KURT GERRON
Berlin, May 11, 1897 - Auschwitz, October 28 1944
When I first saw the reconstructed film “People on Sunday,” it was for the purpose of seeing Kurt Gerron, who is listed in the credits. But I didn’t see him. I saw it twice and didn’t get a glimpse.
I didn’t think anything more than my own vision was limited, that I kept getting so involved in this wonderful picture I didn’t notice him. Perhaps he was thinner, wearing something else than I’m used to. But it was a fact that although I watched and watched he wasn’t there.
So when I watched the reconstructed version of “The White Hell of Pitz Palau,” that 1928 film with Leni Reifenstal, I paid particular attention, and didn’t miss the split second scene where he sits in the background in a bar surrounded by a few women.
But I couldn’t figure out the context. Not only why is there a teensy crowded bar scene in a vast film which operates on the endless vision of men and women in endless white mountains and focuses on 3 people with little additions, but also why doesn’t it do more of that, showing the world’s reaction to the lost couple, the doctor, and the students.
Suddenly one night I envisioned the way I would have done it – slicing back and forth from the starkness and emptiness of Pitz-Palau to the warmth and comfort and shallowness of the bar. And I wondered why it wasn’t done.
But the more films I see where Gerron is credited, the more I realize he was simply cut out, and all copies destroyed. It is as if the Nazis killed him twice, in life and on the screen.
