‘From Where They Stood’ Review: An Unnerving Document of Holocaust Photos Taken by Prisoners

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn one of the hardest sequences to look at in “From Where They Stood” (it’s also one of the hardest to look away from), we see four photographs taken inside the Buchenwald concentration camp by Alberto Errera, a Jew from Greece who was a member of the Sonderkommando — the inmates who were allowed to live, at least for a time, because they agreed to be part of the grisliest work detail.

There has never been a known photograph that exists of what went on inside the gas chambers. But Errera came close by taking several clandestine photographs from the gas chambers, giving us a window into what happened before and after.One of his images shows a group of women prisoners, several of them naked, against a woodland setting; they think they’re about to take a shower, which is the lie that was told to prisoners to get them to enter the gas chambers.

There are also two photographs of the Sonderkommando — the only two in existence — that show several of them walking among a sea of corpses, which they have just dragged out of the gas chambers.

The eeriest thing about the photo is that smoke rises all around them. The crematorium wasn’t functioning that day, and their job was to set fire to the corpses in the open air.