Restored in 2015 from the original 35 mm negative
by the Éclair Group and L. E. Diapason.
NIGHΤ AND FOG
Even a peaceful landscape...
even a meadow in harvest with flights of crows and grass fires...
even a road for cars and peasants and couples,
even a resort village with marketplace and steeple,
can lead to a concentration camp.
Struthof, Oranienburg, Auschwitz,
Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau
were names like any others on maps and in guidebooks.
The blood has dried up, tongues have fallen silent.
The blocks are visited only by a camera.
Weeds cover the paths once trod by prisoners.
No current runs through the wires. No footstep is heard but our own.
1 933.
The machine gets under way.
A nation must have no discord.
No quarrels.
They get to work.
A concentration camp is built like a stadium or a hotel:
with contractors, estimates, bids,
and no doubt a bribe or two.
No specific style - that's left to the imagination.
Alpine style.
Garage style.
Japanese style.
No style.
Architects calmly conceive gates
to be passed through only once.
Meanwhile, Burger, a German worker,
Stern, a Jewish student in Amsterdam,
Schmulski, a merchant in Krakow,
Annette, a schoolgirl in Bordeaux, go about their daily lives,
unaware that hundreds of miles away,
a place has already been assigned to them.
One day the blocks are ready.
Nothing is missing but them.
Seized in Warsaw...
deported from Lodz, Prague, Brussels, Athens,
Zagreb, Odessa, or Rome.
Interned at Pithiviers...
rounded up at the Vel' d'Hiv...
members of the Resistance herded in Compiègne...
those caught in the act by error or at random
begin their journey to the camps.
Trains sealed and bolted.
A hundred people crammed into a car.
No day, no night.
Hunger, thirst, suffocation, madness.
A message drops to the ground, sometimes picked up.
Death makes its first choice.
The second is made on arrival in night and fog.
Today, on the same tracks, in daylight and sunshine,
we move slowly along, looking for what?
Traces of the corpses that fell out when the doors opened?
Or of those herded at gunpoint to the camp's gates
amid barking dogs and glaring searchlights,
the crematorium's flames in the distance,
in a nocturnal spectacle the Nazis were so fond of.
The first sight of the camp. It's another planet.
In the guise of hygiene,
nudity immediately strips the prisoners of all pride.
Shaved.
Tattooed.
Numbered.
Caught up in some incomprehensible hierarchy...
dressed in a blue-striped uniform,
sometimes classified as Nacht und Nebel,
"night and fog."
Political prisoners with the red triangle answer
to the green triangle,
the petty criminals, masters among subhumans.
Above them, the Kapo,
almost always a common criminal.
Higher up: the SS, the untouchable, to be addressed from ten feet away.
At the top, the Commandant, presiding from afar over the rites,
professing ignorance of the camp.
But then doesn't everybody?
The reality of these camps, despised by those who built them,
unfathomable to those who endured them -
we try in vain to capture what remains of it.
The wooden barracks
where people slept three to a bed,
the burrows where they hid
and ate furtively,
where sleep itself presented a threat -
no description, no image can convey their true dimension:
endless fear.
One would need the straw mattress, both pantry and safe,
the blanket one fought for, the denunciations and curses,
the orders relayed in every language,
the SS suddenly bursting in, eager to inspect and bully.
Of this brick dormitory, this uneasy sleep,
we can only show you the outer shell, the color.
Here's the setting:
buildings that might be stables, barns, or workshops.
Arid land now turned into a wasteland,
an indifferent autumn sky.
That's all that's left for us to imagine
a night of roll calls, of checkups for lice,
a night of chattering teeth. Getting to sleep quickly.
Woken up with blows, stumbling in search of stolen clothes.
5:00 am. Endless roll call on the Appellplatz.
The night's deaths throw the figures off.
An orchestra plays an operetta march as prisoners head off
to the quarry or factory.
Working in snow, which turns to icy mud.
Working in the August heat, with thirst and dysentery.
3,000 Spaniards died building these steps
leading to the Mauthausen quarry.
Working in underground factories.
Each month these burrow deeper, hiding, killing.
They bear women's names: Dora, Laura.
But these strange 70-pound workers are unreliable.
The SS keep watching,
stalking them,
herding and searching them before they return to camp.
Rustic signs direct everyone home.
The Kapo counts his victims for the day.
As for the prisoner, he returns to his haunting obsession: food.
Soup.
Each spoonful is priceless.
One spoonful less, one less day to live.
Two, three cigarettes are bartered for a bowl of soup.
Many, too weak to defend their ration against thieves,
wait for the mud and snow to claim them.
To lie down somewhere at last and have one's death to oneself.
The latrines, the Abort.
Skeletons with bloated stomachs came here
seven or eight times a night.
The soup saw to that.
Woe to him who ran into a drunken Kapo in the moonlight.
Prisoners eyed each other fearfully,
on the lookout for symptoms grown familiar:
passing blood meant death.
A clandestine market for buying, selling, and discreet killing.
One met there, swapping news and rumors,
organizing resistance groups.
A society took form, shaped by terror,
yet less mad than that of the SS and its maxims:
"Cleanliness is heath."
"Work is freedom."
"To each his due."
"One louse means death." Then what of one SS?
Each camp holds surprises: a symphony orchestra.
A zoo.
Greenhouses where Himmler nurtures delicate plants.
Goethe's oak at Buchenwald.
They built the camp around it while respecting the tree.
An orphanage, transient but constantly replenished.
A block for the invalids.
The real world, with its peaceful landscapes,
the world from before, might be glimpsed not so far away.
