By Nicoletta Peddis
Current student Nicoletta Peddis reflects on the recent screening of Night and Fog, shown as part of Holocaust Memorial Day, and the subsequent discussions surrounding questions of how to teach and critique culture representations of the Holocaust.
As I speak to you now, the icy water of the ponds and rains fills the hollows of the mass graves with a frigid and muddy water, as murky as our memory.
(Night and Fog)
On the 27th January 1945, the gates of Auschwitz were opened for the first time. Every year, the 27th January marks Holocaust Memorial Day. On and around the 27th January people from all around the world come together to remember the Holocaust and to reflect on the horrific events, on genocides and oppressions past and present. One of the events organised this year by the City of York Council to commemorate the events took place on Wednesday 24th January at York St John University. Following a screening of Alain Resnais 1955’s film Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard), York St. John’s academics Gill Simpson and Adam Stock led a discussion about studying, teaching and critiquing cultural representation of the Holocaust.
The name of the film comes from the Keitel decree, which in 1941 ordered that all Resistance fighters captured in other European countries be brought back to Germany to disappear into concentration camps, explicitly stating that the prisoners were to vanish into “Nacht und Nebel” (night and fog).The film documents the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek, and was filmed in 1955, only ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps. It was commissioned by the museum exhibition ‘Resistance, Liberation, Deportation’, which opened on November 10th 1954 in Paris as part of a series of events to mark the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the camps, sponsored by French government’s historical research on concentration camps. Resnais was initially reluctant to direct the film because, having had no involvement in the camps, he was not sure if he could portray an as accurate as possible representation of the events. Not wanting to speak for the victims and the survivors of the camps, Resnais chose as his screenwriter the poet Jean Cayrol, who had survived the horrors of Mauthausen-Gusen’s concentration camp.
Night and Fog can be described as an ‘anti-documentary’, as it sets up a tension between the necessity of remembering and the impossibility of documenting a reality so horrendous that becomes unspeakable. The voice-over narration is filled with doubt and, referring to the viewer’s difficulty of understanding the unthinkable, it intervenes to say how it is “useless to describe what went on in these cells,” and to repeat again and again that “words are insufficient “. Resnais and Cayrol seems to suggest that, if we cannot document that particular reality in a traditional way, we can and we have to reflect and examine and interrogate our own responses. The film pushes us to the conclusion that only by looking back reflectively “when there is nothing but ruins and desolation,” we can commit ourselves to prevent further atrocities, a point made loud and clear in the ending of the film: “we survey these ruins with a heartfelt gaze, certain the old monster lies crushed beneath the rubble. We pretend to regain hope as the image recedes, as though we’ve been cured of the plague of the camps. We pretend it was all confined to one country, one point in time. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us, and a deaf ear to humanity never-ending cry”. One of the film most powerful question is: “then, who is responsible?”, and the ending points to the fact that we should feel responsible for thinking that evil lies beneath the ruins of concentration camps and has no place in our times. As Adam Stock reflected after the screening, “Holocaust should make us all uncomfortable as Europeans in terms of what governments did and didn’t do, especially now at a time when in the world there is the highest number of displaced human being since World War II”. We fail to commemorate the Holocaust if we don’t look back and reflect on the language of hatred of the past alongside the words of discrimination and fear of our times.
Commenting on the most common question he was asked about surviving in a death camp, Primo Levi reflected on the imperative of reflecting on the Holocaust:
There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred. It is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man, it is a poison fruit sprung form the deadly trunk of fascism, although outside and beyond fascism itself. If understanding is impossible, however, knowledge is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again: even our consciences. For this reason, it is the duty of everyone to meditate on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admired, and adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the credibility or the soundness of the things they said, but from the suggestive way in which they said them. And we must remember that their faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions. (…) The memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can serve as support and warning (https://newrepublic.com/article/119959/interview-primo-levi-survival-auschwitz ).
The screening of Night and Fog and the discussion afterwards were a vital part of the process of engaging with cultural representations of the Holocaust in both a critical and emotional manner, and to spread the fundamental message that we should never stop engaging with this material to commemorate the past and to listen to “humanity never-ending cry” in the past and in our times.