Figures Involved in Making of “Night and Fog” [Nacht und Nebel [NN]]1

--Alain Resnais. Director. The film was made at the request of an association
of French non-Communist resisters who had been deported to concentration
camps. He had not been a resister during the war and insisted that resisters
who had been deported to concentration camps be involved.

--Jean Cayrol. Scriptwriter Deported Catholic resister; NN prisoner; a

Lazarian experience

--Hans Eisler. Composer. German Jewish refugee to US; persecuted in

McCarthy period, emigrated to E. Germany

--Germaine Tillion. Deported Gaullist resister: NN prisoner; Academic

historian, one of several who worked on the film

The Nazis operated two types of concentration camps. The first kind,
established shortly after they came to power in 1933 and run until the end of
the war, were for political prisoners and a variety of criminals. The Nazis put
Communists in these camps before the war and foreign resisters after the war
began. During the war, the period presented in “Night and Fog,” inmates
were worked to death in profoundly inhuman conditions. Examples of these
concentration camps include Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Gusen-
Mauthausen.2 The second type of concentration camp was devoted to the
extermination of Jews. The largest of these camps was Auschwitz.

1
“Night and Fog” was a term taken from Wagner. It refers to individuals
arrested and sent into the “night and fog,” whose fate remained unknown to
those in the world from which they had been taken.
2
By its nature, money erases history and this was certainly a concern of the
makers of the film “Night and Fog.” Wealth created by concentration camp
labor, like the wealth created on American slave plantations, could erase its
origins in other investments. Friedrich Flick was a wealthy businessman and
strong supporter of Hitler. He “created a steel empire, which expanded by
seizing companies in Nazi-occupied territories and in Germany through
Aryanizations—the expropriation and forced sale of Jewish-owned businesses.
As many as 40,000 laborers may have died working for Flick companies,
according to a study of his Nazi-era businesses published in 2008. He was
1. All films, but documentaries in particular, are projects of selection and of
omission (whether by choice or necessity). This film is 32 minutes long. Why
do we see what we see? Hear what we hear? What is the goal of the film? How
does it set out to achieve it? Is it successful?

2. Drawing on your analysis of “Night and Fog,” are there things of value to
historians engaged in their project of doing history, that non-historian
filmmakers like Resnais can do, but historians doing their job either do not do
or do not do as well? There is not a “correct” answer to this question.
However, it should allow you to think about your expectations for historians
and your ways of evaluating their success or lack thereof.

3. The film is an historical document, like all texts we read—and lectures I

give. Think about the film as a document of 1956. Think about the decisions
the filmmaker Resnais and those who worked with him made. In telling us
about an earlier period, how the history of an earlier period is remembered,
what do we learn about the time it was made? The time and place it was made
and has been viewed in different places since 1956?
4. More Questions and Information on the film.
(a) “I’ve always refused the word ‘memory’ à propos of my work,” said
director Alain Resnais. “I’d use the word ‘imagination’.”3 What is the place of

convicted at the Nuremberg war crimes trials of using slave labor to produce
armaments for the Nazis, among other crimes. was released from prison in
1950, after the U.S. high commissioner for Germany granted controversial
pardons to German industrialists. The U.S. and U.K. returned his money and
business properties, including one Aryanized asset. He sold his coal businesses
and invested the proceeds in numerous companies, including Daimler-Benz
AG, eventually becoming the carmaker’s biggest shareholder.” David de Jong,
The Nazi Shadow Behind the World's Youngest Billionaires,” Time, May 7,
2018. [http://time.com/5268155/flick-german-billionaires-nazi-past/ (consulted
July 23, 2018).
3
Jamie Monoco, Alain Resnais, p. 11. Jean Cayrol was a “Nacht und Nebel”
deportee sent to the Gusen-Mauthausen camp for his Resistance activities. He
was commissioned before the film was made, using only a number of still
photographs Resnais provided him. The extraordinary match of visual
images and words is a testament to the artistic genius of Resnais and Cayrol.
“imagination” in study of the past? Its limitations?4

