Alfred Hitchcocks "Memory of the Camps"

In 1945, Hitchcock served as "treatment advisor" (in effect, a film editor) for a Holocaust documentary produced by the British Army. The film, which recorded the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, remained unreleased until 1985, when it was completed by PBS Frontline and distributed under the title Memory of the Camps.

The Hitchcock Documentary on The Nazi Holocaust [at the Belsen Camp]: is a 53-minute film the British and is one of Hitchcock’s unfinished projects. “Memory of the Camps” was intended primarily for German audiences. According to Patrick McGilligan, in his excellent "Alfred Hitchcock -- A Life in Darkness and Light," Hitchcock finished about 55 minutes before funding was suspended, after qualms by the British military command and foreign office and the U.S. State Department. When it was shown publicly in 1984, music critic and columnist Norman Lebrecht called the uncompleted film "Truth at its most naked." "

God, Theology, Israel and the Holocaust.

By Brian Freeman

The Holocaust was the most devastating event in the history of mankind. Hitler’s Nazi Germany killed eleven million people during the Holocaust with six million being Jews. Nazi Germany did not take mercy on men, women or children. They murdered all who where Juden. The Holocaust has left the survivors and the world to ask why? The major question that Jews find to ask themselves is why them? In the movie The Quarrel, the plot revolves around two Jewish Holocaust survivors discussing philosophy, reasoning, and their faith in religion after this horrific event. The two main characters are Hersh and Chaim. Hersh was a Jewish rabbi whose faith was strengthened by his ordeal, and Chaim had escaped the Nazis but lost his faith with the death of his family. In the movie we see many of the issues that the Jews and the theological world debate.

One major issue that comes about is who is to blame. In The Quarrel Chaim blames God for the Nazi Holocaust and states “If I knew God I’d put him on trial.” This brings about a major issue of whether one should blame God for the Holocaust and whether God can be evil. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam traditionally have taught that God is all powerful, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. These claims seem to be in jarring contrast with the fact that there is much evil in the world. Mankind constantly commits evil acts of injury to themselves and others. God appears to be incapable of stopping evil or appears to not want to stop evil acts. This brings the next issue of how to reconcile the existence of this view of God with the existence of evil. This is the problem of evil. The issue that is brought to attention is if God is all powerful. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he is good or at least good in the way that humans understand goodness. Humans are imperfect only having limited knowledge and power. God created the earth and gave humans free will. He placed the power of choice so that those who had yielded obedience might possess eternal salvation. What if the Holocaust was apart of God’s divine plan? Hersh suggests that God punished the Jews for not following the law and being sinful. Chaim strongly disagrees with Hersh’s view stating that even Satan himself could not possibly find a sufficient number of sins that would warrant such genocide. One other view point not mentioned in the movie is the Christian view. One can see the holocaust as the breaking of a covenant, or God’s punishment for Jews forsaking Jesus and seeing this as a symbol for Jews to finally convert.

No matter what belief one has, the Holocaust has had a profound effect on the Jewish religion. The Holocaust created a separation among Judaism and a rejection of Jewish tradition. Those who followed the Jewish culture but not the laws began forming entirely new belief systems. This can be seen in The Quarrel as Hersh relates a story about a train trip he once took. A passenger next to him was a Jewish woman and she said to him in a whisper: “I don’t know who you are mister but I just want you to know how embarrassed I get when I see Jews like you dressed from another century. You make the rest of us look ridiculous. If you have to dress like this, the least you can do is stay at home.” When Hersh said that he was Amish and not Jewish, the woman replied, “I have such respect for you people, the way you keep your traditions.” This can be seen as the Jewish women being ashamed of the Jewish traditions. Her reasons for being ashamed may be because Jewish traditions separated themselves from other cultures. Jews refused to assimilate themselves into other cultures which is one of the reasons why they where persecuted. Jews stood conquered and in diasporas by other nations for hundreds of years. The Western world realized the Jewish people needed to be protected and that they needed their own state.

