I have to say that out of all of the films I have seen that have shown the horrors of the Holocaust, in this movie, the scene where the young boy goes into the area where the people are being led to the gas chambers, was one of the most horrifying and devastatingly tragic I have ever seen on film. (For those of you who haven't yet seen it, I won't say.)
May their souls be bound in the bond of life.
I agree with your sentiments. I was shocked when I first saw the movie in high school. For many of us, we were entirely naive for a time until the reality of how cruel and cold the world can truly be finally set in. As we grow older, we become more aware of these atrocities and the cultures decimated or entirely eradicatd because of them. We look at history and see this was not isolated, but part of the darkness of the human heart.
What's equally as sad is that it continues still in many different forms to this day. There is still ethnic cleansing that takes a back seat when we listen to Lady Gaga or watch American Idol. We dismiss the mass starvations because the reality is too horrible for us to want to think about. We justify killing our unborn children and disguise it under a veil of freedom and personal choice. There is also massive abuse of children in our own backyards yet we turn a blind eye to it and "dont' want to get involved". In reality, we are in many ways as cold and disconnected (if not more so) than the very villains this films portrays; we are just better at hiding it.
Agreed, but it was probably very unrealistic? Certainly the elements of that scene would have happened under other circumstances and far worse.
In the film the people queued up naked in large queues outside for the shower and heard the screams of the dying, which obviously would not have happened.
The nazis were very efficient at exterminating men, women and children. That scene, if true, would have caused panic among the people, mostly mothers and children, waiting for their 'shower'.
It may be sad but for anybody who has read about Sobibor (and the other Aktion Reinhard camps) knows it is totally, utterly unrealistic. There were no chimneys in the gas chambers of Sobibor, there were no ovens to burn corpses and the people entering the gas chambers would not be able to see the death camp around them because the "tube" they walked through led directly to the door of the "bath house" with fences on either side - they would've seen only a corridor ahead of them.
This was known at the time, very well known in fact, but I guess the makers of the movie wanted to make the scene look more horrible for the cameras.
I remember watching this in 10th grade English class. It was during this scene that two girls in my class, ran out of the room with their hand up to their mouths. Pretty intense viewing for a room full of 15 year olds.
At age 44, that scene stuck in my brain like no other....all these years later.
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