Comments and Review: Night Will Fall

On Monday at 9 PM, as the Juno snowstorm was gearing up out here on the east end of Long Island, my wife and I gathered warmly in front of our TV to see the HBO premiere of, Night Will Fall. Cindi, my wife had told me for a few days we must watch this new documentary with new unseen footage of the Holocaust taken by military cameramen while the war was not yet over. I had no idea what I was about to see. While I have seen photos and other shows, nothing had the raw power of the footage of, Night Will Fall, other than perhaps many hours in the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

The documentary, Night Will Fall, was directed by Andre Singer, who used moving film footage taken by British, American and Soviet military cameramen. Sidney Bernstein had been in charge of collecting the film during the war. Intense footage from Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Auschwitz was in fact taken when the allies first entered the camps many times not knowing what they were about to film. These cameramen were trained by the Allied Army to film the advance into Germany. Mr. Singer uses raw footage that even shocked Alfred Hitchcock when he flew over to England in 1945 to organize a film using the miles of this footage. His project was never completed because fellow filmmaker Billy Wilder completed one that was less controversial and widely distributed after the war. The documentary deals with this issue too.

One cannot accurately put down in a few lines the shock/ horror of watching/seeing thousands upon thousands of starved to death or nearly dead tortured souls. Then there was the ovens footage with some ovens still smoldering with human remains not yet totally cremated. It was hard to come to grips that their ordeal of these targeted Jewish souls that started, using the words of a friend, “Sleeping in their lovely house, when suddenly a banging on the door happens…. for millions (the horror) started with a rat tat tat on the front door.” But, Night Will Fall, shows how it ended for those millions, either in huge football field size God only know how deep open pit graves made with bulldozers, or in the crematoriums. The cameramen zoomed in on the faces of the tortured, the faces of the dead being carried to the huge pits, and even from the ovens…it was horrific.

The documentary also showed the locals from the nearby towns being marched through the camps, to be forced to look into the ovens, the huge open pit graves, and lastly past the skeletoned survivors, some who are people we may have met in our lives when we saw the tattoo’s of their numbers on their arms.

I was so moved I wrote this piece to bring, Night Will Fall, to your attention. I know my review left so much out and does not do the efforts of Mr. Singer justice. This is a must see, for everyone.