The Dead Still Cry Out: The Story of a Combat Cameraman

by Helen Lewis

Helen Lewis was just a child when she found an old suitcase hidden in a cupboard at home. Inside it were the most horrifying photographs she’d ever seen—a record of the atrocities committed at Bergen-Belsen. They belonged to her father, Mike, a British paratrooper and combat cameraman who had filmed the camp’s liberation.
The child of Jewish refugees, Mike had grown up in London’s East End and experienced antisemitism firsthand in the England of the 1930s. Those first images of the Nazis’ crimes, shot by Mike Lewis and others like him, shocked the world. In The Dead Still Cry Out, his daughter Helen uses photographs and film stills to reconstruct Mike’s early life and experience of the war, while exploring broader questions too: what it means to belong; how history and memory are shaped—and how anyone can deny the Holocaust in the face of such powerful evidence.

Genres: History, War

Paperback

Published May 28, 2018

Reviews

[Text Publishing]

‘[The Dead Still Cry Out] prompts reflection on the relationship between damaged parents and their children; the received trauma of being an observer of suffering; the question of the situation of Jews in the Diaspora in general and in Britain in particular; how history and memory are formed; and about the pervasiveness of Holocaust denial when such authoritative opposing evidence exists. This book is a fascinating read.’
J-Wire

‘How a Jewish boy from London’s East End ended up clutching a camera to record the war’s harrowing finale is the subject of Lewis’s reflective study, The Dead Still Cry Out...It’s equally a powerful and disturbing account of her attempt to come to terms with her father’s task, his reluctance to describe in detail what he saw, and his legacy to history.’
Australian

‘Military history buffs will love [Lewis’s] tale… She offers a fine discussion on the responsibilities of photographers and publishers of war images.’
SA Weekend

‘This mesmerising account of a daughter’s quest to recreate her father’s life as a combat cameraman sharpens our focus on what it means to bear witness to the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust and its imprint on human history.’
Mark Raphael Baker

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t like reading military combat histories and though this blog has a category called ‘War, Armed Conflict and its Aftermath‘ many of the reviews are of novels, and most of the other non-fiction books in this category are about aspects of war other than combat.
So I might not have read The Dead Still Cry Out, the Story of a Cmbat Cameraman which won the 2018 Mark and Yvette Moran NIB (Waverly Library) NIB Award it if I hadn’t heard the author interviewed by Sarah Kanowski on ABC Radio, in Conversations (Jun 18, 2018). I realised then that Helen Lewis’s account of her father’s war was significantly more than military history. And now that I’ve read it, I’ll repeat what I said in my review of Tobruk 1941: sometimes history is worth reading because of the subject matter and sometimes it’s worth reading because of the quality of the writing. The Dead Still Cry Out ticks both boxes.
Sue at Whispering Gums has written recently about changing aspects of life writing (and I’d reference her post if I could remember which one it was!) so I think she’d be intrigued by the method used in The Dead Still Cry Out. It is a blend of autobiography, biography, memoir and autoethnography, which is:
a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. (Source: Wikipedia)
What this means in practice is that the book contains the author’s own experiences both before and during her research; her father’s own words from his visual diary and from interviews with him; memories of her father from a variety of sources; an exploration of the intergenerational trauma of witnesses to atrocity; and her own reflections about how, why and even if, his story should be told. The result is that the reader gets a strong sense of Mike Lewis the man, the soldier, the cinematographer and the father. It is not a hagiography but it is written with a daughter’s empathetic eye.
The book also canvasses wider issues. Reflecting on military operations in North Africa, the author notes how Great Powers intrude into the lives of people who have no idea what the war is about, and how it is the soldiers on the ground who requisition or simply take what they need, who trample over crops with troops and equipment, and who destroy homes and livelihoods. The fact that WW2 was a just war against fascism does not negate the suffering of an civilian casualty in North Africa who had never heard of the Nazis…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/01/03/t...

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initially I found the story laden with war stories but I stayed with it and grew to appreciate the way the writer built her father's story and brings the whole story together. The chaos and confusion that dominates the experiences of Mark Lewis' war is captured in both his camera work and his daughter's research but the story of Belsen brought the Holocaust into the present. It gave me a personal and a considered perspective to continue to try and learn more about the Holocaust.

[Anne Skyvington · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great background to the story. Courage of the author's father, a war photographer, awe-inspiring.

I found the telling of the story to be more academic than creative, especially in the detailed narration of the battle scenes. The author lacked compassion for the reader who might not have wanted to become part of the fighting experienced by her father in North Africa.

I was expecting the holocaust images to be horrific, but was more shocked by the actual battle scenes.