MovieChat Forums > Shtikat haarchion Discussion > What was the deal with the baths?

What was the deal with the baths?


Just curious. The filmmakers made it seem it was an obscene offense against the ritual. I am not familiar with the ritual, so I'm a little lost when it came to full impact of the atrocity and embarrassment the Nazis were doing to the victims. (To me, it just seemed another humiliation)

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Hmm, maybe the bath/ritual was men-only and bringing the women in was the offense?

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- don't worry that's just my signature.

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Mixing the genders in a bathing rite of purification was a purposeful injury against the people and their religious symbolism.

Similar offenses against them in the handling of their dead -- for example, the scene when the cameraman talks about filming the "shed" full of forty or more unburied corpses, with the implication that the bodies had been left there for quite some time. Bodies left on sidewalks. Carts full of corpses wheeled through the streets. Deliberately dehumanizing.

If you are confused about these things there are many places on the internet to look up ceremonies and rituals of different religions. I think even Wikipedia could help you out.




last 2 dvds: Shtikat Haarchion (2010) & Minato no nihon musume (1933)

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A mikveh (ritual bath) can be used by either men or women (orthodox women go to it after their menstrual cycle) but men and women would never attend the mikveh at the same time, in fact one person would not go into bath while it was occupied by someone else, even a person of the same sex. The Nazis closed all of the baths at the beginning of the occupation. They forced Jews to participate in these scenes for the same reasons they staged other scenes- to humiliate them, and to show how "decadent" and "depraved" they were.

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In simple terms, wouldn't it be a humiliation to be forced at gunpoint to get naked and then be filmed by strangers for unknown purposes?

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