While studying at Yale, I took
a seminar on documentaries following two other, more pertinent film courses on narrative itself. I even took a
preaching seminar on story-telling. The documentary choice was off my
trajectory. The opportunity cost was large, considering that I was otherwise
taking courses in Yale’s better-reputed humanities fields of philosophy of religion,
theology, and history. Now perhaps my excursion into the documentary genre can
bear some fruit, for I analyze here the documentary, Anne Frank Remembered (1995). The strength of this documentary I
take to be its reliance on witnesses even at the expense of narration to tell
the story. People could say with definiteness what had happened to Anne Frank
since she and her sister and parents left Amsterdam. Their journey evinced the
mentality of the Nazis as one not just as dehumanizing the Jews, but as
treating them worse than livestock. Even when Nazi Germany was losing the war,
the Nazis foreswore the use-value of the Jews starved or gassed.
The eye-witness account of the
Franks’ train trip from Vesterborgh, a transfer camp in The Netherlands, to
Auschwitz in southeast Poland. The trip for the 1,019 “passengers” began on
September 3, 1944 and lasted three days. The Jews onboard were in cramped
livestock cars that uncomfortably held forty to fifty people. The “passengers”
had to sit mostly, though some had to stand even while “sleeping.” Urination
and defecation make the trip worse still. The Jews felt completely powerless. “We
felt the end would not be good,” the eye-witness said. Even so, “we refused to
imagine the worst.”
The worst was Auschwitz. The
Nazis there told the new arrivals that they would die there. “Our brains
functioned differently,” the eye-witness from the train said. It was a matter
of survival. Crucially, she added, “We were less than beasts—less than animals.”
This is reflected not only at the camp, but in the train ride as well. At least
animals would have been fed en route.
At Auschwitz, the food consisted of a piece of bad bread.
On October 28, 1944, the two
Frank sisters were sent to Bergen Belsen Camp in Germany. New buildings were
under construction, so the Jews had to spend the upcoming winter cramped in unheated
tents. On November 7, a fierce storm destroyed some of the tents. The Jews were
being deliberately starved, frozen, and racked with disease even though the
medications were not far away. In this sense too, the Jews were not only dehumanized,
but also treated less well than beasts. After all, who would starve an animal
that could otherwise be of some use? Both Margret and Anne succumbed to disease
late that winter. The subsequent publication of Anne’s diary vindicated her
potential “use-value” to German society as a notable writer, yet she was
intentionally starved and not treated.
Without a doubt, being at a death camp triggered
changes to the occupants’ minds so they could adapt to survive in a context in
which survival was forbotten. So too,
the minds of the men who decided to treat certain humans worse than animals
must also have been warped. The variability of the human mind is perhaps here
the real culprit. Specifically, that a mind could find meaning in a situation that
was essentially a slaughter house, and another mind could think of other people
as having worth less than that of livestock, tell us that this species, homo SAPIENS, cannot safely rely on its
mind as a safeguard or reality-tester. Especially as time passes, the
documentary may hopefully become more and more estranger in the sense of being not only foreign, but strange as
well. The mentalities discussed from up close may be so far from those of the
viewers that the inescapable inference will be that the mind itself cannot be
trusted; it can treat as valid some of the most horrendous notions and related
ways of treating other people. Even the way the brain seeks to preserve its
sanity in an awful situation attests to the mind’s willingness to leave reality
behind. In the documentary, even the Jews themselves who were in the Holocaust
look back at how their minds changed and remarked at how strange (and dramatic)
the change was. Watching the
Israeli court’s coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 can give the
viewer an eerie sense of the mentality on the other side, which, in being
preoccupied with making the trains run efficiently, merely assumed that the
living cargo was less than animals. It is the mind’s presumption to being right
when it was so utterly wrong that was perhaps really on trial.
