The Man Who Saw Too Much
106-year-old Boris Pahor talks about his time as a prisoner at Natzweiler, a Nazi concentration camp located in France, where almost half the prisoners died.
The Man Who Saw Too Much tells the story of Boris Pahor (1913-2022). Pahor was sent to Dachau, Dora, Harzungen, Bergen-Belsen and Natzweiler – one of the Nazis' least known but most deadly camps.
Alan Yentob visits Boris Pahor at his home in Trieste, where he talks about his fight against fascism and the Nazis. Boris, a Slovenian, was born in the tolerant, cosmopolitan city of Trieste in 1913. After World War I, when it became part of Italy and Mussolini rose to power, fascists burned down the Slovene cultural centre, closed their schools and the speaking of Slovene in public was banned. During World War II, Boris fought with the Italian army until its surrender in 1943, when he returned to Trieste just before the Nazis took over the city. He joined the Slovene resistance but was betrayed and handed over to the Gestapo, and sent on to the camps. Natzweiler, where he was to stay the longest, is hidden in the mountains of Alsace. Nearly half of its 52,000 prisoners died through the effects of forced labour, malnutrition, illness and execution. The Nazis conducted medical experiments on prisoners and, on one occasion, 86 Jews were brought to the camp and executed to provide skeletons for a Nazi professor of anatomy’s collection. Natzweiler was the first concentration camp in western Europe to be discovered by the Allies – but the camp was empty, its prisoners has been taken to Dachau.
Pahor’s harrowing descriptions are illustrated with remarkable drawings by fellow prisoners, creating a unique record of conditions in the Nazi death camps. His testimony, along with details from a shocking report into the camp by British intelligence officer Captain Yurka Galitzine and the chilling testimony by SS commandant Josef Kramer, infamous as the Beast of Belsen, combine to tell an extraordinary story.
Last on
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Beating
Duration: 00:48
Music Played
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Paul Giger
Vindonissa
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Max Richter
05 Richter Space 21
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Paul Giger, Robert Dick, Satoshi Takeishi
Oogoogajoo
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Max Richter
03 Richter Space 11
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Die Elfen
Der Fluch Des Schicksalswebers - Teil 09
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Max Richter
Dream 3 (In The Midst Of My Life)
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Max Richter
Path 5
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Max Richter
Dream 8 (Late and Soon)
Credits
Role | Contributor |
---|---|
Director | Jill Nicholls |
Director | Alan Yentob |
Producer | Marc Ramsay |
Producer | Alan Yentob |
Production Company | Fishercat Ltd |
Broadcasts
- Wed 27 Nov 2019 22:45Â鶹Éç One except Northern Ireland & Northern Ireland HD
- Wed 27 Nov 2019 23:45Â鶹Éç One Northern Ireland & Northern Ireland HD only
- Wed 26 Jan 2022 21:00
- Thu 27 Jan 2022 02:30
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