New film 'Block 10' exposes Nazi sterilisation experiments on women in Auschwitz

A long, dark hallway. This is how the film Block 10 begins and ends. It symbolizes the suffering of the women who were imprisoned in Auschwitz in 1943, a chapter of the Holocaust that hardly anyone knows about. Hundreds of Jewish women from all over Europe were abused in Block 10 for medical experiments. Nazi doctors, such as Karl Klauberg, conducted forced sterilizations. Prisoner doctors such as Dr. Maximilian Samuel, played by Christian Birkel, were forced to collaborate. Historian and producer Alice Bronner wrote the book and screenplay based on court records and witness testimonies. We showed this whole brutal system of the extermination camps in this small block 10. And in this violent The film is meant to strike right at the heart. Block 10 was reconstructed almost to scale. Music was deliberately omitted. Browner's parents both survived the Shoah exactly 80 years ago. Her father founded a production company in Berlin that has already produced countless Holocaust films to combat the forgetting. Block 10 was also born out of anger over what followed the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. I felt it like a... It was a tsunami that was breaking in on us, it was unimaginable for me, really a tsunami. From all sides we were attacked, especially in social media, but also when you went to eat and recognized yourself as a Jew, bam, immediately it was about the issue of Israel, you were attacked and then all the Jewish prejudices came again. And block 10 was for me again... It's an opportunity to show why Israel was created. Remembrance must not be comfortable, says Alice Browner. In her film, she wanted neither to sugarcoat anything nor to leave anything out. Instead of using fake bald caps, some of the actresses had their hair shaved off on camera. I've never had such a... I personally experienced a close-up shot, everyone cried at some point, all of them. I would imagine that people really understand that the brutality and violence Block 10 opens on November 5 in select German theatres with English subtitles. Alice Bronner hopes for one thing above all, that people will talk to one another after seeing the movie about what happened and about what must never happen again.