FATHER BRESSANI CATHOLIC HIGH SCOOL: A SCHOOL FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AND ADVANCED PLACEMENT CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE
Friday, February 17, 2012
Post #5: The Documentary
We are building cultural awareness through a different medium: The documentary. Share you thoughts and feeling about Night and Fog - a documentary that shows man's violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again. Has this documentary shed new light on Jewish and German culture? Has it increased your knowledge of these two cultures? How does this relate to the novel and the interview? Do these images make you pose questions about your own family culture/s?
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When I watched Nuit et Brouillard, it evoked a deep emotional response from me as well as my classmates.
ReplyDeleteWhile we already knew most of what was done during the holocaust, including the experiments on Jewish prisoners and the mass graves, seeing these things on tape and seeing the soullessness of the perpetrators really made us realise the degree of the crimes being committed against humanity. For me, that moment came when a bulldozer was being used to shove a mound of emaciated corpses into a ditch.
This relates to the interview with John Boyne because, like the interview, Night and Fog tells the viewer that something like this could very well happen again, and is happening right now. It is by our own complacency that such things have been allowed to happen. Both the interview and the film hold the same message:
We cannot sit idly by while others are suffering.
We cannot allow things to be bad simply because we do not want to get off our couches and do something.
We must see that things are bad.
We must think of ways to help.
We must put a stop to it before it gets worse.
After this, I think I will ask my parents where my family comes from, and where they would have been during the holocaust and maybe get a little idea of how my ancestors would have seen it.
No day; no night; hunger thirst suffocation madness. Night and Fog shows man's violence toward man; something completely unnerving and unsettling to watch. It puts me to a loss of words, for the moment, in awe of what is appearing slide after slide on the screen. I always knew it happened, the Holocaust I mean, I talked about it in school. I read multiple books, even diaries on it such as The Diary of Anne Frank or most recently The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I learned a lot about the actions that took place in the past and I know it affected millions of people, innocent people, I must add, but now I have a clear picture. Unfortunately, I do not like it; I do not like it at all. It disgusts me….watching the screen in horror, learning facts that I did not want to know but now truly feel that I along with everyone else ought to know. We need to know, or else we might be presented with the idea that such horrors could come again. So here goes….. The trains and carts held passengers that would never be seen again. Some did not even make it off, their cut already been made for them. All their belongings were taken and nudity stripped them of all pride they might have had, in one strike. Those, lucky to get to the camp, had very little words. The first sight of the camp – it was another planet. Soldiers and others in charge walked with their heads held high, and recited in their brain “We must destroy but productively”. One German soldier’s only job was to simply put a red line to strike out the names of those that were dead. The Commandant’s job: to pretend to know everything. Pretend… not actually know what was going on or what he was doing, the thousands of people the ovens on his camp were killing each day. Or how the hair of millions of people was used to make cloth and fabric for clothes and bones were crushed to make fertilizer, right outside the door of his home. Everything they had taken away; their hair, skin, bones, the only thing not captured and saved was their lives. The fact that thousands each day were taken away, and people behind these actions went to sleep at night sickens me. They truly thought “I am not responsible…”, that it was okay to kill innocent people without an ounce of thought, regret or hesitation, for that matter. The only real feeling going through their mind; was probably only pride to have served their leader and finished their job. My thoughts about what the documentary is portraying are limitless and endless at the same time but overall Night and Fog was definitely the best I have ever seen.
ReplyDeleteOur class today watched Night and Fog and I could honestley say that I have never seen something so horrific in my life!!! We witnessed murders and where genocides occurred. Our faces were glazed with horror and sympathy for the victims.
ReplyDeleteAs I watched, I was in disbelief that someone would think of such a cruel and inhumane thing to do and was able to get people to believe that was right! I was also stunned that there were people who actually filmed and took pictures of the horror.
We were told before we watched the documentary to get the idea of a single story out of our head. The story that I was taught was that hitler was a man who wanted to create the perfect race; 6 feet tall, blond hair and blue eyes.nso in order to get what he wanted, he killed millions of people, not just Jews, but Catholics, homosexuals and people with disabilities. The more I got to think about it, the more I realized that there was a small part of me who felt sorry for hitler. He was obviously dealing with some greater evil that was inspiring him that no one knew about. Whatever he was dealing with was strong enough to provoke such a terrible mistake. However, that greater evil was still no excuse for genocide.
I looked behind me at some parts where they showed corpses to gruesome to watch and I saw some people covering their eyes, some looking away, and the rest could not take their eyes off the screen because they were so shocked that such a thing could be possible. Yes, we were taught about the halacost when we were in grade 7, we read the diary of Anne Frank after all, but witnessing it first hand from the videos was a reality check. It made me realize there ARE people in this world who want power and who WILL do whatever it takes to get there.
If some one were to ask me if I was shaken by this documentary I would answer honestly I wish I had never seen it, because it was not fair that people lost their lives because of that one man and it was by far the scariest reality check I have ever received.
I pray to God up above that no one ever has to deal with this ever again and that the fences that are present in the the world today are gone as soon as possible. Love is stronger then any fight, and it makes no difference if you are from different cultures. Isn't that the point of our school for international studies? To create a border land and to show that fighting is not the solution to anything? To prove that people from different cultures are able to get along? That is what I thought of the documentary and made me wonder if there will be another episode like this ever again in our lives.
Horror, disgust, shock, fear, anger. For me, the documentary Night and Fog shed new light on a topic that I have been learning about for a few years already. We have all read books, diaries, and newspaper articles about the Holocaust, but few, if any, of us have ever been faced with the brutal truth in a way that smacks you in the face, that makes you want to scream and cry and hide your eyes, and that really sends a powerful message – through actual footage and photographs. The documentary Night and Fog was unlike any documentary I have ever seen before. It was magnificent in how it blended the old and new, and even in silence, managed to tell a powerful, provocative, and completely appalling story. While watching the film, there were many moments when I found myself totally captivated yet disgusted and horrified at the same time. I actually quite enjoyed how we watched the film in silence because it really allowed me to focus on the pictures instead of on the words being spoken, and as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. I think the images were so powerful that they did not need narration; they told a story all by themselves, and as a matter of fact, a story more compelling and meaningful than could be told with any of the words in the English language.
