Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts

Thursday, 6 September 2018

No Asylum UK Premiere: Anne Frank's Stepsister Holds a Q&A at Screening of Holocaust Documentary

Eva Schloss and Paula Fouce answer questions during the Q&A session after the screening (Photo: Eric Schloss)
London - 6 September 2018 - On Monday 3rd September 2018, "No Asylum - The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank's Story" was screened in the UK for the first time, at Conway Hall, London. The Holocaust documentary shows the desperate attempts by Otto Frank (Anne Frank's father) to get his family out of Europe to safety and save them from the Nazis.

This remarkable documentary came to be, following an incredible discovery at YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, by a volunteer who was sorting through some Holocaust archives when she came upon lost letters written by Otto Frank.

Otto and his family - his daughters, Anne and Margot, and his wife Edith - were refused entry by country after country around the world. The film documents the world’s failure to respond to the plight of the Jewish refugees and suggests global anti-Semitism as one of the reasons for this. 

Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, Anne Frank's posthumous stepsister who appears in the film, and Paula Fouce, the film's producer, attended the premiere and, together, held a Q&A session after the screening. Also in attendance was John Wood, son of Bergen Belsen liberator, Leonard Berney who gives his account in the film of liberating the concentration camp in 1945 in which Anne Frank perished, aged only 15.

The screening-and-talk event was hosted by the mind body spirit events company, Alternatives, and Malcolm Stern, Alternatives' founder, acted as MC. Click here for the Facebook Live Broadcast of the Q&A with Eva Schloss and Paula Fouce: https://www.facebook.com/NoAsylumFilm/videos/271053763716971
Malcolm Stern hands the mic to a member of the audience (Photo: Eric Schloss)

Eva Schloss, Malcolm Stern and Paula Fouce (Photo: Eric Schloss)
"I have seen this documentary many times, but each time, I am really shocked...I mean, I went through it but I can't believe this really did happen. This should be a wake-up call; we should show it in every in Parliament for all the MPs everywhere in the world because they really should change their selfish policies," said Eva during the Q&A session.

Paula Fouce: "This film is so relevant at this particular time in our history because there are many similar conflicts and genocides wiping out populations today. Also, the current refugee crisis wreaking havoc in Europe mirrors that which happened during World War II."

No Asylum is available on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, Vudu and XBox.

About Eva Schloss
Eva and her mother miraculously survived Auschwitz when it was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. Eva's mother married Otto Frank in 1953. Today, Eva (89) who lives in London, works tirelessly in the field of Holocaust education. She is co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK. A hologram of Eva is now installed as a interactive display in several museums around the world, where she "personally" gives answers to almost every conceivable question she could be asked about the Holocaust and about her world-renown stepsister.

About Paula Fouce
Paula produced and directed No Asylum. A critically acclaimed author and filmmaker and President of Paradise Filmworks International, Paula’s films include Not in God’s Name: In Search of Tolerance with the Dalai Lama (PBS stations), Song of the Dunes: Search for the Original Gypsies (PBS stations), Naked in Ashes and Origins of Yoga.

About No Asylum
Released in 2015, No Asylum, produced by Paradise Filmworks International in association with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, co-produced by Stephen A. Kollins, M.D. and Elayne Kollins, The Kollins Family Limited Partnership, The Pinnacle Gardens Foundation and Michael Flores, and directed by Paula Fouce tells the story of Anne Frank’s father, Otto, who struggles to obtain visas to save his family from the Holocaust. This unknown chapter of Anne’s life is revealed through Otto’s letters that show how the world turned its back on the Franks, and millions of other families in the same situation. The full length of the film is 75 minutes, but a shorter educational version that contains less graphic content, currently being translated into several languages, is available. www.noasylumfilm.com

Media coverage of the UK premiere:

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Saturday, 11 April 2015

Unique Personal Account of the Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp Marks its 70th Anniversary

Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp - A Personal Account
by (former) Lt-Colonel Leonard Berney R.A. T.D.

"Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp - A Personal Account by (former) Lt-Colonel Leonard Berney R.A. T.D." is the only book published that recounts the events that led up to the British Army’s uncovering of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its 60,000 prisoners, and their subsequent liberation.

