Film Bios

The first film I watched called The Ambulance, was really intense. This is because an event and emotions were all captured without their being any words in the film. It was only about 15 minutes. But in the film, there is an ambulance. A group of children and a guard with a dog that kept barking. A little child goes up to the dog and is frightened by the dog. There was also a man with these children. Then someone, (a man) is seen covering the exhaust pipes of the ambulance. This part really touched me because I know that when exhaust fumes are covered, they are trapped in the vehicle and you will die.
So, he does this and gets in the ambulance and drives a bit by pressing the gas pedal.
The next event, they toss these kids one by one on to the ambulance. Just like they weren’t even kids at all. Especially 2 or 3 of the kids, were violently thrown in. The next thing I saw was the man that was with the kids get in as well. It was silent because the director said that words just would not do it justice. People sometimes do end up getting lost in what is going on because

they are listening to what is being said. There is no need to have them talking because it’s really self-explanatory and speaks by what is being shown. I learned that these kids were being taken and killed by the loads. It’s sad to think of these kids as alone and being murdered, but this one man that went with them, who didn’t have to, died with them. Very touching and it’s something new that I learned about and decisions that some of the people probably made on a regular basis during the Holocaust.
The next film, Imaginary Witness basically just depicted the Holocaust through films.
It tells us that compared to how the survivors of the Holocaust actually were. For instance,
I learned that after the Holocaust, some of the survivors, became mute. Didn’t say anything to anything about it because they were ashamed. Some had gotten amnesia, which mentally happens to us when something very traumatic takes place in order for us to block it out. There had been a lot of criticism as well as curiosity when it came to Hollywood and the Holocaust..
One interesting fact I remembered hearing was that in the Diary of Anne Frank movie, the cast for her had no ethnic qualities.
She was depicted without Jewish features and more “Americanized”. I just feel as if you are going to recreate to show people what they went through, the least you could do is try to do it as accurate as possible, which already is a task in itself because they were not actually there. I saw some of the critic reviews for Imaginary Witness. Fresh: Anker's excavated some remarkable stuff here... – Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice, Jul 7, 2010
Fresh: Daniel Anker's film faults Hollywood both for ignoring the Holocaust during the war years and for trivializing it later. It's a mixed message that coheres largely thanks to Anker's archival spadework and his luck in securing interviews. – Ty Burr, Boston Globe, Oct 18, 2008.

Fresh: Imaginary Witness is powerful and complex, and few will manage to make it through to the end without gasping, weeping or covering their eyes. – Richard Nilsen, Arizona Republic,
Oct 18, 2008. Fresh: Anker's film is an important one, shining a light on that red stain and how we saw it filtered through Hollywood's lens. – Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times, Jun 24, 2010
One thing I learned from this film is that theatrical is not always the best way to learn about something, because false information is added, and things that actually did happen, unbeknownst to us or not, are not even depicted sometimes. The best way to get these fact is not third party, but from the people who were there, who are still living.
In Kitty, return to Aushwitz, it was almost overwhelming to see her reliving the
Holocaust all for the sake of education. She was with her grandson I believe, and she was telling him about the Camps and the events and how living there was,, so that he would know and for any of the doubters or denyers. Once she landed on the grass, she remembered saying none of that grass was there. It was all dirt. She went through and showed him how the toilets had been, low row of cement holes. Explained the meaning of their buckets, how important it was to never take your clothes off because you wouldn’t see them again. Sometimes in order for a place to sleep, she had to bring whatever food she had in order to trade it for a place to sleep that night.
She worked carrying bodies, so whatever body had some of these things on them, I’m sure she used what she could. Her mother hid her body once underneath a dead one because the area was going to be taken to the gas chamber and Kitty was still small enough to be hid. Her mother saved her life. These are things that I definitely won’t forget seeing how emotional it was for her and learning these things that I had not known before. A review I found for this movie was “The great thing about this documentary is that she is telling her own son about what happened to her,

