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Belzec (2005)
Directed by Guillaume Moscovitz
Distributed by Menemsha Films; www.menemshafilms.com; 100 minutes
One of the most recent additions to the body of films on the Holocaust, this French film documents the history of a little-known Nazi concentration camp called Belzec, Located in the southeast of Poland, near a small village of the same name, Belzec was one of Poland's first death camps.
In the early 1940s, the Nazis set up a number of labor camps in and around the village, to house Jewish workers building the "Otto Line," a series of fortifications between the Bug and San rivers, on the border with the Soviet Union. These Jewish labour camps were disbanded in October 1940, and construction of the concentration camp - by workers from nearby Lublin - began on the site shortly thereafter, in November of 1941. By late winter of 1942, the facilities were completed, and in March, Belzec received its first transport of Jews, as part of what would come to be known as Operation Reinhard. Historical details regarding the various transports of the Jews from Lublin and the role of the "blacks'-Ukrainians in black uniforms-are painstakingly researched and revealed in the film, and add powerful imagery to the existing literature on the Holocaust and to the history of Belzec itself, one of the "smaller," but horrifically "efficient" death camps.
In operation for only 10 months, from March to December 1942, the camp's physical existence, as well as its memory, has...