Zyklon Portrait

If you think you have seen every possible documentary treatment of the holocaust, Zyklon Portrait will make you think again. This poetic yet shattering film is Elida Schogt´s way of dealing openly with the death of her grandparents in the Holocaust. Schogt interviews her mother about her never-talked-about experiences as a Jewish survivor and asks about her grandparents, who were caught by the Nazis in the early 1940s while in hiding in their native Holland. They were transported to Auschwitz where they were immediately killed in the gas chambers. There are no familiar Holocaust images in this film; in fact there is not a frame of Holocaust footage. Instead, Schogt juxtaposes her family´s history told through photos, underwater photography and hand-painted images with a clinical history of Zyklon B gas, which was used to exterminate the victims of Nazi concentration camps. It also juxtaposes fragments of conversation with her mother with excerpts from a scientific text and the memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. Personal vulnerability is underscored by the contrast with the impersonal objectivity of instructional archival films. Finally, the intimacy of a family album is overwhelmed by the chilling calm of mass murder. The provocative premise that the greatest human tragedies often remain incomprehensible and even indescribable is here given a surprising and original answer.