Hitchcock’s Holocaust film is powerful. But in a cruel world, empathy is on the wane (The Guardian)
Caution: GraphicThursday 22 January 2015 17.34 GMT
An unseen 1945 documentary about Belsen is finally to be screened. Can such images even shock us any more?
The women are smiling. The women ambling down the street, in sharp suits that now look fashionably vintage, look as if they’re off to a picnic or a show. In the next shot, their smiles have gone. In the next shot, the women from Weimar, who had known about Buchenwald, and been happy to make use of its labour, are staring at the shrunken heads of prisoners who tried to escape.
The women from Weimar were filmed by British soldiers in 1945. The soldiers were ordered by the British government to film some of the things they saw. At Bergen-Belsen, for example, they saw beautiful countryside and “well-stocked farms”, but then they smelled a strange smell. As the smell got stronger, they saw watchtowers and barbed wire. And then they saw the bodies. Piles and piles of bodies, but bodies which looked like skeletons wrapped in skin.
It was Sidney Bernstein who was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to create a documentary that would be “a historical record” and “a lesson for all mankind”. So he, and the editors he took on, and Alfred Hitchcock, whom he commissioned to oversee it, sat down to watch what the soldiers had filmed.
In all the camps they saw bodies. Naked, skeletal, disease-ridden bodies. In most of them they saw survivors too, though you couldn’t, said one American soldier, always tell who was dead and who was alive: “You would step over a body” and it might “suddenly wave at you or raise a hand”. It was, he said, “hard to imagine for a normal human mind”. And he was trying not to cry when he said it. “It’s not something you quickly forget.”
cont'd...
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/22/hitchcock-holocaust-documentary-belsen-night-will-fall
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along with with all other allied veteran HEROES.
>> As well, my father served as a 24 year old 1st lieutenant in the 7th Army, in the Rhineland Campaign, at the Liberation of Dachau, April 1945 & in the Army of Occupation.<<
That's some family history to be very proud of.
My Grandad was in the Royal Canadian Navy (stationed in GB during the war). He died when I was seven, so I've only ever really heard second-hand accounts of his service.
>> In my family we've always cherished history, realizing that others don't always share the same interest.<<
I know exactly what you mean.
We see so much horror on TV, social media (beheadings on YouTube), etc., that it doesn't shock us anymore. We've become numbed to the sufferings of people, for a variety of reasons. Damn shame, but it's the truth.
But the media goes on and on about them, I find it sickening. It's almost as if they're reveling in it, not realizing that they're basically acting as part of a recruitment tape for Isis, Al Qaeda, etc. We need the media to treat things like this respectfully. The media reflects us, and us, them. Unfortunately, I don't see either side willing to change. 
