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Photos and drawings from a Holocaust artist, concentration camp survivor and unsung hero.

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Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
The amazing story of 10,000 children saved!

Lost Children of Berlin (1997) Starring: Lost Children of Berlin, Anthony Hopkins, et al. • NTSC format (US and Canada only) • Color, Black & White, NTSC •

The Last Days (1998) Director: James Moll • NTSC format (US and Canada only) • Color, Closed-captioned, Dolby, NTSC

The Hiding Place Starring: James F. Collier, et al. Director: James F. Collier • NTSC format (US and Canada only) • Color, NTSC •

Death Camps • Black & White, Full length, Full Screen •

[Continued from previous page.]

According to archives at Sachsenhausen, Wiktor Siminski was an artist, writer, and member of the Polish Underground who was arrested by the Gestapo within days of Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. He was on the Nazi's "most wanted" list and was sent off to Skrochowice Concentration Camp in the former Czechoslovakia where he was interrogated and tortured by the SS in a futile effort to get him to reveal the names of his compatriots in the Underground. When Wiktor resisted, the Nazis sent him on to Sachsenhausen where he remained until he was liberated on the "Death March" in 1945.

Together with official Sachsenhausen Guide Maika Leffers, Mueller showed Julian and his crew the places where Wiktor had lived out his days in the Camp. Most horrifying was the notorious "Klinkerwerks," a site where prisoners were sent, essentially, to die. Inmates were forced to collect heavy stones from a bog and run up and down a muddy slope. When a prisoner slipped and fell, those behind were instructed to step on the man's back -- pushing him down into the mud.

"We are in a place of great beauty," Mueller told Julian, "but in reality, we are standing on blood." Julian and the crew documented the places where Wiktor worked and slept, often nothing more than outlines on the bare ground. But their biggest breakthrough came when they were ushered behind the walls and into the Sachsenhausen Archives. There, Julian was able to view some of the vast collection of artwork that Wiktor had created during his internment.

Camp records showed that Wiktor became widely respected among his fellow prisoners for his artistic abilities. By trading his daily bread ration for pencils and paper, Wiktor created sketches of life and death in the camp. He also became known for the sketches he created in the monthly letters prisoners were allowed to send to their families and contacts on the outside. Many of these sketches contained ingeniously hidden messages about the true conditions in the camp, which went undetected by the SS censors. Many of his creations reveal Wiktor's unwavering belief in the beauty of life, and a steadfast belief that the misery would end and that a better world awaited. He also exhibited a remarkable capacity for "gallows humor," which scholars say was a key to day-to-day survival amidst the horrors of the camp.

Among his art pieces were beautiful inlaid boxes, graceful sketches, carved pipes -- even watercolors -- fashioned with tools made from discarded bicycle spokes, scraps of metal, glass and wood that he found around the camp. The archivists produced Wiktor's actual uniform, bearing a red triangle with the letter "P," marking him as a Polish political prisoner. The archives also contained numerous letters -- suggesting Wiktor's family history, his hometown, and who his friends may have been. But there was no time for Julian's crew to translate or study the documents. That would have to come later.

Records confirmed that Wiktor was liberated by Allied troops on the infamous Nazi "Death March" in May of 1945. Historians believe that this mass forced exodus was part of a final plan by the SS to erase any trace of the camps. The entire population of Sachsenhausen - except those too weak to walk -- was being herded toward the North Sea. There, the Nazis reportedly planned to pack the prisoners onto ships and sink them in a last desperate attempt to eliminate all witnesses to their barbarity. Rescued, Wiktor immediately returned to Poland, probably on foot.

In one of the most stunning revelations caught on tape, a top Sachsenhausen official, Dr. Horst Sefrens, said that shortly after returning home, Wiktor set about writing a meticulous 1300 page memoir -- a remarkable accomplishment since so few survivors could bear to relive the horrors they had escaped. But Wiktor did -- not only reliving his ordeal, but giving names, dates and even supplying photos of the murdered and the murderers, the betrayed and their betrayers. He also created dozens of sketches and watercolors graphically illustrating what he had witnessed -- memories most Survivors were too traumatized to revisit, let alone record. But Wiktor did.

Some of Wiktor's artwork has surfaced, in a collection sold to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But in a series of events still shrouded in mystery and layered in wartime intrigue, the manuscript itself mysteriously dropped from sight for the next fifty years. The whereabouts of the "Lost Manuscript" became known to some people in Poland and Germany only in the last few years. Those who have seen the document describe it as a foot-high stack of yellowed, typewritten pages, filled with careful lists of the members of the Polish Underground who were arrested along with Wiktor, and their pictures.

The book -- still in the original Polish -- also gives the names and photos of the people who betrayed the patriots. Many of the family members of these Nazi collaborators are reportedly still living in Germany and Poland. The text also reportedly details his experiences in the Silesian Uprisings before the war, little known details of the super-secret Polish Underground, Wiktor's arrest, torture and the atrocities he witnessed in the first weeks and months of the war. He describes his years at Sachsenhausen, and on the "Death March." Wiktor's writings may also detail Liberation, his overland journey back to Poland, his bitter homecoming and later, his struggle to make a living under the Communists.

Wiktor's "lost manuscript" remains hidden. In a secret negotiation, the pages were offered to Sachsenhausen for a price that was reportedly exorbitant. But Sachsenhausen's Dr. Sefrens confided that the Memorial eventually did purchase the one chapter -- about 300 pages -- dealing with Wiktor's time at the camp, which is slowly being translated. Just from the small number of pages he has seen, Sefrens said, Wiktor's revelations could well turn out to be "one of the most important reports that we have of what it was like to be a prisoner at the Camps."

As Julian and his crew pursued their investigation in Germany, like the saga of the "Lost Manuscript," Wiktor's life soon emerged as a bona fide mystery of epic proportions. In interview after interview, many key facts of Wiktor's life were similarly shrouded in secrecy, with just enough revealed on camera to draw Julian and his crew down an investigative trail that grew more fascinating every day.

Julian knew almost nothing about Wiktor's family ties before traveling to Berlin. But within moments of meeting at Sachsenhausen, with the camera rolling, Mueller revealed that Wiktor had a wife, daughter and son in Poland. He said he was a political prisoner, a high priority for the Gestapo's "enemies' list."

Mueller admitted that he knew more, but said Sachsenhausen has strict rules of privacy, which prevented him from saying anything else.

After that apparent dead end, there was a new breakthrough. The director of the Sachsenhausen archive, Monika Knop, made a telephone call to Wiktor's daughter. Curious to meet this relative from the States, the daughter agreed to talk to Julian, and invited him and his crew to come to her home.

The drive was heavy with anticipation and anxieties -- what would they find out? Would they be welcomed? The visit -- recorded on video -- turned out to be cordial, but strained. Like the trip to Sachsenhausen, the visit with Wiktor's daughter raised as many questions as it answered. She claimed not to know where or how Wiktor had died, and whenever Julian probed for details of Wiktor's last days, the on-camera conversation grew more halting, the faces of the family more pained. In one startling moment, the daughter says on tape that she didn't want to know about her father when he came home -- that the family was "ashamed" of him.

That word -- "ashamed" -- shocked Julian and his crew. Why would the family shun such a brave and heroic man, a man who had fought through his youth for a free Poland, who resisted Hitler, and survived the Camps and the Death March? A possible answer would emerge later on when the crew interviewed another of Wiktor's relatives. More.