Witness
“Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But, by God’s grace, we who live will learn.” - Richard Crossman
Cultural memory is the outer dimension of human memory. It binds society together, with the help of culture mnemonics, ensuring cultural continuity. Collective understandings about the past are constructed and reconstructed through the printed word, monument, exhibition, and more recently, digital media. The origin of the term history, evolving from the ancient Greek word historia (inquiry), indicates an innate human desire to learn from the past. Indeed, this is implied in these words from Richard Crossman. Historical events are framed and reframed as they pass through one generation to the next. These ongoing dialectical relations shape our understanding of our everyday lived experience; they serve as an explanation to the world we inhabit.
The human desire to preserve the past is ancient, but concern with memory has grown exponentially in Western societies since the late twentieth century. Contemporary memory practices weave the past into the present day. We live in the age of “present-pasts”, and this is illuminated when we consider the privileging of the future demonstrated during the Enlightenment. Explanations for this phenomena continue to be debated; certainly a traumatic twentieth century ending in two World Wars called for the reassessment of Western modernity. The Holocaust has become a symbol of the dangers of nationalist movements, and subsequent genocides are bleak reminders of our continuous inability to live in peace with difference.
Fascination with the Holocaust has been reported as early as the 1950s, but it was not until two decades later that it became a shocking and distinctive historic event. In 1961, the televising of the Eichmann trials contributed to public awareness and interest in the Holocaust. In the 1970s and 80s, media attention paid to a series of commemorative events and anniversaries in the history of the Nazi regime stimulated a broadening debate. Alan J. Pakula’s 1982 Sophie’s Choice and Stephen Speilberg’s 1995 Shindler’s List are testament to the power of film in energising public awareness of historic trauma. The recent spate in Holocaust films indicate that public fascination shows no signs of receding. National Holocaust Museums continue to be constructed across Europe and the United States. Statistics reveal an increased public attendance to former concentration camps, and whilst some visitors are survivors and their relatives, the majority have no direct connection to the Holocaust. Whilst former camps are an important part of memorialisation and historical education, this increase in access has given rise to debates about “dark tourism”. This debate is largely problematised however, as the motivations of visitors have not been sufficiently studied to-date. Put simply, it is no longer niche but mainstream to visit Auschwitz, Birkenhau or Dachau. In their 2018 report, Auschwitz states the memorial site is “in the world’s heart”; I would agree, Holocaust discourse is certainly alive in global cultural memory.
The Holocaust has been endlessly commodified, though not all commodifications banalise the historic event. There have been a number of notable feature films and documentaries which far exceed mere entertainment for public consumption. Creating such a film is a contentious balancing act between preservation and reconstruction, between promoting accessible history without over-simplification. Consider Andre Singer’s documentary Night Will Fall (2014) which reconstructs a previously unseen catalogue of the atrocities uncovered at the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945. ‘The German Concentration Camps Factual Survey’ was abandoned having lost support from the British authorities who deemed it politically inconvenient. Sidney Bernstein immediately began working on the film after receiving reels of footage shot by the cameramen who accompanied the allied forces as they liberated the camps. Alfred Hitchcock consulted Bernstein on structure, and former Labour minister Richard Crossman was commissioned to write the script. Andre Singer and Imperial War Museum curators have restored the original footage to create a new documentary which tells the story of the creation and suppression of the original film. Night Will Fall is about bearing witness to atrocity, recounted through the eyes of those who were there at the time.
The film is certainly not for the faint-hearted. It reveals horrifying footage of the crimes against humanity which took place on these camps: hopeless, malnourished, diseased-ridden prisoners survive amongst mounds of the dead, their bodies rotting or burned. SS officers haul the bodies of people they starved to death into mass graves filled with thousands of corpses. Singer interviewed survivors who appeared in this original footage, along with other eyewitnesses and members of the original production team. Jasper Britton speaks the original script, as narration from Helen Bonham-Carter reframes the film from a 21st century perspective. The reasons for the suppression of the original film are alluded to: during a politically turbulent period the government was wary about growing Zionist support and believed Germany to be a necessary post-war ally against the Soviets.
Theodor Adorno said “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. He was expressing his ethical concern with art representing atrocity. How do we make comprehensible stories out of incomprehensible atrocities? How do we preserve human dignity in doing so? According to Andreas Huyssen, when it comes to representation, the question of ‘quality' is one to be decided case by case; much depends on the specific strategies of representation and commodification and on the context in which they are staged. The makers of Night Will Fall were primarily interested in cataloging the experiences of people at the moment of liberation and used atrocity footage to serve that narrative, not the other way around. They avoided creating ‘drama’ in the conventional sense; the real story is engaging enough. In seeking the truth, they allow “real memory” to do the work of captivating its audience. The film compels the viewer to consider traumatic memory along with the social and political implications of what is captured on film. Overtime, as the Holocaust becomes ever more distant history and very few survivors remain, personal connection will inevitably decline. This documentary introduces the viewer to individuals who recount the event as they experienced it. The director takes a backseat, as this complex story is told by survivors, not about them.
