Theater of Cruelty (20 page)

One of the great merits of Yael Hersonski’s
A Film Unfinished
is that she doesn’t press any answers onto the viewer. She doesn’t pretend to know precisely what the Nazis were thinking when they commissioned or made this awful film. Her aim is not to make a
particular political or moral statement, even though politics may have inspired a certain line of cinematic inquiry. Hersonski, an Israeli in her thirties, is after something else, which has to do with the nature of cinema, with being a witness, with recording reality, and how it affects filmmakers as well as the audience. In her own words:

Having grown up with films and photographs of the Holocaust, she fears that we have become numb to the images of horror. She says, “I mean, we see it as far away, black and white images of history, as dry illustrations, as objective documentation—as allegedly objective documentation—like it got done by itself.” What she demonstrates with great finesse is how subjective our perceptions actually are. She shows the same footage from utterly different points of view: that of the cameraman, Wist, whose recorded testimony is read by an actor (Wist died in 1999), and that of several survivors of the ghetto who are now living in Israel. We watch the survivors watching the film, sometimes covering their eyes when the pictures (or the memories) become too painful. Their comments are mixed with readings from ghetto diaries, including Czerniaków’s.

The cameraman, an owlish-looking figure in glasses, whose own image suddenly appears in one of the outtakes of the ghetto streets, as though by accident, does not come across as a deliberate liar but as a man who lived his life in shocked denial. He was, in his own
word, “shattered” by the experience, and tried to distance himself from it as much as he could afterward. Aware of the “terrible conditions” in the ghetto, he claims that he never had any inkling of the ultimate fate awaiting the Jews. They themselves had no idea, he recalls with great conviction, even though his contacts with the Jews can hardly have been intimate. When it comes to Wist’s own complicity in acts of sadism, such as the filming of naked people forced to humiliate themselves and others in the ritual bath, he hides behind technicalities, talking about the difficulty of filming in low light.

The survivors, filmed by Hersonski, mostly stare at the images in numbed silence, afraid, as one of them says, of recognizing her own mother in the crowd. One of the women can’t bear to look at the piles of corpses being dropped into a great hole in the ground, like rubbish in a garbage dump. She explains that when she lived in the ghetto, as a young girl, she grew so used to such things that it hardly affected her anymore, except once, when she tripped over a corpse and found herself with her face pressed against the face of a dead man. The memory of her mother comforting her with the extraordinary luxury of a crust of bread and a speck of jam still brings tears to her eyes. And she cries now when she watches the film. “Today,” she says, “I am human. Today I can cry again. I am so glad that I can cry and I am human.”

And what about us, the viewers who were neither victims nor complicit in the crimes? In some ways, this is the most painful question raised by Hersonski’s film, because there is an element of voyeurism in watching atrocities, whether we like it or not, and yet it is important to be reminded of man’s capacity for inhumanity and not to forget what happened in the past. I can remember a debate in the German press almost twenty years ago, when an exhibition about the Holocaust was held at a villa in Wannsee, outside Berlin, the very spot where the logistics of genocide had been planned on a cold
morning in January 1942 by brandy-drinking Nazi officials. Photographs were displayed on the villa’s walls of cowering women, stripped of their clothes, lined up in front of freshly dug pits in Poland and Lithuania moments before being shot. The pictures were taken by German killers, as mementos, one last humiliation before the murder of their victims.

Should we be watching this now? Should these women be humiliated once again by our gaze? Weren’t we all being turned into peeping toms too? It was decided by the organizers of the exhibition that the importance of showing historical evidence, of making sure people didn’t forget, was greater than the dangers of prurience. Hersonski, by making her film, clearly thinks so too. But implicitly, she takes the dilemmas of witnessing horrors further. Seeing what the Nazis did is one thing, but what about watching images of atrocities taking place in our own time? Mass murder and torture can now be seen in photography exhibitions, magazines, and movies, on the Internet, and even on the evening news.

Talking about her film, Hersonski made this link with the present quite clear: “What is my ethical position when I’m sitting very comfortably in my living room and seeing whatever is happening a few kilometers from my city in the occupied territories?” Her point is not that Gaza is like the Warsaw ghetto and she does not suggest that Israeli behavior can be compared to Nazi mass murder. The question is how we respond to images of human suffering, especially if we can be held in some way responsible:

Hersonski believes that the bombardment of photographic images has numbed us. Others have thought this, and then changed their minds.
⁹
It was not a problem that occurred to the makers of
Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today
. Filmed atrocities were still too fresh, too shocking. Perhaps this also explains why the Nazis refused to finish
Das Ghetto
. German audiences might have been so horrified by the images of Jewish suffering that the propaganda message, whatever it was, would have gotten lost. One hopes that this would have been the case. The impact of
A Film Unfinished
is surely sufficient proof that, even in our media-saturated age, filmed images can still move our feelings, if not necessarily create a better world.