Israel can be seen as Gods reparations to Jews fulfilling the Torah. The Land of Israel was promised to the Jews as their homeland. The state of Israel was a concept central to Judaism for over three thousand years. The Holocaust and the reestablishment of the State of Israel is a case unique in human history. This event had been predicted by the prophets of the Old Testament and it constitutes the most important single event of the end times.

Star of David

By: Brian Freeman

There is no other symbol that best represents the suffering of Holocaust than the Star of David. The symbol during WWII became a sign of hate, anguish, and pain directed at the Jewish people who were forced to wear the symbol.

The pain the symbol causes can be seen in Elie Wiesel “Night”. In “Night” after the Germans moved and occupied the area where the Wiesel family lived, the Germans slowly began to enforce anti Jewish laws and rules. In order to differentiate Jews from other racial groups, the Star of David was forced upon them. Wiesel’s father, in response to the law says “The Yellow Star? Oh what of it? It’s not Lethal”(Night 11). Wiesel’s father never knew the little yellow star would lead to his death. He and millions of others would all suffer the same fate. Of all the symbols associated with the Holocaust, one symbol that is synonymous with the Holocaust and Judaism is the Star of David. Under Nazi rule the yellow star has become a symbol of persecution and suffering.

The Star of David in origin is very cloudy. One generally accepted theory according to the Jewish Virtual Library states that, “The Magen David or better known as the Star of David is supposed to represent the shape of Kings David’s shield (or perhaps the emblem on it).” The symbol is also seen in many other cultures. The author continues saying, “The symbol of intertwined equilateral triangles is common in the Middle of East and North Africa and is thought to bring luck.” In the 17^th century, it became popular practice to put the Star of David on the outside of synagogues. According to Jennifer Rosenberg, “The Star of David did not gain popularity as a symbol of Judaism when it was adopted as the emblem of the Zionist movement in 1897.” The Nazis were not the first to force Jews to distinguish themselves apart from the society. It is believed that the first time that the implementation of a Jewish badge was discussed among the Nazi leaders was right after Kristallnacht in 1938. At a meeting on November 12,1938, Reinhard Heydrich made the first suggestion about a badge. On November 23, 1939, Hans Frank, the chief officer of the Government General, declared that all Jews above ten years of age were to wear a white badge with a Star of David on their right arm. It was not until nearly two years later that a decree, issued on September 1, 1941, issued badges to Jews within Germany and Poland. This badge was the yellow Star of David with the word "Jude" ("Jew") sewn onto it and worn on the left side of one's chest.

Jennifer Rosenberg, “The Yellow Star,” 1-3. [October 15, 2007] http://history1900s.about.com/od/holocaust/a/yellowstar.htm\

Jewish Virtual Library, “The Star of David,” [October 14, 2007] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/star.html

Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz, Revised ed., (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press), 25-47.

United States Holocaust Museum, [October 12, 2007] http://www.ushmm.org/photos

Book Review: Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz

By: Brian Freeman

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 1995. p.192

In the History of the world there have been few incidences of atrocities that equal to the treatment of the Jews in Europe during World War II. The Holocaust is one of the most important and horrific incidences in the history of mankind. Sixty years later we still ask how and why? We try to find some understanding but it is difficult for us to accept the levels of systematic cruelty and terror experienced by Jews during this period. There are many great authors of Holocaust Literature that give understanding or a glimpse into that world. We have been blessed with great works of literature by Elie Wiesel with his trilogy of books Night, Dawn, and Day. The Diary of Anne Frank and the poetry of Nelly Sachs help paint pictures of understanding. All these authors and their works are great in their own ways. However, there is one author who stands out. Primo Levi and his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, is a true masterpiece of Holocaust literature. It is not simply a recounting of personal tragedies and historical atrocities, but a clear-eyed and highly detailed story of the fragile nature of human personality.

