Amongst thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands imprisoned within the Holocaust, one man specifically stands out — and stood out even to his Nazi captors. “On the Mauthausen storage yard, a black level stood about amidst the dust-colored multitude,” writes novelist Joaquim Amat-Piniella. “It’s a black boy from Barcelona, born in Spanish Africa. The officer who had noticed him from the balcony ordered that he be introduced as much as him. His strong and muscular physique stunned the Nazis,” as did his cultivation: that he responded to their questions in German could effectively have stored him from being despatched instantly to the gasoline chamber. His identify was Carlos José Gray Molay, also called Carlos Greykey, and his exceptional life story is the topic of 5124.GREYKEY, Enric Ribes’ brief documentary movie above.
Narrated by Greykey’s daughter Muriel Gray Molay, “5124.GREYKEY makes use of retro strategies, recreated house films and private/archival images to visualise a daughter’s reminiscences of an enigmatic father.” So writes Rob Munday at In need of the Week, occurring to explain the movie as “consisting of painstakingly recreated house films (reshot on Tremendous 8 and 16mm — as Muriel couldn’t retrieve them), pictures (each from Muriel’s archive and historic archives) and stop-motion (created by S/W alums I+G Cease Movement).”
By means of these supplies, “very similar to how the daughter builds a strong understanding of her Dad’s previous, bit-by-bit, an image of Jose solely begins to type after we’re given the items of the puzzle to place collectively ourselves.”
The Barcelona-born son of fogeys from modern-day Equatorial Guinea, Greykey was learning medication at college when the Spanish Civil Warfare broke out. Conscripted, he fought in opposition to the rebels, and later moved on to France, the place he fought in opposition to the Germans. It was the Nazi victory there that put him within the Mauthausen focus camp together with Amat-Piniella. Like everybody else interned there, he obtained a quantity — the titular 5124 — however his refinement and formidable language expertise (along with his native Spanish, he commanded not simply German, but in addition French, English, and Catalán) secured him the particular place of serving on the desk of the camp’s commander. No matter privileges attended this place, Greykey’s wartime expertise haunted him for the remainder of his life: a life swept up in sufficient currents of historical past to be greater than overdue for a characteristic film-treatment.
by way of Aeon
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embrace the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the guide The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
