Director: Yael Hersonski, color, s & w, 89 Min., 2010
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During the month of May in 1942, a few weeks before deportations to the extermination camp Treblinka began, secret films were ordered to be shot in the ghettos of Warsaw, on the orders of the SS. The barely touched original footage survived the war, to then emerge from the film archives of the GDR. Up to now, the material has provided detailed insight into the everyday life of the ghettos. The images show the gatherings of the Jewish security services set up by the SS, the work of the Jewish Ghetto Police, the kosher butchering of a hen, death on the streets and burials in mass graves.
The filmmaker Yael Hersonski, granddaughter of a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, sets the 60-minute long, silent, black and white images in the context of comments from witnesses of the era. The juxtaposition of comments from those who survived the ghetto with the perpetrators’ perspectives makes it very clear that the intention was to use it as propaganda. Scenes depicting what were supposed to be the Jewish upper-class in restaurants and bourgeois living rooms are contrasted with other scenes of poverty. Through these images the so-called luxurious living conditions of Jews are portrayed as well as the idea the Nazis held of their enemy, “greedy, unscrupulous Jews”, conveying the inherent anti-Semitism of the National Socialists.
Scene by scene, the reality behind the images is deciphered via the recollections of survivors as well as the reconstructed testimony from one of the cameramen involved. Sceptical remarks about the filming appear in Adam Czerniakow’s diary, the Jewish Council's Chairman. Two months later the writer of these took his own life, after receiving a list of 6000 names of those to be deported. Quotations from the texts of the Underground Archive “Oneg Shabbat” detail the daily suffering of those living in the ghettos. Only the statements from cameraman, Willy Wist, remain uncritical and impartial when confronted with his false portrayal.
ARTHOUSE CINEMA
Arthouse Cinema is the regular film program of the Goethe-Institut Indonesia. Every 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month, we screen independent movies, avant-garde movies, retrospectives, experimental films or documentary films from Europe and Indonesia – anything but the mainstream!
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