A Day In the Warsaw Ghetto; The Truth Shall Make Us Free: Inside the Neo-Nazi Network

With the recent release of Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated Schindler's List, interest in Holocaust-related materials is high. a Day in the Warsaw Ghetto delivers a haunting montage of photographs, taken by Heinz Joest, a German officer who walked through the Warsaw ghetto on September 19, 1941--his 43rd birthday--and took 140 photographs. In 1982, a year before he died, the ailing Joest turned over his macabre photo collection. Combining dramatic readings from ghetto journals, sound effects, and the pictures themselves, filmmaker Jack Kuper's a Day in the Warsaw Ghetto evokes images ranging from the sacred (a secret wedding ceremony) to the profane (Jews being ordered to dance around a basketful of corpses) in its recreation of the daily horrors of ghetto life. Although many of us have become sadly accustomed to the sight of Holocaust imagery, the details continue to jolt, to break through the self-protective armor we raise to shield ourselves from the unimaginable--we are told, for example, that ghetto children played a game called "tickling the corpse." Neither as broad nor as compelling as Lodz Ghetto from PBS Video, a Day in the Warsaw Ghetto is still a moving photographic essay on man's inhumanity to man."The Truth Shall Make Us Free": Inside the Neo-Nazi Network, on the other hand, introduces us to people who claim the Holocaust never happened. People like David Irving, the noted British historian whose Hitler's War and other books are virtual staples in libraries across the U.S. In a speech before a German group of Neo-Nazis (whose headquarters incidentally is in Lincoln, NE), Irving claims that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were erected by Poles after WWII. Later, during a party, Irving shares an obnoxious anti-Semitic joke, unaware that he's being filmed. The filmmaker, journalist Michael Schmidt played a dangerous cat and mouse game for three years--recording the inner workings of the Neo-Nazi party in Germany, under the pretense of making a film which would glorify the party. At the outset of the 90s, the East Germany contingent of Neo-Nazis held over 15,000 members; the coalition of East and West has made a much larger union according to Schmidt (whose numbers may be high; the New York Times' Stephen Kinzer, writing in the February 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, estimates that "6,200 are part of the militant neo-Nazi scene"). Schmidt's film captures the ravings of the late Neo-Nazi leader Michael Kuhnen, as well as his replacement, the dead-eyed Gottfried Kussel. We see impressionable German youth drinking beer and jeering as they watch the old (and purportedly banned) propaganda film The Eternal Jew. And we hear the former SS officer Thies Christopherson say that it's too late to correct untruths in his popular hate pamphlet "The Auschwitz Lie"--the booklet that forms the basis of many of the Holocaust-is-fiction arguments. Too, we see ordinary German citizens, shocked at the resurgence of Nazi ideology and fearful for the future. Above all else, "The Truth Shall Make Us Free" underscores the importance of memory, and reminds us of Santayana's dark dictum: "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." a very disturbing film.A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto is recommended for larger collections. "The Truth Shall Make Us Free," whose price is up in the stratosphere, is highly recommended for larger collections. (R. Pitman)