Of Night and Fog

After watching Night and Fog yesterday, I left the class, along with my other classmates, in a very solemn mood.  Upon leaving the building, there was a noticeable silence, and Sam broke the silence with a remark: "Now let's all go home and write something insignificant in our blogs."  I felt these words to have a lot of truth in them.  After seeing the film, I feel that I couldn't say anything to do justice to all the people that died, and that anything that I have to say just is not all that important. What could I possibly say that could describe such an event? "Hitler was bad."  "The Holocaust was a tragedy."  "Many people died."  All of these statements just don't come close to describing the horrors of what happened, and they just seem too simple, no matter how you word them.  And I think in that sense, this is what the film Night and Fog captures so perfectly.  

As we see from the grass and peaceful life that is now growing over Auschwitz, the event of the Holocaust will never be fully remembered, we will always see it as an event that has passed.  It is a distant memory to us now, one that feels so large in proportion that we can not fully grasp it or explain it.  I think the actual footage of the event that was shown in the film really revealed to me how terrible it actually was, and why it is so difficult for us to explain or even remember.  I have read Anne Frank's diary, and the book Night by Elie Wiesel, yet personally I felt disconnected to what I was reading about, no matter how hard I tried to grasp it.  Yet with film technology, we are allowed a window into the actual event, to see what actually happened there. To me, this is certainly a film not easily forgotten.

The picture I chose this week is a picture of a candle that was on a website on the Holocaust.  Below the picture was a quote by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: "The Holocaust stands as the eternal symbol of what happens when we forget."

--Ryan