Warsaw video repsonse- Jamie Beelow

The video we watched in class displays the Warsaw Ghetto. The intention of this video was to illustrate what was happening to the Jews after they were rounded up and taken from Germany. It shows what the living conditions, and daily lives, of the Jews were like. However, the Nazi’s went through every precaution to show the lives of the Jews were more spectacular than reality. They rounded up Jews and asked them to parade around the streets to show how “active” the ghettos were. They also hired staged actors to go into homes and stage dinner scenes and parties. The video shows actual survivors of Warsaw watching these films in horror, as they recollect their lives in the ghetto.  Numerous survivors viewed the staged depictions in complete shock stating, “When did one see a flower? We would have eaten it. It was food.” They were in disbelief of the way the Germans tried to depict the lives of the Jews. In reality Jewish people lived in single bedroom homes with numerous families; not extravagant homes with china, flowers, and fancy furniture. Later in the video, the film depicts more of the reality of the ghetto. Here, film crews capture corpses on the street, people, skin and bones, lying in the street because they are too weak to walk. The most horrific of all these rolls are ones that illustrate the bodies being carted away to burial grounds where mounds of corpses are created. One roll even shows the roundup of Jewish men and women who were forced to congregate in a bathhouse and strip completely naked as camera men filmed them. Many people in the ghettos maintained hope that this was a temporary situation and they would soon be released to go home. However, as the years went on, they soon realized that this was the least of their horrors, as they watched thousands of Jews being carted to concentration camps. Videos of the Holocaust have always been difficult for me to watch because I have a hard time watching people being treated this way. I don’t understand how a group of people could be ok with exterminating thousands of people.