instead of the person making the documentary, so she really cares about telling the story, it's important to her that her son understands, and tell his children later on what happened to her, and
I think it makes this film really special. I like that there is little structure, the camera simply follows her around the camp whilst she explains the different blocks and her experiences to her son, but it feels much truer with she herself narrating, rather than somebody else. In some areas of the documentary she seems to have a sense of humour about some of the stories she is telling even though they're awful, and that's interesting to watch. She's a brilliant woman, and the documentary is well worth a watch.”
In One Survivor Remembers, this film is a little different because it is not the Survivor actually showing us where she was. It was clips and footage from the Holocaust. It
It still was personal and suitable I feel like because they were real footage that people had filmed and she had been there and this is what she went through. She said at first, she though it was a parade because she saw the men and the horses, but once she was in the street and saw that they were not moving, she knew it not a parade. This particular surviver had also endured the
Death March, which is what the Jews were on after arriving in Auschwitz. She’s seen just as much death as Kitty because a lot of people died on the Death march. Her mother died during the Holocaust, and her last words to her daughter as she was put on the back of the truck was “be strong”. Her father and her brother also died as well. Her deaths were more closely related to her than Kitty’s.
This survivor also lost a couple of close friends she grew up with. Another woman was starving herself and she wouldn’t’ eat anything and said do not tell anyone how I died. When the
Holocaust first began, and she and someone else were talking about how long it would last, she

said the woman told her a couple of years, while she said 6 months, but she ended up losing. The bet was for whip cream and strawberries. I learned that there were plenty of times that everyone was scared and frightened for their lives. But they were still trying to be positive and find the silver lining. An imdb review reads “ In exception to all of the things that I thought I knew about the Holocaust previous to seeing "One Survivor Remembers" were the Nazi death marches. With such a shocking meaning owned by the two words, I was particularly surprised, but also interested by the rather unorthodox form of torture. Once again, Weissman made it through the villainous ordeal except, this time, loosing a friend, some health, but winning a bet. And that is why I will remember "One Survivor Remembers".
The film Genocide was really tough for me to watch because it did show actual footage of the Jews being killed by the Nazis. Alot of them were killed by the masses, such as execution style shootings and being hung. Noone was excempt. Women and children. One clip explained how someone’s grandmother ill and elderly, but her daughter decided to stay with her. The grandaughter left to save her life. But she said sometimes she wonders why she didn’t try harder to get her mother to leave. They were taken to the gas chamber later. Also, in this film, it showed how the gas chambers were set up like showers in which masses of people would be sent in at once. I learned just how some people were faced with these tough decisions,sacrifices that were made, that some people resisted. For instance, the Nazi told the Jews to sing, and they did..but they changed the lyrics!
Janet Maslin, a critic review from the NY times said “It is thus understandable that the film's director, Arnold Schwartzman, has tried for a powerhouse effect. He chronicles the
Holocaust not through newsreels and photographs alone, but with the addition of montages,

animation, snazzy multiple-image shots and Elmer Bernstein's big, booming score. Narration is by Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles.
Actually, the film is at its best when it dispenses with its razzle-dazzle techniques, slows its breathless pacing and lets the facts speak searingly for themselves. The capsule history of
European Jewish culture goes by much too quickly to have sufficient impact, and few hard facts are clearly stated. But when ''Genocide'' moves on to the Holocaust itself, it becomes as chilling and forceful as its makers wished it to be.Miss Taylor, whose narration is particularly simple and affecting, reads letters from victims of the Nazis, farewells to friends and loved ones, and horrifying accounts by first-hand observers. The newsreel footage and still photographs reveal terrible sights, in forthright and unblinking detail. As Miss Taylor reads the account of someone who witnessed a massacre, the screen presents images of naked, terrified victims being marched off to their doom.”
Some of the onlookers/bystanders were their neighbors! Who just were not Jewish so they didn’t get involved. The rescuers are the people took some of them and tried to hide them.
The perpetrators obviously were the Nazis and the victims were the Jews. The collaborators involved those who played a role in the Holocaust, may it have been shipping the Jews on the trains or supplying something to help Hitler. There were all these roles and the whole experience for the Jews was beyond words.
The last film I saw, Conspiracy had to have been the most shocking one I saw. This is because it was a meeting about exterminating the Jews. How they would basically murder them.
The whole meeting was for the most part nonchilant,. They was joking, eating, and smoking. But the content was anything bt noncilant! They deliberated over who they considered a Jew, in the

