Sunday

The Last Survivors

9pm, BBC Two

Sometimes, you feel as though you can’t say what’s actually awful and horrible about humanity – you feel as though you ought to say what people want to hear: about ‘hope’. My goal, my aim at the moment, is to try to live my few years left without too much pain for me, my family, and the world in general. But I have a feeling that’s too big a wish.”

The speaker is an elderly man called Ivor Perl. He is out walking his dog in a little park near his home in some British suburb, watching the trees in the sunlight and listening to the birds sing, and all the while remembering 1945, and the forest he could see and the birds he heard flying overhead when he was a child being held in the concentration camp at Dachau.

Ivor is the first speaker whose testimony is preserved in The Last Survivors, a new documentary made for Holocaust Memorial Day by director Arthur Cary.

In perhaps a minute of screen time, before the documentary’s title card has even appeared, Ivor, talking matter of factly, has already suggested how the past and the present mix together for him.

Watching reports of the Grenfell fire, for example, he not only felt how terrible it was there and then for the people caught in the tragedy in London, he also began to see his own family, being burned alive eight decades ago.

This idea, about how the past is never dead, not even past, becomes a recurring theme. “It is not possible to reject the past,” another speaker will put it later. “It has various ways of guiding your life.”

The reasons for making this film are clear enough: to ensure the past is kept present. As another interviewee, Manfred Goldberg, puts it: “Time is marching on, and it will not be long before there are no first-hand survivors alive. It is important to record this testimony for future generations.”

After the camps were liberated toward the end of the Second World War, a few thousand survivors came to Britain. Only a couple of hundred now remain alive, and Cary has persuaded several to record their experiences on camera.

All were children during the war, and, just as much as their stark and sharp memories of the Holocaust itself, it is the after-effects, ringing out across entire lives, that are important.

Some talk about the impossibility of even talking about it, the failure of words to express the unimaginable. Some stayed silent on the subject for 50 years or more, unwilling or unable to speak.

“I can’t really communicate with others properly, because they don’t know what I’m talking about. How many people in England have their parents murdered, or have seen a gas chamber in action?”

Cary films some contributors in a studio, talking straight to camera, as if sitting for a school photograph.

Others allow him to follow them over the year, and he records extraordinary things: a man returning to Auschwitz with his daughter; a German Jewish survivor addressing the Bundestag; a man returning to his German childhood home-town for the first time since 1946, there to finally acknowledge the death of his little brother.

Asking questions from behind the camera, Cary keeps the film quiet, simple.

Despite this, he is at times chided for trying for effect. “People always want to see emotions,” a woman named Anita Lasker-Wallfisch admonishes him when he tries to probe. “We are talking about facts here.” Mostly, it’s just facts, faces, voices, memories, details. And it’s devastating.