Jamie Buerger Mr.

Neuburger Eng Comp 102-106 7 March 2012 A Film Unfinished A Film Unfinished details the time in history when Jews were placed in Ghettos before being taken to concentration camps. After watching the film, I feel a great respect for the lives lost to senseless brutality. In high school, we read about Anne Frank but I vaguely remember the details of what we learned. Before now, I was unaware that the word ghetto originated in Germany and was a description for the confinement the Jews were placed in. This film that the Germans were taking of the Jewish people to display their everyday life in the Ghettos is one of the most appalling things I have ever seen. Forced to sift through their own trash to find nourishment for their families and failing. The faces of the starving children will haunt me forever. I have wondered why more Jews did not try and run away from the Germans but I see now that before the concentration camps, they were starved to the point of death and were unable to do so in most cases. The senselessness of this event is overwhelming. While filming, the Germans would stage different scenes to give the effect of happy Jewish people, living in their own areas. Elaborate clothes were worn and gourmet foods were served to help the shots seem more believable, that people were actually not suffering at all. Even though these films were never used, they were created to show the German people that the Jews were ok but still out of the way. They did shoot video depicting rooms with multiple tenants, a very starved population, and corpses lining the walkways. It is

unclear to me why things like this were documented because it just proves how awful the Jews were treated before being sent to their deaths. After a person died, someone pushing a body cart would come collect the corpse and take it to a pit where it was slid down a hill and buried in a mass grave. Corpses looked like skeletons from lack of nutrition. All of this seems so very senseless and a great loss of life in our history.