Forewords by Nanette Blitz Konig, Belsen survivor and former classmate of Anne Frank, and Major-General Nicholas Eeles CBE, with the introduction by the Oscar®-nominated film director Joshua Oppenheimer.


London - In this first-hand memoir, former Lt-Colonel Leonard Berney captures the drama and horror encountered by the British Army, and recounts the heroic efforts by the liberating troops to provide food, medical care, housing, and rescue the thousands upon thousands of concentration camp survivors. 
On 15th April 1945, the then 25-year-old Leonard Berney (now 95 years old) was one of the officers of the advance party detailed to take over Belsen Concentration Camp from the Germans and one of the first of the liberators to go through its gates. 
"We drove the length of the camp and back; it was nearly half a mile long. Announcements were made in German and other languages that the British Army had arrived to take over the camp; the inmates were now safe but had to stay where they were. As we drove along the camp’s main road we saw dead bodies lying beside the road, and many hundreds of emaciated men and women prisoners still mostly behind barbed wire. 
"We saw many long wooden huts with corpses littering the ground between them. In open areas at the rear of the huts, more piles of corpses. At the end of the road, we saw a large open mass grave containing hundreds of corpses. The sights, the stench, the sheer horror of the place, were indescribable." 
"Then at the end of the road, we arrived at a large pit partly full of corpses, both men and women—there must have been several hundred."
This is the only book to be published that recounts:
  • the events that led up to the British Army’s uncovering of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its 60,000 prisoners
  • how the Army dealt with the unprecedented horror that existed in the camp
  • how the surviving prisoners were rescued
  • how the inmates were evacuated
  • how the Royal Army Medical Corps established the world’s largest hospital to care for the many thousands of sick and emaciated ex-inmates
  • how the survivors were rehabilitated and cared for
  • how they were repatriated to their own countries
  • why many thousand refused to return ‘home’ and 
  • the eventual establishment of the Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the largest DP camp in Germany. 
It includes a foreword by Belsen survivor Nanette Blitz Konig, a foreword by the General Officer Commanding Scotland and Chairman of the Royal Artillery Historical Trust, Major-General Nicholas Eeles CBE, and an introduction by Oscar®-nominated film director Joshua Oppenheimer whose work includes "The Act of Killing" and "The Look of Silence", both of which document the genocide that took place there during the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66.

Leonard Berney was a senior British Army officer who participated in the liberation of the Camp, who was in charge of evacuating the ex-prisoners to the vast Rehabilitation Camp that the Army set up, and who was then appointed as the Commandant of that Camp until its management was handed over to the United Nations, and who gave evidence against the SS guards at the Belsen War Crimes Trial.

Leonard Berney as a 2nd Lieutenant, aged 18 in 1939 before the outbreak of war.

 The book is available on:

Some responses to "Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp":

"I wept through much of your account of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Minutes after I reached the end, I felt the urge to start again from the beginning." 
Joshua Oppenheimer

"The importance of your historical observations are more relevant today than ever before. Thank you for devoting your energy and talent to the task."
Judy Sheindlin (Judge Judy)

 About the Author

Leonard Berney was born in London in 1920. After leaving St Paul’s School, Hammersmith in 1938 he joined the Territorial Army as a Second Lieutenant. At the beginning of 1939 he and his Anti-Aircraft Regiment were mobilized for full-time military service in the defence of London. He took part countering The Blitz and the V1 flying bomb attacks. In August 1944 he was in Normandy as the Staff Officer, Anti-Aircraft Defence, of XIII Corps of the British 21st Army. This is his personal account of his experience of the Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp and as the Commandant of the Displaced Persons camp that housed the survivors. Following his time at Belsen, he was appointed Military Governor of Schleswig-Holstein and was released from the army at the end of 1946, rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He pursued a business career until he retired. Today, Leonard Berney is regularly asked to deliver lectures on the Liberation of Belsen, by groups such as Congregation Ner Tamid, Las Vegas and Greenwich University, London and he is often asked to take part in documentaries on the Holocaust such as Night Will Fall which was broadcast on television in twenty countries around the world to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2015. Leonard now lives on the residential ship The World. In his 95th year when he wrote this book, he has to be one of the very few survivors of the liberators of the infamous Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

Leonard Berney today
For more information, please contact:

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