Unter den Brettern hellgrünes Gras (The green, green grass beneath)

Ceija Stojka survived the Nazi death camps. As a child she was imprisoned in Auschwitz Ravensbrück and Bergen Belsen where she and her mother were liberated by Allied troops in 1945. Sixty years later this seventy two year old Romani woman recalls before the camera the memories of that inferno.

Directed by Karin Berger the film conveys her testimony with a haunting intensity. Stojka speaks without concessions about the horrors endured, the strategies of resistance that sustained her liberation and the painful difficulty of resuming everyday life.

By means of an austere yet forceful mise en scène the film dispenses with the conventional iconography of horror and instead entrusts its weight to the authority of speech and the persistence of memory. What emerges is a narrative of survival and resistance that operates simultaneously as a historical testimony and as an enduring portrait of human experience.