The blue girl asked me to watch a documentary with her. She needed to watch it for the course she is designing. It didn't surprise me to be invited to watch a documentary: "I have a documentary..." is a common phrase in her discourse. However, last time it was "The World According to Sesame Street": it was optimistic and after watching it I was excited again by the ideas behind it. This time I expected something related to war or reconciliation, but I didn't expect what I got: Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard), by Alain Resnais.
It is a disturbing, incredibly sad documentary about concentration (death) camps in Nazi Germany, shot in 1955, relatively shorly after the end of the war and the discovery of those horrors by "the rest of the world".
I won't try to summarize or recreate with my poor writing ability what I saw or what I felt, but I will try to at least say something. I can't stay quiet. I shouldn't. I should say more. How can I stay quiet after hearing: "Je ne suis pas responsable, dit l'officiel", "Je ne suis pas responsable, dit le Kappo", ... "Alors, qui est responsable?"  ("I'm not responsible", said the officer. "I'm not responsible", said the Kappo. "So, who is responsible?" Asks us the narrator).
With tears in my eyes and barely able to speak, I just kept asking myself: how can we, humans, be capable of such cruelty, of such lack of consciousness for the suffering we cause? What brings people, people like me or you, to be so INhuman, so cruel. How can someone not shed tears after watching "Night and Fog"?
I know, this is so plainly shallow, so bluntly ignorant... but, that's what I am, and I don't feel like I can say any more. Anything else would simply be commonplace.