Aufstand in Ausschwitz

A documentary film about the Jewish Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the only armed uprising at the extermination camp.

In the presence of director Gabi Schlag and graphic novelist Vincent Burmeister

*Uprising in Auschwitz* explores a chapter of the Shoah that even those with an interest in history often know only in broad strokes: the uprising of the Jewish Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 7, 1944. These prisoners were forced to work at the heart of the machinery of extermination. They had to escort people into the gas chambers, clean up the traces of the mass murder, and for that very reason became unwanted witnesses to a crime that defies imagination. These men of the Sonderkommando are the only ones who can bear witness to what happens in the death factory—how people are forced to undress before being murdered with Zyklon B in the gas chambers, how they must remove the dead from the gas chambers, to burn them in high-capacity ovens specially designed for that purpose. Then the men of the Sonderkommando must grind the bones to dust and dump them into the Vistula River so that nothing—absolutely nothing—remains of the hated Jewish people.

The film does not approach these events through the overwhelming iconography of National Socialism, nor through an aesthetic of horror. Director Gabi Schlag takes a different approach: one that focuses on individual people, their voices, their memories, their despair, their inner turmoil, and their courage. Through interviews with survivors and testimonies from relatives—supplemented by insights from international historians—Gabi Schlag paints a multifaceted portrait of those men who, knowing they were doomed, decided to fight back and reveal the true nature of the death factory to the outside world. She is supported in this by animated graphic novel illustrations by Vincent Burmeister, whose stark contrasts depict everyday life in Auschwitz.

It is precisely here that the film’s special power lies. It portrays the uprising not as an isolated heroic act, but as a final attempt to assert dignity, leave a mark, and tell the world what happened in Auschwitz. The documentary narrative combines eyewitness accounts, historical research, and a sparingly used graphic novel aesthetic into a form that does not seek to illustrate the unspeakable, but rather to give shape to remembrance.