ReplyDeleteIn relation to the novel, this documentary made me reflect deeply upon Shmuel’s life. I always had an idea of the atrocities that were happening in the concentration camps; however, I have never seen live footage and photographs like the ones that were presented in the film, so they really allowed me to picture the story in my head. John Boyne clearly expressed the horrors of the camp in the novel and the documentary really brought them to life, in a way that was surprisingly unnerving. Also, even though the people in the film were just ordinary people whom I had no personal connection with, it still put my stomach in knots to see them go through what they did. Now, if I were to imagine Shmuel and Bruno, who I had grown close to through the novel, or worse yet, someone I knew personally or who was part of my family, going through the evil and cruelty of the concentration camps, I do not think I would be able to handle it. I think it would simply be too horrible, too brutal, to bear. And yet, who knows, I am Polish, so some of the people could have possibly been my ancestors.
Finally, while the old footage was completely shocking, the newer footage of the abandoned concentration camps as they are today was surprisingly familiar. My trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau (another major concentration camp) was about 3 years ago, yet, when I saw the photos appear on the screen, I clearly remembered when I visited the exact same places. From the crematoria and gas chambers, to the stone cold barracks, “hospital”, and execution wall, they all looked the same. And the descriptions, too – almost identical to what I learned on the guided tour. When I was actually on this trip, I had not really learned much about the Holocaust yet and so I did not really fully understand the meaning behind everything, but now, as I reflect back, I am realizing what a unique and valuable trip it really was, and I am very thankful that my parents decided to take us there.
In conclusion, after reading the novel and watching the documentary, I am still left with the same question that has been floating in my mind since the very beginning of learning about the Holocaust – why did it happen? What would possess men to destroy other men with such mercilessness? Why...simply why?
(Written immediately after watching “Night and Fog”)
ReplyDeleteOne image—a Jewish man being held by two Nazi soldiers, still alive, had an expression of such deep pain and agony on his beaten face—left me with eyes threatening to overflow with tears. This is real. Not a gory horror film as Maryann pointed out. But after that point, as I watched the bodies—there’s no way those boney figures could be humans—being pushed around on the side of the street, I just gave a blank stare. My head on one hand, eyes dry…I couldn’t do anything. I was past the point of crying, gasping or even shielding my eyes. My gaze was glued to the horrors of the concentration camp before me. And even though I knew better, one thought kept running through my head: this isn’t real, this can’t be real. But it was.
From experiencing such an event before your eyes (rather than hearing or reading about it), it becomes a reality. I can’t “unsee” those images of utter brutality. Nowadays with horror movies and video games for example, people have become insensitive to things like this. If only everyone can witness this, or even just the documentary, and try to imagine what it must feel like to go through that…but you can’t. It’s crazy; living the life that I am now, it feels surreal. How could this being going on, even today, in the same world where I’m laughing and loving and going about my normal day?
Will I be okay after watching this documentary? Of course I will. I have seen torture and violence before, in movies and what not, people do every day…and life always goes back to the same routine. The most brutal things can be embedded in our minds, yet we’ve become so insensitive in this day and age that we can push them to the back of our minds and just move on…
From viewing this documentary and realizing that this sort of thing goes on practically every day, I now view the Germans differently. I have to admit that I gave in to stereotypes and let myself feel hatred to Germans for performing such violence. But now through class discussions and the documentary, I know that it is not all the Germans, or only Germans, that have taken part in such a large massacre of human beings. It can be anybody anywhere anyday.
Today, when we watched Night and Fog in class, everyone was silent. As the documentary showed the pictures and videos of the malicious acts that happened, everyone was trying to wrap their heads around the fact that actual people could be so cruel. This documentary has given me a lot to think about. One thing is that I just couldn’t believe that actual people preformed these cruel acts. One thing that this documentary showed me about the German culture is that not everyone would follow this. To me, this documentary proves that not all the Germans knew what was going on. I can barely believe that one person could do it, but I refuse to believe that an entire country would want to. The documentary makes it obvious that the public clearly didn’t have all the facts. For the Jewish culture, I learned that they have been beaten down by a group of people, not Germans necessarily, but people in general who thought they were the best. This documentary showed that the Jewish culture has been deeply scarred, and will probably all shudder at the thought of something like this happening. There could have been family of people today in the Holocaust, family that died because of prejudice.
ReplyDeleteIn the novel we only see the bare minimum of the camp, as much as a nine-year-old boy could see and understand. The novel shows us about the way the world was, through the perspective of a young child. In the documentary, it shows us the facts about it. Nothing there is opinionated, other than the fact that everyone thinks it is wrong. In the interview, the author says that he wanted to make the setting be very general, so that no one could focus on just one place, but everywhere in general. The documentary shows the same, like giving an image to the idea we already knew.
So far, the images and ideas shown to me make me question a lot. One thing is could my family be faced with prejudice like this. Could we be hated because of who we are or where we come from? I believe that no one should have to live with this thought on their shoulders. I know that where I live is a good place, and I haven’t seen hatred like this, but it really makes me think about what would happen if things were different.
This morning I sat in a dark and silent classroom, viewing the horrors of the Holocaust on a screen that seemed a gateway to a much different time. This time period was devoid of love, filled with misery and undoubtedly one of humanities worst. I sat transfixed, unable to turn away because I simply had to know what was going on. I felt that to turn away would be a sin; it would be to say that I was willing to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others; as so many complacent Germans were. There were moments where I imagined that I was there. I took in the surrounding scenery; I smelt the pungent odour of smoke and death, I heard the screams and cries of the starving and dying and I saw the emaciated figures slowly crawling; unable to perform the simplest actions. Suddenly with a scream people would drop the ground quiver slightly and then never move again, their eyes bored into me asking the question “why aren’t you doing something?” However, each time that I entered these scenes in my mind I could not last long before pulling myself from the horrors and back into a modern day classroom.
