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“A Film Unfinished” and Jewish Degradation
by Lawrence Bush
Just watched A Film Unfinished at the cinema in Woodstock (see Nick Jahr’s excellent commentary on the film). Only eighteen people in the theater, all gray-headed, on this Sunday afternoon. At the film’s end, a woman spoke in the dark: “I was there in the ghetto. If you want to talk to me before you leave . . .” Everyone who was there stayed and asked her questions about life for a relatively well-off Jewish child in the Warsaw Ghetto . . .
Why did the Nazis make the propaganda film on which this film is based? Three purposes seem to emerge: First, most obviously, to show how uncaring towards one another the Jews of the Ghetto allegedly were. The rich stuffing their faces while the poor starve. I wondered, in the course of watching, if there had been efforts, perhaps led by leftists, to collectivize the remaining resources in any of the ghettos — and I thought about how appalled I would be if a committee approached me, under those conditions, and said that I would have to contribute two out of the six ounces of bread I’m holding for my children in order to feed the other children . . .
Second, the Nazis simply seemed to view Jews being Jews as repellent to watch. Like watching rats or other vermin at their daily activities. And indeed, the people are so degraded, so helpless-looking, so hungry, so misshapen by hardship, that it is hard to watch them. I felt something I have not felt in a long time: the degradation of being Jewish. Of being whupped. Of being made to scurry for survival. It occurred to me that in my ruminations and presentations on the ambivalence many modern Jews feel about Jewish identity, I’ve greatly underestimated the degradation factor, the internalized anti-Semitism . . .
Third, the Nazis seemed to want to create a document for posterity, for after the Jews were exterminated: This is how they lived. This is how they were. This is the subhuman culture we exterminated, at great sacrifice to ourselves.
It’s a very hard movie to watch.