January 16, 2025

There's an astonishing degree of optimism to this film, as the children playing offers us hope that the atrocities it goes on to graphically illustrate may never happen again. The bulk of this documentary shows the sheer devastation caused by the Nazi invasion of Poland. Not just to the nation's infrastructure but to it's brutalised population, too. There is a great deal of potent archive used throughout, but for me it is the photographs that pun… read the rest.

There's an astonishing degree of optimism to this film, as the children playing offers us hope that the atrocities it goes on to graphically illustrate may never happen again. The bulk of this documentary shows the sheer devastation caused by the Nazi invasion of Poland. Not just to the nation's infrastructure but to it's brutalised population, too. There is a great deal of potent archive used throughout, but for me it is the photographs that punch hardest. The shoes, the spectacles, the images of despair and helplessness. It didn't matter about age or sex, whether you were strong or weak, rich or poor - these photos capture most emotively the sheer indiscriminate nature of this attack and of it's aftermath for a great many in the camps. Still, there are the children and as long as they are seeing films like this, surely a guarantee this could never recur?

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