Looking for Zion

Anne Frank's world famous diary came to an abrupt end shortly before she and her family were discovered hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex at the top of Otto Frank's office building, on August 4, 1944. While her diary tells the story of Anne's life, the story of her death reveals the atrocities encountered by millions of Jews during the Holocaust. In a solemn remembrance of the horrors that Anne Frank and these millions of others suffered during the dark days of World War II, National Geographic Channel (NGC) takes viewers inside the concentration camps in a two-hour special. In keeping with NGC's tradition of unparalleled storytelling, Anne Frank's Holocaust incorporates new findings and rarely seen photographs to reintroduce the story of the massacre of Jews in one of the most comprehensive documentaries on the subject to date.

The documentary tells the stories of people who were just children during the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Its protagonists now live in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Odesa, where the filming took place. They survived the ghetto and also witnessed mass shootings that took place, according to researchers, in about five thousand locations across Ukraine. Each of the heroes lost loved ones. Parents, brothers, sisters, loved ones. Everyone had a single task during these terrible years - to survive. The entire mosaic of terrible memories collected in the film is part of a story of survival.

This story follows one man's quest to uncover the origins and reveal the mysteries of a possible Holocaust artifact some historians now say never existed: lampshades made of human skin. When the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina receded, they left behind a wrecked New Orleans and a strange looking lamp that an illicit dealer claimed was 'made from the skin of Jews.'

In 1935, German scientists dug for bones; in 1943, they murdered to get them. How the German scientific community supported Nazism, distorted history to legitimize a hideous system and was an accomplice to its unspeakable crimes. The story of the Ahnenerbe, a sinister organization created to rewrite the obscure origins of a nation.

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.

In September 1943, 17-year-old Stanisław Zalewski was arrested in Warsaw as a member of a Polish resistance group and taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp for labour service. From there, he was sent to Mauthausen and finally to the Gusen camp, where the prisoners were forced to work for the German armaments industry under inhumane conditions. For a long time, Stanisław Zalewski, like many other victims of Nazi terror, remained silent about his painful experiences. It was only after forty years that he began to talk about it, at events, memorial services, and in schools, and he continues to do so to this day, even at the age of 99. Now, for the first time, he tells his stirring life story in a film as a deeply impressive ‘ambassador of remembrance’.

Over the past few years, Israel's ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territory and repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world—except the United States. This documentary takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S.

The Israeli filmmaker Shai Corneli Polak records the building of the 'security wall' through Palestinian territory at the village of Bil'in. The villagers protest mostly peacefully, while the Israeli army doesn't react peacefully. By now the Israeli High Court has ruled that the building of the wall was illegal.

As a 10-year-old “Mengele Twin,” Eva Kor suffered some of the worst of the Holocaust. At 50, she launched the biggest manhunt in history. Now in her 80s, she circles the globe to promote the lesson her journey has taught: Healing through forgiveness.

Can a secret change who you are? Mysterious events unfold and reveal how Martha, a Polish holocaust survivor, managed to lead a double life in Australia. The vivacious Jewish artist and doting mother, died without ever revealing her secret. The film follows Martha’s daughter Eve, over a decade, as she unlocks the mystery behind the streets named Eve and Martha. Clues are found in old recordings and Martha’s home movies revealing a mystery man gazing into the lens. Eve’s investigation leads her to the Sobieski castle in the Ukraine, the site of a massacre where her grandmother died, and the Eichmann trial as she explores her parents’ holocaust survival and her father’s heroic escape from a concentration camp. When a ‘doppelgänger’ contacts Eve, her life is forever altered, as she uncovers lies, tracks down her mother’s young lover and reveals the family secret that led her to rewrite her entire life.

A film about a district in Buda, which to this day cannot face the inconceivably cruel crimes committed by its former inhabitants.

In this documentary road movie, filmmaker Danielle Arbid tries to conjure up an image of the country that is called Israel or Palestine.

Ventanas

Les Enfants de Terezin et le Monstre à Moustache

The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.

Who's Afraid of Alice Miller?

Les évadés de Drancy

A documentary exploring how Albanians, including many Muslims, helped and sheltered Jewish refugees during WWII at their own risk, and trying to help the son of an Albanian baker that housed a Jewish family for a year return some Hebrew books that the family had to leave behind.

1981: for the first time, contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust speak on German television in the two-part documentary "Witnesses - Testimonies to the Murder of a People" - at prime time on the first channel. Only 36 years after the Second World War, Bremen filmmaker Karl Fruchtmann has created a counter-design to the US drama series "Holocaust". While there are hardly any people left today who can personally recount their experiences of the Holocaust, there were still many contemporary witnesses in the early 1980s for whom the murder of the European Jews was still very present. Karl Fruchtmann interviewed 60 survivors of the Nazi concentration camps in Israel and Poland, the tapes are in the archives of Radio Bremen, almost 80 hours of interviews, a historical legacy! Only a small part of them has been published so far.