Fallen, frail: Holocaust Memorial Day

I was going to put up fascinating colour footage of Dachau shot by George Stevens in 1945, but could not bear to do it. This material is just too indecent to show, too painful to watch. “How can one human being do this to another human being?” was his question. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one helpful contemporary take, in a year the focus is on children.

It matters that we remember, because the awful truth is that evil can take root anywhere, any time, given the facts Christians call Fall & Freewill. Political convictions, good intentions, progress, even religion or lack of it, all existed in Central Europe in 1941. They cannot innoculate against evil. Only truthful memory enables us to understand our own moral frailty and, perhaps, make better choices in future.

I can understand lack of belief in God. God does not compel faith, and honest doubt is worth more than feigned belief. I object, however, to lack of belief in evil, including the possibility of anyone being entangled by it, for that really is a pernicious, blinding thing.

Evil through the eyes of a child

Way back, the Go Between explored how adult games look through the eyes of a child, vivid, simple, utterly pragmatic. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is Auschwitz through innocent eyes — good script, brilliantly cast, beautfully made, well acted, almost impossible to watch.

This film does not ham things up, preach, sentimentalise, or demonise. The unvarnished tale is more disturbing. The horror is in the substance not the way it’s served up. Conventional war movies, even compassionate ones like Sergeant Ryan, are all well and good, but all the wrong things steal the show. They’re like sermons where the circumstantial illustration smothers the point. This one is painfully right on the button.


The “Bloody Fool” school of history has answers to everything, but understands nothing. It’s too ready to believe that people in the past were just utterly different, that‘s all. Big labels like “Evil” do not answer the basic question that matters — “how do people do such things?”

Filling in faces of the holocaust is a painful necessity, or it simply becomes incomprehensible or, worse still, the stuff of prurient curiosity or myth. We have to try to understand what there is in us what blinds us to what we don’t want to know, our own capacity for “Don’t ask, don’t tell”.

The audience we were part of in Wycombe was slightly stunned. So we bloody well should be. I suspect this film will not pack the cinemas this autumn, but people who can bear to watch it, may understand a little bit more, and, in the end, be glad they did.