I'm going to see a new documentary in Sioux City on Wednesday, it's called The Angel of Ahlem here's a blurb about it
Angel of Ahlem
Angel of Ahlem is the story of how a gentile and small group of Polish Jews find redemption, hope and love because of 19 black and white photos.
On April 10, 1945, 20-year-old Vernon Tott from Sioux City, Iowa, stumbled upon a compound outside Hanover, Germany. He and his buddies in the 84th Infantry Division had just routed the few remaining Germans. The compound, ringed in barbed wire, displayed a sign warning SS troops not to enter for fear of disease and lice. To Vernon Tott’s horror, he saw emaciated men barely able to stand, others lying in their urine and feces, racked with dysentery, still others stiff and cold, dressed in tatters, dead for days.
Not quite sure why—perhaps as proof of what his eyes refused to believe—he pulled out a second-hand camera he’d bought in New Orleans before joining the war in Europe. He recorded the horror of what he saw but also the hope in the face of those who had survived.
When he returned home, he had the pictures developed but put them away with the rest of his bad memories of the war. For 52 years, the pictures stayed in his basement, in a shoebox covered by dust, until one of the camp survivors placed a notice in a 1997 veterans’ newsletter seeking the GI who had taken the camp photos some 52 years ago.
Vernon Tott saw the notice, realized he was the GI and pulled out the photos and contacted the survivor. This chance encounter became the catalyst for Vernon Tott’s fevered quest to find each survivor featured in his photos. To date, he has found 13 of the 19. Vernon Tott, 79 and beset by cancer and a stroke, spends his days looking for the remaining five.
Vernon has sent 13 survivors their photos, forging a deep and unbreakable bond between this midwestern gentile and small group of Holocaust survivors. Nine of the survivors traveled to a recent reunion of the 84th division just to meet Vernon and to thank the man they call their “angel.”
Angel of Ahlem is a story about hope and how one man changed his life and the lives of a handful of Holocaust survivors by choosing to bear witness to man’s inhumanity and to reach out to strangers and offer them undeniable and irrevocable images of the most seminal moment in their lives.
