"A Film Unfinished" Summary

Katie Nass

Mr. Neuberger

English Comp 101- 135

4 October 2012

Summary

A Film Unfinished

A Film Unfinished was found in a concrete vault hidden in the forest. This is where the Germans hid their films of what was their propaganda machine. There was a single copy of this film simply labeled the Ghetto.  It was never finished, didn’t have opening or closing credits or a sound track. 

It was taken in 1942, before the Warsaw Ghetto was wiped out. It was made to show the German people where the Jews went. German camera men went into the ghetto to show the life of the Jews. It was staged to show that they were living well but also to show that those prosperous Jews cared nothing about the poor.

The Warsaw Ghetto was a three square mile area. This is the where the Jews lived before it was a ghetto. Jews from all over the Reich were moved there. It was over crowded and had poor living conditions. There were 500,000 Jews of all classes living in this small area.  The man assigned to oversee the area documented the filming process.

The filming showed people living in nice homes with furniture and plenty of food.  This was shown to be at the expense of the poor living in the area.  A lot of the prosperity of the Jews was staged. 

They also documented dead bodies on the sidewalks, putting some of those bodies in coffins and the mass grave burials of the dead.  They forced the Jews to engage in a ritual bath with both men and women.  These things were not part of the Jewish cultural and were humiliating to the Jews.  But, they were done to show the German people how different the Jews were.

Once the war was over, the film was used to document war crimes.  The film did not show the people being removed from the city to go to Treblinka but the diary documentation of the overseer did.  When he was asked for lists of names to deport to the camp, we took the cyanide capsule to show the people that death was imminent.