The photos were either smuggled out or hidden and retrieved only after the war. A visionary artist’s life cut short at 26 by the Nazis.

Within these parameters there was mutual understanding and a shared experience. The fundamental difference is that here the photographers, and often their subjects, who may or may not have known they were being photographed, were prisoners like they were. These photos are clearly a world apart from Nazi propaganda shots, but they also differ from the ones taken by allied forces at the end of the war, who viewed what they saw through a horrified and empathic prism. But they were determined to leave a record of what they had witnessed and experienced. Taking pictures was an act of rebellion and insurgency, whether the inmate was shooting the “brothel,” where female inmates serviced the SS, or the facility where medical experimentation occurred, or even a fellow inmate - if caught these photographers would have been shot on the spot. It is an extraordinary, wholly unfamiliar, unprecedented film centering on largely unknown and clandestinely shot photographs taken by a handful of prisoners in five Nazi concentration camps: Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Ravensbrück from the spring of 1943 until the autumn of 1944. Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” is not another Holocaust documentary.

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