Nacht und Nebel

I had heard the phrase "Night and Fog", but had missed the true meaning of it until I saw this movie sitting on a shelf in a local video store. I rented it and watched.

I don't possess a vocabulary to convey the impact the images had upon me. I sat unmmoving, sick to my stomach. Those images would not leave my head.

As a student of history, I had seen still images and brief clips of the victims of the Holocaust. None of it compared to seeing these images moving across my screen.

To any doubters of the Holocaust, I say, "Watch this film!" It did happen. This is the result of hatred and complacency. We like to think it couldn't happen here, until we remember the treatment of the Native Americans and the slaves brought to this country. We think it could never happen again, until Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc., showed it still does.

This movie is the greatest Holocaust film ever, and few will ever deny this fact. Beautiful and intense, its makes the stomach turn when one sees the footage and pictures obtained in this film. I've never seen footage this brutal in my entire life, not even in a movie. The voice-overs seem odd at place, but it is really the voice of history, speaking of unspeakable horrors which are captured almost perfectly in this film. A dark tribute to those who lost their lives in the concentration camps. This should be used as a teaching tool for tolerance and the atrocities of World War II.

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 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.