Memory of the Camps on PBS

Cafe Society
1

I feel a bit odd putting this in Cafe Society, as I can’t think of anything I’ve ever watched that was so far removed from entertainment. But it was on TV, and there’s really no debate, so here it is.

So did anyone else watch this on PBS last night? I’d never seen it before and was simply blown away. I couldn’t change the channel, I couldn’t look away, even though part of me really wanted to. How horrifying it must have been for those soldiers and cameramen who liberated those camps. I’m young enough that this was distant history long before I was even born, but through my life I’d heard references to the Allied forces liberating towns and camps, passing out candy, interacting with the natives, and I’d always imagined that as a happy scene.
Now I know better. None of those people looked alive enough to even breathe, let alone celebrate.

One thing I did notice was that all of the graphic footage was of men. The narration did single out one corpse as a woman, but she seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. Were there really so few women and children left in the camps towards the end? Or were they simply not filmed or included in the documentary out of respect?

Does anyone who has seen this film have an opinion on showing it to schoolchildren? Not first graders of course, but high school perhaps?

2

I didn’t see it, but I read in a book recently (a work of fiction that passes off the events as if they really happened, which is why I’m unsure about this) that some of the detainees were so starved for food that they couldn’t stop eating and their stomachs burst. This sounds very much like an UL, but at the same time, those camps were so horrible it’s easy to imagine even more tragedy topping things off. Did this really happen?

3

The stomach “bursting” maybe UL but the getting sick from eating and possibly dying from it was very real.