This Ordinary Thing
- Dr. Lloyd
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
The Kindness of Strangers
A film review by Dr. Lloyd Sederer
As a boy, my family lived with my grandparents in an attached 3-decker, brick house in the north Bronx. My mother’s parents had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe (antedating the Fascist Holocaust), penniless and homeless, ‘settling’ into the tenements of New York City’s lower east side. When I had asked them about the lives they had before they came by “steerage” to the US, they deftly avoided answering. I could not understand then, as I do now, the trauma, forced immigration, and danger they endured to protect themselves and the families they were to raise. My grandparents survived when so many other Jews were later killed by the Nazis and Eastern European bigots. Their lives were dedicated to making better lives for their children, and, in turn, their children. Like me, a beneficiary of their sacrifices.
Among the survivors of Europe’s Semitic slaughter were those protected by non-Jews, who saved thousands of Jews from Hitler’s slaughter. “This Ordinary Thing” is a remarkable and revelatory film that portrays 45 non-Jews, who endangered their lives and those of their family and friends to protect European Jews from the Holocaust.
The Nazi killing machine took an estimated 6 million Jewish lives, prosecuted largely by everyday Germans falling under the spell of a delusional hate monger. Many of those Germans, not only Jews, have said they could not see the horror coming, until those murdered included their family, neighbors, and friends – children included.
A profoundly tragic dilemma faced those Germans witness to the staggering human slaughter of Jews (some Catholics and Christians as well), as if it was an “ordinary thing”. We as viewers to the 51-minute narrated archival film, This Ordinary Thing, will puzzle about why some Germans, at risk to themselves and their families, opened their homes and lives to save Jews hunted by the Nazi stormtroopers. And why others shut their doors to those Jews seeking shelter from the murderous hands of their Nazi hunters.
Using carefully chosen and edited archival photographs and film from before and during the Second World War, prominent artists narrate stories of Jews in the urban ghettos that became make-shift prisons in Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands and other European countries dominated by the Nazi Reich.
Why some Europeans opened their homes to Jews running for their lives is well represented in this film as, “how could we do anything else”? Their remarkable kindness portrays the humanity that lives within so many of us. It is a tribute to the kindness of others, especially when they too were likely to be killed, in this instance, for protecting Jews during the Holocaust.
Many non-Jews hid Jews, often strangers to them, often for long periods of time, in their attics, basements, walls built to conceal, even furniture that could hide a child, sometimes an adult. We see in this film chilling archival film of how families concealed what they were doing by living with blinds drawn. Some lived by night to protect their Jewish house ‘guests’, letting them out of hiding but only by cover of darkness. Of feeding and comforting them during the nightmare they were living. They provided safety, for no material benefits, from the Nazis tasked to find and kill Jews. Their lives were spent in the terror of discovery, knowing if caught they would face cruel or deadly punishment for their actions in violation of the Nazi persecution.
Many a Jew, went from home-to-home beseeching safety. The Nazi threat was pervasive. Financial rewards were also paid to families who revealed who was a Jew and where to find them.
Still, some non-Jewish families did not let the Nazi threat or rewards stand in the way of saving Jews from a bullet to the head or a train headed to a gas chamber in a German concentration camp.
Bystander behavior, taking no protective action when witness to violence or deadly neglect, is not confined to Nazi Germany. It is sadly present in many countries, both third world and developed (like the US). As I write this review, 42 million Americans were to be cut off from vital food supplies and, thus, would starve because SNAP benefits have been shut off by the federal government. Countless other Americans have no safe or reliable housing. Deportation threatens immigrants who are being hunted, as were the Jews some 60 years ago. As American citizens, we are bystanders to a culture of high-power guns and deadly violence.
Stray bullets kill children and teenagers join gangs for their ostensible safety. Addiction to drugs and alcohol traumatizes the fabric and heart of families. Drug overdose (OD) deaths are no longer confined to people of color and living in poverty. The number of OD deaths continues to escalate. As a doctor and psychiatrist, I have met with many families who have lost a child, sibling, parent, spouse or partner, even a grandparent to a drug overdose. Their agony never ceases. Grief and the pain of loss drives some survivors to a mission seeking to help others.
Human brutality and neglect will always raise the question: will I open my door when asked? Will I support and save fellow humans when by no fault of their own are not receiving their fair share of food, shelter, and safety? To save those foreclosed from the blessings of a life suffused the love of others and the grace befitting being alive?
Dr. Lloyd Sederer is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction writer.
More of his work can be found on his website, www.askdrlloyd.com
