Closing Out the Intellectual Part of the Odyssey

Even though Jay and I are physically back in Atlanta, I still need to finish grading the final blogs that the students wrote. All did well on the final exam and occasionally surprised me by commenting on how moved they were by the experience of reading about the Holocaust and viewing so many Holocaust films.

Indeed, many expressed the feeling of being "blown away" by the experience of watching one of the very earliest of Holocaust documentaries. Set at the abandoned camps of Auschwitz and Majdenek, the film includes excerpts from contemporary Soviet, Polish, and French newsreels as well as footage shot at the internment camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands, or by the Allies' "clean-up" operations.

The title is extremely rich in allusions. On December 7, 1941, Hitler signed a directive that declared anyone guilty of endangering the "security or state of readiness" of German forces and who was not to be summarily executed simply vanished into the "night and fog" of Germany. Prior to the "Night and Fog" decree, political prisoners were treated according to international law, which Hitler felt was too lenient.

However, Hitler's code name is a reference to Goethe, Germany's most acclaimed poet and playwright, who used the phrase to describe clandestine actions often concealed by fog and the darkness of night.

One of Resnais' collaborators, the poet and novelist Jean Cayrol, who had been imprisoned at Mauthausen as a result of his work with the Resistance had written about his experience in Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard.