Holocaust Memorial Day: Colchester film-makers telling the stories of staff who work at Auschwitz
Video report by ITV News Anglia's Russell Hookey
A group of young film-makers from Colchester who have produced a documentary about the people who work at Auschwitz, say they hope it will inspire viewers to learn more about one of the darkest chapters in human history.
Aaron Compton, Sarah Gharib and Davy Pinnuck directed and edited the piece called Why We Work at Auschwitz after they took a trip to Poland to visit the former Nazi concentration camp.
During their time at the camp, they met the men and women whose job it is to keep alive the memory of millions of prisoners murdered by the Nazis.
The trio said they wanted to explain what gave staff the motivation to work on a site that had played host to such horrors.
"We've all got a deep passion for Auschwitz and the war, and we just thought we'd focus on something a little bit different," said Mr Pinnuck, the group's director of photography.
"We thought we'd focus on the people who work at Auschwitz, what they do and why they do it. We just wanted to get a perspective of their daily life and how they conduct the work that they do."
While carrying out research for the documentary, the filmmakers discovered that many of the staff are descendants of Auschwitz prisoners.
Thanks to the film, these stories will be brought to life again as a tribute to everyone who died there, and the group admit searching through the archive was often a heartbreaking process.
"When you're on the tour, you get told all these stories which are so horrific," said Mr Compton, the director.
"You're just overwhelmed by just how horrific it all is, it just goes from one level to another. During the post production stage we spent some time at the Imperial War Museum in London going through all the archives, and some of the footage on there did really get to you - children's bodies, women's hair etc. That kind of thing really brought it home."
The documentary is due to be released on YouTube on January 27 to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day, the day the camp at Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945.