YAMADA FUTARO
(1922–2001) was a novelist, known in Japan chiefly for his mystery stories. He studied medicine before the war and was a voracious reader of European, mainly French, literature. Donald Keene, the éminence grise of Japanese scholarship in the US, was born in the same year as Yamada and shared his taste in French literature, though “Yamada probably read more of Balzac than I did.” Even as Tokyo was being obliterated around him by B-29 bombers in early 1945, Yamada was reading Maeterlinck’s
Pelléas et Mélisande
. Keene was in Okinawa then, and carried
Phèdre
in his knapsack.

And so, “in some ways,” Keene observes, “we were alike.” Which makes the diary entries of this bookish Japanese intellectual with cosmopolitan tastes all the more surprising. March 10, 1945:

Keene, who never hated the Japanese, even though he certainly looked forward to their wartime defeat, tries to find a charitable explanation for Yamada’s bloodlust, and his own lack of it:

He adds that “the dropping of the atomic bombs profoundly shocked me.”

Fair enough. Like more than 70 million other Japanese in March 1945, Yamada was facing the almost total destruction of his country. But there was more to it: he was convinced, long before the catastrophic end of the war, that without a passionate belief in
Yamato damashii
, “the spirit of Japan,” his country was doomed. He had an exulted, heroic, quasi-religious view of national destiny, shared by many Japanese writers at the time (not only Japanese writers, of course, but they are the subject at hand). Keene, in his superb little book
So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish
, tries to figure out why.
¹

Why were so many writers and intellectuals in Japan ecstatic about the news of Japan’s successful raid on Pearl Harbor? And they were not all right-wing fanatics either. Keene mentions a distinguished scholar of English and French literature, Yoshida Ken’ichi, son of the postwar prime minister Yoshida Shigeru. Ken’ichi (1912–1977) had studied at King’s College, Cambridge, before the war, lived in Paris and London, and translated Poe, Baudelaire, and Shakespeare. Here he is, just after Pearl Harbor:

This image of clearing skies, of clouds being lifted, is common in poems and diaries written at the time of Pearl Harbor. One reason is that the skies had been far from clear in the low decade of bloody campaigns in China that preceded it. The feeling was common that on December 8, 1941, Japan was at last fighting the real enemy. Whereas the war in China, officially designated in 1937 as the “China Incident,” felt ignoble and deeply hypocritical, with all the propaganda of liberating Asia barely concealing mass murder, taking on the “Anglo-American beasts” felt like a noble, even glorious enterprise.

There was a racial element in this, born of a sense of cultural humiliation, experienced more strongly, perhaps, by intellectuals, especially Westernized intellectuals, than by most other Japanese. The greatest Japanese writer of the early twentieth century, Natsume Soseki (1867–1916), had warned his countrymen in 1914 that the speed and intensity of modernization along Western lines would lead to a collective nervous breakdown. In 1941, the breakdown appears to have been complete. Ito Sei (1905–1969), a poet and novelist who translated
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
after the war, wrote on December 9, 1941:

And Ito, as Keene remarks, did not consider himself to be a fanatic (nor, clearly, was he very well informed about Nazi Germany). What his words reveal, of course, is a crippling lack of confidence, a feeling of humiliation that had turned lethal. In most cases, this wasn’t lasting—at least not the lethal aspect. Yamada’s overwrought cries for revenge, as late as 1946, were rare. Ito, as well as Yoshida, became a friend of Keene and spent a year at Columbia University on his recommendation.

Keene first came across wartime diaries, by Japanese soldiers, as a US Navy translator. These were often far from fanatical, or even particularly ideological. In Keene’s words:

Why, then, did he decide to concentrate on the accounts left behind by well-known literary figures? Keene’s main reason is that they were simply better written than most. “The surviving diaries by ‘unknown’ Japanese,” he writes, “tend to be repetitious because the writers usually lacked the literary skill to make their experiences distinctive.” Besides, as he also explains, one can’t read all the diaries of the time. So one might as well stick to real writers.

This raises questions upon which Keene does not choose to dwell: How representative were writers and intellectuals? Did they simply express popular feeling with greater skill? Or were their views and emotions perhaps too distinctive to illuminate what was in the thoughts and feelings of most “unknown” Japanese? There are no watertight answers to these questions, of course. For it is impossible to know what most people really thought at a time when expressing the unorthodox, even in diaries, could have dire consequences. The Thought Police, as well as one’s neighbors and other busybodies, were constantly prowling around for subversive or defeatist elements.