With the far right on the up worldwide, it’s getting late in the day to exhume the lessons of the mid-20th century. There are few surviving Holocaust perpetrators and victims still living, but this exemplary Austrian documentary, an attempt to chronicle the massacre of Hungarian Jews in the Danube river community of Hofamt Priel, does its damnedest to track down and understand both sides before they are gone.
Director Hans Hochstöger grew up in Hofamt Priel, a rural farming village about 100km west of Vienna, which was annexed to the larger town of Persenbeug. It was from a construction site on the river here that, on the night of 2 May 1945, the SS marched more than 200 refugees a short way inland and murdered them; an atrocity all the more senseless because the Nazis surrendered days later. Their remains, shoved into a ditch, were moved to a Jewish cemetery in 1964. But the killing was wilfully ignored and never investigated, unlike similar “endphase” incidents nearby, and only half-heartedly acknowledged in the form of a forlorn roadside memorial.
Despite his calm narration, Hochstöger is disturbed by the pall the massacre still casts over his home village. Starting with a neighbour – who was present in a house opposite as it unfolded, and evidently still haunted by it – he methodically pulls words out of this silence. Most eloquent, even in their lapses or having to let another complete their testimony, are three survivors: Marton and Zev Vilmos Klein, two brothers who escaped death with their family because they were doing forced labour in a Budapest factory; and Yakov Tibor Schwarz, who as an 11-year-old hid under straw at the construction site as the SS machine-gunned the infirm and child prisoners.
Uncovering the killers is more difficult: evidence suggests that Persenbeug’s mayor, a local doctor, a Nazi party member, and others collaborated with the SS. But they are long dead, and family members won’t talk. There is one reckoning: a description of an improbable and shocking reprisal recounted in archive footage by György Roth, another relative of the dead. Given these pitiless trajectories, you can only thank heaven for the counterbalancing goodness also on evidence here, especially the family who hid Schwarz in the forest, and the local police chief who tried unsuccessfully to bring a prosecution. This is an austere, searing act of testimony.