Night Will Fall Page #3

Within its gas chambers,

more than a million men,

women, and children died.

Their fate was usually

determined within minutes

of their arrival.

The cattle car doors slid open,

thousands of people spilled out

from the cattle car.

My father and two

older sisters disappeared

in the crowd.

Never ever did I see them again.

As we were holding

onto mother, a Nazi

was running, yelling

in German, "Twins, twins!"

A woman came up,

and she took the little suitcase

from my mother and she says,

"Listen, are these two...

are these two twins?"

My mother said, "Yes."

So she says, "Why don't

you say they're twins?

"It's a good thing

to have twins here

in this place."

The next time the Nazi came,

my mother said,

"Here are my twins."

They took us to Mengele.

Mengele looked at us.

The Nazi said, "Here,

I found twins for you."

Eva and Vera were

among the few survivors

of Josef Mengele's infamously

cruel medical experiments.

1,500 of his other victims

died at his hands.

The Soviet army camera unit

did not arrive

until a few days after

the first troops.

There came a... there

came a crew, a film crew

to film... to film the...

the inmates,

especially the twins.

A soldier, a Russian soldier,

he was beckoning to me.

He says, "Come, come, come.

Film, film, film."

So they filmed us marching

between those two rows

of barbed wire,

and because Miriam and I

had the striped prison uniforms,

we ended up in the front.

These children are twins.

When identical twins were

born to non-German parents,

they were confiscated

and handed over

to an experimental station.

German doctors injected

them with diseases

and attempted cures.

Success in the cure was

not important as these

children were

written off, unknown.

They had no names, only numbers

tattooed on their arms.

Across Germany,

many more concentration camps

were coming to light.

The Allies recorded

the evidence on film,

more material

for Bernstein's documentary.

300 kilometers southeast

of Bergen-Belsen at Buchenwald,

the Americans entered a camp

described as

a prison and labor camp.

I found out the Buchenwald camp

was being liberated,

so the captain that

I was working with,

we hopped in... got a Jeep,

and we drove over

to Buchenwald death camp,

and I started filming there.

It was shocking, yeah.

It was because the bodies

of the prisoners were

stacked up,

they were dead, you know,

and they were piled up.

55,000 of them

died because of this place.

Here, Schoker,

the camp commandant said,

"I want at least

600 Jewish deaths reported

in the camp office

every day."

Thugs were appointed

as overseers or block leaders.

People were tattooed

across the belly

with slave numbers

and forced to work

on starvation diet.

People were coldly

and systematically tortured.

We would receive a report that

strange groups of people

had been seen on a road.

They seemed to be wearing

some kind of a pajama,

and they all looked

like they were dying.

The ones who were seen

on the road were those

who were still alive.

Those who couldn't

walk were lying dead

on the ground.

Everybody has seen the barracks.

I don't want to go

into the details.

It's a little difficult

for me to do that,

but you couldn't tell if

they were dead or alive.

You'd step over a body,

and it would suddenly wave

at you or raise a hand.

Total chaos.

Dysentery, typhoid.

All kinds of diseases

in the camp.

Um... putrid.

It really... the smell

of the camps...

the crematoria were still going,

the dead bodies piled up

like cordwood

in front of the crematorium.

It's hard to imagine

for a normal human mind.

I had peered into hell in this.

It's not something you

quickly forget, uh,

and it's a little hard

for me to describe.

Some of the American

crews were beginning to use

color film,

although as it was sent

for processing to America,

it wasn't included

in Bernstein's film.

When color came out,

that was the start of 1945,

in January.

We were the first unit to

start using color film.

Up to that point,

it was black and white,

and it was 35-millimeter,

but when color came out,

it was 16-millimeter movie, see?

That was sent to the processors,

and then they would enlarge it

for showing in theaters.

Newsreel theaters were

showing this stuff

in the States.

We covered the people

that were living in a town

called Weimar,

and they were paraded

through this camp to show

the death scenes

and the bodies stacked up

and the ovens where

the, you know, the prisoners

were put in.

So I covered a lot

of that with Captain Carter,

and we... we shot

a lot of coverage.

German citizens

were brought in from Weimar.

They had to see, too,

to see what they had been

fighting for

and we had been

fighting against.

They came cheerfully

like sightseers

to a chamber of horrors,

for here indeed were

some real horrors.

These shrunken heads belonged

to two Polish prisoners

who'd escaped

and been recaptured.

Some of the visitors

did not care for the sight

and were assisted

by ex-prisoners.

They had been aware of the camp

and had been willing to make use

of the cheap labor it provided

as long as they were

beyond smelling range of it.

The Supreme Commander

in Europe General Eisenhower

came to the camps

to see for himself,

telling accompanying reporters,

"We are told that the American

soldier does not know

"what he is fighting for.

Now at least he will know

what he is fighting against."

Eisenhower arranged

for journalists,

senators, congressmen,

and a British parliamentary

delegation

to visit the camp and publicize

their findings at home.

Towards the end of April,

the Americans,

moving close

to the city of Munich,

entered and filmed another camp.

The footage was sent

to London, where it was viewed

in the processing laboratory.

One morning, just sitting

there waiting for rushes,

we got a dope sheet which had

the name of the cameramen,

how much film had been shot,

and we looked,

and there was

an enormous amount of film,

much more than usual,

and at the top

of the dope sheet was a name

which was totally unfamiliar

to all of us.

It was spelt D-A-C-H-A-U,

and we didn't know

what the hell that was,

whether it was

initials or anything,

but we soon found out

because once they started

screening this material,

it was like looking into

the most appalling

hell possible,

and especially in negative...

where the blacks were white

and the whites were black.

There was a grotesqueness

to it anyway,

but to see it in negative

was shattering,

and there was 4 hours

of this without break.

None of us wanted a break,

and to see these piles

of bodies,

these rooms stacked with bodies,

and there was what looked like

a... a giant barbecue made

out of railway sleepers,

which an attempt had been

made to burn the bodies

obviously before

the Americans arrived

to try and lessen the...

lessen the atrocities,

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