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In The Birch Grove

This film project was a direct consequence of an interview I held with Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in New York. Following our discussion of his writings and experience of Auschwitz, I conducted research in the library and archival holdings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. It was there that I discovered the diary of Dr. Johann Kremer, a physician and professor of medicine at the University of Munster, who also held a PhD in philosophy, and who at the age of 59 served as an SS camp doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In finding what might be termed an unlikely perpetrator, whose diary alternates between descriptions of his meals and human dissections and murders, I proceeded to make a film which uses these observations to re-examine expressions of the banality of evil (Hannah Arendt) set against scenes of the physical site today. The film’s title is drawn from a small birch grove, still present today, where families waited their turn to enter the gas chambers. Nature’s encroachment on the perimeter of Birkenau, together with the deteriorating structures, as seen in the film, underscore the fragility of memory’s association with totemic physical remains. The film’s observational methodology is accentuated by use of long takes and a ‘silent frame’, designed to enhance the transparency of the fourth wall and approximate the viewer’s steady gaze, while permitting time to closely examine and reflect upon the compositional elements within the frame. The film has been disseminated internationally as part of conference keynotes, invited talks and screened in association with Holocaust Memorial Day (Jan 2013) and Derry’s UK City of Culture programmed (October 2013)