Squeezing half a million Jews into the 3 square miles of the Warsaw Ghetto led to almost unimaginable poverty and desolation. The beggars in pathetic rags, the starving people dying on the streets, the sick and destitute living in squalor, these make the most powerful of impressions.See also, NYT, "An Israeli Finds New Meanings in a Nazi Film."
Just as disturbing are the original footage's numerous close-ups of ghetto residents, close-ups that are simply awful to look at. Living faces haunted by knowledge of a sure death, these are among the most purely despairing images ever put on screen.
As bad, if not worse, are scenes that almost beggar description. There is the horrible humiliation of forcing women to disrobe and then filming them, clearly terrified, using a mikvah, or ritual bath. And shots of the numberless corpses piled one on top of the other in the ghetto's massive cemetery leave one speechless with despondency.
The Nazis, obviously, were not interested in a film that emphasized Jewish suffering. The aim of "The Ghetto," as far as can be determined, was to contrast this pain with the alleged callous indifference of better-off Jews, to show, as the voice-over says, "the paradise the Jews lived in." Only, there were no better-off Jews, let alone a paradise, which is where the Nazi fakery and manipulation came in.
Outtakes show that key scenes were staged over and over again from multiple angles. As a voice-over reading from the journals of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the ghetto's Jewish Council, makes clear, the sequences we see of Jews putting on evening dress to go to Champagne banquets were completely fabricated. As a survivor of the ghetto laconically says on watching a dinner with flowers on the table, "We would have eaten the flowers."
I posted the trailer previously. I'll have some comments on the film later today.
2 comments:
Very depressing. My father survived the Holocaust, was in the camps, but his parents, my grandparents, were murdered in Auschwitz.
What is also depressing, though, is how my fellow Jews are suicidal and back the Left, including against Israel, or for the Ground Zero Mosque. Tolerance is one thing, abject surrender and tolerance for evil is another.
And that should be a powerful lesson from the film. We...and this means Americans, in this case, and those who value Western Civilization, should realize that cooperation with evil is evil and to no avail. It will not stop evil to reason or cooperate with evil.
Those who rose up against the Nazis, in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or those who bombed the crematorium at Auschwitz (I was privileged to meet one of the men involved in the latter) had it right. Those who rose up in Hungary and Czechoslovakia against the Soviets were right, or those who braved the tanks in Tianammen Square...but the morons who are letting Sharia and Islamic domination gain a foothold in the US...and Islam is more insidious than communism ever was here...are fools.
I would forgive the Jews in these scenes, because I am sure they held out faint hope there was a way out; but, we now know better. And we should learn from both the history of Islam and all totalitarian movements (for Islam is just one of those) that passivity will bring about the loss of everything. And, we know what can happen. The Warsaw Ghetto was not very long ago. You'd think we'd learn.
Mo,
Excellent post.
Christians should pay very close attention to what is happening right now in this very country, as they are slowly-but-surely being made into the same bogey-man that the Jews were in inter-war Germany.
Genocides always start very subtly, almost imperceptibly, really, and many Christians in America today mistakenly still believe that "religious freedom" still exists in America.
They are fools.
-Dave
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