Film Essay

In the Oscar award winning dramatic comedy/fable Life is Beautiful by Robert Benigni, historical/poetic documentary Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, and personal memoir Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is thoroughly depicted. The Holocaust stands as a looking glass through which many people view the world s greatest devastation that caused the murders and deaths of millions of Jewish people. Although all 3 works are similar depicting the Holocaust through genocide, dehumanization, and Jewish people s survival methods, each author used a different form and genre to communicate these visions to their audience.

The main similarities in the three works described above are the author s portrayal of genocide, dehumanization, and Jewish people s survival methods during the Holocaust.

The first similarity, genocide, means the systematic planned extermination of all Jewish people. The extermination of Jewish people during the Holocaust is often referred to as the Final Solution. In an attempt to try to justify the madness of the Final Solution it becomes evident that there isn t a rational explanation to validate its lunacy.

At the time of the Holocaust, Jews were stripped of their possessions, walled in ghettos, imprisoned in concentration camps, and most important, powerless and submissive. Placing myself into the shoes of a powerless Jew it becomes clear to me that I couldn t be a danger to Hitler s rule. It also becomes clear that only a sick and neurotic person such as Hitler could visualize the Final Solution. Despite Hitler and the Third Reich s outward appearance of strength, their inner self s represented people fully controlled by a figment of the imagination. Hitler and his Third Reich believed German s were the greatest people who ever lived enabling them to rule the world, while Jews were his powerless enemies plotting to destroy him. Based on the idea that Jews were bent on destroying Hitler he captured millions of Jews and imprisoned them in extermination camps.

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand sense of the term extermination camp (Levi 224) and dehumanization.