In 1998, French filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann famously debated the existence or nonexistence of archival footage of the gas chambers. While Lanzmann maintained he would have destroyed such a reel had he found one during the making of his Holocaust opus Shoah (1985), Godard claimed that he could have discovered these missing images with the assistance of a researcher inside the archive. Their debate articulates the ethical responsibilities that befall filmmakers and researchers in the aftermath of the Holocaust: To whom do archival images of atrocity belong? Who should search for them? If they are found, should they be shown or destroyed?

These questions encapsulate the premise of Liebe Perla, a documentary also released in 1998 that could have been titled “The Missing Picture.” When Israeli director Shahar Rozen met Perla Ovitz for the first time, she asked him to search for archival footage of her and her family recorded by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Inside the extermination camp, Mengele isolated them for his research and experiments on little people. According to Ovitz, he filmed them one day “for five hours … like soldiers, stark naked.” Through the lens of his camera Mengele imposed on the Ovitz family the “eugenic stare” characteristic of Nazi propaganda films about people with disabilities—a stare “that tells us that human variations we think of as dwarfism should be eradicated from our human community.” While an estimated 250,000 disabled individuals were murdered in Germany under the Euthanasia Program between 1939 and 1945, Ovitz and her Jewish family survived Auschwitz because their disability enabled them to be “rescued” from the gas chambers by Mengele.

Rather than look for the archival footage captured by the “physician- killer-researcher” of Auschwitz, Rozen found funding to support a research trip to archives in Germany and Poland. The documentary he made chronicles the hunt for these moving images undertaken by Ovitz’s friend Hannelore Witkofski, a German radical disability activist born in the postwar period whose research focuses on the fate of little people during the Third Reich. Herself a short-statured woman with a visual impairment, Witkofski is accompanied by two assistants who help her access the archives and the material—whether in reading reports out loud or providing verbal descriptions of images.