ReplyDeleteAs grotesque and stomach churning as the documentary was, it was also enlightening as it provided information about the German culture that helped me to better understand the sinisterly systematic way the camps were run. I was shocked and appalled to learn that the camps were built and run like any government project. What really disturbed me was that German companies bid on the contract to build the camps. In essence, they were actually competing to see who got the opportunity to build the vessels that would ultimately lead to the death of millions. This greed and selfishness caused me to wonder if companies in our modern world would do the same if given the chance. Would they be willing to condemn their neighbours to almost certain death if it meant that they would make a little extra money? I also learned about the hierarchy of officers in the camp. The fact that common criminals were the day to day guards and sentinels, responsible for keeping the Jewish people under control was indicative of what really went on in the camps. By putting the already very vulnerable Jewish people under the control of people who were not used to power and very likely to abuse it, the Nazi’s took an additional step in insuring the pain and misery of the Jewish people.
However the actions that I found the most repulsive were the Commandant and officers statements that they were not responsible for what had happened. I wanted to go back to the Nuremberg trials of 1945-1946 and scream that they were responsible. They had killed, tortured and maimed millions of people and for them to calmly say that they were innocent and uninvolved was pathetic. It was extremely evident that they felt no remorse for what they had done; they persevered in their mistaken belief that their actions had been noble and that above all is truly horrifying. I thought this related to the interview because it really put into focus the sense that the Nazi’s were completely remorseless and complacent. Even after they had time to reflect on what they had done they were still complacent and able to deny all accusations.
I believe that the documentary related to the novel because it really put the setting into great detail. Whereas the book was not very descriptive and tended to focus mainly on character development, the documentary was much more vivid and through the images of Auschwitz and the suffering that was occurring there we were able to truly put into context where Bruno and Shmuel lived, and what Shmuel had to go through on a daily basis. It also helped me to really understand what it had looked like beyond the fence and understand what Shmuel had to see every day and why he would not talk about it with Bruno.
In conclusion, the documentary was horrifying, but it was also eye opening and enlightening. It allowed me to finally be able to truly understand the atrocities that had occurred and it gave me the motivation to work so that they would never happen again.
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ReplyDeleteBelow is something I would like to share with the class. It may not answer every question directly, but I really want to get this out. I wrote the immediately after watching the documentary, when Mr. Racco let us just write. It is the most successful way I could manage to share my thoughts. Anything else would be lying, would be embellished and would not do myself or the documentation justice. If you take the time to read below you will see I did not write in the formal sense. It’s more like spell check’s worst nightmare, a bunch of sentence fragments, my own species of poetry. I just wrote about what ‘Night and Fog’ evoked. If you follow the path of my thoughts you will see they all link together, even though they may all different and sporadic. You will see the path my thoughts took as I tried to understand what it was I watched, or mostly avoided watching.
ReplyDeletedon’t know what to do. i’m going to cry. who is responsible? for skinning. burning. amputating. experimenting. poisoning. stripping. gassing. raping. torturing. am i? for not doing anything. for not trying to stop the history that has already begun to repeat itself. in Bosnia. in Rwanda. in Kosovo. where do i fit? can I even do anything? i cannot even watch the truth laid bare. black and white. and even if i could bear to look at the screen i wouldn’t see. my tears would blind me. and i am ashamed. at humanity for what has happened. at myself for not caring enough. i can’t explain it. i don’t want to. i want to let it leave my mind forever. but i know it won’t and i know i won’t let it. if only because i would hate myself. for becoming as awful as any of them. the perpetrators. but are they the only ones? are they responsible? or are we all? for not taking care of one another. for letting dark feelings overcome us. for watching and crying about things in the past only because we know they will happen again. i’m scared. we all have dark thoughts and feelings in a deep recess in our mind. because we are not perfect. we sin. so there must be something dark within the human mind. dark feelings. jealousy. hatred. bloodlust. anger. destruction. i am terrified of myself. of people. of the camp. i don’t believe i can ever visit a place like that. or ever want to visit a place like that. i couldn’t even watch. i could only try to read the words on the screen. imagine the horrors. because if I looked then I wouldn’t have to imagine. it would be real. and it scares me. i don’t think i’ll be able to sleep tonight. alone. in the dark. but i will distract myself. try to forget for the time being. just like everyone else did. i will forget for the night. but i will have it forever echoing in my mind. my heart. the heart that will never turn black and empty. controlled. destroyed. or poisoned by the darkness that may be within everyone one of us. i don’t believe in world peace. in perfection. i don’t think i ever can again. but i can hope. and i will. because it is light. it is a light in the darkness. And i’m going to hold fast to it. i’m going to love. and hope. and believe. and dream. because i wasn’t alive then. and i would never want to be. maybe i’m selfish. maybe i’m privileged. maybe i’m both. maybe i’m disrespectful for hiding behind hands. hands frozen in fear. frozen like the rest of my body. cold. despairing. hating what was. what is. what will be. and being little more than powerless to stop time. maybe prolong it. but never stop. just like the disjointed flash of images running of a continuous reel of awfulness. just plain awful. i’ve never liked horror movies. i still don’t. i never will. i couldn’t watch it. i couldn’t bear to. i’m glad it was muted. i don’t think i would’ve had enough limbs to cover my eyes and plug my ears. i don’t have the ability to ‘unsee’. to ‘unthink’. i only have the ability to move forward. i have to.