Primo Levi’s story begins July 31, 1919 when he was born to a Jewish middle class family in Turin, Italy. His family had long been assimilated into Italian life. Levy never discovered his Jewish ness until he came up against the racial laws enacted in 1938 by Mussolini Fascist Regime. Levi continued with life and graduated first in his class as a chemist from the University of Turin in 1941. Active in the resistance against the Fascist cause, Levi was captured in northern Italy. He was imprisoned in an Italian transit camp, from which he transferred to Auschwitz. One of the most compelling chapters in Survival in Auschwitz is The Journey. The Journey describes his arrest, transportation, and arrival to Auschwitz. Primo with 650 others was loaded into a freight train for a four day journey without food or water. Primo says,” In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply.” The German SS Soldiers separated those they deemed capable of work from those they deemed incapable, such as women, children and elderly. Only 135 of the 650 from Levi’s train were admitted into Auschwitz, the other 515 went immediately to the gas chambers.

He was herded with the others into the camp and after being stripped naked and having his head shaved. He was given an old striped uniform and the identification numbers 174517 were tattooed on his arm. Levi describes his experience as “Becoming a mindless slave one would soon forget the point of life itself almost not caring whether you live or whether you die is the most inhuman trait imaginable.” Levi uses this kind of depiction as a prisoner with almost unemotional tone that often disguises the horror of what he is describing. As a prisoner of Auschwitz he was forced to work seven days a week with two Sundays off a month which were filled with tedious, exhausting tasks and were often the only opportunity available to attend to personal hygiene needs. The bulk of their time was spent working sixteen hour days in factories and around the camp and making supplies for the war and other items for the Germans. With little food and inadequate clothing, it was easy to fall ill or die from exhaustion while working in the snow and rain. Levi was lucky enough to be sent to the Ka-be or the infirmary to recover from an injury to his Achilles tendon. The Ka-be was overcrowded, and it was populated by individuals with deadly, communicable diseases such as typhus and dysentery. There were no medicines available to relieve the symptoms or the pain and suffering was widespread. Despite the pain and suffering, he was able to rest and build up some strength before returning back to work. Much of the work assigned to them was needless. If not for his degree in chemistry, which earned him a place in the Chemistry Command working indoors during the last winter, Primo would have probably suffered the same fate as about eleven million other people did. Of the eleven million, six million of them were Jews who died during the war.

Primo Levi’s life and writings are marked by his wartime experience and by the guilt of having survived when so many others perished in the German Concentration Camps. In 1987 Primo could no longer withstand the guilt and committed suicide. Levi's haunting memoir about his ten months in the German death camp Auschwitz is an unforgettable chronicle of systematic cruelty and miraculous survival. When reading Levi’s tale of survival and lengthy repatriation, we come to understand the need for telling this extraordinary experience.

Jeannette BaxterAuthor’s, “Primo Levi (1919-1987)” October 12,2007.http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2709.

David Damrosch and David L. Pike, The Longman Anthology World Literature Compact, Compact ed.,(Pearson Education, Inc., 2008), 2680-2691.

Book Review: Elie Wiesel Night

By: Brian Freeman

The Holocaust is one of the most important and horrific times in the history of mankind. Never has the world seen a group of people singled out from society and executed with mass precision as seen during the Holocaust. The shock and terror which the Jewish people faced under Nazi rule can never truly be understood. The survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust have made countless efforts to try to give the world some kind of description of what they experienced. Millions of testimonies and literary works have emerged trying to describe the Holocaust to mankind. One piece of literature that stands out as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature is Elie Wiesel’s Night. The story ranks alongside Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl as one of the best in Holocaust literature. The one hundred nine page story is a simple but devastating account based on Wiesel’s personal Holocaust experience.

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a village in the Carpathian Mountains in northern Transylvania. Elie Wiesel is the author of more than forty celebrated works of fiction and nonfiction. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America Congressional Gold Medal, the French Legion of Honor, and in 1986 was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Night is the first book in the trilogy Night, Dawn, and Day. The books reflect Wiesel’s state of mind during and after the Holocausts. Wiesel was only fifteen when the tragic story of Night unfolded. In order to describe this journey, Wiesel uses a sparse and fragmented narrative style with frequent shifts in point of view. This style of writing really allows the reader to almost feel the emotional and physical pain Wiesel describes.

