Much of the good intentions of this Academy Award Winning documentary short is lost in the images of the 90-year-old lady reliving a long-buried suffering in ways never before experienced: why take her to visit the death camp where her brother died? Just so that the young history student who accompanies her learns a valuable lesson? Let her go alone then!
For Colette had already made a point of declaring that she had never visited a camp, as she was against this form of “morbid tourism”. And the scene in which Colette is “honored” in a restaurant by the mayor of the German city where the camp was located, an event that ends badly, with the touching discomfort of the lady (weeping and screaming) at the clearly rally speech of the ruler, is unbelieveably cringeworthy.
This should have never been included in the final cut of the film. Taken as a whole, this “story” is more like a sordid example of abuse of people in vulnerable situation to caress the self-indulgent fury of a certain “journalism”. And the victory at the Academy Awards only reinforces the pernicious prestige that this predatory journalism has. In one word: exploitation.
film-induced 
A sole positive that I can think of for this is that we must never forget the past, so that such atrocities that happened to this poor woman’s family will never happen again.
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Indeed. That brings us precisely to the importance of preservation of the camps, open to visitation that should not fall into the common place of morbid tourism (the cringeworthy images of people taking smiling selfies at Auschwitz, talking loud etc., as if they were at some theme park). The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, with the underground section with preserved letters from Holocaut victims, is also an invaluable testimony.
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