A Film Unfinished

David T. Campbell

Mr. Neuburger

ENG COMP 102-117

24 March 2013

Response Essay

A Film Unfinished

            While in the ghetto people, particularly Jews, were exposed to horrific things such as torture and corpses of individuals who had starved to death. They were also forced to bury their own in mass graves. Developed by the Nazis as a new to torture Jews, men and women were brought to a ritual bath. While being videotaped in the bath they were forced to perform different exercises and were whipped on their heads. German soldiers were then ordered to fire their rifles into the pools.

            Half naked corpses littered the sidewalks in the ghetto. People were asked to walk by the corpses with their heads high and they became indifferent because the started to get use to life in the ghetto. After many days, men would haul the bodies off to the cemetery with body carts. At the cemetery, there was a shack filled with forty to fifty bodies that needed to be buried. Bodies were slid down a slide into a large pit and then organized into layers by men. These pits made up mass graves which were dug by people who lived in the ghetto.

            Life in the ghetto was videotaped by the Germans who tried to hide how harsh the Jews were being treated by staging fake scenarios. They tried to show that the Jews lived a luxurious life by staging a food market and that the Jews had a good burial by using a fancy hearse. However, how harsh the Jews were really being treated was also videotaped and allowed for the truth to surface. The Germans shot film for thirty days until the SS arrived and developed a list of Jews to be executed. The Jews did not know that they were planned to be executed until after the war ended.