Night Will Fall 
(or ... What would have become of us, had Bernstein and Hitchcock had been allowed to be our teachers, instead of Wilder?)

Last night Japhia and I watched a new documentary on Netflix, called "Night Will Fall."  It's a hard film to watch, with terrible but terribly important images of what the Allied troops found when they first stumbled upon the concentration camps in Germany.

In March to June of 1945 when Russian, British, and American troops advanced into Germany they took along with them companies of specially trained photographers and movie-camera-men to record for posterity images of the defeated nation, and of the decimation that Nazism had brought onto the country of its own citizens.  What they ended up recording was more than they were ever prepared for -- up-close, unfiltered, raw images of the Holocaust that was practiced in the concentration camps, and the utter dehumanization and destruction of millions of human beings.

Overwhelmed by what they encountered and knowing they were witness to something beyond words and beyond acceptance in the history of humanity, the British government immediately enlisted two leading movie directors of the time -- Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock, to work with the gathered footage and images to create a documentary titled "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey."  The intent was to create a public record for all humanity to see what incomprehensible evil we are capable of, and learn never to allow ourselves to fall prey to it again.  As one line in the narration says, "Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall."

The film was not finished.  The project was taken from Bernstein's and Hitchcock's hands and shelved for political reasons.  Almost immediately after the war, the British realized they needed Germany as an ally against Russian communism in the post-war world, and it was thought the documentary would too severely alienate the German population.  It was also feared that if people in Britain and other Allied countries saw the evidence of what actually happened to the Jews, it would lead people to question and oppose the policy of those governments not to accept Jewish refugees from Germany and Poland, to keep them out of their countries.

The fear was real for we know what happens when people actually see images of what other people are made to suffer.  The image of the body of little Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach in his family's desperate attempt to reach Europe and then Canada was all it took for the governments of Canada and other nations around the world to be forced to open their doors and put resources into their refugee-settlement processes, to reach out to the thousands of Syrian refugees that until then were struggling to be noticed and helped by the world.

Coincidentally last night HBO also premiered a new documentary called "Cries from Syria" which focuses on the dignity and struggle of the people of Syria, and includes up-close and raw footage of atrocities that people have suffered over the past six years at the hands of their own government.  The intent is precisely to re-vitalize flagging care for the refugees.

I wonder ... if the 1945 film project had been allowed to be finished and shown to people of that generation, might history have been different?  Would deepened understanding of our own nature and our capacity for unthinkable evil, have led us to create a different history?  Being more aware of such things always being possible within us, would the world have worked harder and more effectively against them happening again ... in Serbia, in Rwanda, in Syria?

One other thought ...

Instead of the British-planned-then-suppressed Bernstein-Hitchcock project, the intent of which was to show all the world the evil we all are capable of, so as to learn from it, what the world got instead was a hastily-conceived, hastily-crafted American version by Billy Wilder, both shorter in length and more simplistic in its message -- that the German men and women of the S.S. were monsters, and that the American and Allied troops saved the world from them.

No hint of our common capacity to be seduced into evil.  No glimpse into what the Holocaust reveals about humanity in general and what we all are capable of.  Just good guys and bad guys.  

And how much has this mythology shaped -- and does it continue to shape, the history we make?

At which point ... at this point ... it is time for me to breathe deeply, and honestly identify the temptation to which I often fall -- to begin a self-righteous rant about what evil someone else (in this case, America) has brought into the world through their unquestioned sense of their own goodness.  So easy to be as I accuse them of being -- like the self-righteous Pharisee in one of Jesus' little stories (Luke 18:9-14) who stands apart from one whose sin is exposed, and says, "I thank you, Lord, that I am not like him ..."  Which is the Billy Wilder version, but not the Bernstein-Hitchcock lesson of the Holocaust in the concentration camps.

It is easy to fall from recognition of horror, evil and mistakes into judgements of good guys and bad guys, and the "othering of evil."  Far harder just to sit with the recognition of the horror, the evil and the mistakes that are ours as a species.  

But until we learn and are able to do that -- just to sit with the horror we see and let our souls absorb its meaning, is there any way through the night that still so easily falls upon all the world?