A Film Unfinished
Directed by Yael Hersonski
When it comes to the subject of the extermination of the Six Million, there are two kinds of people. First are those for whom the details of the Final Solution are a source of endless horrified fascination. And there are those for whom the mere thought of it provokes a visceral sensation akin to seasickness mixed with rage and for whom reading about or watching material relating to the Holocaust is close to unbearable. (There are others, of course, such as those who don’t care and those who admire the Nazis, but we’ll leave them out of it.)
As I grow older, I find myself more and more in the latter camp, though I was once very much in the former. The turning point came in the early 1990s, during a conversation with Anne and Jen, two fellow Washingtonians, in a convertible Mustang on the way to an Orioles game.
“Hey Jen,” said Anne eagerly, “have you been to the Holocaust Museum yet?” It had just opened.
“No,” Jen said. “How is it?”
“Out. Of. Control!”
“Wow!” Jen replied.
Anne had meant only that touring the museum had been a visceral experience for her. But the juxtaposition of the sentiment she had expressed, which could just as easily have been the words she would have spoken upon exiting her rollercoaster car at Space Mountain, and the beautiful scenery whipping around us on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway with the Holocaust itself, was profoundly disorienting for me.
How, after all, are we to understand, to take in, to manage the fact of this consuming event, very likely the worst in all of human history, in tandem with the rest of our lives—the beauty of a car ride, the thrill of youth speeding along in a convertible, the ineffable pleasure of a night game on a perfect summer eve? We can’t, of course. So it’s natural to convert the experience of learning about or talking about or reading about or watching things about the Holocaust to other, more familiar, more comprehensible experiences.
Thus, for my friend Anne, the museum intended to expose the enormity of the event was something like a rollercoaster. And so it is for cultural depictions as well. In 1978, when NBC aired its nine-and-a-half-hour miniseries on the Holocaust, TV Guide featured a summary of its third hour that went something like this: “Helena (Tovah Feldshuh) and Rudi (Joseph Bottoms) take time out to get married.” Oh, how nice. They got to take time out from the Holocaust to get married. One could hardly have faulted TV Guide for this; if you make a miniseries about the Holocaust, it’s going to be more a miniseries than it’s going to be the Holocaust.
And what of documentaries about the Nazi extermination program? I just returned home from seeing one, from Israel, called A Film Unfinished. It’s an original, provocative, and fascinating piece of work centering on a film crew sent by the Nazis into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 to take extensive footage of life inside the three-square-mile walled-off area inside the Polish capital into which Hitler’s minions had crammed half a million Jews whom they then systematically proceeded to starve before systematically sending them off to their deaths later in the year in Treblinka.
The images recorded by the Nazi film crew, which were discovered a decade after the war in an East German vault, will be immediately familiar, because they have been duplicated in fictional renderings of the ghetto from Schindler’s List to The Pianist to, yes, Holocaust. The director of A Film Unfinished, Yael Hersonski, explains in the narration that whatever purpose the Nazi propagandists had in mind, they abandoned, and the footage (on reels with the title “The Ghetto”) was consigned to the vault.
Hersonski then reveals that more footage was found—outtakes from “The Ghetto” cut because they feature mistakes in which other members of the film crew can be seen. What these reveal is the extent to which the events in “The Ghetto” were staged for the benefit of the cameras—in particular, a lavish funeral through the streets of Warsaw and the emptying of a prison.
Clearly, the propagandists in charge of the project had notions of using the footage for anti-Semitic purposes. They set up scenes of wealthier Warsaw Jews walking by starving beggars; dragged people into a Warsaw theater and made them clap and laugh on cue for 12 hours to show how much fun they were having (and God pity anyone who didn’t laugh loud enough). But what the footage truly reveals, and the reason “The Ghetto” was surely abandoned, is the Holocaust in chrysalis: half a million people being purposefully starved to death.
Typhus-riddled children stagger through the streets on canes; Jews rifle through garbage in the dump in search of any scrap of food; a gigantic mountain of feces and garbage in an apartment courtyard is created by starving tenants throwing their trash from the windows because they no longer have the energy to bring it down on foot. And then there are the mass graves of people who have simply died on the streets, sent down a chute into a vast pit, and covered over with paper.
It’s horrible to watch and, I suppose, a worthwhile reminder of the Final Solution. And yet there I was, in the Lincoln Plaza Cinema on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, holding a Diet Peach Snapple Iced Tea, feeling oddly virtuous because of the gasps that emerged from my mouth and the tears that sprang from my eyes—before I realized that I was reacting exactly as I did the previous week when I watched the horrific rape scene in the Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my iPad on a flight from New York to Detroit.
Because, in the end, even a documentary about the Holocaust is a movie first and foremost, and has more in common with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo than it does with the experience of the Six Million. It is Out. Of. Control. And that’s the problem. Because the Holocaust was the evil opposite of Out. Of. Control.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.