Mr. Neuburger
English Comp 102-117
March 26, 2013
The Warsaw Ghetto
A Film Unfinished
A Film Unfinished
This short 90 minute film epitomizes the horrors that Jews faced daily in the Warsaw Ghetto. The film was hidden away and was never intended for viewing. One can see that it is a film based on the mockery of the innocent and the poor. The people of the Ghetto lived a daily hell. The Ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire over brick walls and housed hundreds of thousands of Jewish people. The Nazi's left people to die from starvation, diseases, and even sent them to an extermination camp, Treblinka. The first extermination of Jews totaled around 300,000. A crew of German soldiers was sent to Warsaw to film the life of a Jew. It was a propaganda film to discredit Jews by showing their life wasn't as bad as they stated it was. The German's filmed a circumcision ceremony, a burial service, actors dining on lavish meals at a restaurant, dinner parties, and even dancing. One survivor stated as she watched the film that Jewish people do not bury their dead in coffins as the film showed. Also filmed was extreme poverty and people lying dead on the sidewalks and in the streets. Jewish people died because of malnourishment. Their hair was falling out and they were skin and bones. People would come and pick up the corpses and throw them in a wagon and take them to a trench that was used for disposing of them. They would throw them down a wooden shoot and pile them on top of each other and walk over the corpses to stack the bodies. After so many were in the trench, they would cover the bodies with paper and throw dirt over the top of them. At the cemetery, there would be 40 to 50 corpses at a time that still had to be buried. One of the comments from a survivor was, "We became indifferent to the suffering of others". After 30 days of filming, the cameramen packed up and left. The Warsaw Ghetto was full of innocent people left to die either by starvation or at the hands of evil people.
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