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A look at a silent march from Auschwitz to Birkenhau held in remembrance of the Holocaust.
It is very hard to talk about human suffering, to recreate other people’s torment and heartrending pain. Maybe the talking part isn’t the toughest and what really is harsh is the listening to it. The concept of war sounds distant for most of us, like the things that happen in other parts of the world, and the Holocaust recedes from us in time.
There are three kind of people who have the power to recreate history to bring it closer to the public.
In the first place, we would have, of course, historians. The second part would go to artists. A painting, a poem, or a song has the ability to transport you to different places. Also a movie. Some directors have tried to tell the story of the Nazis against the Jews as the true drama it was, as in the multi award-winning “Schindler’s List,” directed by Steven Spielberg in 1993. Others found a way to make you smile like Roberto Benigni did with “Life is Beautiful” in 1997 or Radu Mihaileanu with “Train of Life” in 1998, where characters create a fake deportation train to make their escape.
The third kind of people that can bring pieces of history back to us are witnesses. The people that lived the times of the Holocaust are the ones who can best tell the details to recreate the big puzzle of history.
Jessica Sanders’ 2010 documentary starts with an Elie Wiesel quote; “To hear a witness is to become a witness oneself.” A sentence I don’t totally agree with and I think either would any judge. But there is another quote I truly liked, “The Marches (of Life) march into history to un-walk the Death Marches.” Since 1988, the last generation of survivors travel to Germany to memorialize those terrible events. And that is a great premise for a film, if only the filmmakers could have stayed focused on that, but they didn’t, and what could have been a great documentary, following the survivors steps back to where they once wanted to escape so desperately, listening to their everyday stories, recreating the people they knew–instead becomes insights of a 8-day trip though the most horrible concentration camps in Germany and Poland á la Jesus Summer Camp, with lapidary sentences such as “the Holocaust was the biggest tragedy in the whole human civilization.”
Among the characters followed by the cameras, we find some that make more sense in the movie than others. For example, the survivors portrayed, unlike the other marchers, transmit their thoughts in a very empathetic way. The other really interesting aspect is the teenagers that march with them. It is incredible the amount of stress they are put under. I went to a school in the south of Germany and know very well how it feels to visit a Konzentrationslager (KZ), and I tell you that it is almost a sadomasochistic idea to visit the biggest ones one right after the other in less than a week. As a palette cleanser, the last day everyone gets to go to Jerusalem and celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary.
The movie gives a mixture of totalitarian and pretentious essence. And it makes me think about why these people have to willingly go through this sorrow and guilt to understand what happened in the past, instead of focusing in trying to solve the problems of today.
Average crying scene: every 7 minutes.
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