What's wrong with me, posting stuff like this? Wait, I know what's wrong with me allready.
Today in my film class, we watching this 30-minute documentary called Night and Fog, about the Holocaust. To begin with, it was full of archival footage from the Holocaust, not re-enactment, as with most movies. Scenes of emanciated corspses being pushed into mass graves by bulldozers. Bodies decapitated to the head-less corpses could fit easier into containers. Bodies lying on barbed wire as blood flows from their bodies in grainy streams. Mountains upon mountains of hair taken from the Jewish women before getting gassed. Hair used to make carpets later, of all things. People with legs so thin I could encircle them with my thumb and pinky. Horrible, horrible things.
The teacher earlier had told us that should it become too intense, (interesting choice of word) we could leave the class. I hadn't taken her seriously, but now I understand. I came out of that class feeling like I was going to vomit. Normally, after a film, I'd turn to one of my friends and discuss a bit. None of us said anything, or even looked at each other, we just left. I felt hollow inside, and yet brimming with something as well. I didn't realize that I was trying not to cry until I got into the club room and sat down and someone asked me if I was allright. At which point, I stammered out that I saw Night and Fog, a Holocaust documentary, and leaned back and started to cry with my head in my hands.
I'm not even sure what really set me off. That humans coudl really be so cruel? That some of my class-mates could comment on the odd choice of soundtrack after the viewing instead of sitting numbly and trying to digest what they had just witnessed? I just remeber thinking that if it was showed back at my high school, someone would have been making stupid cracks about how the dead bodies were naked. At which point, I would have been ready to spit in their face, call them all sorts of wonderful names about how they lacked a soul or other human characteristic and walked out the door.
A friend of mine who was Jewish and had been shown a lot of Holocaust documentary got off the couch and came and hugged me for a while until I stopped crying. That definitively helped.
Another thing I'm wondering about is what my crying meant. Am I starting to open up more, or did I just snap?
 Nihilistic Seraph · Tue Oct 25, 2005 @ 02:02am · 4 Comments |