because time waits for no one. never did. never will. the bodies that were turned to ash. to nothing. bodies discarded. now rotting. disintegrating. disintegrated. only the cries are left. trapped between the walls of the chamber. the blood. soaked into the soil. and here i am. watching relieving. remembering. and trying my hardest not to. here i am. with a family who loves me. friends. clothes. an education. paper and a pencil. a name. a life. a mind. clear. impressionable. but my own. not gone. not lost to death. not lost to the numbness that shields from guilt. guilt that should destroy each killer from the inside out. guilt that should destroy every person who lay down and accepted what they thought of as fate. life is precious. life is perfect. even if everyone who is blessed with it may not be. even if some do not appreciate it. they died. and we will die. but we have to live first. not be forced to survive. to submit. to become a shell. a skeleton. a living dead. they will live eternally in their suffering. their cries will be heard forever. and we must live eternally through what we decide to cry back to them. how we choose to respond. not by tears. not by being grateful. not by trying to understand something incomprehensible. not by waiting to do something. by doing something. despite your powerlessness. your pessimism. your fear. but by acting. and caring. and standing against time. and history. and human nature. i will not make their cries in vain. i will not make my cries in vain. i will not let my anger. terror. fear. hatred. my thoughts. my words fall silent. history may repeat itself. the cyclic violence of man against man may return. but i will be the person fighting time. tradition. history. fighting against the foreseeable future. because if humans can create war they can eradicate it. if humans can kill they can preserve. if humans can hate they can love. humans will always be able to mold history. because it was ours to create in the first place. and their will always be a choice. to do or not to do. to ignore or not to ignore. and the choice will always be yours. choose wisely. live freely. love unboundedly. don’t be blocked by the invisible borders of your imagination. or by the physical borders placed around you. because we are one endless borderland on earth. forever in unity. the unbreakable bond that comes with being exactly the same. Human.
ReplyDeleteAfter watching Night and Fog I wrote this right away. It’s disgusting what happened at these camps, but what makes it worse was the satisfaction that I saw on some of the German soldier’s faces. There was one clip where German soldiers were laughing and giving each other high fives. This showed me that they were not just puppets in Hitler’s plan, they wanted to be there and they enjoyed every moment of it.
ReplyDeleteIt scares me that there may still be people like this out there. Maybe not one’s who hate Jews or homosexuals but maybe Canadians for being peacemakers or the British because they have accents. Who knows who is really out there.
When the prisoners first saw the inside of the camp they were amazed, but not in a good way. It was another world. A world of death, torture and everything else that was evil. Before they did anything they were stripped of their identities and had their head shaved. Then they were given a test to figure out if they would be able to withstand the cruel forced labour ahead. If not they were killed immediately. Or taken to the testing facility to be experimented on as if they were not even a living human being. If you passed the test, they made you do labour day after day. What really made me sick was that there were companies that knowingly purchased their goods from the concentration camps. The CEO’s of these companies may not have actually killed people but they knowingly contributed to the atrocities going on in these camps.
The part of the documentary that really got to me was the part when the Allies broke down the front doors of Auschwitz and were so incredibly shocked by the bodies that they found. They were everywhere. In huge piles and just thrown all over the grounds. They actually had to get a bulldozer to clear the way for the tanks and other vehicles to get through. It is a shame that no one could stop Hitler’s rampage until it was too late and he had already exterminated this many people.
The documentary “Night and Fog” brought emotions of sadness and disgust to me. Over the years I’ve learnt and experienced many stories about the horrible things that went on during the holocaust in the concentration camps, but this movie put a whole new perspective on it. My classmates and I didn’t hear the stories being told as usual, but rather saw images of what was going on. If I could put the experience into one word, I would say it was absolutely horrific.
ReplyDeleteHow could the perpetrators even bare living with themselves after doing the wrongful actions they had done? It is hard t believe that any human being would agree to commit such horrible crimes and to watch people just like themselves die by the thousands.
That brings up another point that I’d like to discuss in reference to these two cultures. They weren’t that different after all. This movie only demonstrated the Germans as horrible wicked people, which most were, but it does not show the kind gentile ones who were against the persecution of Jews. There are always two sides of the story, but this film only presents one of them.
This story relates to both the novel and the interview because, of course, they both present the theme of the holocaust. The main difference of the two forms of media is that with the novel and the interview, one must create a visual picture in their mind as to what might be going on rather than actually seeing the appalling images on the screen.
(My feelings immediately after watching the documentary Night and Fog)
ReplyDeleteMy biggest thought right now is HOW! How could someone possibly do that? I just do not understand how someone could be so cruel. It blows my mind to know that this actually happened. Although I have seen real footage of the Holocaust, it is still hard to grasp the fact that this actually did occur. The photos were so horrifying that I was forced to turn my head away from the screen multiple times. I felt so disgusted I could throw up. Seeing all the bodies just thrown made me realize that at one time all those people were part of a family, felt emotions such as love, sadness, happiness, anger and now they were just left there to die. They were no longer treated like human beings but like animals. Actually, correction; animals were treated better than the way Hitler treated the Jewish people. It makes absolutely no sense to me why the Jewish people were targeted I do not understand how any group of people could be targeted in such a hurtful way. Can someone please help me understand WHY?? At the beginning of the documentary, one of the sub-titles stated that the “machine [went] into action”. This is exactly what happened; Hitler created some sort of “machine” that controlled what the Jewish people did. The Jewish people had become robots going through the same motions/actions each day, no longer being an individual person with a name, family, unique looks—NO. Now they were all just a number, a number just like every other Jewish man, woman and child—A NUMBER.
This documentary relates to the novel and interview because although in the novel we do learn some about what happens during the Holocaust; because the story is told through the eyes of nine-year-old boy we do not get the “gruesome” details that the documentary clearly provides for us. In my opinion ‘Night and Fog’ sheds new light on the novel by allowing me to feel a sense of extreme happiness that although Shmuel was constantly shown images of death and darkness living in the camp when he spent time with Bruno, he was able to act like a normal nine-year-old boy just like Bruno.
