First Films of the Holocaust by Jeremy Hicks

Author:Jeremy Hicks [Hicks, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Holocaust
ISBN: 9780822978084
Google: zn8e-7txTXQC
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Published: 2012-11-20T04:57:33+00:00

6

Liberation of the Camps

On 24 July 1944 the Red Army liberated the Majdanek death camp, near Lublin, Poland. Despite the catalog of appalling Nazi crimes already uncovered by the Soviets, all who saw the first captured Vernichtungslager were shocked by the industrial efficiency and sheer scale of the murder perpetrated there.1 Recognizing the news value of this discovery and needing to prove their moral superiority over the Nazis, the Soviets hastily sent a group of writers turned journalists, including Konstantin Simonov and Boris Gorbatov, to report on this death camp, the first to be captured.2 All the reporters promised to send their material at the same time, but Simonov broke his promise by wiring his material to Moscow before the others transmitted theirs.3 His first article, published in the Red Army daily newspaper, Krasnaia zvezda, on 10 August, was followed by two more in the next two days.

Filmmakers were on the scene as well. In fact, Polish cameramen had entered the camp minutes after the Nazis had vacated it.4 They were soon followed by a Soviet film crew under Roman Karmen, whom the political directorate of the Red Army had just assigned “the special task” of documenting the most important events involving four fronts (a type of military unit), including actions by the First Belorussian Front, whose operations encompassed the Lublin region; the directorate issued Karmen a letter of introduction to this effect just one day after the camp had been liberated.5

During the course of August 1944, both the Soviet and the Polish camera crews set about producing a film record of the camp. All the footage was dispatched to Moscow for the addition of a soundtrack, and these efforts resulted in two films: the Soviet special-release newsreel Majdanek, edited by Irina Setkina and approved for release in the Soviet Union on 18 December 1944, and Majdanek Death Camp—the Cemetery of Europe (Vernichtungslager Majdanek—Cmentarzysko Europy, henceforth referred to by its subtitle), a Polish film edited under the direction of Aleksander Ford and first screened three weeks earlier, on 27 November, in Lublin.6 Nonetheless, though the discovery of the death camp site was unprecedented, Soviet and Polish cameramen produced footage that fitted the evidence into a preexisting template, muting and downplaying the extent of Jewish suffering to suit the priorities of Polish or Soviet ideological priorities. At the same time, these priorities themselves were shifting. As the war progressed beyond the borders of the Soviet state, Nazi crimes could no longer be presented simply as an injury to the Soviet spectator that demanded vengeance. Filmmakers negotiated this transition into more unpredictable territory with difficulty.

Majdanek: Making Sense of the Unprecedented

There is a widely accepted sense in which the discovery of the camps marks a profound break in Western culture, most famously expressed by Theodor Adorno’s aphorism “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”7 While compelling reasons motivate the use of Auschwitz as a metonymic image for the Holocaust as a whole—the single largest number of people were murdered there–the moment of shock

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