Night and Fog by Alain Resnais (1955)

It is hard to know where to begin with the subject of the holocaust.  The cruelty of totalitarian regimes is legendary and what is sobering and depressing is that it could happen again, has happened again, and only the victims and perpetrators have changed.  

The Nazi work and death camps were planned and their objectives realized with all the scientific precision of a meat packing plant.  Millions of men, women, and children whose only offense was to be Jews or some other unwanted nationality were slaughtered, their hides collected, their hair made into fabric, and whatever fat was left on their bodies rendered into soap.  What was left, their bones, their bodies, were burnt in massive ovens, or piled into trenches, mass graves and covered with soil.  And what is more, there are photographs and films made while this was happening as if this process was to be remembered by the SS men and women who committed these atrocities.  

It is not as though the motive to mass slaughter one's fellow human being has only been a recent phenomenon, but modern technology and the advances of science have made it much more efficient.  If it happened today there would be bar codes tattooed to skin rather than numbers on a forearm, and the data would be on a hard drive, not in ledgers compiled in neat handwriting.  And of course, if necessary even hard drives can be destroyed so that only God knows (if indeed he wished to remember) what went on.  

But it is a trick of the mind that acts that are unimaginable when you are looking into the eyes of the people subjected to such ghastly fates, can calmly be contemplated in an office somewhere accompanied by a secretary, a filing cabinet, and full pot of coffee.  Bureaucracies thrive on statistics and reduce all life to a number or a demographic category.  Mass death is just an abstraction we the living can somehow live with, like statistics on auto crashes and other horrible things that one merely reads about in newspapers.   It is very human to summarize an ethnic group or a life to a mere idea.  The world has become much less humane thereby.

This was a short film in which surviving footage taken during the war is interspersed with the color photographs of the lonely buildings and weedy landscape of today.  The barbed wire the mute testimony to what went on.  It is painful to remember, but in many ways necessary to remember, alas.