In the Charnel House

Naked Among the Wolves. When the truth was finally told about World War II concentration camps, it was so shattering that the civilized world is still recovering pieces of its conscience. Now East Germany has joined the film makers of France, England and the U.S. with an examination of one of the German charnel houses during the final days of the war.

Into the Buchenwald barracks comes a group of prisoners from Auschwitz. Among them is an ancient Pole bearing perhaps the most unusual luggage ever brought into the camp--a cardboard suitcase containing a three-year-old boy, orphaned and alone save for his gaunt guardian who has so far kept him from harm. When the Pole is transferred to another compound, the Kapos (trusties) and other prisoners combine forces to hide the child and save him from the packs of Nazi wolves who run the camp. But it is not long before the commandant hears of the "Jew brat" and determines to find him.

The child comes to have significance beyond his own life. Prisoners submit to torture and death rather than reveal his constantly changing refuge. As Allied planes drone overhead, the great war outside Buchenwald is echoed by the small one inside. Men whose lusterless eyes have long since accepted defeat and early death begin again to act like people with a future. The precious burden of the boy becomes synonymous with the tomorrow none of them had ever hoped to see. Rumors run through the camp that the war is almost over. And when the Germans continue their pathological extermination of prisoners, the inmates rise up to attack their tormenters with a meager store of guns, knives, sticks--anything they can lay their hands on. The wolves flee; the hordes of prisoners burst forth with the little child who has led them.

Though this particular episode is fiction, occasional rebellion did occur in the death camps. The story of those camps has been filmed with subtler skill in such movies as Night and Fog and The Pawnbroker. But Director Frank Beyer's stark documentary style and the unaffected pathos engendered by his actors--all unknown in the West--underline a truth that bears reiteration. At a time of utmost degradation, man still has the will to endure, and to prevail.

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