Presented at Union Station by the Copaken Family

There have been 100’s of documentaries made about the Holocaust and many of them focusing on the horrors of Auschwitz.  In this context and as the title suggests, ‘Auschwitz Untold’ (narrated by Oscar winning actor Ben Kingsley) succeeds at providing new insights into one of the greatest crimes in human history and telling the story in a new way.

‘Auschwitz Untold’ was commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.   One of the distinguishing features of this feature film is colorization. From the outset, the idea of ‘colorization’ of Holocaust related archive was highly controversial and opinions among Holocaust scholars was deeply divided (several were consulted beforehand including the Director of the Auschwitz Museum).  There was complete transparency with all contributing survivors about this aspect of the treatment and none of the participants considered colorization to be a sensational concept per se nor a distortion per se.  The consensus was that colorization would make events “closer to what actually happened”, and introduced a degree of humanity to the archive that was losing its power to convey the realities of Nazi horrors.  The colorization process succeeded as an innovative dimension in Holocaust education for a new generation of young viewers today – who otherwise might find it hard to connect to black & white archive.

This film includes some graphic images, viewer discretion is advised.