Hitchcock's War

Hitchcock's War

   Just in case you missed it, a piece of history, terrible as it was, was shown on the PBS show, Frontline.  It was archival footage taken by soldiers, mostly American and British but some Russian, of the first days of arrival at the Nazi concentration camps.  In their rush to leave, the Nazi soldiers burned and destroyed as much as they could (including prisoners) in a futile effort to hide their atrocities.  And as difficult as it is to watch, it is indeed a part of history, captured in all of its horror of what humans can do to tarnish the word "humanity" (or perhaps define it).  The Frontline show titled Memory of the Camps will be available online for another month.

   Film footage of the camps was already in circulation not long after the war, but somehow this footage was shelved for nearly 40 years before Frontline bought the rights and showed it for the first time in 1985.  Controversial to say the least, film crews went back and forth until Afred Hitchcock, yes that Alfred Hitchcock, stepped up to the plate and decided to put his input into the footage.  As Frontline reveals:  Hitchcock is credited as "treatment advisor."  He acted as a consultant in organizing the footage, along with writers Colin Wills and Richard Crossman (both of the London News Chronicle) and editors Peter Tanner and Stewart MacAllister.  In an interview before he died, Lord Sidney Bernstein explained that Hitchcock's contribution was to help shape the way the material was presented.  "He took a circle round each concentration camp as it were on a map, different villages, different places and the numbers of people -- so they must have known about it...Otherwise you could show a concentration camp, as you see them now, and it could be anywhere, miles away from humanity.   He brought that into the film."  Another known contribution was Hitchcock's including the wide establishing shots which support the documentary feel of the film and showed that the events seen could not have been staged.  According to Peter Tanner, one of the film's editors, Hitchcock's concern was that "we should try to prevent people thinking that any of this was faked...so Hitch was very careful to try to get material which could not possibly be seen to be faked in any way."

   If you've watched Hitchcock's trademark suspense films such as Rear Window,  this footage of the camps is even more horrifying.  It is extremely difficult to watch, to see pits nearly the size of football fields being filled with bodies, then to see the finished burial sites capped and with their identifying signs.  Pit #1 -- 5000 bodies.  Pit #2 -- 5000 bodies.  Pit #3...all the way up to Pit #7, and all from just one camp.  Dachau alone held nearly 80,000 prisoners (there was even a brothel in a separate section, certain female prisoners picked out and used until they perished, only to be replaced).  And despite all the endless emaciated bodies being dragged across the dirt and thrown into the pits like rotting garbage (the captured SS guards were made to do this, mostly in front of German officials from nearby towns who pleaded ignorance as to what was going on in the camps), the additional horror comes from the camera pulling back and showing a map view of Germany and where the camps were located...20,000 in Germany alone (about 42,500 camps throughout Europe according to an article in The New York Times).

   Alfredo Guevara, founder of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, had this to say (as taken from the book Ten Eternal Questions by Zoe Sallis):  Yes, I think we pay for the consequences of our actions.  But I don't like the idea that there is some charge to be levied.  If I am able to perform noble or worthy actions, if I am able to enter someone else's skim to understand them and accept them, for whoever understands accepts, I am a better person.  That is my reward.  I create it myself.  If I cause harm, if I am so selfish that I am unable to understand other people, if I am not able to put myself in their skin and understand their way of being and their vision of the world, I impoverish myself so much, I am such a valueless thing, that this is my punishment, to be a fool, an empty being, to be without love.  To translate it into the words of Catholic Christendom, heaven and hell lie within oneself.

   As my wife pointed out, as horrible as this film's footage is, such atrocities are still going on throughout our world; and, like the German town officials who pleaded ignorance, we are just as guilty of tuning out, watching a blip on the news of a bombing or a war and then heading off to something more lighthearted, a football game perhaps, or a fantasy series of medieval times.  Prisoners and killings, tortures and rapes...they are happening somewhere, but thank heavens it's not in our backyard.  The reality, of course, is that it is in our backyard.  The world is our backyard.  And after watching this Frontline film --and one should watch it-- one can only hope that future generations will not be watching archival footage of our world today, gasping at the horrors that they're seeing, and wondering why so many, in such a connected world, simply stood by, pleading ignorance of what was going on.