I've seen an awful lot of Holocaust documentaries (both for scholastic purposes and for writing research), and thought I'd seen everything that could shock me by now. Then I watched "Night And Fog." It's truly amazing how much poignant footage can be captured in a slight 31 minutes. Yes, there are plenty of familiar scenes for those of us who know our history (and who've seen the excellent BBC series like "Nazis: A Warning From History" and "Inside Auschwitz"), but there are moments in "Night..." that genuinely took my breath away, such as a lingering shot of a building whose sole purpose was to store the hair shorn from prisoners and later sold by the Nazis to wig makers and the like. That scene kicked me in the gut as hard as, if not harder than, the more familiar one we've seen of the warehouse full of shoes taken from prisoners before they went to their deaths.
Short, to the point, astonishingly well shot, and gut-wrenching. I agree with the other reviewers who've said this should be mandatory viewing in history classes. If more documentaries could pack the punch that "Night And Fog" has done, perhaps history would be less likely to repeat itself. A must-see.
Short, to the point, astonishingly well shot, and gut-wrenching. I agree with the other reviewers who've said this should be mandatory viewing in history classes. If more documentaries could pack the punch that "Night And Fog" has done, perhaps history would be less likely to repeat itself. A must-see.
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