Film Lesson: Night and Fog

Night and Fog was a chilling documentation of the most dangerous death camp built by the Germans in 1940, Auschwitz. Contrary to Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg, this documentary depicted a more domestic view of the concentration camp, and also provide more facts that cleared the image of the death camp. The movie, directed by Alain Resnais in 1956, was critically acclaimed, received several awards, and nominations.

The documentary held some very graphic and depressing scenes. But unlike Schindler’s List, these were all real footage. Everything we saw in this documentary was the real Auschwitz, the actual place were the mass genocide of the Jews took place. This sole fact made the film even more chilling. What we were looking at was Auschwitz. Now, without having to visualize, I could faintly imagine what life there could’ve been like. Barbed fences, with electricity coursing through it at all times would keep you inside day and night. Each and every day of your life there, you would wake up in cold wooden bunks with others sleeping in the same exact bunks, just to be senselessly killed by the Germans. Though outside, the camp seemed like a small town: it had a hospital, showers, etc. But these weren’t what they seemed. The showers did not disperse water. They dispersed Cyanide. People were led to believe they were showers, being that when they first entered the camp, they actually normal showers! But that was all part of the German’s insanity. When the Jews walked in, they would scramble to achieve the highest ground away from the gas. They would fight so much for high ground that deep nail marks and scratches were drawn across the ceiling. However, none would escape. They would all die, in a single room filled with showerheads. And then came the hospitals. I would rather work in the camps than land myself in the hospital. Despite the assuring look of the facility, it was the home of sickening amputations and experiments on the Jews. Some lost their arms, legs, and fertility, as a result of the crude experiments. Some lost their lives.

The scenes in this documentary were very different from that of Schindler’s List. The Hollywood movie featured more dramatic scenes to convey the terror felt by the Jews when the German’s invaded their homes and sent them to the Ghetto, and then the death camps. It also emphasized the German’s emotionless killing. Especially in the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto scene, there was a handful amount of senseless, and open killing, where the sick, elderly, the children, and those who opposed the Germans were shot down without a care. In Night and Fog, the director used cold hard fact over dramatization of fact to illustrate the extent of the German madness.

While the documentary was powerful, I think that its Hollywood counterpart illustrated the Holocaust best. The documentary only gave its viewers a study of the concentration camps, and avoided going in depth with how the Jews ended up in the camps (which is also a crucial part of the Holocaust). The latter showed the Jews, before, and during their time inside the concentration camps. It showed how these Jews were stripped from their homes and families, right before their eyes. The movie utilized heavy gore and death to express to the viewers that the Germans were not joking. They really wanted the Jews dead. It allows the viewers to sympathize more with the unfortunate Jews, because seeing their lives taken away before their eyes in a gory blood bath is enough for one to really think what made their killers so inhumane to do such a thing.

I can honestly say that I found Night and Fog as powerful as the director most likely intended it to be. What really made this documentary so powerful is that everything was real. It showed the real Auschwitz. It showed footage of the captives in Germany’s most devastating death camp. It had footage of the allies going into the camp and plowing all the bodies in clumps from the field as if it had just snowed. Though it did not cover the entire span of the Holocaust as Schinlder’s List did, it still packed all the emotional influence of the Hollywood movie into a short 30 minutes, and made the absolute best of it. Using fact, it showed what the death camps were truly like. It showed the truth.