Night Will Fall

Just watched “Night Will Fall” on Netflix, the 1945 documentary on the Holocaust made by Alfred Hitchcock. So named from a quote in the documentary, “Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall.”

The Hitchcock version of the film was never released as the British/US governments at the time did not want to create more sympathy for the displaced & liberated Jewish people, who understandably did not want to return to their former homes in Germany, Poland, etc., places where they were treated terribly prior to being forced into the concentration camps and ghettos. But the British and US governments also did not want to let these potential illness carrying refugees into their countries either.

Before seeing the film I of course had heard and read many things about the Holocaust, but I had never seen images so brutally honest and telling of the actual conditions the prisoners had to live and try to survive in.

Images of warehouses full of hair (purposely weighed and packaged for some reason), teeth, shoes...mass graves, people literally shrunken down to nothing but skin stretched over bones.

One thing I didn’t realize was how big of a problem relocating the Holocaust survivors was, and this documentary sheds light on the US/British governments seemingly unwilling to provide assistance to those people after freeing them - a theme that has recurred many times since, when countries go to war and those in power are overthrown, only to have the country who won the war not see through the aftermath and ensure the people in the war torn country can fully recover. Governments and politics wage wars, but the citizens in those countries, on both sides, are the ones who suffer the death and destruction. Shame on those in charge for not providing more help to the survivors.

It is the most real/awe inspiring imagery I’ve ever seen, it literally brought me to tears. To think about the incredible # of people that it took to design and carry out a mass execution of this magnitude really made me think about something that I heard mentioned in the show by the Duplass brothers on HBO, Room 104 - in one episode they were discussing if you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler before he came to power? And the repair man says he doesn’t think he would because Hitler is only one man - there had to be a whole of people who shared his ideology in order to carry out something the scale of the Holocaust..would killing one man really have been able to prevent it? And if so, there’s no way to know that another, even more evil person would rise to power, and this time maybe their army wouldn’t be defeated.

The Room 104 show is really good too by the way for anyone that hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

If you have seen Night Will Fall I’m interested to know what you thought about it, and your thoughts on a film with this type of imagery being burried in storage boxes for 70 years instead of being part of the public’s consciousness?code