One of the images from the documentary that constantly played in my mind throughout the day and has continued through this weekend is the image of a pair of eyes. The documentary showed these eyes with the caption “Jews arrived at the camp with looks like this”. For lack of a better word, the only way I can truly describe this pair of eyes is astonished. Astonished by the way the camp was set up and by the amount of people at the camp. Another image that would not leave my head was the image of the immensely skinny people dying with their eyes wide open. This terrified me and I can honestly say I had trouble sleeping Friday night. The images that I saw in this documentary will stay with me forever.
A hollow pit is what I felt like, absolutely empty, and I find myself still thinking why I felt that way after watching Night and Fog and even after reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. After watching we were told to write down all the raw emotions we felt when watching the documentary and while others knew exactly how they felt I didn't know why I was feeling this emptiness and I was trying to think of the reasons why. When watching the documentary my eyes were fixated on the screen and even though I was seeing the actual setting of death, injustice and cruelty of innocent people in front of me it felt as if the whole movie wasn't real. It felt as if this was a reanactment of the Holocaust that these people were just actors, and when the director yelled cut that they would be fine and walk off or if this was some sort of horror film, I knew this was real but for the time being it felt fake my brain stating this is real but it isn't a constant tug of war without meaning to. We mention that Bruno that Bruno is so naive and ignorant to all the attrocities outside his window but we are all like that in some way, I mean I never got to see an actual video of the Holocaust myself, I've seen pictures but not a video that showed how the camp was made to look like a town to give some sort of false hope, or their food, where the Jews slept, none of that, I'm fourteen, with so much information available from so many media sources and I still don't know the complete story. During the beginning of the Holocaust circa, mid 1930's many countries and people were completely unaware of the damage going on because it didn't really effect them, years later countries came together to attack when most of the damage was already done,Bruno isn't the only one so naive and ignorant and he's just nine. Ignorance to a certain extent is bliss because we don't face with the ugly truth in front of us and but in reality to make a change in the world so we can prevent events like these we have to be aware of mankind's mistakes so we reflect on our behaviours. It is scary to think something like this can happen again, and dictarship,conflict and uprising are happening today but if we aware of humankind's mistakes we as humans can have a better future, and learn to treat people with better respect because we reflect on our own behaviour and our culture. This documentary has shed some light on both Jewish and German culture because the book though it did shed some information on the two cultures I found it went more in depth in the personalities of various people than culture in itself, though personalities of certain people do reflect the culture of people. When I think of German and Jewish cultures and reflect on my own behaviours I reflect on my Italian-Canadian culture and how thats influenced me and what role culture played in this event. It also makes me wonder a bit more on my family history and roots as well.
ReplyDeleteI also think that that the reason I feel this emptiness is due to the fact that I feel guilty and depressed when watching this documentary because Im viewing dignities being ripped from innocent people helplessly and I was shocked to see some things that I never knew occured in the camps. I hope that through all this destruction we've seen, that maybe if we all reflect on our actions like bullying people, descriminating,labeling and building fences between people we can learn from human mistakes. I still dont completely understand why the fences between Jews and Germans (and various other countries)were built, and how such hatred can build up to cause genocides not only during this period but during all our human history, and I don't think i'll ever understand.
The movie “Night and Day” was both graphic and disturbing. I already knew the gist of what happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust, with the cooking of people, the gas chambers, the atrocious ways that the Nazi’s experimented and murdered the Jewish people. So it has not shed any light to me on the German culture or the Jewish culture because this is just a certain group of people, like we have said in class. Not all Germans hated the Jewish people and not all Jewish people hated the Germans. This is just one single case, which was written down in history and it happened to be incorporating the Jewish and Germans. This only tells you about these culture’s history, which you cannot judge a whole culture by. The movie was disgusting because even though I know what happened, just the visual pictures, reading the descriptions that the narrator gave, in silence. It made the movie ten times more intense. In the book, Bruno has this concentration camp, a torture ground, right beside his “home” but he has no idea what it is or what it does. He just thinks it is Shmuel’s home and another place to explore. It is just another way of showing Bruno complete obliviousness.
ReplyDelete"Only negative thoughts fill me as I watch this video. Horrifying, disturbing, disgusting, cruel, unfair and inhuman are just a few examples. To have watched such tragedy on television is devastating to me. Words cannot even being to describe how this will affect me. Bodies that looked like sticks, heads being chopped off, body burners, nudity, children, guns and soap made of human remains are just a small portion of the many things these people suffered through at this time. You find yourself asking 'How could someone have let this happen?' Then, you think that you wish no one will ever be treated with harm in any way shape or form ever again. But, who are we kidding? We hear stories in the news of children and teenagers taking their lives because of bullying and all we do is hope for it to come to an end. These Jewish people had no choice but to suffer and then they were viscously murdered in groups. But, now we hear of students at such young ages putting their own suffering to an end. We hear of their own parents finding their bodies hung in their rooms with a note next to their body explaining how much hurt they were going through and how no one seemed to understand. This video will haunt me for a long time. I still can't see to shake these horrifying graphics from my mind. We need to step up and stop the suffering of all these people, and we should act on our words and plans to do so. I feel sick to my stomach over what has happened to these people and I wish I had been there to put all of their pain to an end. We may not have been able to stop the suffering of the Jews during that time, but we can stop the suffering of the people living around us now who are victims of hate crimes."
ReplyDeleteI wrote that just minutes after watching the video "Night & Fog". It is now three days later and I still feel the same way about that video as I did three days ago. John Boyne wrote a novel that left us guessing about the things these people had to go through, and now Alain Resnais has answered all of our thoughts and has showed us the true side to that story.
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ReplyDelete*note: the documentary left me speechless and writing this post was in a way tough because I had to relieve those painfully descriptive accounts of what might be the ever recurring nightmares of many of the survivors.
