The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
In 1987, in a Viennese antique shop, some four hundred color slides were discovered of activities inside the Lódź Ghetto, where Jewish men, women and children were held and put to work while Nazis determined their fate—if you will, a productive halfway concentration camp. The first voice we hear in Fotoamator (literally, Amateur Photographer), Dariusz Jablonski’s probing documentary, belongs to one of the 877 survivors from the 230,000 Lódź Jews, to which, during the course of the war, 25,000 others were added. This is Dr. Arnold Mostowicz, whom we actually see, who immediately informs us that the photographs do not show the truth. Rather, they compose a documentary record skewered by the outlook of their amateur photographer, the Ghetto’s chief Nazi accountant, Walter Genewein, an Austrian from whose written records an actor reads. Genewein explains that the purpose of the photos is to demonstrate the Nazis’ “achievement” in civilizing subhuman Jews. The camera used? Confiscated from a Jew.
One principle of the film’s methodology is the discrepancy between the innocuousness of the slides and the horror of the Holocaust. “The Ghetto was not a death camp,” Genewein’s words insist. There, in the courtyard, children with a wheelbarrow! Mostowicz explains their fate: deportation; extermination. Moreover, Mostowicz vividly recalls sounds and odors—things that photographs cannot communicate.
The role of Chaim Rumkowski, the Jew who orchestrated the Ghetto’s work ethic at the Germans’ behest, is exactingly addressed. Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, 1993) whitewashes Oskar Schindler, failing to note Schindler’s selection for extermination of people on his labor “list”; Jablonski gives us Rumkowski’s rationalizations, how the “limb” of Ghetto children had to be “sacrificed” to save the “body.”
In the process of its investigation Jablonski’s film uncovers different strategies for coping with very different involvements in the enormity of the Holocaust.
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Dennis Grunes 