‘Stanisław Zalewski survived Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Gusen as a political prisoner. The director Magdalena Zelasko returned with him to the original places, let him tell his own story and gave him plenty of time to convey his message. She accompanied him on his travels for three years and then told his story largely chronologically, without additional dramatising effects. She gathered 100 hours of material, resulting in 100 minutes of film.’

‘If you are looking for gloss and grand staging à la Netflix, this is not the film. And that's a good thing, because Magdalena Zelasko simply lets her protagonist tell his own story. And he has a lot to say, even about relatively banal things such as the sharing of daily bread among groups of five prisoners in Auschwitz or being robbed of the most nutritious parts of the soup from the pot by kapos using tricks with a ladle. It also deals openly with the subject of sexuality, which was omnipresent in the camp. The film has its strongest moments at Gusen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen. In a place that was forgotten for decades, Zalewski, as a prisoner, was forced to participate in the production of armaments for the German army. During the anniversary celebrations there, the growing emptiness of the institutional memory of the Holocaust becomes all too tangible. The director extensively shows how half of the federal government, led by Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP), stands in a pose of dismay while the Israeli delegation awkwardly tries to strike up a chat with Zalewski. The then ambassador, Mordechai Rodgold, wished the 97-year-old a happy 120 years. ‘It's too old because people are getting worse and worse,’ Zalewski replies crystal clear. ‘People haven't learned any lessons from what happened, what is this!’ he says to the camera of a TV reporter.