ReplyDelete“Night and Fog” was the first documentary that ever hit a bull’s-eye on my interest. It was the most emotionally powerful film that I have ever experienced, and the fact that it was so simple in its portrayal made the actual horrors of the story more intense. The vivid footage focused on the camps and their terrifying purpose, yet it had an underlying tone about humanity’s appalling inhumanity to their own race. The contrasting images of the present and the past overlap in a way that makes the film flow as each image leads to another.
A picture is worth a thousand words, I really think that this statement illustrates the documentary through and through. I saw flashes of the movie and even those brief seconds, turned everything upside down. I was overcome by sadness and helplessness, knowing that I cannot do anything about it. The reason I saw flashes was simply because I have always been weak and not able to withstand much pain and suffering that I cannot take away, and those images simply were gruesome to my eye. Before, the documentary I technically understood what happened and why, but there are many technicalities in this world. Now I truly know.
“As I speak to you now, the icy water of the ponds and rains fills the hollows of the mass graves with a frigid and muddy water, as murky as our memory.”
—Narrator, Night and Fog
So lets us remember and value and live out our life to make up for the ones that were taken away.
A picture is worth a thousand words. This movie evoked emotions in all of us. An image that is still burned in my mind is the hospital inmate; everything about him was dirty, so the whites of his eyes stood out. Those eyes seemed to show a level of fear that we have never known. Seeing the bodies being bulldozed into the pit was another frightening image. The humans didn’t look like humans anymore. They were angular, and they seemed fragile, like a strong gust of wind could break them. They looked like dolls. This was frightening, it was nauseating, and it was scary. Dead bodies were everywhere; these were once someone’s parent, someone’s child, and now they lie in a mass grave, with hundreds of others dead. It’s truly frightening, but words cannot seem to begin to say how disturbing this was.
ReplyDeleteThis documentary makes the Nazis seem worse than humans, like they were sub-human. The documentary makes you want to believe that nobody could possibly be this cruel. Yet we have been shown the truth, that millions were murdered in cold-blood, by heartless killers. It shows how Jews must’ve fought to stay alive every day, for many, it was a losing battle.
I find that the documentary relates to the interview, because at the end of the book, the author states that fences like the ones at the concentration camps are all over the world. He hopes that we will never have to encounter one. The fences at the concentration camps were specifically constructed to separate people, to make the ones on the outside hate the ones on the inside. Fences like this consist, not always in a physical form. Stereotypes and ignorance seem to have become a permanent fixture in society. With every display of ignorance made, the fencepost is driven deeper into the ground.
This makes me wonder where my family was during the war years. What they did, if they remember anything about the leaders of the time, and if they remember the Jews leaving their town.
My Reflections on the Documentary:
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts bounced around from one scene to the next, but my primary focus always came back to the Nazis; to know that such humans once stood on this earth, to think that they looked like me and ate the same food that I eat, and drank the water on this planet – it makes me want to throw up. Because really, these people weren’t sane, they weren’t like me mentally; they didn’t have a heart like mine or my friends or family. They were real, but they weren’t really human – not the kind of humans they were intended to be. What I’ve finally broken through to is the beginning of an understanding as to why and how such people existed. After watching the documentary, I think that the reason why these soldiers were able to cope with their actions and live with themselves after performing tasks I never had the nerve to think about is because they lived off of hate and anger. It was their drug. As humans, we are made to love – we love others and receive their love in return. Some people think that love is an action, other people think that love is a feeling, but it doesn’t matter so long as it is shared. So what happened in the Holocaust, with the German Nazis? Hate happened. It took over them and it turned them into cold, emotionless creatures of existence. The more they partook in the cruelty towards other beings, the stronger this hate grew! I asked myself, why didn’t they stop when they saw what they had started? But I think that it’s because seeing torture and suffering inflated the feeling of hate within them. Sitting behind a school desk, dozens of years later, I FELT HATE serge within me – I felt like I hated everyone and everything just from seeing past events replay on a TV screen. Could you imagine what kind of miserable beings were created when these happenings played out before their very eyes!? I could never sit here and say that I wouldn’t have done the same thing if I was a German soldier during World War II, and that is a horrible feeling for me to posses. The holocaust bread humans into a form that no one should ever have to live in, a form of hate and anger which was the gateway to events that come about during this period in time. As I watched “Night and Fog”, I looked at those Nazis and I told myself not to hate them completely, because I trust that hate was the initiation of this entire catastrophe.
I also thought about the victims, the Jewish people, the HUMANS who were targeted. These people had religions and beliefs, they shared stories and passed along lessons, they united and helped one another out because they cared, and moreover, because they LOVED. Yet, they were treated like animals and if we aren’t careful, they will go down in history as nothing more than that. In school we learn about the Nazis, the politics, the camps and the way that Jewish people were treated, but we rarely get to see the Jewish people for themselves. When I saw the things that these people did and how they lived under circumstances unimaginable, it opened my eyes to a new side of the prisoners. Repulsive as it is, watching those skeletal bodies being thrown around like they were nothing more than dirt on the road made me realize that these people were REAL. I understood that every one of those bodies was evidence of a person that could have done great things, but didn’t because of the mistakes of other people. Those Jewish people were not born the way they died, because all are born equal, but died at the hands of a devastation that did not see them for who they were. The face of every Jewish person that flashed into the screen was the face in front of a story and life. Unfortunately most of these stories are left untold due to the slaughtering of these innocent people. But while we can’t undo the past, let us try to understand it because even if everything that I’ve said un until now is wrong, at least I’ve made an attempt to understand the people who I’m talking about.
