Night Will Fall Page #4

but none of us,

none of us could talk,

and I think each one of us

was hoping that we were

not going to get... be the ones

who were going to cut it.

When it was over,

we sat absolutely still,

and nobody smoked,

nobody could talk.

We had no idea what

had been going on

in these camps.

Richard Crossman,

German expert and writer,

was a member of the

Psychological Warfare Division

in London and was sent to report

on the situation in Dachau.

His experience there was

later to inform

his final script

for Bernstein's film.

In the last

3 months, official records show

that 10,615 people

were disposed of here.

Their clothes were turned over

to the Deutsche Textil

und Bekleidungswerke GmbH,

a private corporation

whose stockholders were

SS officials, which reclaimed

and repaired the garments

with the use of unpaid

prison labor

and then resold them

to the camp clothing depot

for the use of new prisoners.

The prisoners arrived

often in railway trucks,

but there'd been no hurry

to unload this one.

They went away leaving

the prisoners to die

of hunger and cold and typhus.

We found them like this,

frozen stiff in the snow

alongside a public road.

By some miracle,

17 men were still alive.

All the rest,

about 3,000, were dead.

Germans knew about Dachau

but did not care.

By the beginning of May,

the scope of Bernstein's

documentary had expanded.

He wanted a director,

and his thoughts turned

to his friend Alfred Hitchcock,

already a major Hollywood name.

Alfred Hitchcock was

an eminent director,

and I thought he,

a brilliant man,

would have some ideas how we

could tie it all together,

and he had.

Hitchcock was fully

committed in America

and not immediately available,

but he agreed

to join the film later as

its supervising director.

It was to be his only known

documentary work.

I left America to go to England

to do some war work.

I had felt that

I needed at least

to make some contribution.

There wasn't any question

of military service.

I was overage

and overweight at that time,

but nevertheless,

I felt the urge,

and my friend Bernstein, who was

the head of the film section

of the British Ministry

of Information,

and he arranged

for me to go over.

Before Hitchcock could

join the Bernstein team,

the Allies declared

victory in Europe.

It was the end of the war,

but the challenges

of dealing with the peace

were just beginning.

In the concentration camps,

a huge relief effort was

continuing

among the many thousands

of stranded inmates.

In Bergen-Belsen,

army cameramen were still

filming and sending their

material back to London.

I was... had a big

temperature, a fever,

because I get

"tee-phus"... typhus,

and I was thinking,

"I'm dying."

I was thinking, "I've died"

because there was

a music coming,

and I think it was

the pipes of the Scottish...

I think in front

of the Brits there went

a Scottish brigade with pipes,

and there was a music

I'd never heard.

I haven't seen them

because I cannot go up

to the window, but I heard them,

and I was thinking that I

heard so many about angels

and how they're singing

and making music,

and I was thinking,

"I'm in heaven."

It was amazing how quickly

those poor people

who were reduced

to almost animal status,

how they came back to be...

be human again,

and some of the girls,

women, who really were

in a terrible state

quite soon started to dress

themselves up a bit

and clean themselves up a bit,

get their hair done

a little bit,

and get back to being

normal humans again.

It happened amazingly quickly

within 2 or 3 weeks, I suppose,

these people began

to become human again,

and they'd been... they had been

completely dehumanized.

There's no question about that.

As they logged

their shots, the army cameramen

made notes on what were

known as dope sheets.

One of them commented,

"It is interesting to note

"that as soon as the first

primitive necessities

"of food and rest

and warmth had been met,

"the patients,

particularly the women,

"were immediately

crying out for clothes.

"Clothes became

a medical necessity,

"a powerful tonic

against the dangerous apathy

of the very weak."

Uniquely, Bernstein's

film documented

the healing process.

Clothes was

another urgent problem,

so an outfitting department

was set up,

and clothes gathered from shops

in the surrounding

towns were soon being

tried on an gossiped over,

as women love to do.

In late June 1945,

Hitchcock, released

from Hollywood,

at last arrived in London

to start work with Bernstein.

The Americans had been

slow in sending their footage,

but despite this,

the film was taking shape.

Hitchcock's visit was

short but intense.

After seeing the footage,

he returned to

the London hotel Claridge's.

There he made a series

of proposals

for the completion of the film.

And I can remember him

strolling up and down

in this suite at Claridge's

and saying,

"How can we make

that convincing?"

We tried to make shots as

long as possible,

use panning shots so that

there was no possibility

of... of trickery,

and going

from respected dignitaries

or... or high churchmen straight

to the bodies and corpses

so it couldn't be suggested

that... that we were

faking the film.

Hitchcock was struck

by the contrast

between the normal lives

of Germans living near the camps

and the nightmare within.

He suggested using maps

to highlight

how close they were.

Alfred Hitchcock's...

one of his contributions

to the film is that

he had a particular

conceptualization of those maps.

He also thought they

were very important

because he said not only

should they show the sites

of atrocity

or the concentration camps

were close

to population centers,

they should do so

on a map that was very simple,

and it should be like

a school's atlas.

We wanted to know whether

the Germans surrounding

the concentration camp

knew about it.

So Hitch did

this drawing, circles,

one mile from the camp,

two miles from the camp,

10 miles from the camp,

20 miles from the camp.

His idea was show

the area surrounding each camp

and show how people had

led a normal life outside.

Ebensee is a holiday resort

in the mountains.

The air is clean and pure.

It cures sickness,

and there is a sweetness

about the place,

a gentle peace.

In this place, the Luftwaffe

or SS Panzer officer

on leave relaxes,

eats well, breathes deeply,

finds romance.

Everything is charming

and picturesque...

but the concentration camp

had become

an integral part

of the German economic system.

So it was here, too.

Able to see the mountains,

but what use are mountains

without food?

Even as Hitchcock

and Bernstein worked,

events in postwar Europe

were developing

in unexpected directions.

In many of the camps,

thousands of survivors

remained, marooned.

Now we were faced with...

with... in... in Belsen anyway

over 20,000 who refused to go,

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