January 26, 2015, - 1:38 pm
DebbieSchlussel.com TV Guide: MUST WATCH Tonight – “Night Will Fall”
While Holocaust-deniers will persist (and most of them know the Holocaust happened, but they hate Jews so they deny it), tonight’s HBO film, “Night Will Fall” is heretofore unseen stark proof of what happened in Nazi Germany in the camps. Most of the footage, used at the Nuremberg Trials, was taken at Bergen Belsen, where my Holocaust-survivor maternal grandparents were inmates and were liberated by the British. Some other footage is from Auschwitz. It was edited and directed by the late great Alfred Hitchcock, but it’s sadly not fiction. The film–since redone/redirected and with modern-day narration included–which debuts at 9:00 p.m. Eastern tonight. Here’s a description of it by Wall Street Journal TV critic and editorial board member, Dorothy Rabinowitz:
In April 1945, British army units entered the large civilian camp in Germany about which they had been warned, by the German military itself. The inmates had typhus, which could spread if the prisoners escaped. British army units nonetheless entered the camp, and there British army camera crews recorded, in unflinching detail, all that they saw for two weeks. The result was the beginning enterprise of a film titled “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.” Bergen-Belsen, in the heart of Germany, and not far from beautifully pastoral surroundings, was the dumping ground for what remained of the Jews after the Germans had tried to rid themselves of inmates of other camps as the Allies closed in, by killing as many as possible in the last days of the war. The British army photographers’ pictures of Bergen-Belsen—insistently focused on every detail of the heaps of dead, the details of faces, the angles of bodies, their numbers beyond comprehension, piled in ditches—remain, in their clarity, the starkest, most explicit of all the photographic evidence of the reality of the camps.
Films would be taken later, at other camps, including the Soviet-liberated Auschwitz, largest of the extermination and labor camps the Germans established in the east. All of it would be assembled for a film by Sidney Bernstein of the British Ministry of Information and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Still, despite the stellar talents and authority of its creators, the film would be stored, rather than seen. Though its footage would provide some of the most damning testimony presented at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
It would be housed, from 1952 on, in the archives of the Imperial War Museums. Then four years ago the IWM undertook the enormous task of restoring and digitizing the documentary, along with the long-missing sixth reel. “Night Will Fall,” a new documentary about the historic film, leaves no question as to the reason it was withheld. Its commentators note that the British government then, whose policy was to bar any flow of European Jews to Palestine, was not eager to present a film that would create a great deal of sympathy for these survivors, as such a film surely would.
“Night Will Fall,” directed by André Singer and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, draws heavily on interviews with British army photographers who first entered Bergen-Belsen and some of those they liberated. The first of the British troops entered, with loudspeakers blaring in several languages: “We are the British. Help is on the way. Stay—we will come to you.” Again and again they heard it—“We are the British.” One of the survivors, age 19 at the time, recalls how every soldier looked like a god. “It was not what we expected—to be still alive.” Sgt. Mike Lewis recalls his own despair at what he had seen in his two weeks at Belsen. “I thought, as time went by, that it would leave me, that I could forget. But it never does leave you.”
I do not have cable, but I’ll find a way to see this, maybe when it comes out on DVD. For those who do and who subscribe to HBO, please let us know your reaction to it.
As we approach Holocaust Remembrance Day (tomorrow), let’s never forget the souls who perished there, why they were targeted, and who liberated them. And ask why those liberators, today, make nice with the new Nazis of Islam (who were actually part of the old Nazi cabal and never left). The mass murder at Paris’ Super Cacher, the kosher supermarket, shows us that it never really ended, and we are all still in need of liberation . . . this time–as time and again over the centuries–from Islam.
Documentaries like this are important, but completely meaningless if we refuse to connect the dots of the past to those of today.
I used to ask my late grandfather, Isaac Engel, why he didn’t have a number tattooed on his arm, unlike some of our other relatives. He told me that by the time he was in Belsen (he’d been in and out of various camps, some of which he escaped from), they wanted to exterminate the Jews so quickly that they didn’t bother with the tattooed number formality.
Whom do we know that wishes the Jews (and Christians and everyone who doesn’t adhere to their Orthodox fundamentalism) total extermination?
Hint: they worship Mohammed.
That Was Then . . .
This Is Now . . .
Nazism was, at one time, both popular with the European elite and deemed unstoppable, like Islam is today.
Islam is a totalitarian philosophy masquerading as a religion, and should not have Constitutional protections.
Occam's Tool on January 26, 2015 at 4:28 pm