My Reflections on the Experience:
ReplyDeleteThinking back to Friday morning, after the documentary was shown to me, and after I had taken some time to write about it, I arrived at a point where I was trying to erase the images, scratch them out, cover them up from my mind. When I learn about, or witness something that makes me feel so morally wrong, or takes me to 3000 new emotions at once, I just push it out. That is my first instinct. So after Friday morning, after I wrote down whatever I could muster, I just shoved the page into my binder and went to my next class. That was it, and that could have been all there ever was because it is so easy to take what we don’t like, what we don’t want to know or hear about and just shove it away. Simple as turning off the TV or putting down a newspaper. Why am I writing this reflection 3 days later? Because I didn’t want to think about those people, that camp, the faces, trains, beds, hospitals, and have to feel my insides turning because of everything that I’ve seen. And maybe that’s selfish, and comes from being raised where everything is as you please; don’t like a type of food? You don’t have to eat it. Don’t like a style of clothing? You don’t have to wear it. But I have to have enough perspective on this situation to realize that it can’t just be another subject that I don’t like talking about, and will shut out due to that. This is more important than me. That’s why today, when I revisited “Night and Fog”, I tried to understand and trace every emotion and image that I beheld, because only through that can I do justice to the people who deserve to be thought about every day. Still, there are things that I keep in the recesses of my mind and don’t completely resurface as I write today because they are too deep to touch on. I may not feel that I’ve written enough this week, or next month, but I know that with time, I will accept certain tragedies and learn from them.
Personal Reflection:
This documentary has taken the Jewish and German culture and shown how it is only the means by which themes of humanity are portrayed; subjects like love, hate, war, cruelty and torture, freedom, friendship, past, future. I have learned about more than just the Holocaust through Bruno and Shmuel and I think that that was the authors’ intent. Likewise, this documentary shed light into feelings and thoughts that I may have intended to keep dark. But that’s okay, because it is thought growth that I learn and will become more accepting of cultures and people.
Furthermore, learning about the Second World War has encouraged me to read about the effects of the Holocaust on Serbia, the country from which my parents immigrated, and where the rest of my family lives. Serbia is south-east of Germany and was greatly affected through the war. During these years, Serbia was under German occupation and 70 concentration camps were established within Yugoslavia (the country Serbia was a part of at the time). Approximately 14 500 Serbian Jewish people were murdered of the 16 000 living in Serbia. Furthermore, my dad grew up in Kosovo, so I’ve taken up an interest in the various dilemmas and controversies which do exist there today, and have in past years.
Overall, this documentary has dwindled down to many different areas of thought and has provoked many more ideas than I thought it had the power to. I feel that I’ve learned about myself and about the people around me; ultimately, that is the greatest gift that miseries of the past can give.
As the screen faded to black, my eyes were wide with horror and my jaw slackened from the shock of what I was watching. My heart was pounding furiously against my ribcage and my hands are trembling now as I try to decipher my feelings onto paper. I pause. There are really no words to describe how I’m feeling. It’s like every negative feeling mixed together. I feel physically sick; my stomach twisted into knots and my throat parched as though I ran miles. I witnessed the true horrors of the Holocaust today.
ReplyDeleteI have heard, read, been taught of the Holocaust but until now, I don’t think I’ve really grasped what happened behind all those years. When Mr. Racco had said that we were going to watch a documentation, I expected black and white pictures and cold, hard facts. I never would’ve expected this. This was an emotional blow. This film presented me with something entirely new; it showed me the raw emotions of the victims in the Holocaust.
What I saw was imprinted in my mind. My eyes kept pulling me back to the screen even as I turned my head away. I could not simply turn the TV off and forget about it like it was a bad horror film. It was my responsibility to learn what had happened all those years ago. It was my duty to witness what had happened to the prejudiced when everybody turned their heads away before.
My disgust and anger was directed at the Kapos, or anyone in charge. Do they not realize that they would look exactly the same in that situation? If you pin a star to your chest, shave your head bald and wear the same striped pyjamas, you would be in those concentration camps as well! We are made up of the same thing! We have the same feelings as those victims! We feel hunger, loss, sadness, hurt, pain and anger. It makes me sick that they can pretend to play dolls with real humans. Dress them up, cut their hair, and label them. Their minds are corrupted! Building zoos? Making hospitals? What for? They are not of any use except for their own entertainment.
Not only did they strip the Jewish people of their freedom, family and pride, they humiliated them even after death. They stacked skulls upon skulls, body upon body. There were no proper burials, they were shovelled, swept, dragged and thrown into dirt pits and cremation ovens. But the Nazis went even beyond that cruelty; the victim’s skin was used for parchment, their bodies made into products. Even after death, the prisoners are still prisoners. They were only released from the pain yet they are still trapped and chained to the horrors that have taken place.
Another thing that had made me so sick was that after they were captured and put into court... they calmly replied, “I am not responsible”. I wanted to scream at them. YES YOU ARE. YOU are! YOU directed all of this, YOU helped it happen! YOU were the one who ordered this! How could they just push away their faults like that? I was exasperated. They would think they were right until the end. I was then slapped in the face by the fact that the blame was not completely theirs to take; it was not all the Germans or Nazis.
ReplyDeleteDiscussing about it now, Jewish people had always had to deal with prejudice. This event has opened our eyes. This makes me afraid. Everyone else had turned a blind eye and only came into action when this happened? We let all this cruelty pass by us until... this? How could we point fingers when we ourselves are to blame?
The people who came in after the war was over, started to “clean”. They were the ones that shovelled the dead bodies. That scene was what struck me the most. They didn’t even get the right of having a proper burial even from the “good guys”; instead they were piled into the ground and had dirt shovelled onto them.
The soldier’s faces were emotionless as they repeated the task of carrying bodies away from the camps. They were repeating their task over and over again with no pity what so ever. Were “we” only doing this because it was duty to? The documentation ends, yet the words that the narrator gives me chills. “Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?”
These questions could only be answered by ourselves, will we do something different when faced with prejudice? Will we stand against genocides? I hope we will. I hope that we have learned from history and not have let all those victims die without a purpose. We will always remember them and they will stand as a reminder that this should never ever happen again. And it won’t."