(b) Primo Levi wondered whether he would be able to describe Auschwitz were
he to survive because “daily language is for the description of daily experience,
but here it is another world, here one would need a language ‘of this world’.” 5
How do Resnais and Jean Cayrol handle this issue? “Does preserving piles of
hair or eyeglasses, help people remember the Jews as those Jews would want to
be remembered or as the Nazis would remember them?”6

In “Night and Fog,” Cayrol makes reference to human artistic creativity

surviving in a world of inhumanity. Cayrol himself wrote a number of poems
while working as a forced laborer in a workshop while at the Gusen-
Mauthuasen camp. Cayrol lost them at liberation, but in 1955, ten years after
his release, an anonymous German sent them to the Bordeaux Chamber of
Commerce and they made their way back to Cayrol. Publishers turned them
down in the mid fifties—it’s better that survivors go on to new things they
said—and they have only recently been published as Alerte aux ombres 1944-
1945 (Seuil).
4
Hannah Arendt wrote that the disappearance of NN prisoners marked the
separation of their experience from that of the world more radically than
imprisonment or execution: “There are no parallels to the life in the
concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the
imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can
never be fully reported for the very reasons that the survivor returns to the
world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his
own past experiences. It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet,
for the status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is
supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they had
never been born.” The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 444.
5
Among the best web sites on the Holocaust are www.wiesenthal.com (Simon
Wiesenthal Center); www.yad-vashem.org.il (Yad Vashem); www.ushmm.org
(US Holocaust Memorial Museum; www.gfh.org.il (Jewish Resistance
Heritage Museum); and www.auschwitz.org.pl (the Auschwitz Camp
Museum).
6
NYT, January 5, 1994. A “brisk trade [in human hair] emerged between
German death camps… and German felt and textile manufacturers who used
the versatile fibre in the production of thread, rope, cloth, carpets, mattress
(c) When antisemitic acts or troubling issues about the Occupation are in the
news in France, the Ministry of National Education invariably asks middle
schools and high schools to show “Night and Fog.” In 1993-94, a teacher
commented, “for twenty years, I showed ‘Night and Fog’ to students who had
been made sensitive by what had happened to people; for the first time, this
year I will not screen it, because the students watch this documentary like a film
of Stallone; now that violence has been made commonplace by movies….”7 Are
Americans desensitized to the Holocaust?8

stuffing, lining stiffeners for uniforms, socks for submarine crews, and felt
insulators for the boots of railroad workers… human hair `was often used in
delayed action bombs, where its particular qualities made it highly useful for
detonating purposes` [assistant to Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele]… The [20
kg.] bales were marketed to German companies at twenty pfennig per
kilogram.” When the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was being set up the
German State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau sent about twenty pounds of
hair. The US museum’s Content Committee composed of scholars, religious
leaders, museum officials, and survivors debated whether to display the hair.
Many felt it was important to show the hair as an important element of the
historical record, but the survivors, knowing that the hair could have come
from their mothers or sisters, opposed its display. The Committee agreed and
decided to show only a photographic mural of material at the Auschwitz
Museum, including photographs of the two tons of human hair there.
Timothy W. Ryback, “Evidence of Evil,” The New Yorker (November 15,
1993), p. 68. In sum, now do we remember victims of genocide in terms of
their humanity, not the dehumanization to which they were subjected?
7
Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy; An Ever-Present Past), pp. 188-89.
8
Or are Americans fascinated with the Holocaust because it protects them
from analyzing racism in their own society? In an epilogue to Black Like Me,
John Howard Griffin’s account of his experience in 1959 of discrimination
and segregration in the United States as a white man who passed as a black
after dermatological treatment, he wrote: “Most white Americans [in 1959]
denied any taint of racism and really believed that in this land we judged
every man by his qualities as a human individual. In those days, any mention
of racism brought to the public’s mind the Nazi suppression of Jewish people,
the concentration camps, the gas chambers—and certainly, we protested, we
were not like that.” (p. 161).