But for the prisoner it was an illusion.
For his world was this finite, self-contained universe
bound by towers
from which soldiers kept watch, endlessly aiming at the prisoners,
sometimes killing them out of boredom.
Anything is reason enough for pranks, punishment,
and humiliation.
Roil call lasts for hours.
An untidy bed: 20 strokes of the cane.
Don't attract attention. Don't gesture to the gods.
They have their gallows their sacrificial ground.
This yard in Block 1 1 shielded from view
has been set up for execution by firing squad
its walls protected from ricochets.
Hartheim Castle, where buses deposit passengers
who will never be seen again.
"Black transports" depart at night, never to be heard of again.
But man is incredibly resilient:
body consumed by fatigue the mind works on
hands wrapped in bandages work on.
They make spoons puppets that they hide.
Monsters.
Boxes.
They manage to write to make notes.
Exercise memory with dreams.
Some might think of God.
Some even organize politically
challenging the petty criminals for control of camp life.
They care for those most stricken.
They share their own food, organize mutual help.
As a last resort and in anguish they take them to the hospital.
Getting there gave the illusion of real illness
and the hope of a real bed,
but the risk was a lethal injection.
The medicines are a mockery, the dressings mere paper.
The same ointment is used on every type of wound.
Sometimes the starving eat their dressings.
All prisoners ultimately look alike: indeterminate in age,
dying with eyes wide open.
There was a surgical block.
Lt might almost pass for a real clinic.
An SS doctor.
A menacing nurse.
There is a façade, but behind it,
needless operations, amputations,
experimental mutilations.
The Kapos, like the SS surgeons, can try their hand.
The big chemical factories send samples of toxic products
or buy a batch of prisoners for testing.
A few of these guinea pigs survive.
Castrated.
Burned with phosphorus.
The flesh of some will be marked for life
despite their return home.
Faces of these victims
are filed upon arrival.
Names are recorded too names from 22 nations.
They fill hundreds of ledgers, thousands of files.
A red line strikes out the dead.
Prisoners keep these insane, always inaccurate records,
under the eye of the SS and privileged Kapos.
These are the bosses the upper crust.
Kapos have their own rooms
where they can hoard supplies and receive young favorites.
Nearby, the Commandant's villa,
where his wife keeps house and even entertains,
like in any other garrison.
Though they're all perhaps a bit more bored:
The war just won't end.
At least the Kapos had a brothel.
Better-fed women but equally doomed to die.
From these windows some bread might fall for a comrade outside.
The SS had built the semblance of a real city with its own hospital,
red-light and residential districts
and yes, even a prison.
No need to describe what went on in these cells.
Ln cages designed so one could neither stand nor lie down,
prisoners were tortured methodically for days.
Air vents don't muffle the cries.
1 942.
Himmler pays a visit.
"We must annihilate, but efficiently."
Leaving efficiency to technicians,
Himmler focuses on annihilation.
Plans are reviewed.
Models.
They're carried out, the prisoners set to work.
A crematorium might look a bit like a postcard.
Today tourists have their picture taken in front of them.
Deportation spreads all over Europe.
Convoys lose their way, stop, start again,
are bombed, and arrive at last.
For some, the selection has already been made.
The rest are sorted out at once.
Those on the left will work, those on the right...
These pictures were taken moments before an extermination.
Killing by hand takes time. Zyklon gas is ordered.
Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary block.
Inside, a fake shower room welcomed the newcomers.
They locked the doors.
They watched.
The only sign - but one must know to look for it -
is the ceiling scratched by fingernails.
Even the concrete tore apart.
When the crematoria prove insufficient, pyres are set up.
Yet the new ovens consumed thousands of bodies a day.
Nothing is wasted.
Here are the stockpiles of the Nazis at war.
Their warehouses.
All this is women's hair.
At 1 5 pfennig a kilo,
they make cloth from it.
From the bones...
they make fertilizer - at least they try.
From the bodies -
But words fail.
From the bodies they try to make soap.
As for the skin...
1 945.
The camps are spreading, are full.
Cities of 1 00,000 inhabitants. No vacancy anywhere.
Heavy industry takes an interest in this renewable labor force.
Factories have their own camps, off limits to the SS.
Steyer, Krupp, Heinkel, IG Farben,
Siemens, and Hermann Göring do their shopping there.
The Nazis may win the war.
These new towns are part of their economy.
But they do lose.
No coal for the crematoria, no bread for the men.
Corpses overflow the camps' streets.
Typhus.
When the Allies open the doors...
All the doors...
The prisoners look on, not understanding.
Are they being freed?
Will everyday life recognize them?
"I'm not responsible," says the Kapo.
"I'm not responsible," says the officer.
"I'm not responsible."
Then who is responsible?
As I speak to you now,
cold water from the ponds and ruins fills the mass graves...
a water as cold and murky as our own faulty memory.
War has dozed off...
one eye still open.
Grass has returned faithfully to the Appellplatz.
An abandoned village, still full of menace.
The crematorium is no longer used.
Nazi scheming is out of fashion.
Nine million dead haunt this landscape.
Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower
to warn of the arrival of new executioners?
Are their faces really so different from ours?
Somewhere among us there are still lucky Kapos,
reinstated officers, and anonymous informers.
There are those who refused to believe, or only now and then.
We survey these ruins with a heartfelt gaze,
certain the old monster lies crushed beneath the rubble.
We pretend to regain hope as the image recedes,
as though we've been cured of that plague.
We tell ourselves it was all confined to one country, one point in time.
We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us
and a deaf ear to the never-ending cries...