If something strange is known about the hand -drawn characters who are in an animation film about a survivor of the child of the Holocaust, it is not without good reason.
That is because the artist carefully spent hundreds of photos behind the project who took during the Second World War to depict the real faces of those who have passed unimaginable horror by the Nazis.
Animator Zoom Rockman also ensured that all locations, events and even conversations were based on the real life experiences of Ivor Perl, who was only a boy of 12 when he arrived in Auschwitz in 1944.
It was there, the younger, born Yitzchak Perlmutter from Mako, Hungary, would be known as number 112021 for his duration at 'Literally Hell on Earth' until allied troops arrived a year later.
He cheated on death many times, including the claws of Dr. Josef Mengele escaped-astring to his hair-raising human experiments, as the avoidance of selection for the gas chambers, to walk up deadly typhus and to survive a 500-Mile death march for kausting and Dachau.
Perl, who lives in a pension home in North London and will be 93 next month, will undoubtedly feel the enormous size of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day, which is 80 years old since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was here in this Nazi -Doodkamp in Poland that 1.1 million people died, including a million Jews from all over central and Eastern Europe. In general, six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
Tragic enough were among them the parents of Perl and seven of his brothers and sisters. Only he and his brother, Alec, still lived at the end of the war, when they got asylum from the British government to build new lives for themselves.
Animator Zoom Rockman has changed the story of survival of Ivor Perl into a film with a feature film
Survivor is based on the real life of Ivor Perl, who was only a 12 year old when he arrived in Auschwitz in 1944
At the age of 18, Perl met his future wife, Rhoda. After he had set up his own business production clothing in 1953, the couple finally married and had four children.
For decades, the now great -grandfather of six rarely spoke about the traumatic events he saw as a survivor of the Holocaust, but years later he finally revealed what he had seen.
In 2023 he published his memoirs, chicken soup Under the Tree, who inspired Rockman to make the personal story of survival of Perl in an animation of a position.
Survivor will now be shown on Tuesday at the JW3 Community Center in London, as well as on ABC TV in Australia.
The beautiful spooky soundtrack of the film was composed by Erran Baron Cohen, the older brother of actor Sacha Baron Cohen, while Rockman's author Kate Lennard wrote the scenario.
Rockman, 24, has long earned a name for himself as an artist and cartoonist. At the age of 12 he became the youngest artist in the history of Beano after his comic strip, Skanky Pigeon, was employed by the magazine.
He became a satirical cartoonist with a private -eye for six years, until 2023.
Now in his newest company, Rockman has used his own unique style of live action animation with the help of hand-drawn dolls that are moved by smart mechanisms to bring the heartbreaking story of Perl to life.
It was important for both artists and the subject that this new way of presenting would be the Holocaust 'buoys' for Gen Z and Younger-a goal that has become the more necessary as the number of witnesses decreases first-hand.
Perl meets the puppet version of itself as used in Zoom Rockman's animation film Survivor
A photo of Ivor Perl at the age of 14, which was taken just after his liberation from Auschwitz
Rockman spent nearly a year closely through hundreds of photos to portray the real faces of those who endured the Holocaust
Equally important was that everything that is depicted in the film is where – from the faces of the dolls to the historical events that took place.
Speaking with MailOnline, Rockman was determined that the film would be a work by Holocaust -Feit, not fiction.
He explained: 'We were always told at school that we were the last generation who would meet survivors of Holocaust.
'I was aware of the attitude, the Holocaust denial that is there, especially on the internet. It feels like the trend is more denial and the wrong representation of things while we continue.
'At the same time we have a growing amount of Holocaust fiction, in which the characters and events are presented – but if you do the research, it is all there, the absolute horror. I saw no need to come up with anything. '
Rockman used Perl's memoirs as his core reference and supplemented it with the well -known testimonies of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi to ensure that he figured out the circumstances in Auschwitz as authentically as possible.
He also visited the notorious Nazi Doodkamp and Munich in Germany, where Perl was moved a short time after liberation.
And when it came to drawing his dolls, no face would have written a face by his own imagination.
Animator Zoom Rockman ensured that all locations, events and even conversations were based on the real lifelong experiences of Ivor Perl
The young person from Mako, Hungary, was known as number 112021 during his time in the camp
Rockman has tried to make the area on the infamous Nazi -Doodkamp authentic
Survivor will now be shown on Tuesday at the JW3 Community Center in London, as well as on ABC TV in Australia
Rockman admits that he has barely slept for a year while he is investigating, drawing and filming his feature film
Rockman has used his own unique style of live action animation with the help of hand-drawn dolls that are moved by smart mechanisms to bring Perl's Heartrenty Story to life
It was here in Auschwitz in Poland that 1.1 million people died, including a million Jews from all over central and Eastern Europe
“Everyone in the film is based on the actual photo reference of a real person,” he said, adding that some faces were drawn from images taken by the famous war photographer Lee Miller after liberation.
He even recorded a special nod to his own big uncle, Lazar Rozenwajn, who was also deported to Auschwitz.
A doll with Lazar's face appears in a scene with the young Perl who asks innocent why there is so much smoke from a long chimney on the edge of the skull.
“It's a bakery,” says Lazar to protect him against revealing the horrible truth about the camp crematorium.
Rockman has also recorded the face of the Holocaust artist David Olere, whose explicit drawings and paintings describe life as a Jewish Sonderkommando – prisoners who were forced to wear and remove bodies from the gas chambers.
He was inspired by the works of Olere, as well as the detailed camp images in Sketchbook from Auschwitz, a collection of 22 drawings composed by an anonymous prisoner who was found hidden under one of the barracks.
Regarding the overall appearance of the film, Rockman opted for black -white ink drawings with hints of blue in every scene.
Rockman thought of blue to indicate the spots on the plastered walls left behind by Zyklon B while it reacted in the gas chambers – but also for another important reason.
After watching the movie for the first time, Perl gave a moving note to Rockman and said: “Dear Zoom, now I know why I survived”
Perl, depicted with King Charles, when Prince of Wales in 2017, rarely spoke about what he had experienced until his last years
'There is a role in the testimony of Ivor in which he said not to believe all nonsense about the birds that never sang in Auschwitz, for when he arrived it was a warm, sunny day, the sky was blue, birds sang, and there were Butterflies flutter.
“He wanted to say that the Holocaust did not happen in dark corners – the Holocaust happened in broad daylight, precisely while the world looked.”
After ending his love work – one that gives Rockman, he barely slept for the duration of a year while investigating, drawing and filming – the artist proudly showed the final version to Perl.
He sat and watched the movie before he spent a few but moving words on a private far that he spent to Rockman.
It just said, “Dear Zoom, now I know why I survived,” the artist revealed.
From the perspective of Perl, he has high expectations that the film will inform more people about the brutality of the Holocaust long after the last survivors have died.
“I hope I am right that his film will be a huge help for humanity,” Perl told MailOnline. 'Not only for me, or Jews, but also for humanity in general.
“Hopefully what Zoom has done, future generations will help to realize that things that happen to Jews or another group of people may start there, but it will not end there.”
