Memorandum

Made in the mid-1960's when the Jewish holocaust was still largely ignored, this National Film Board of Canada documentary is one of the most moving tributes to to the millions who died in the death camps and those who survived and carry the psychological scars and the memories of spouses, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends who were brutalized, starved or consigned to oblivion. Signs point to extermination sites with the stark numbers of those who were put to death. Without resorting to emotional language, the film goes to the core truth that this happened in a supposedly advanced civilization with the world sitting on the sidelines. Because the narration is sombre and the camera work so stark in black and white, the message is powerful. The makers of the film wisely chose not to dramatize such a story, charged as it is with deep, gut-wrenching sorrow.

This is a superb contribution to our knowledge of the Holocaust. It has the virtue of brevity. In just one hour, it captures the broad sweep of the atrocity, including grisly archival images but also of Germans in 1966, , scarcely a decade after the end of the Final Solution, now putting fellow Germans on trial for that atrocity, those not captured in time for the Nuremberg trials. This great film anticipates Claude Lanzmann's epic Shoah (1985) in depicting a normality, even a beauty, to the former killing grounds, now overrun by meadows, as if the monstrosity never happened. How could such a thing happen here? And in the tradition of NFB documentaries, there is no moralizing here, just a presentation of the facts. I agree with the previous review by barryrd, that this account succeeds though it came so early after the death camps were finally closed, and is as fresh and relevant today as when it was made. There is, after all, much murderous hatred in the 2023 world. Vigilance.