Frank Beyer’s moving 1963 drama recounts a humane story of survival in the face of inhuman atrocities. The “illegal camp committee,” a group of prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar who have formed a secret resistance movement, work together to rescue a Polish-Jewish boy from the SS guards. Produced in socialist East Germany, the script was based on a novel of the same name by Bruno Apitz, a Buchenwald inmate himself from 1937-1945. It is amongst the very first films in Germany to dramatize the conditions in the Nazis’ concentration camps. 124 min.
Part of the Emory Cinematheque series “Resisting Fascism.” Each film in the series will be introduced by Paul Buchholz, assistant professor of German Studies, with contributions from other faculty in Emory’s Department of German Studies.