Truth and Lies DVD

The exhibition Truth and Lies: Filming in the Ghetto Terezín, 1942–1945, which has been put together by the Jewish Museum in collaboration with the National Film Archive in Prague, focuses on three SS film projects about the Terezín ghetto and provides a wealth of fascinating documentary material. The medium of film was used by the Nazis with a view to making their ideology more attractive to the masses, and to explaining and justifying their repressive measures and the deportation of Jews. The electronic catalogue (PC version) includes a montage of film fragments from 1942 that were hidden in the ghetto by prisoners, previously unpublished photographs from 1944–45 that were taken out of the editing room by the cameraman Ivan Frič, and unique drawings by the Dutch prisoner Jo Spier that document the course of the filming in the summer of 1944. Also on view is the propaganda film Terezín: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area – better known under the title The Führer Gives the Jews a City. Diary entries by prisoners, drawings by Terezín artists, excerpts from children's magazines, summons to take part in the filming, recollections by contemporaries – all this material not only depicts the atmosphere of filming in the ghetto but also captures the reality of life for the Jewish prisoners: the illness, hunger and, above all, fear for the lives of loved ones and fear of being deported to the east.