The Dead Still Cry Out: The Story of a Combat Cameraman

(Paperback)

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Description

Helen Lewis was just a child when she found an old suitcase hidden in a cupboard at home. Inside it were the most horrifying photographs shed ever seena record of the atrocities committed at Bergen-Belsen. They belonged to her father, Mike, a British paratrooper and combat cameraman who had filmed the camps liberation.
The child of Jewish refugees, Mike had grown up in Londons East End and experienced antisemitism firsthand in the England of the 1930s. Those first images of the Nazis crimes, shot by Mike Lewis and others like him, shocked the world. In The Dead Still Cry Out, his daughter Helen uses photographs and film stills to reconstruct Mikes early life and experience of the war, while exploring broader questions too: what it means to belong; how history and memory are shapedand how anyone can deny the Holocaust in the face of such powerful evidence.

Reviews

`This mesmerising account of a daughters quest to recreate her fathers life as a combat cameraman sharpens our focus on what it means to bear witness to the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust and its imprint on human history. -- Mark Raphael Baker
`Military history buffs will love [Lewiss] tale She offers a fine discussion on the responsibilities of photographers and publishers of war images. * SA Weekend *
`How a Jewish boy from Londons East End ended up clutching a camera to record the wars harrowing finale is the subject of Lewiss reflective study, The Dead Still Cry Out...Its equally a powerful and disturbing account of her attempt to come to terms with her fathers task, his reluctance to describe in detail what he saw, and his legacy to history. * Australian *
`[The Dead Still Cry Out] prompts reflection on the relationship between damaged parents and their children; the received trauma of being an observer of suffering; the question of the situation of Jews in the Diaspora in general and in Britain in particular; how history and memory are formed; and about the pervasiveness of Holocaust denial when such authoritative opposing evidence exists. This book is a fascinating read. * J-Wire *
`[A] beautifully written investigation' * Good Reading *
`Sometimes history is worth reading because of the subject matter and sometimes its worth reading because of the quality of the writing. The Dead Still Cry Out ticks both boxes. * ANZ Lit Lovers *

Author Bio

Helen Lewis is a writer, editor and researcher who was born in England and moved to Australia when she was twenty-one. She wrote her PhD thesis on her fathers experiences as a combat cameraman and has presented conference papers in Australia and overseas on the ethics and aesthetics of disseminating images of atrocity. In 2012 she was a research associate at the Imperial War Museum, London. She lives in the hinterland of Eden, New South Wales, where she indulges her love of gardening.