Nacht und Nebel

I stared at the wall for what seemed an hour. Time meant little to me. After watching Alain Resnais' 1955 Holocaust film, "Night and Fog," I struggled to remove my mind from Auschwitz. Images of death echoed in my head. Bits of poetic narration played over and over. "Who is responsible?"

I came about this film by accident. I am an English teacher, and currently my students are reading Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize winning memoir, "Night." Looking for a visual connection to the piece, I came across "Night and Fog." At 31 minutes, it appeared the perfect video complement to that devastating book. After watching the film in my dark, empty classroom, I realized the film offered so much more.

In a culture where violence and images of death are glamorized, "Night and Fog" serves a unique purpose. It cuts through the desensitized soul and puts us face-to-face with true, unadulterated evil. While many might suggest this is overkill, occasionally we need to do this if only to remind ourselves of man's potential to perpetrate the abominations this film so cruelly unveils. We need to force ourselves to confront such forces, if only to ensure the film's prophetic final lines do not become a reality. "Who is on the lookout...to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?"

This is the question which consumed me as I stared seemingly forever at the wall after the film ended. This is the question I want my students to ask. After much deliberation, I decided to show it, not as a history lesson, but as a moral lesson in the nature of evil. Great films get a strong reaction. Resnais' film is one of the greats.

I originally had no intention to see this movie and had no idea that it even existed until I saw it. I actually saw it in High School Economics class (of all places)because my teacher had just finished showing it to his world history class and instead of wanting to hear him drone on about the GDP and recessions, we smooth talked him into showing us what was in his VCR. We had no idea what we were about to see.

This movie is probably the best holocaust documentary ever made. The images of piles of human hair, emaciated skeletons being pushed around by bulldozers, lampshades of human skin, men looking like corpses walking around, has never left me. The opera and classical music in the background helps to further add to the shock value of this film.

After about 10 minutes, kids in my class told my teacher we didn't want to watch this movie anymore. We stopped it and there was still 30 minutes left in class. We didn't learn anything about economics that day, we talked about the holocaust instead.

Called the "greatest film of all time" by director Francois Truffaut, the documentary Night and Fog by Alain Resnais shows the holocaust tragedy in all its horror. Though the film is only thirty minutes in length, it is devastating in its impact so approach with caution. Night and Fog refers to the arrival of prisoners in Auschwitz under the cover of darkness and also the ultimate failure of the Nazis at Nuremberg to take responsibility for it. Written by Jean Cayrol, a holocaust survivor, and poetically narrated by Michel Bouquet, its gruesome images seem like a surreal nightmare. The purpose of the 30-minute documentary is to document for future generations what actually took place in the camps since this was a time when officialdom was reluctant to talk about what happened and the full extent of the horror was not generally known.

Another purpose is to show the ultimate failure of the Nazis at Nuremburg to take responsibility for it. It would have been welcome to also depict the complicity of others: big business, the other victims of the Nazi's, similar atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, ethnic cleansing, genocide, state violence and so forth but this was not possible given the length of the film and its purpose. Today, when there is so much holocaust denial, people need to be reminded not that the Nazis were demons but of the consequences of unchecked state power without an ethical base.

The film opens in 1955 with an image of a barren field of grass with lush romantic music in the background. The scene then abruptly shifts to wartime. We are in Auschwitz and the prisoners are arriving. We are shown scenes shot after liberation that are so shocking that they have never been made public outside of this film. Resnais does not spare us: the hair shaved off the heads of women piled high on the floor, bodies -- men -women - children -- are tossed in a garbage pit like so much rubbish, their fat used to make soap. The film only lasts a short time, but the images remain indelible. Unwillingness to acknowledge responsibility is depicted in brief scenes of the Nuremberg Trials. As we witness the conscious distortion of the past still going on today, we are left numb.

If you want to describe or give your audience a feeling for the holocaust, or "Man's Inhumanity To Man", then this is the vehicle to use..Show it..be warned, it is so powerful, that you will never forget what you see, neither will any of your viewers..It is impossible to describe, intermixing l955 footage of Auchwitz Concentration Camp, with captured Nazi footage which the allies found at the end of the war, and the scenes of American and British troops liberating the camps...In French, with English subtitles.. and scenes that are unforgettable and horrific. Even the sad music of death from this film plays in my ears, and I have not seen it in 15 years. Once you hear it, you will know.

This is the one to show if you want people to understand the truth of what happened and the reason for its reaction in today's current events....It is shocking in a special way. I showed it to my classes. Students were warned, and told what was coming, they said it would be "nothing" By the end some were crying and moaning in horror...

I consider myself to have a fairly strong stomach- I've seen the results of traffic accidents and violent crimes, and like anyone else I have seen (via the TV) the horrors of war. But I was just totally unprepared for this. It was thirty harrowing minutes of a sight-seeing tour of hell.

It was so difficult for me to sit through that I was tempted to shut the DVD player off three times, but I told myself, "No, this is important. It has to be seen, if only as a reminder of what can happen when an inhuman world-view is fused to state-of-the-art technology." The Holocaust was far more (and worse) than simple mass-killing, awful as that is. It was a business decision, coolly and scientifically calculated, to destroy millions of innocents while reaping a profit from them- in death as well as in life.

The sight of the starved, broken bodies, the ghastly scenes taken in the medical labs in the death camps, the sight of little children being led by the hand to their last train ride. It is all so monstrous as to be indescribable.

I am glad I watched it. But I do not think that I'll be watching it ever again, and I give it a 10. It affected me that deeply.