A picture is worth.......

Can a well-written book deliver the emotional impact of a documentary film? I recently finished "The Invisible Bridge" by Julie Orringer. Orringer concentrates on the experience of Hungarian Jews during World War II, and uses one family and their friends as her vehicle. The protagonist, Andras Levi, is meant to be an architect and is accepted at an avant-garde Parisian college. In Paris, he meets and falls in love with an older woman who is also Hungarian. The first part of the novel concentrates on their growing romance and the parallel growing threat of the Nazi party. The couple eventually marries and returns to Budapest, where the Hungarian government has protected Jews from the Nazis far longer than in most European countries. However, Jewish men are sent to work details in the most dangerous parts of the war. Orringer's descriptions of these camps makes for compelling reading. Yet, there is still something too sanitized about this novel. I could feel Orringer trying to horrify her readers. I always felt her presence, looking over my shoulder wondering if she had done her job. I enjoyed this book, and learned from it, but I wanted more.

I got almost more than I could handle when I went to see "A Film Unfinished." If you haven't heard about it, don't be surprised. It only played for one week at the local art cinema in our area. This film was made by Nazis as anti-Jewish propaganda in 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto, right before the residents began to be sent to annihilation camps in great numbers. As someone who has read about the Warsaw ghetto since junior high, has looked at still photos of the ghetto in Warsaw, and has seen just about every film made about the plight of those massacred by the Nazis, I still wasn't prepared for the punch to the gut this film gave me. The Nazi party sent a crew of filmmakers into the ghetto for a very brief time. Many scenes were staged; some over and over. Yael Hersonski, the screenwriter and presenter, found survivors of the ghetto who comment about the scenes in the film as we watch. Hersonski has also pored through journals kept, in secret, by many who lived there. These provide a valuable context for the images we see. The Nazis attempt to show that Jews are so insensitive and uncaring that they will even let other Jews suffer and die. There are staged scenes of Jewish people eating in restaurants while others lie on sidewalks right outside, starving to death.

However, in any situation where horror abounds, human beings go into survival mode. Anyone who works in a highly stressful situation where he or she is surrounded by the suffering, the hopeless, the severely mentally ill, abused children, the dying, learns to cope. We look away. We make bad jokes. We stop crying. We become cold in order to keep on doing our jobs without falling to pieces.

There is a memorable scene in "A Film Unfinished" where one of the survivors (who was a young girl when she lived in the Warsaw ghetto) describes walking past dead bodies every single day without looking at them, so she would be able to keep on walking. Then one day, she tells us, she falls into a body. She can't avert her eyes this time. She is hysterical. But, when she goes home, her mother comforts her with a piece of bread and jam, and she goes on. She survives.

Every day, we watch or listen to the news. We see hungry children, victims of natural disasters, people who live without enough food, water, clothing, and shelter. We see the victims of war. These human beings are our fellow travelers in this life. Yet, most of us generally ignore the plights of those who are not our own relatives or friends.

The images from long ago in the Warsaw ghetto moved me very deeply. However, I know that the lesson I need to take from "A Film Unfinished" is that hatred, genocide, and war are all around. I just need to open my eyes before I fall into a dead body.