Northern Transylvania, where Wiesel had been born and raised, was annexed by Hungary in 1940. Wiesel lived there with his Father Shlomo, his mother Sarah, and his three sisters Hilda, Beatrice, and seven year old Tzipora. He was raised in a close knit community of 10,000 to 20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Wiesel was a deeply observant, studied Talmud and yearned to learn all the religious Jewish books. Moshe the Beadle is one of the major characters in Night and sets up two major recurring themes. Moshe is the caretaker in the synagogue and teaches the Kabbalah and the mysteries of the universe in secret to Elie. The first theme Moshe introduces in Night is that spiritual faith is sustained not by answers, but by questions. One day all the foreign Jews are gathered and deported, and Moshe is sent away. Time passes and Moshe returns no longer the same. He runs from Jewish household to household begging for them to listen. Moshe tells them how Gestapo made them dig their own graves and murdered all the Jewish men, women, and children. Time passes on and Moshe’s words are forgotten, which leads to the second theme Moshe introduces. The second them introduced is that the Jews of Sighet and Eliezer were given many warnings and many opportunities to escape the hell.

Even when Germany invaded Hungary at midnight on March 18, 1944, few believed they were in danger. At first the Germans seemed polite and hospitable. On the seventh day of Passover the curtain of hatred was lifted and restrictions on Jews gradually increased. Gold, sliver, and valuables were no longer allowed to be kept by Jews. They were not allowed to visit restaurants, attend the synagogue, or leave home after six in the evening. Eventually they would be forced to distinguish themselves from society by wearing the yellow star of David at all times. Elie’s father makes light of this when he states, “The yellow star? Oh what of it? You don’t die of it…(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)” (11).

The wearing of the star was just the beginning of the cruel injustices placed on the Jews during the Holocaust. Night goes on to tell how Elie, his family, and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos created in Sighet. “The people thought this was a good thing. That they would no longer have to look at all those hostile faces, endure those hate-filled stares. No more fear. No more anguish. We would live among Jews among brothers…” (12). Two weeks later the German secret could no longer be kept. All the Jews in the Sighet would be deported. The forced Jews marched to a train station where a convoy of cattle cars awaited them. With eighty people to a car, little bread, and a few pales of water, the journey to hell began.

Elie arrives with his parents and sisters in Poland at Auschwitz Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II. Men and women are separated on arrival -- Elie and his father to the left; his mother and sisters to the right. Elie would learn that his mother and Tzipora had been sent straight to the gas chamber. The remainder of Night describes Wiesel’s desperate efforts not to be parted from his father and to survive. Wiesel’s attempt to stay close to his father causes him grief and shame at witnessing his father’s slow decline into helplessness. He becomes his father’s caregiver, but his father’s existence threatens his own existence. It is through this struggle that Elie loses his innocence and faith in God.

He managed to remain with his father as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the closing days of the war. Just a few weeks after the two marched to Buchenwald and before the camp was liberated by Allied forces, Wiesel’s father suffered from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion. The last word his father spoke was “Eliezer” (111). His father was taken away to the crematory in the middle night of the without him even knowing.

Wiesel’s story of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp paints a picture of such horror that at the end the reader asks, “Why?” Elie Wiesel wanted the world to know what he saw and experienced as a young boy and how it colored his world forever. He lost his entire family to the Nazis and came away from the concentration camps a survivor but a bitter and disenchanted one. Throughout the book, there is a dark feeling of hopelessness and unreality. It seems difficult to believe that anyone could be so vile and utterly devoid of conscience to send millions of Jews to their deaths. The Holocaust tested those who survived and left them with questions that cannot be answered. Elie Wiesel does not give us the answers, but gives a story of one man’s witness to the death of God, children, innocence, and self.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958.