Reminders From The Past

So I decided a while ago not to watch anymore Holocaust related movies whethere fiction or documentaries, for my well being. I just can't handle the subject matter, in the past it has left me incapacitated - and yet, because this is the history of my people I am drawn to. Thus I recently found myself watching A Film Unfinished, a documentary about the Nazis attempt to create a movie of the Warsaw ghetto, a propaganda film to show the inhumanity of Jews. Posing "wealthy" Jews with malnourished ones, juxtaposing the corpses with a dance in the cafe by those care free Jews in the ghetto - never mind that all the gay scenes were staged.

There are many images that have stayed with me from the movie, so much sorrow, humiliatoion, and loss. And yet the image I comeback to is a staged scene of a woman putting on her lipstick. She put it on exactly the way my grandmother did. Such a simple thing and yet it finds a way to become completely personal, to connect you to the people who are through the tiny details of life. Arresting image for me.