The documentary Night and Fog was a very effective film that showed real footage captured during the Holocaust. Though presented in silence without a word spoken, the series of images were as loud as can be. The effect of no volume made me concentrate even more on the images and made them more significant. By observing the documentary it made me think about my self and how it would feel to be part of the Jewish culture in the late 1930s and 40s and the horrors my family and I would have to face. The images shown drew disgust and fright to my eyes. I learned some specifics I was never aware of like the experimenting of amputations and the baking of live innocent people. It must’ve been pure hell living in concentration camps and can’t bare the pain suffered by all those people but what about the German people. More often than not people tend to mourn and put themselves in the Jewish peoples shoes, what most people don’t take into consideration is the guilt suffered by the German soldiers. To take another human’s being life can bring insanity and guilt that can cause damage, which could lead to them taking their own life. Knowing that you killed hundreds maybe thousands and maybe just one person can effect you so immensely. Also, looking at the point of view of the German people back in Berlin. They must’ve felt terrible in the inside about what they were supporting and were forced too at that. It wasn’t necessarily their choice to support Hitler’s regime, most were forced with their backs against the wall, what other choice would they have? It also would mean long term effects like stereotypes about their culture. As we established before, not all Germans were Nazi’s and hated the Jews and not all Jews hated the Germans, it was just a series of wrong choices and misconceptions made by specific group of people. The documentary related to the interview with the author because as he explained how smaller events similar to this are occurring right now and the present complacency still exists. The meaning I take from the documentary, the novel and the interview is that the world is ours to destroy. A moral I obtain is, just because you help someone doesn’t mean you have to expect something back. If we work together and assist each others colonies and countries without hesitation we would achieve something worth more than money, peace.
ReplyDeleteBrutality, sickness, agony, sadness and anger were my overall emotions to the documentary 'Night and Fog.' When watching this film, I felt sick to my stomach. What kind of animals do such things to people? They are evil beings and should be punished themselves for all the terrible and gruesome things they made others go through. They striped people of their humanity and dignity, and left them to starve. They were hungry, and like they said, "One spoonful of soup is priceless." The needy and ill were brought to 'hospitals' on camp to be treated. They were given medicine that was the same for anyone who was ill, and those poor people ended up dying with their eyes wide open. People that needed surgeries performed were really experimental victims. The outside of the hospital was disguised to look like a real hospital, but inside brutality struck. An SS doctor and terrifying nurse would perform experiments on the victims. When I saw this, I literally wanted to jump through the screen and kill every German in sight. Executions were heart wrenching. Gas chambers that looked like showers, and the only way you knew that you were in a gas chamber was to look for the fingernail scratches on the concrete. Ovens could easily handle 1000+ bodies per day, and when I saw the images of victims after being burnt to death, I literally wanted to scream and vomit. Bones were used for soap, and the skin of the innocent was used for canvas. That goes to show you how SICK people were. Corpses were pushed into a large sunken hole by a plough, and filled with soil and mud. Prisoners looked from afar thinking that their fellow Jew's were free at last from that never ending pain. Commandants would live in a villa where he would go home to his family each night. They should be ashamed of themselves, and sick to their stomachs because of the millions of lives they had taken and affected. Women's hair was cut and kept. It looked like a never ending mountain of hair. I hope that they are forever punished in eternity. God bless all of the brave Jew's who's lives were lost. Rage is circling within me at this very moment. I wouldn't recommend this film for people who get sick and angry very quickly.
ReplyDeleteMy heart sank, my mind cleared, and everything around me suddenly froze. My stomach turned, my voice disappeared, and moans filled the room. The horrors of the Holocaust had been shown to me through the documentary, entitled Night and Fog. How disgusting and gruesome the screen was as the images slowly faded from one gut-wrenching photo to the next. Actual footage was embedded into my mind, having no mercy towards the young viewers staring in silence. There it was, in black and white, the death of millions of Jewish people. There are not enough words in the English language to describe the feeling I had after witnessing (not even first hand) the extermination of human beings. I was disgusted, first and foremost, since the film was honestly way too much for me to handle without having the least bit of sickness. The suffering portrayed helpless, desperate souls, wanting nothing more than the life that was given to each individual innocently without cost. I watched as the cameras gave me a tour of the living conditions and torture methods that the Germans presented to the Jewish people of that time. They were treated like lab rats, only used for experimentation, and then disposed of, in the most inhumane ways possible. Bodies were placed – not even placed, but thrown – into mass graves using bulldozers, a thought that will not escape my head, covered in dirt and left to rot. No one deserves this kind of behaviour. It is atrocious, appalling, and frankly, quite nauseating, to say the least. I simply cannot accept these events, even though they did occur, and to think that anything like this can so easily happen again! I am left shaking my head in utter disbelief and repulsion.
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ReplyDeleteI loved the documentary because it allowed me to listen to the speaker and at the same time it allowed me to read the speech at the bottom of the screen. After I listened, I went back and read the speech and highlight important words and sentences. I enjoy multimodal media. At one point I was multi-tasking: reading, listening, and flipping back and forth writing on a Microsoft Word Document page. Zachery correctly makes the correlation between the Interview and the Film: “Night and Fog tells the viewer that something like this could very well happen again, and is happening right now. It is by our own complacency that such things have been allowed to happen. Both the interview and the film hold the same message:
ReplyDeleteWe cannot sit idly by while others are suffering.
We cannot allow things to be bad simply because we do not want to get off our couches and do something.
We must see that things are bad.
We must think of ways to help.
We must put a stop to it before it gets worse”
I think we all share the same emotions as Meagan, “completely unnerving and unsettling to watch. It puts me to a loss of words, for the moment, in awe of what is appearing slide after slide on the screen.”
A very comment about Hitler! It got me thinking Kayla: “The more I got to think about it, the more I realized that there was a small part of me who felt sorry for Hitler. He was obviously dealing with some greater evil that was inspiring him that no one knew about. Whatever he was dealing with was strong enough to provoke such a terrible mistake. However, that greater evil was still no excuse for genocide.”
I think watching the documentary with no volume added to the power of the graphic and distrubing images.
Great job everyone.