REVIEW: Film Unfinished Leaves Haunting Impression of Nazi Imagemakers, Victims

Hersonki chooses not to identify the survivors, and at times we are not sure exactly what their faces, filmed in close-up, are reacting to, or if what she cuts to is what they have just seen. Occasionally a vaguely similar image is used to accompany a specific description: One woman describes a memory of an anonymous young woman lying on the sidewalk; an image that meets that description is shown. It is a very minor example of a larger problem in representations of the Holocaust: The images of countless atrocities have taken on an insidious sameness in the public imagination; they risk becoming interchangeable. That pervasiveness is both a testament to their power and a detriment to the memories of their subjects, seen and unseen, who were individuals, and whose suffering can never be adequately expressed. In the case of the example above I couldn't help but think the juxtaposition distilled the power of the living woman's memory and compromised the sovereignty of an unknown woman captured during the worst moment of her life.

Hersonski seems aware of this conundrum -- we must see to remember, but can never really know -- and occasionally includes scenes, like that depicting young children being shaken down for the vegetables they are smuggling, without context, leaving us unsure whether they were staged or not. What becomes clear, whether the subjects were being forced to perform their nightmare or simply live it, is that some images are beyond the scope of both history and human comprehension. Some images are in fact only what they are: pure horror.

In one of the most affecting scenes a survivor describes the numbness she developed to the skeletal bodies laid out on the street, a defense the living needed to go on. It served her, for a time. Then one day she stumbled on the street and lost her footing, falling not to the ground but onto what she instantly realized was a corpse. Her face was forced against his, and she couldn't turn away. "It was a human being," she says, dissolving at the memory of the truth she had been fending off to stay alive. The imperatives of history are manifold, and this film is among the most urgent of them. You cannot look, and you must look: This happened. They were human beings. All of them.

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