Holocaust horror stories, principally those of five Hungarians, now Americans, who survived the accelerated genocide of the final year of the war. A pedestrian documentary technique -- a standard mix of interviews, archive footage, family photos, etc. -- is given a lift by the potency of the subject, and by some pathetic specifics, but not by the insipid inspirationalism toward the end. The best idea, indebted to Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, though without the poetic refinement, is revisiting the sites in the present day, in the company of the survivors and their descendants. (It can be no coincidence that Steven Spielberg, the executive producer of the documentary, employed the same idea for the framing device of his Saving Private Ryan.) Setting up a meeting between a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz and one of the survivors, seeking an explanation of the "experiments" performed on her dead sister, seems like a good idea, too, but nothing much comes of it. Directed by James Moll. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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