggests a possible reason the plan by Wetzler, called Freddy here and played by Noel Czuczor, and Vrba, referred to as Valér and played by Peter Ondrejicka, might have failed. The camera observes a man—dressed in a ragged prisoner uniform, a sign hanging from his neck ("Hooray! I've come back," it mockingly reads), gradually revealed to be Freddy as the camera pushes ever closer—hanging from the neck at the entrance to Auschwitz. This, obviously, is not how this story ended in reality or ends in the film, but it so easily could have happened that Freddy's nightmare of it continues until the very end of the story.

There's an additional decision in this image and, more importantly, the way in which Bebjak suddenly removes the horror, as a quick cut makes the man slowly suffocating from the restraint of a noose disappear. That has to do with the filmmaker's choice of how and how he does not portray violence in the film's first section, which details how other prisoners suffer and die to keep Freddy and Valér's plan from being known by the guards.

The two men are hidden under a wooden pallet, in a section of the camp that's under construction to add more gas chambers and furnaces. They have the documentation, both of the dead and murdered numbers and a label proving the camp's use of poison gas, but if they escape outright, Freddy and Valér are sure to be caught. They must wait for the guards to give up a search, and their fellow prisoners must endure torture, threats, and execution to keep the two men's secret.

Unlike in so many dramatizations of the Holocaust, Bebjak keeps death off-screen, such as when the prisoner in charge of Freddy's barrack is beaten to death, or visually obscured, such as when one prisoner's daughter is brought from the women's camp, where she is far away and in out-of-focus silhouette (The fact that the woman isn't the man's daughter offers no comfort, because the daughter is dead regardless). The observed suffering and the knowledge of how death is occurring within this section of the story is enough, and Bebjak's restraint offers a level of respect that these prisoners aren't granted in reality.

The plan eventually continues, sending Freddy and Valér into the woods beyond the camp's barbed-wire limits. There are moments of terror, compassion, and exhaustion (A subjective shot from an extreme angle is particularly effective in communicating that) as their trek toward any sign of civilization unfolds. The two men have to endure hunger, injury, and infection, while accepting help from people who, for all they know, cannot—but must—be trusted.

Up until the third act, the film tells its story well, as well as with reverence and relative restraint. It shows us horror without indulging in its effects, only dealing with the deadly consequences. It's effective and harrowing enough, and Czuczor's mostly silent performance is particularly engaging.

That third act, as Freddy and Valér have to convince people that what they know to be true actually is, puts forth an appropriately cynical view of how simple disbelief and doubt can have ramifications beyond what we once believed to be humanly possible. The Auschwitz Report opens with the famous quote by George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." As the final credits roll and breaking the silence, we hear modern-day voices, both intentionally forgetting and sounding too eager for history to repeat itself.

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