The entire ghetto was then burned to the ground. The film takes the viewer all the way to the end of the war, even showing the moment when Jews were rounded up out of the ghetto and put on cattle cars straight to Treblinka for their demise. They then took to smuggling people out, and hiding them until they could falsify papers and smuggle them out of the country. This plan allowed the zookeepers access to the ghetto itself. The pigs would be fed with the trash from the nearby Jewish ghetto. The German army used the zoo for barracks, but the zookeeper and his wife secretly used their quarters to hide and smuggle out as many as 500 Jews during the war – hiding people in plain sight, so that their lives could be spared the machinery of death.Īgreeing to let the zoo be used by the occupying troops, the zookeepers proposed also that they raise pigs to feed soldiers.
The inspiration part here is key: it is not enough to become aware of the fullness of evil of the German occupation we also need to know how goodness and heroism can find expression even in the midst of mass death.
It tells the terrifying but inspiring story of how the Warsaw Zoo in Poland – very near to the Nazi-run Jewish ghetto that held 300,000 people in near-starvation conditions during the war – became a center of resistance. These were my thoughts when I decided to head to the independent theater to watch an extraordinary film about one part of what we call the Holocaust.
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The time will come in the not-too-distant future in which this will no longer be the case. There are soldiers on all sides who were there, and even now there are people alive and living in the United States who were small children who survived the experience thanks to those who resisted. And yet it must be done, simply because right now there are still people alive who remember and can tell what happened. It will likely not realize commercial success. So making films about this topic is a financially thankless task. It is a general tendency that everyone possesses to look away from a history that is almost too recent and too morally egregious to grapple with. This is why “Holocaust Denial” is not just the designation for a gaggle of self-publishing cranks and Nazi apologists. Why learn about death camps that killed millions when you can use your time to admire monuments to bravery in war? The Holocaust Museum stands there as a rebuke to a sin you did not commit, a horror you see no need to face, evidence of a blight on humanity from which you would rather avert your eyes. It is more comforting to spend time at the monuments to greatness, virtuous leaders, and war victories, however much these traffic in mythology.
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At the same time, hardly anyone really wants to come face to face with the full expression of horror and evil that the Holocaust represents, and what it meant for Europe and the so many millions of victims. The Holocaust Museum stands there as a rebuke to a sin you did not commit, a horror you see no need to face, evidence of a blight on humanity from which you would rather avert your eyes.
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