First, the movie:
I'd come to Poland on other business, and I tagged along with two acquaintances to the movie that evening because I was curious. Like many, I'd followed the debate since "The Passion" began its promotional warm-up this past winter. I knew there was friction over Mr. Gibson's ugly portrayal of the Jews, especially at a time when in many parts of the world anti-Semitism is again on the rise. I'd read about the scenes in which Jesus is scourged and crucified--with the most expert special effects that 21st-century filmmaking, on a $25 million budget, can deliver.Earlier that day, Ms. Rosett had visited reality (Auschwitz and Birkenau):
What I had not anticipated was that "The Passion," in its frenzy to convey suffering, would inspire an urge not to weep, but chiefly to wince. Whatever faith or beliefs individual moviegoers may bring to the theater, what transpires in the film itself is a Hollywood marathon of dizzyingly bloody close-ups, some in slow motion, some moving along at a music video clip, all set to a hyperventilating score of hypnotic drumbeats and soaring chants.
In the 59 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camps, so much has been said about Auschwitz that it may seem there's nothing to add. Perhaps. But some things need saying again and again. Some places need visiting by every generation, and not solely because there are crackpots at the extreme, such as Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, who would have us believe that the Holocaust was mostly fiction (his logic being, apparently, that the Nazis lacked the fuel to burn the bodies of six million Jews). We tend to remember the Nazi death camps today as a sort of shorthand for evil. I wonder how many Americans contributing to "The Passion's" $200 million take at the box office could find Auschwitz on the map.
[snip]
Auschwitz was just one hub in the sprawling system of concentration and extermination camps operated by the Nazis across Europe during World War II, but it was a big one. Early in the war, the Nazis realized that the original Auschwitz camp, with its one small gas chamber, could not begin to kill human beings on the scale they desired. Just down the road, they set up the vast Auschwitz II-Birkenau complex, equipped with four big gas chambers. At Auschwitz and Birkenau some 1.5 million human beings were murdered, most of them Jews. Those not dispatched immediately to the gas chambers served as slave laborers, usually dying within months, if not weeks, from starvation, exposure, overwork and disease.
Today there is no Technicolor gore to be viewed at Auschwitz or Birkenau. There is no music-swollen sound track. There is a short black-and-white film. There are modest kiosks at the entrances, selling books and postcards, and there are personal guides (if wanted). At Auschwitz, there are exhibits documenting a system designed to utterly dehumanize all who were forced to enter.
Prisoners spared from immediate gassing in order to perform slave labor were stripped not only of their clothes and belongings, but even of their names--replaced by tattooed numbers. A guide explains that when the camps were opened, some of the surviving children used for experiments by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele answered only to numbers; they no longer knew their own names.
A South Korean pastor I know, Benjamin Yoon, who specializes in discovering and disclosing the horrors of North Korea (a nightmare state itself), visited Auschwitz the day after I went there. He tells me he got as far as the exhibit of shoes taken off by people about to enter the gas chambers. He began wondering about the individual stories associated with each pair-and could not bear it. He had to leave.
