It’s The Jews, Stupid!

I might have seen Anne Frank’s body.

That was what went through my mind as I watched HBO’s documentary, “Night Will Fall.” In 1945, as Allied soldiers liberated the concentration camps, combat and newsreel cameramen recorded the scenes from hell that they encountered. Several scenes showed piles of bodies in Bergen-Belsen — the footage filmed days after Anne Frank died.

The cameramen worked under the supervision of British producer Sidney Bernstein, and the footage was supposed to have become a film, “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” Its intended purpose: to show the German people what has been done in their name.

Who was supposed to have directed the film? None other than Bernstein’s friend, Alfred Hitchcock. But the project was never completed. The project remained in the can, though the prosecutors at Nuremburg used its images as evidence in the war crimes trials. 

“Night Will Fall” is simply devastating.  There is no way that the eye can “un-see” what it portrays. Nor can the mind “un-know” why Allied cameramen filmed their visual records in the first place – prophetically, to bear witness against the day when people would come to deny that it ever happened.

Except for one thing.

“Night Will Fall” spoke of “prisoners,” “inmates,” “victims.” But who were they?

It takes an hour for “Night Will Fall” to get around to uttering the word “Jew” — and when it comes, it is from the lips of a Jewish survivor.

For more —