"The hell I saw will never leave me" – The cameraman who exposed Bergen-Belsen's true horrors
How a cameraman accompanying troops liberating Bergen-Belsen revealed its full horrors to the world.
The Second World War experiences of British Army Sergeant Mike Lewis can be defined in two chapters, before and after 15th April 1945, the date he became an eyewitness to atrocity.
Among a unit sent to film and photograph what he’d been told was a camp, with an outbreak of typhus, for political prisoners and criminals being handed over to the British under a truce agreed with German officers, Lewis characterised what they found as "a different planet, a different Earth – a hell".
Lewis – a paratrooper with the Army Film and Photographic Unit – and his fellow soldiers from the British 11th Armoured Division literally could not comprehend what they were seeing when they entered Bergen-Belsen, to find nearly 60,000 half-starved prisoners, and another 10,000 rotting corpses lying around the camp unburied. By then 50,000 others had already died there.
For ten days after 15th April, it was the task of Sergeant Lewis and his colleague Sergeant Bill Lawrie to capture on film the indescribable horror of the Nazi concentration camp.
Now the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, alongside executive producers including David Baddiel, has created a documentary marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation, chronicling the silent footage shot by Lewis and Lawrie, accompanied by archive oral interviews with the two soldiers recorded in the 1980s.
Mendes’s spare, and unsparing, treatment of the material is perfectly judged. No embellishment could add depth or context, either to the footage or the cameramen’s description of having to film it. Historian Dr Helen Lewis, daughter of Sgt Lewis, is proud that their testimonies are heard.
Lewis was parachuted into Arnhem carrying a pistol and a cine camera to document military operations as part of AFPU Number 5 Unit Europe. "The AFPU was almost invisible," she says. "After the war, the footage they took was handed to the Imperial War Museum and was used again and again in documentaries – but the men were never credited, only the Museum. I found that really problematic. So I wrote a book to highlight their experiences at Belsen."
The title she chose, The Dead Still Cry Out, was a phrase her father used to capture the memories that crowded his mind, right up until his death in 1986 at the age of 69.
"I knew the camera had pushed the reality of the sights away from me and protected me from it,” he said in 1985. "When I left Belsen, I wanted to forget. After 40 years, I know I will never forget, that the hell I saw will never leave me."
Lewis – who had fought in North Africa and been wounded twice - was Jewish: his parents escaped the early 20th-century pogroms in Poland by fleeing to London in their late teens. But Britain itself was not free of anti-Semitism, and the family name Weissenberg - Mike changed his surname to Lewis - was a potential barrier to employment.
Lewis was attacked by supporters of British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley after attending a rally held after the Battle of Cable Street. Even in the army he was singled out, discovering that fellow soldiers placed bets against him completing the necessary seven training jumps to become a paratrooper, simply because he was Jewish.
"He found it difficult to understand and very hurtful," says Helen Lewis. "But it was only after Belsen that he understood the depth of truth in his parents’ stories of the Polish pogroms. Belsen altered his world view and affected him very deeply for the rest of his life."
Having written a PhD thesis on her father’s experiences as a combat cameraman, she has presented conference papers in Australia (where she has lived for almost 50 years) and overseas on the ethics of disseminating images of atrocity.
"Some people felt the images and footage taken by my father should not be seen or shown, on the basis that it re-victimised people who were already victims," she says. "Even my father didn’t think the film should be widely shown. He didn’t like the idea of showing horror pictures, but he said that if it could make a difference, then it should be.
"Back in the 1980s when he recorded the interviews about Belsen, my understanding of what he went through was superficial. It mortifies me now. He was so overcome. He said, ‘Why do I have to keep telling this over and over again? Isn’t it enough that I took the film?’ But I think he knew it was a story that needed to be told."
What They Found airs on Monday 7th April at 10pm on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.
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