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A decade after the end of World War II, East German archivists began to sort through thousands of films stashed in a vault. One copy of an unedited film was found titled “The Ghetto.” Another reel was discovered with outtakes of this film and showed that much of the scenes in original film were in fact staged. A new documentary called ‘A Film Unfinished” attempts to shed light on how the film was really shot. (Photo: Steven Davy) Download MP3
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JEB SHARP: The Nazis documented, on film, life in the Warsaw Ghetto in occupied Poland. Some scenes showed well-heeled Jews eating sumptuous dinners. Others showed poor Jews starving to death. For years, some historians used the film as something of a record of life in the ghetto. Then, another reel was discovered. It showed the filmmakers staging the scenes. All of this prompted Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski to put together the Nazi footage in its entirety, and to solicit the input of ghetto survivors. The result is called “A Film Unfinished.” It opened today in New York. Hersonski says the footage the Nazis shot in 1942 made a kind of morbid sense to her.
YAEL HERSONSKI: When I first watched the footage, I understood the basic attempt, which was to edit scenes in which we see Jews allegedly living a life of luxury, and to cut it with scenes that seemed to be more documentary scenes, from the streets, from the outside, where people were starving and dying. When I was asking myself why they showed also the atrocities and not only the false fact that Jews were well off, I think that the only clue we have there is something that the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary four days before the filming began. He wrote that now when they have decided to move the Jews to the east, it is urgent for them to make films, as many as possible, for the education of the future generations of the Third Reich.
SHARP: When you open up these reels and play them, what are you actually seeing? Give us some example of the luxury, and also the destitution.
HERSONSKI: The film begins with a general shot from a high angle, of the ghetto. And I think that they were trying to create a snapshot of daily life. But inside this snapshot, to create their own narrative about how the Jewish community was, without the context of the Nazi occupation. And we see many scenes in which Jews are having dinner at a restaurant and eating food that you couldn’t get, even in Germany during that time. People are wearing best suits and dresses. And then it changes and shows the opposite scenes of people who are actually dying in front of the camera. So they wanted to build a typical character of the Jew – whether a rich Jew who is manipulating, exploiting the weak; or the subhuman Jew who is always in rags, and create a reaction of disgust. There is also a long sequence which merely shows a series of Jewish rituals. But these rituals are, from the religious perspective, distorted as well.
SHARP: And one of those Jewish rituals is a funeral. And as a survivor points out, who ends up seeing the footage, they get it wrong.
HERSONSKI: Right. One big, rich funeral, in the Jewish community, had one coffin. And they used it in order to build this ceremony which looks much more Christian than a Jewish one, because Jews are not buried in coffins. And one of the survivors, when she sees that, she almost laugh, I think, because it was not done the way the film shows.
POLISH SPEAKING
SHARP: Now, you were quite focused on having these survivors, the last people who would have experienced the reality of the ghetto, participate in this filmmaking. What motivated them, the ones who agreed and who felt they actually could handle it?
HERSONSKI: Well, I think that these people, they had basic curiosity to see this place of childhood again. So for me, it was quite a surprise to realize that the experience of the survivors watching the film was not completely that of horror or fear. There were also moments in which they smiled and laughed because they remembered how it was, the people that surrounded them, things that they liked to see and to remember again. They added such important emotional layer to the images, and for me it was the most overwhelming stage of the filming. They had a lot of information about the staging. And one survivor was saying something, that even the most documentary, seemingly documentary scenes, when we see a street, the people who are passing by were specifically chosen to do so.
SHARP: So this was for propaganda purposes. Did you come to understand what the Nazis intended to portray?
HERSONSKI: I think – and this is my own very personal speculation – I think they were trying to capture a kind of a last snapshot of a community – a community in which the upper classes are completely immoral and corrupted, exploit the lower classes, the weak, the poor. And they are, in fact, the cause of atrocities we can see in this film that were caused, of course, by the Nazis.
SHARP: And just to be clear – I mean, propaganda intended to justify what the Nazis ultimately did?
HERSONSKI: I think so, yes.
SHARP: Just to underscore this, what did, indeed, happen to the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto?
HERSONSKI: Two months after the film crew had left the ghetto, nearly 70% of population, meaning 300,000 people, were sent to the gas chambers in Treblinka. And in general, most of the ghetto was just annihilated. In April ’43, there was the uprising, which brought the final end of the ghetto.
SHARP: Why did you make this film at this moment? What was really driving you?
HERSONSKI: Well, thinking of the time when no witnesses will be left to remember, and actually we’ll have only the archives and their images. During the decades, the survivors were still a mass of people. It was much more important to listen to them. But now when they are slowly dying, I think that the images are much more important to understand than anything else, because to understand what it contains is to try and seek full truth.
SHARP: Yael Hersonski – thank you very much.
HERSONSKI: Thank you for inviting me.
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