'SURVIVORS' DOES JUSTICE TO HOLOCAUST.

Byline: Ray Richmond 

It is difficult to conceive of a more stark, unrelenting documentary than one that turns on the camera and captures the testimony of Holocaust survivors unvarnished by a shred of narration.

Yet "Survivors of the Holocaust" (showing at 5:05 p.m. and repeating at 8:05 p.m. Monday on TBS) manages somehow to rise above its horrific subject matter to serve as a moving, even spiritually uplifting primer in survival that documents the Jewish death camp experience more eloquently than anything that has ever preceded it on television.

Culled from the rich trove of interviews gathered by Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, "Survivors of the Holocaust" flawlessly blends the survivor testimonies with film footage, music and photos to create a haunting memoir of an unspeakable time.

It is broken into three sections: prewar, wartime concentration camp life and postwar. We hear the survivors tell how no one could have foreseen what would happen - and then the war comes, and it happens. They were torn from their families, tortured, starved, forced to live like animals in cramped, freezing, barren dwellings and transformed into living corpses.

One man tells of how he saw another beaten to death by his own son over a piece of food. A woman laments that, having spent her adolescence in the camps, she was denied her teen-age years.

But "Survivors of the Holocaust" ends on a note of hope, with the liberation of the camps, the survival of a tough, fortunate few - and the chance to start over.

Now, decades later, Spielberg is lending the stories of these survivors a renewed importance, preserving their testimony for future generations while there's still time. The project may well prove his proudest legacy.