Universal human monstrosity never ends!

Rating: 10/10 (5 December 2015)

This film is probably the darkest film on the Holocaust I ,have aver seen because there is not one single moment of non-suffering, non- torturing, non-cremating, non-exterminating with gas, with bullets, with fire. It wants to show what the Nazi version of Dante's Hell was in this very case for Jews, but it was the same for all social, ethnic or national groups the Nazis or their Ukrainian, Hungarian and other allies decided to exterminate, such as Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals, social marginals, trade-unionists, etc. The concentration camps were not only for the Jews. Some might have escaped the concentration camps, like trade-unionists for example, but then they were hanged to lamp posts along streets to be the proper example to the proper Germans and keep everyone within the narrow limits of National Socialism.
When we have said that we have said everything that counts. In this particular case people were brought there to be exterminated and then incinerated, and they were arriving by the thousands. Those who were doing that dirty work were prisoners that were selected to survive a few months, generally four or five, and they were those who moved the new arrivals, pushed them into the room where they had to undress, then into the shower for disinfection, meaning the disinfection of the world of the vermin these prisoners were for the Nazis. It was not presented like that of course, only disinfection of the bodies before having some hot tea. They had then to sort out the clothes left behind, recuperate the gold and valuables, the papers of all types and of course the clothes and the shoes. Then they had to clean up the shower room, take the bodies to the ovens to be cremated, then bring the coal to the ovens, take the ashes away and dump them in the next door river, etc. On the other side of the crematorium some women were sorting out the suitcases and everything in them and the clothes and shoes in some warehouses. That was an industrial definitely sustainable extermination procedure that was supposed to cost as little as possible and even to bring to the market vast amounts of goods, products and commodities. Even these bodies, alive or dead were used for medical experiments to improve biological knowledge and other scientific or technical know-how.
And what the film shows brilliantly is the fact that these working prisoners were organized in a hierarchy of Ober Kapos, Kapos and then prisoners, but also in various "teams" or "brigades" that had very precisely defined duties and territories. At the same time some flexibility was necessary for things to work smoothly and the Ober Kapos and Kapos were those who could move – ordered or not though always under control – the people that were needed here and there for some special or particular missions or tasks, like repairing a lock or carrying a body to the autopsy room where some of the doctors were prisoners too, or cleaning the tables or quarters of the SS.
The film though has one more interest. It shows that some human feelings could survive in such a death factory. Saul dedicates his very last days in this camp to saving a young man he declares is his son by burying him, hence getting him away from the autopsy room, away from cremation and into the ground with the Kaddish sung by a rabbi. All that is futile, useless, pointless, and yet it is essential because it shows in all these prisoners who are just surviving for a short time and are destined to be killed and incinerated sooner than later some human feeling, respect, honor, shine. The film adds in some of them the desire to rebel, to liberate themselves from the camp, from this tyranny. That too is human: resist any tyranny by principle because yielding to it is destroying you utterly, that is to say spiritually.
As such this film is a Jewish masterpiece, and yet it is also universal. Never in any historical period humanity has been totally clean of such horror. Any regime, even the most democratic, has produced such horrors: Guantanamo and the Americans, torture in Algeria and Indochina by the French, torture in Vietnam by the Americans, Pol Pot and his Red Khmers, Mao Zedong and his Red Brigades, Stalin and his Gulag, and all the colonial wars of the French, the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and some other Dutch people and Germans, Russians and Ukrainians, Turks and so many more. We have to understand this film as being universal and not exclusively, specifically and narrowly Jewish. To reduce it to the Jewish Holocaust under the Nazis would be to fall in the trap of an ideological reduction of the death instinct in man.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU