Biography
Kamil Majchrzak, born 1976 in Wrocław, Poland, emigrated to Germany in 1995, where he studied law at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. He worked for several years as editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and later as a human rights lawyer at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. He first got involved in film production as script researcher and assistant director for Hans-Christian Schmid's award-winning drama "Lichter" ("Distant Lights", 2003). He was responsible for the sound on Michael Gutmann's TV documentary "Familienreise" (2004). He has also acted as translator for several films, such as Robert Thalheim's "Am Ende kommen Touristen" ("And Along Come Tourists", 2007), Hans-Christian Schmid's documentary "Die wundersame Welt der Waschkraft" ("The Wondrous World of Laundry", 2009), about a Polish industrial laundry, and Christian Carlsen's documentaries "Liza ruft!", about the Holocaust, Jewish resistance and the politics of memory in Lithuania, and "Vergesst nicht unseren Kampf!".
Since 2010 Majchrzak has been working for the compensation of Nazi victims. For his successful commitment in the German Bundestag for the payment of ghetto pensions to Polish Jews and Sinti and Roma, he was honored in 2015 with the Mordechai Anielewicz Medal of the Association of Jewish Combatants and Victims of the Second World War; in 2019 he received the Hans Frankenthal Prize of the Auschwitz Committee Foundation. He is a member of the board of the Comité International Buchenwald-Dora et Kommandos (ICBD).
In 2015 Kamil Majchrzak began work on his directorial debut, the essayistic documentary film "Contemporary Past", for which he accompanied a group of young people from Germany, Poland and Romania on their visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The film was released in German cinemas in autumn 2020.