Night and Fog

Last evening, TSR2 showed the French documentary "Nuit et Brouillard," (in English, "Night and Fog") directed by Alain Resnais and shot in 1955, ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.   The film features then-contemporary photos of the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps, while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps.  Last night's film was shown in French only, but here is a version on Google video with English subtitles.  It's short, a bare half-hour, but the horrors it encompasses resonate long afterwards.

There have been many other films, both documentary and historical fiction, since then that discuss these subjects, many in more depth and length, but this was the first literally to burst upon the international film scene.  It also caused controversy when it was first distributed.  In fact, it very nearly was not distributed at all.

At the end of the film, person after person stands before tribunals at Nuremberg, saying "Je ne suis pas responsable," (the French translation of "I am not responsible" -- the individuals concerned were most assuredly speaking in German).   One description of the film notes that there is a dual meaning behind the title.  First, it references the arrival of interned prisoners under the cloak of darkness, and second, it references the conscious suppression of knowledge and culpability for the "resulting horror of the committed atrocities." 

While it is fervently to be hoped that the horrors and scope of the Holocaust during the Nazi regime will always be stand-alone, never to be replicated, events, it appears that the worst of human nature has not yet run its course.  So long as a detention situation like Guantanamo exists, for example, where individuals have been imprisoned for years without ever being able to defend themselves in a court of law, many of whom there simply because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or to have been on the wrong side of a powerful warlord who collected a bounty for their delivery whether they were actually guilty of anything or not, we Americans are on shaky moral ground to point fingers at anyone else.  This is true, even though there are many -- far too many in fact -- nations whose actions are every bit as atrocious, or worse.

If "je ne suis pas responsable," who is?  And when will "they" be held accountable?