The first 9 minutes of the film is dedicated to explaining the arrival of the allied forced into the camps; only then are the first atrocity images shown. I should say the makers cannot have been too concerned with audience palpability as these graphic images are extremely distressing. However, only a fraction of the film consists of actual atrocity footage, and as these shots rarely last for more than 10 seconds, it avoids distasteful spectacle. The absence of any reconstruction means the film does not compromise on authenticity.
But what do we really learn from seeing atrocity? Singer said “we can only truly understand the horror of war if we use images like this”. He is probably right. After seeing the film I was determined that this could never happen again. These portrayals of human violence should provoke the viewer into action. Though it is unclear what this action should be. There is an argument that showing atrocity footage in an educational context actually leaves students exposed to their own inability to respond to genocide. Whatever the answer, these images should not be seen isolation. They should be given context and humanity. It is this that incites compassion as well as shock and terror.
The original footage is mostly observational, but does express qualities of cinéma vérité. One survivor who was imprisoned with her twin sister at the Auschwitz experimental station explains how Russian cameramen asked them to walk in a line between the fences of barbed wire, herself and her sister at the front dressed in striped uniform. It’s a powerful moment; the viewer is left disturbed by the thought of Josef Mengele’s cruel genetic experiments on these innocent children. “Only now do I understand the importance of the Russian images”, survivor Tomy Shacham says, “that’s almost the only documentation.. they managed to bring the world everything we experienced.”
Cinema does have a role to play in urging awareness and action in the present day. Night Will Fall is an exception as most academic documentaries seldom produce such an engaging result. It is tentative, reflective and reflexive. An example of how the visual medium can provide fresh perspectives to change public consciousness about historical events. It pays homage to Bernstein’s ambition for his documentary to be used as evidence. This vision stands in stark contrast with other uses of the same atrocity footage, such as Billy Wilder’s 1945 Death Mills. The 22-minute short film was intended to educate German audiences about the atrocities committed in their name. As producer Sally Angel said at a Night Will Fall talk “the quality of Richard Crossman’s script, the editing, and the use of the footage in German Concentration Camps is so superior to anything that is in Death Mills.” During the same talk, historian Rainer Schulze added “for some young people, to be introduced to the men who made those films, will give [the footage] a new life, a new reality, a new immediacy”. Schulze is right when he says that the film’s power is its immediacy; it 'thinks together’ the past and the present, rather than seeing them as mutually exclusive. Introducing the Auschwitz 2018 report, Piotr Cywiński shares his concern that the most frequent statements regarding Auschwitz, escape present day responsibility: ‘young people must visit this place for their world to look different in the future’; ’what will happen upon the passing away of the last survivor?’. This shift in responsibility “does not augur well” Cywiński says. Which brings us back to the turn toward memory and how it indicates our deep fear of forgetting.
It is curious as to why it took seventy years to realise this masterpiece. The potential for political disruption explains its initial suppression. Shock based on revealed truth does not necessarily always lead to transitional politics, but that certainly was the British government’s concern at the time. Singer said releasing the film “would [have] provoked sympathy for the Jewish refugees still in the camps after the war [who] wanted to go to Palestine. The British were having problems with nascent Zionism and felt the film would be unhelpful.”
But this still does not address the long delay from release. My theory is that the memories were just too raw to be formally represented until now. Images have the power to disrupt established narratives; if this happens too soon, if they cut through the denial or “amnesia” of the time, they will be rejected. Schulze has theorised that there can be a longer-term benefit to a period of amnesia following traumatic events. Initially, the Holocaust was not given prominence in public German discourse. This now stands in stark contrast with the ways in which a generation on, German society accepts its responsibility and extensively commemorates the loss of Nazi victims. According to Schulze, concentration camp films produced in the immediate postwar period (such as Death Mills) failed to cut through the amnesia of the German population.
Human response to the memory of the past makes Art, by default. Art is not pretty, nor is the memory. Art fills the gap between the imagined and the reality. There is irony in that the British government’s suppression of the original documentary has unwittingly preserved the integrity of the footage. The release of Night Will Fall seventy years after the Holocaust means it can watched for the first time. The viewer is walking through the gates of the camps shoulder to shoulder with the liberating soldiers. We cannot escape the self-interrogation these images provoke. Could I have been a perpetrator in these crimes? The documentary points a finger at all of us and says, guilty. But this is not a conclusion, the story goes on.