event that it was amixed person by their parents, what would happen to those who were married to Jews, and the efficiency of how they were killing them. They said the gas chamber wasn’t efficient enough. But they were really discussing purging on them and just killing as many in a day as they could so that these huge amounts were dead each year.
They briefly described the benefits of killing as many Jews as they could and wiping the entire Jewish population. This was so the people who were not Jewish could be the only ones left, have more space, more money, and the world would be this utopia with only the Aryans left.It was shocking because this was already going on as they were having this meeting. They were talking about the camps and how they thought it would be a good idea to to leave the able bodied men for laor. But also someone said why don’t they just ignore the Jews and just make them feel like even though they’re human, they’re not one of them. But both of those suggestions were overthrown and they ultimately decided on carrying out the plan of murdering all of them.
Critic review George Chalbot said “If you ever wondered how the mass murder of Jews was adopted as a policy by the German government, Conspiracy shows it was handled like a high level business meeting where a forceful chief executive, supported by a team of minions, alternately coaxed and browbeat the other department heads until all were agreed to support the plan. This is not a fantasy, it is history; and a warning to all to observe leaders and not to trust them too far...The movie is a reenactment of the Wansee Conference held in Berlin in January,
1942. The meeting was chaired by Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, the head of SD; second man in the SS; and known as The Butcher of Prague for his role as Protector of Bohemia and
Moravia - one of Hitler's loyal supporters and rumored to be his chosen successor. Heydrich would soon succumb to assassination but his role at Wansee gives insight that Adolf Hitler was

not the only evil person in the Reich but had able and willing support from brilliant men such as
Heydrich, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels, all of whom are present in spirit, if not in person, with appointees from their various departments attending the meeting.
Kenneth Branagh (Henry V) stars as General Heydrich, with Stanley Tucci as his right hand man SS Lt Colonel Adolf Eichmann. These two play the major parts with Branagh the charismatic leader and Tucci the humorless myrmidon bureaucrat with a bean counter's eye that everything be carried out as efficiently as possible. Although set at the height of WWII, this is not your typical war movie with heroics but a business meeting with buffet lunch held in the comfort of a palatial estate while the German army was bogged down in Russia and the
Americans had just entered the war.
The Nazis needed buy-in from all the government departments which were more or less dragging their feet and Heydrich was just the man to get their cooperation. The SS had already enacted their extermination plan with camps in Poland and more mass killings had taken place in Latvia and the USSR. Heydrich used a letter from Reichmarschal Herrmann Goering to illustrate their mandate for a final solution for European Jewry. Like Juror 9 in Twelve Angry
Men, Heydrich in up close and personal discussions convinced all the dissenters to accept his forgone conclusion for the Jewish people of Europe. The fact that the meeting was even known was only discovered years later when a copy of the minutes prepared by Eichmann and supposed to be destroyed after reading turned up in the files of one of the attendees.
The full horror of this staggers the imagination and you need to see Conspiracy for yourself. The 96-minute HBO DVD is in color and has two featurettes showing the "making of" Conspiracy.” I learned that this meeting even took place, which I was not aware of. For

intance, I thought Hitler gave orders and the people he gave them to just followed them. That’s not true, This meeting proved that, whoever Hitler thought was stern enough to put in charge had a backbone where he made some of these decisions and did things that Hitler didn’t say he could do or couldn’t do.

Sources http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114044/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt April 24, 2008 , Szazler from Canada http://www.epinions.com/review/mvie_mu-1112708/content_460323065476 February 8, 2009, George Chalbot http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/imaginary_witness/reviews/?type=top_critics January 4, 2008, Ty Burr http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A03E0DB143BF937A25750C0A964948260 March 14,1982, Janet Maslin http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049317/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt July 28, 2013 Author: megsymooks-525-881893 from United Kingdom