"The War" by Ken Burns
Last night our local PBS station aired episode 7 and last of Ken Burn's "The War".
I saw a lot of stills and movie footage that I had not seen before. And I have read and studied a lot about WW2. To see so much good quality video is both amazing and disquieting. So, so much death. American, German and Japanese soldiers, with a lot of them indistinguishable as to nationality.
But there was absolutely no mistaking the bodies found at the, and I use the word advisedly, liberated, German death camps. Naked bodies stacked up like cord wood. Bones in a crematory furnace. A hand and arm, extending from a crematory opening. Bodies by the hundreds, nay, by the thousands.
How, how, how can a human being with a loving family be so cruel to fellow human beings ? A question that shall remain unanswered.
I did not sleep well last night. Dreams. Gruesome dreams.
1 comment:
Thank you for the warning, Chief. We've DVR'ed this series, as it's fairly slow-going and we wanted to watch it piecemeal as our schedules permitted, so I haven't seen the last episode yet. I've been dreading the concentration camp footage, much of which I and my yeshiva classmates FORCED to watch at age 12 during an assembly. I remember many girls ran screaming from the room. A lot of us lost relatives in the Holocaust. Ever since that day I cannot watch anything approaching this footage, and it's nice to have the warning to once again avert my eyes.
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