Flowings of Your Everlasting Taffyman

Response to Night and Fog (a movie shown in my modern europe class)


I’m a human being, a pacifist and a student of history. Knowing that we would be learning/discussing the holocaust meant a lot to me, and I was aware that I wanted something more personal from class that day. I hoped that the movie or the lecture or something would hit me hard emotionally. I didn’t want a contrived and fake emotional experience; I wanted to have a moment where the reality of human history at its most horrible actually meant something to me as more than just a historical fact. A week earlier I teared up when thinking about the eastern front and the thousands, millions killed senselessly. A year earlier I visited the remains of two of the camps where some of the atrocities in Night and Fog took place.
Night and Fog is a very simple movie about something very complex and does not do it justice (though I’m not sure what could), but that does not take away from the importance of the film. Like visiting the camp today, there is no way you can understand what happened there, there is no possible way you can re-experience the crimes, the freezing cold, the burning heat, the exhaustion, confusion, depression, starvation, survival induced selfishness, loss of family and friends, loss of purpose or any of the other terrible human induced horrors described in the movie, nor would anyone want to but this does not mean that you shouldn’t go to see the camps, or try to empathize.
The beginning of the movie shows much of the grounds of Auschwitz, the fields with overgrown grass and flowers which used to be mud as Alain Resnais describes how different it looks. Similarly when you go today, its hard to imagine what it used to look like, the buildings of some of the camps are torn down, the roads ripped up, the crematoriums and gas chambers destroyed and of course all of this is shown in the film, but the film is also able to remind us of what it looked like before, and both the pleasant and terrible scenes are important to be reminded of.
I don’t know that the focus of Resnais’ film is as important now as it was at the time. The movie seemed to be about remembering and assigning blame. But now it serves a different purpose, a purpose that is perhaps harder even than assigning blame, the purpose of remembering and taking on the responsibility to never allow such things to happen again.

In Warsaw, a friend and I asked some Polish college students, anarchist activists really, where we could go to find the death camps. We were baffled when they couldn’t tell us anything but, “Auschwitz.” “Weren’t there like a lot of them?” we asked. “Well yeah, but there isn’t anything left of them.” they told us. “Nothing? Have you been there? Can you describe them?” we asked. “There is like a plaque in a field, nothing to look at.” And then we asked them why… and they said they didn’t know, maybe because no one knew, or no one wanted to remember. They saved Auschwitz, but they assumed that polish people didn’t go there except on school trips when they were young –when they were too young to really understand. When we asked them what they knew about the camps before and about the people murdered, one of them said he could call his friend and ask, his friend knew things about Jewish people but most people didn’t. They knew about Soviets, and capitalists, and Catholics, and the police and fighting against the police when the police were corrupt, but these 20-somethings didn’t know about Nazis, and they didn’t know about Jews, they had been told about the ghetto being burned down and read the plaques commemorating the uprising and they had lived in the city their whole lives, but didn’t know what had happened in their country 60 years earlier. And we were baffled.
I bring this up to talk about the necessity of remembering, of trying to learn about things that are important, even if they are painful. I got the impression from these students that no one wanted to tell them what went on, perhaps it was too hard, perhaps they had struggled so much in-between to build something new, or struggled against the new power that had forced itself upon them. Whatever the case, it shocked me that a society could so easily forget.
Later in my trip while in Sarajevo I met the nicest, most politically correct guys I had ever met in my life. They went to school in Bavaria, but weren’t proud to represent that state. They humbly and un-presumptuously examined and reexamined every question and answer to make sure they weren’t misrepresenting anything. So when I asked them why they weren’t proud to be Bavarian, they were reluctant to let their beliefs about their state out. After a few beers, they mentioned that they weren’t proud of the conservative and even pro-Nazi stance that much of the population of their region believed in. They were horrified, but were quick to explain how hard it was for their grandparents and even their parents to overcome the beliefs and values they had grown up with especially at times of economic crisis. They said that the people don’t understand why they can’t be proud of their history, their country. They mentioned how even they (progressive politically correct medical students) struggle with it too, but had always been taught to never forget what could happen when hatred and nationalism come together. (They were on a trip to Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia for the same reason I was, to study how the people dealt with the war). These men could never be mistaken for Nazis, overly sympathetic-overly kind and yet they couldn’t claim their heritage because of the atrocities committed by their grandparents’ generation.
I’m not exactly sure why I wanted to include this story except to talk about how remembering isn’t easy for people, even those who wish to make things better. But I found it interesting how these young German Bavarian men grew up knowing their history and wanting to make something better, more peaceful, more encompassing of different viewpoints and different customs. While the Polish students who did not know much history beyond their parents generation, were quick to announce their anti capitalist views, their anti socialist views, their anti catholic views, their anti police views… but they didn’t know what exactly they stood for, except the deconstruction of their society through whatever means. OF COURSE this is an over simplification of socio-politics, psychology and more… of course this ignores the vast numbers of Polish and German youth who have differing ideals, I just thought it was interesting what growing up knowing about the suffering your people have inflicted or had inflicted upon them can do to a persons outlook on life.
I guess this mimics my own personal beliefs. I may have always had similar values but I wasn’t sure why or how much I believed in them until they were tested by knowledge and experience that was quite painful and traumatic. These influences though, are some of my most cherished memories, the periods in my life that I feel the most proud of. They have served to teach me, not only about myself, but about what and who is outside of me, and the similarities between all people. This is why I think it’s important to make and watch films like Night and Fog, they may not be able to do the situation justice, but they help remind us of painful but helpful things we can learn.
Scenes in Night and Fog that are particularly hard to watch: pictures, videos and descriptions of the captive people, those who were about to be murdered, the places they were tortured, the places they were killed, the masses of material wealth derived from their dead bodies… are all things that are hard to watch, and yet it is only by acknowledging that we remember and keep it from happening again.
This last part is really important, because although the movie may have been documenting one particular period in human history, the backdrop of: green fields, brick, wood and cement housing, factories, modern looking cities, towns and farms, people that look like us, etc, remind us that the horrors depicted in the more horrific scenes all happened in a place that was very similar to our world today. The guns, tanks, planes, bombs, poisons, crimes, racism and abuse of power are all still with us today and it is this very important realization in the viewers that is really significant… because seeing these things, and the people who accompany them in these pictures and videos remind us that they are us. Different faces of humanity, aggressive/abusive, selfish, hateful or caring, selfless, helpful, accommodating- all human. The best part about the movie is that instead of showing the politics and morality of the Nazi’s alone, it showed the morality of the choices and actions humans are capable of good and bad, and so, although it may assign guilt to the Nazi’s, in essence movies like Night and Fog due to the projection of shared characteristics of humanity, require all people to take responsibility.






Sorry for all the run on sentences, I know my points are fairly obvious, but I guess the importance of the movie was more important to me than talking about whether it was a good representation, it is a good representation because it makes us remember the importance of such things.