A film made of what the archive is made of — files, orders, certificates, a handwritten petition, and fingerprints. Female police officers processed the deportations; Sinti and Roma women wrote back to the same office by hand. And from inside the paperwork, someone is looking out.
Meier works in the criminal police archive in Magdeburg, on the registration and deportation of Sinti and Roma. What her research surfaces is a fact that almost never frames Holocaust perpetration: the people processing this were women, and so were the people resisting it.
Female criminal police officers — among them Officer Ladage, whose photograph survives in the file — handled the paperwork that moved families to the camps. And Sinti and Roma women wrote handwritten petitions back into the very same system, addressing the office that was deporting them. Women on both sides of the document.
The Dan David Prize selection committee described her as “a rigorous scholar whose work gives voice to those who have been silenced, while also tackling the challenge of understanding how a social system can enable extermination” — and singled out her exploration of the long history of Roma and Sinti persecution in Europe.
The film is made of what the archive is made of: the personal files with their blue and pink covers, the deportation orders, the transfer certificates, a photograph of the police station, a handwritten petition — and the fingerprints. The documents were supplied by Verena Meier from the Magdeburg archive she works in, and the film was built from them as a stop-motion, handling a range of archival materials rather than drawing them. The fingerprint becomes the recurring material: it appears as the bureaucratic mark, as the ground you walk across, as the texture of the world, as the instrument of erasure — and finally as the thing that survives when everything else has been taken. A fingerprint is how the system reduced a person to a record.
What Verena Meier supplied from the archive in Magdeburg, and what the film made of it — each pair is the original beside a few seconds of the stop-motion. Names are redacted as in the archive’s copies.
The street emptied because the families who lived on it were taken away. The film keeps the register of the archive and does not say so outright: what remains is the trace of an administrative act. Into that empty street we tried to bring back the children who played in it, as white silhouettes. Not to depict them, but to give them presence.
This is how the system fixed identity: it pressed a thumb to a card, filed it and assigned a number. In the film, people’s faces turn into these fingerprints, and the prints slowly disappear. Once they have faces, they are no longer neutral. The red that appears in some of them also makes them flesh and blood.
The fingerprint becomes a maze on the ground, and women are lost inside it. This is the moment the film sets the scale of the Nazi state’s killing machine against a single woman.
We chose to use stop-motion sequences. The film tries to give people we will never know another kind of presence, so that we feel them rather than read about them, and through that to return a little of the dignity that was taken from them.
Verena Meier is a historian of the persecution of Roma and Sinti in modern Europe. Her research works through police and criminal-registration archives — among them the Magdeburg files — to recover both the mechanics of persecution and the voices of the people it was aimed at.
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.