Austerlitz

Stark, jarring, but subdued, Sergei  Loznita’s documentary,  Austerlitz is a must see for anyone that seeks to comprehend the Holocaust and its impact on the Western world.  It ranks next to Son of Saul as an important film work for serious thinkers and writers about that horrific event.

Austerlitz is appropriately filmed entirely in black and white, and echoes of two previous works—Memory of the Camps, the documentary film co-directed by Alfred Hitchcock and narrated by Trevor Howard that contained the raw black and white footage of film taken during and after the liberation of the camps.  It also is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, by Leni Riefenstahl.

Contrasting with its black and white format, the film opens on what appears to be a beautiful, sunny summer day with throngs of visitors and tourists streaming into the sites of the concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, in Germany, just as if they were entering into the San Diego Zoo or the Art institute of Chicago.   They are young and old, from a variety of countries, some sporting New York Yankees baseball caps, wearing t-shirts with “Jurassic Park,” or, almost obscenely,  “Cool Story, Bro.”  As the throng of visitors stream past the wrought iron gate like a river, marked with the ominous words “Arbeit Macht Frei,” one cannot help but think that over 70 years ago, innocent people just like these tourists similarly streamed into the camps but never left.

This unusual film has no narration at all (except the occasional docents conducting guided tours of the facility of torment and death), no dialogue, no music, and no historical footage or background,  but consists solely of an eye level view of the visitors to the camp (now a museum).   You are simply provided the perspective that a security guard might have on an ordinary day at the camp/museum grounds.  Most of the background noise is the shuffling of feet and murmuring of the crowds.  You are a people watcher in this solemn place.  You spend much of the film’s 90 minutes observing the facial emotional reactions of the visitors to this monument to inhumanity.  People wander through the barracks, on the grounds, and in a room where one assumes hideous human experiments were performed.   The only sparse narration is provided by the docents providing guided tours that you overhear that are punctuated by words like “extermination,” “screams,” “no hope.”

While most of the visitors treat the camp with the solemnity the site demands, there are some—especially some of the younger people that act with irreverence.   Several times visitors have to be reminded of places they are not to step, or where it is appropriate and not appropriate to each lunch (begging the question of who could actually have sufficient appetite to eat in this place).   Of course, everyone has a camera or a video recorder and several people are taking selfies, the act of which seems to defile this hallowed place.  Some sequences rattle the soul.  One fellow has his girlfriend take a picture of him in front of the large poles where prisoners were strung up and tortured as he crosses his arms over his head almost in mockery.   In another sequence that makes you grimace, a young woman has her boyfriend take her smiling photo in front of the crematorium. 

Still, there are other sequences—and mostly they are focused on some of the older visitors—where the people are appropriately horrified and revulsed by this monument to industrialization of death that the Nazi regime perpetrated.   You can see the anguished looks on their faces as they attempt to process the magnitude of the Nazi horror.

Austerlitz is a unique and powerful film.  It is meant to be a warning.  Yes, young people are often oblivious to propriety and demands of solemnity, but the film clearly that time has diminished the human horror of the events that occurred at this place, especially for the millenials.   As the Holocaust survivors die off, and their firsthand accounts of the Nazi genocide begin to fall silent, sacred places like Sachsenhausen become as emotionally remote to the next generation as a trip to the mummy exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is to us.  The “never again,” cry has gone unheeded since in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now Iraq and Syria by ISIS, although those horrors were not on the magnitude of the Third Reich. 

Almost as if deigned by Providence, a cold, blustery, miserable March rain began to fall as I left the theater.   I pulled my cap down and tugged my coat tightly around my hunched shoulders and walked the three blocks alone, silently, in the chilly, dark mist to my car and wondered whether and when this may happen again.