It may be that certain traumatizing events recalled by the survivor Perla Ovitz in Shahar Rozen's Liebe Perla (1998) did not happen precisely as she remembers them. Let there be no doubt that Ovitz experienced, in some form, the dehumanizing treatment she describes in Rozen's film and elsewhere, but whether there exists, as she believes, a filmed record of her dehumanization at Josef Mengele's hands is another matter. There is no material evidence, at least none that comes to light in Rozen's film, that corroborates her memory. To be sure, there is no shortage of evidence to support the basic outlines of her story. Still, this particular incident of victimization, in which a film camera served as yet another tool with which to torture her while Mengele presented her and her family “as a zoo director would present a rare animal species” endures only in memory. But as historians and other viewers of Rozen's documentary are likely aware, there are a multitude of reasons to pay attention to Ovitz apart from adjudicating whether a dehumanizing film was made of her. Dominick Lacapra's conclusions regarding the rationale for listening to victims’ testimonies applies: historians should not restrict their approach to “narrowly empirical and analytic techniques,” ones that may inhibit them from coming to terms with their objects of study. There is plenty to learn from Rozen's Liebe Perla, regardless of whether the footage Ovitz seeks is ever recovered.

Throughout his documentary Rozen is careful not to revictimize or retraumatize his subject: Unlike some of the witnesses and survivors in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), Ovitz is not burdened by having to dramatize or reenact painful experiences. Moreover, Liebe Perla's director does not intrude, either physically or verbally, into his film's frames. Although a film's director invariably makes a great many decisions, Ovitz, alongside Hannelore Witkofski, her chief interlocutor, exerts a significant influence over Liebe Perla's trajectory. The director's decision not to include atrocity images in his film can be seen in this light. Despite the perpetrators’ attempts to eliminate evidence of their crimes, a large amount of footage, whether it was taken following the camps’ liberations or stems from the Nazis’ own filmed documentation of experiments related to the T4 euthanasia program, could have functioned as evidentiary indices of the horrors described; yet Rozen excludes all such images.