The Witness is a short film (19 minutes) directed by Chris Gerolmo, starring Gary Sinise and Elijah Wood.
Set in a Nazi concentration camp, The Witness shows a series of repeating set of psychological actions.
A camp guard's daily routine is to corral Jewish prisoners through a tunnel and into the gas chamber. Each day, as he performs this task, the guard is watched by a Jewish little boy, whose piercing stare unsettles him. He tries to shake this child's steady glare, day after day, until one night he steals into the barracks, finds the child and smothers him. Instead of being free of the accusing stare, another child has replaced the one he killed.
The Witness was produced in 1992 in the United States and is in the German language.
This film was one of four on a DVD released in Australia by the MRA Entertainment Group as Perverse Destiny, Vol 3.
Gary Alan Sinise is an American actor, director, producer, and musician. Among other awards, he has won a Primetime Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. He has also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he has been nominated for an Academy Award. Sinise has also received numerous awards and honors for his extensive humanitarian work and involvement with charitable organizations. He is a supporter of various veterans' organizations and founded the Lt. Dan Band, which plays at military bases around the world.
Of Mice and Men is a 1992 American period drama film based on John Steinbeck's 1937 novella of the same name and is the second film adaptation of the novella, following the 1939 film of the same name. Directed and produced by Gary Sinise, the film features Sinise as George Milton, alongside John Malkovich as Lennie Small, with Casey Siemaszko as Curley, John Terry as Slim, Ray Walston as Candy, Joe Morton as Crooks, and Sherilyn Fenn as Curley's wife.
During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German SS troops were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II. It is unclear how many SS guards were killed in the incident, but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50. In the days before the camp's liberation, SS guards at the camp had forced 7,000 inmates on a death march that resulted in the death of many from exposure and shooting. When Allied soldiers liberated Dachau, they were variously shocked, horrified, disturbed, and angered at finding the massed corpses of prisoners, and by the combativeness of some of the remaining guards who allegedly fired on them.
Balloon Land, also known as The Pincushion Man, is a 1935 animated short film produced by Ub Iwerks as part of the ComiColor Cartoons series. The cartoon is about a place called Balloon Land, whose residents are made entirely out of balloons. The villain in the cartoon is the Pincushion Man, a character who walks around Balloon Land popping the inhabitants with pins.
Now Where Did the 7th Company Get To? is a 1973 French-Italian comedy war film directed by Robert Lamoureux. The film portrays the adventures of a French Army squad lost somewhere on the front in May 1940 during the Battle of France.
Resurrection of the Little Match Girl is a 2002 South Korean action film. It was screened at the 2003 London Film Festival and was the opening film of the Fantasia Festival that same year.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 historical fiction novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. The plot concerns a German boy named Bruno whose father is the commandant of Auschwitz and Bruno's friendship with a Jewish detainee named Shmuel.
JankielWiernik was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who was an influential figure in the Treblinka extermination camp resistance. He had been forced to work as a Sonderkommando slave worker there, where an estimated 700,000–900,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered. After his escape during the uprising of 2 August 1943, Wiernik reached Warsaw and joined the resistance. He also wrote a clandestine account of the camp's operation, A Year in Treblinka, which was copied and translated for printing in London and the US in English and Yiddish.
The Plainsman is a 1936 American Western film directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. The film presents a highly fictionalized account of the adventures and relationships between Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, and General George Custer, with a gun-runner named Lattimer as the main villain. The film is notorious for mixing timelines and even has an opening scene with Abraham Lincoln setting the stage for Hickok's adventures. Anthony Quinn has an early acting role as an Indian. A remake using the same title was released in 1966.
Child in the Night is a 1990 American television film broadcast during the 1990 May sweeps. It aired on the CBS Network before a subsequent release to home video and syndication. The psychological thriller stars JoBeth Williams as a child psychologist, Tom Skerritt as a local police chief and introduced Elijah Wood as a troubled witness to a brutal slaying. Darren McGavin co-starred.
Josef Blösche was a convicted war criminal and a member of the Nazi Party who served in the SS and SD during World War II. Blösche shot and killed many Jews, and helped send many more Jews to their deaths in extermination camps. He also participated in several massacres.
Bronston v. United States, 409 U.S. 352 (1973), is a seminal United States Supreme Court decision strictly construing the federal perjury statute. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for a unanimous Court that responses to questions made under oath that relayed truthful information in and of themselves but were intended to mislead or evade the examiner could not be prosecuted. Instead, the criminal-justice system had to rely on more carefully worded follow-up questions.
Alexander "Sasha" Aronovich Pechersky, also known as Oleksandr Aronovych Pecherskyi, was a Jewish-Soviet officer. He is one of the organizers, and the leader, of the most successful uprising and mass-escape of Jews from a Nazi extermination camp during World War II, which occurred at the Sobibor extermination camp on 14 October 1943.
Kurt Hubert Franz was an SS officer and one of the commanders of the Treblinka extermination camp. Because of this, Franz was one of the major perpetrators of genocide during the Holocaust. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the Treblinka Trials in 1965, he was eventually released in 1993.
The Wrong Guys is a 1988 American comedy film directed by Danny Bilson.
Oskar Gröning was a German SS Unterscharführer who was stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. His responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners, and he was in charge of the personal property of arriving prisoners. On a few occasions he witnessed the procedures of mass killing in the camp. After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning surrendered to the British at the end of the war; his role in the SS was not discovered. He was eventually transferred to the UK as a prisoner of war and worked as a farm labourer.
Machine Gun Preacher is a 2011 American biographical action drama film directed by Marc Forster and starring Gerard Butler, Michelle Monaghan, and Michael Shannon. It tells the story of Sam Childers, a former gang biker turned preacher, and his efforts to protect, in collaboration with the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the children of South Sudan from the atrocities of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The screenplay by Jason Keller was adapted from Childers' book Another Man's War and Ian Urbina's Vanity Fair article "Get Kony".
The Cowra Breakout is a 1984 Australian mini series based on the Cowra breakout, focusing on the friendship between an Australian soldier and Japanese prisoner.
Kalman Taigman also Teigman Hebrew: קלמן טייגמן was an Israeli citizen who was born and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. One of the former members of the Jewish Sonderkommando who escaped from the Treblinka extermination camp during the prisoner uprising of August 1943, Taigman later testified at the 1961 Eichmann Trial held in Jerusalem.
In the best-known photograph taken during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a boy holds his hands over his head while SS-Rottenführer Josef Blösche points a submachine gun in his direction. The boy and others hid in a bunker during the final liquidation of the ghetto, but they were caught and forced out by German troops. After the photograph was taken, all of the Jews in the photograph were marched to the Umschlagplatz and deported to Majdanek extermination camp or Treblinka. The exact location and the photographer are not known, and Blösche is the only person in the photograph who can be identified with certainty. The image is one of the most famous photographs of the Holocaust, and the boy came to represent children in the Holocaust, as well as all Jewish victims.