Educational Media Reviews Online

This documentary chronicles the Allies’ growing but reluctant awareness of the Holocaust during the war. Four early messengers to the powerful western governments recount what they knew when, how they gathered their evidence, and their efforts to publicize the unbelievable horror. They describe their meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill, who offered little response. These heroic messengers failed to get any significant response from anyone, although in 1944 enough public pressure had finally built up to prompt FDR to form the War Refugee Board, which saved the lives of 200,00 Hungarian Jews. The U.S. State Department comes in for special criticism for actively undermining what efforts there were to aid the Jews. The former Chief Historian of the State Department, William Slany, discusses their obstructionist role.

The emphasis is on the activities of the messengers and the spreading of information. Less attention is devoted to analyzing or explaining the world’s lack of response. The messengers have enough to tell that it’s reasonable to leave the complex issue of the world’s indifference beyond the scope of this documentary. This film leaves no doubt that the world did indeed hear truth that it did not want to hear.

The technical quality is good and the footage of Hitler, Nazis, the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps makes the testimony of the messengers that much more vivid. The film jumps right in with only the briefest of introductions, so it’s hard to remember who’s who as the film bounces back and forth from one messenger’s testimony to another’s. Having their names appear on screen the first few times they appear would have helped. The decision to move chronologically, rather than person-by-person, was the right one however, since it makes it clear how knowledge of the atrocity grew during the course of the war.

Recommended for classes dealing with anti-semitism and the peculiar effects of prejudice in general, as well as classes on the Holocaust and World War II.