Rogers: Indifference and the Individual in “Night” “Soviet Story” and “Conspiracy”

In “Soviet Story” there is shown briefly a newspaper story entitled “Pawns of Tragedy in Ukraine,” in which there are pictured three little girls in Ukraine muffled in dirty layers and obviously starving. For the benefit of the documentary, this picture was supposed to underscore the shameful and willful ignorance exhibited by the U.S., since we are told right after the newspaper clippings are shown, that the U.S. did nothing to help the starving Kulaks. While this picture was trying to bring home that message, what I saw were these three little children, who are ignorant of anything but their own rumbling bellies, whose parents had done nothing to incur their terrible treatment. Three individuals representing millions, whose images were shown to well-fed Americans who were unable or unwilling to believe that an Ally government could inflict such tortures on its own people. Nobody wanted to believe, because the truth was too awful, even with evidence before their eyes. Americans dealt with concentration camps filled with Jews the same way: Willful, comfortable, ignorance and indifference. The easier way.
Group behavior, blind obedience like that of the SS guards, is always thought of as irrational versus that of the individual, who can weigh the issue at hand only from his own point of view. At the beginning of Elie Weisel’s “Night”, the villagers of Sighet scorn the words of the individual, Moishe the Beadle who tries to tell them of the horrors to come. The villagers deny, deny, deny, up till the last minute when they are deported. We learn in “Night,” through Eliezer’s tortured resentment of his rapidly failing father, that it is easier to be alone in the camps. The individual has more of a chance of survival, because the individual only has himself to look after and keep whole.
In “Conspiracy” we are shown a beautiful façade, an elegant setting for the most highly systemized mass slaughter ever imagined by man. The government officials and the high ranking SS officers chat amiably, eat heartily, smoke fine cigars and calmly discuss the mass extermination of the Jewish race. It is perhaps not quite correct to say that they are all calm. Several of them do get uppity during the council, but not because they are against “Evacuation” (another façade, for evacuation, read: extermination), they are just not comfortable with being ordered around by the SS. Co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, Wilhelm Stuckart, played by Colin Firth, loses his temper, not through any misplaced sense of humanity, but because he is angry that the Nuremberg Laws are being mistreated and generally trampled upon. Friedrich Kritzenger, deputy head of the Reich Chancellory is the only guest at the conference who voices his opposition to the plan. Quickly subdued with threats, the individual once again fades back into the group.
Fear is what induces the individual to join the group. Indifference to the fate of others is what is fostered in these groups. The Nazi’s used fear to intimidate and control the countries they occupied. They no longer wanted to deal with individual Jews, but wanted to wipe them out as a group. Same goes for the Kulaks in Soviet Russia. Willful indifference and ignorance to the plight of fellow human beings is still happening and genocide is still being perpetrated by individuals clever enough to exploit the group as a whole and destroy the individual.