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This month is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, and, in Jordan Dunbar’s documentary What Happened at Auschwitz, there is a sense of these chances to remember running out. Most obviously that’s true in terms of being able to speak directly to the survivors: Dunbar meets a handful of them, and their clarity and focus are undimmed, yet their numbers are declining.
Dunbar, however, assigns his subject matter another, different urgency. We live, he observes, in an era of disinformation and rising hatred. A terrifying percentage of online content and commentary about the Holocaust questions whether it happened or celebrates that it did. Less than a century since this appalling crime against humanity, the principle of Never Again is wobbling.
This film is a small step back towards enlightenment. Simple and short at half an hour, it could and should be shown in schools. It swiftly details how Nazi Germany’s scapegoating of Jews progressed to violent ghettoisation, the loss of businesses and jobs, the burning of schools and synagogues and, then, the final phase: forced mass transit to death camps.
The murder of 6 million people is, Dunbar says, virtually impossible to comprehend, so he hopes the survivors’ individual stories will be difficult to deny or forget. They are indeed indelibly stark. Having survived the journey by rail and been met at Auschwitz by the snarling of dogs and the roaring of Nazi soldiers, little Renee Salt jumped down from the carriage alongside her father, then looked up and could not see him. “Without a kiss, without a goodbye, he disappeared right into thin air.” She did not see him again.
When the new arrivals were split into two lines, Ivor Perl and his brother were told to go to the right; their mother and siblings were directed to the left. Ivor tried to run to his mother, but she told him to stay where he was. She had, perhaps, realised that the line on the left-hand side was for those who had been earmarked by the camp guards for immediate extermination. He did not see her again.
Dunbar bolsters these first-hand accounts with film taken at the time, and with sparing but very effective footage of his own visit to Auschwitz today. We see still photographs, the only ones that exist, of piles of bodies being burned after they had been dragged out of the gas chambers. Arek Hersh remembers being made to labour in the fields around the camp, a task that included spreading ash that was supposedly to be used as fertiliser. Sometimes the ash would contain bones.
We don’t see the exhibit at Auschwitz that is just a vast glass case full of hair, kept after it had been shaved off the prisoners’ heads and bodies, since Dunbar is not permitted to film it. But seeing his face after he views it, and hearing his voice wobble when he utters the phrase “human hair” then has to take a breath before he can continue speaking, is enough.
“I don’t think I’ve ever come across a physical embodiment of hatred like this,” he says, the camp’s perimeter fence stretching out seemingly endlessly behind him. “If you’ve not been here and you’ve not experienced it, then I don’t think you are afraid as you should be of where hatred can go … For most people in their normal lives, this is unthinkable. But it happened.”
What Happened at Auschwitz shows us how such things happen, slowly at first but then suddenly too fast for them to be stopped. Look at the world in 2025 and you can see why Dunbar felt compelled to make the film. Some countries are on the road to fascist government, while others are almost all the way there; in some places the process of dehumanising whole peoples is still at the rhetorical stage, while in others it has gone far beyond that.
The programme issues a grave admonition but, even within such an economical running time, space is found for a little hope, and a hint at the way forward. As well as laying out the warning signs that prefaced the Holocaust, Dunbar also tells us what happened after it to some of his interviewees. The camera leaves Auschwitz and relocates to the shores of Windermere, where two of the survivors featured in the film ended up. When the war finished they became refugees, immigrants, people who had seen horror and needed help starting a new life. They were among the lucky few whom Britain agreed to take in and, of course, they went on to become valued contributors to society. In a programme full of hard lessons, that ought to be an easy one to learn.
