MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Jane Wells, a freelance writer and a producer of the film, The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur, has traveled to Sudan, Chad, northern Uganda and Rwanda to witness and document atrocities. Jane, the daughter of movie producer Sidney Bernstein, speaks to Jerry Fowler about her father’s film about Nazi concentration camps, and the parallels between two silenced atrocities: the Holocaust and Darfur. Also, she is the founder of Three Generations, an organization based on her father’s legacy to educate and archive acts of genocide.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: Okay. My guest today is Jane Wells. She is a producer of the documentary, The Devil Came on Horseback, which is about the experience in Darfur of former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle who was our guest last week. Jane is also the daughter of Sidney Bernstein, a movie producer himself who was with allied forces at the end of World War II when Nazi concentration camps were liberated and the full scope of the Holocaust was discovered. He produced a film about the camps, and some of his footage is part of the permanent exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Museum today. Jane, welcome to the program.
JANE WELLS: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, Jane, I wanted to start with your father’s story. How was it that he came to be with the Allied Forces?
JANE WELLS: Well, he had been working in the film division, I do not know the technical terms of the divisions he was in anymore, but I think he would been in film division throughout the war. He was a bit old to see active combat and he had been in the entertainment business. So up until the time the Americans came into the war he was working for the Ministry of Information trying to engage the United States through propaganda to join our war effort. And some of the things he did were to bring films from the U.K. over to the U.S. and show them to people here and to go to Hollywood and try to engage Hollywood and the media here in joining the war effort. After the U.S. came in, he was part of divisions that went out and filmed what the troops were doing and action in the war. So I think he was just filming with the allied forces that were advancing through Germany at that time when they happened upon Bergen-Belsen.
JERRY FOWLER: I want to obviously talk about Bergen-Belsen which was one of the most notorious concentration camps, but I want to pick up for just a second on this, what he was doing before the United States came into the war. The war started in Europe in September of 1939.
JANE WELLS: Correct.
JERRY FOWLER: And then the United States did not enter until Pearl Harbor was attacked into 1941. So there were two years there. When you say he was making propaganda, which is kind of a loaded term, do you have more details on what it is he was doing and how he was trying to effect American opinion?
JANE WELLS: Well, they were trying to do it through news reel footage. I think they did a lot of the programs and films, well; there were not TV programs then, but programs with Ed Murrow and When London’s Burning and these things. He also brought over In Which We Serve, which was a Noel Coward film. So the idea was to show Americans how hard things were in Europe and how much at risk our lifestyle way of life was. And he would just, he used to come over across the Atlantic in aircraft and boats, and had amazing stories to tell about that, and then would walk into Washington and into Hollywood and try and encourage Americans, I mean, I say propaganda because one of the things that happened with the later footage was that he insisted it was not propaganda but, in fact, he was working for the Ministry of Information, and they were rolling out footage regularly to try and show what was going on and to get people to support he war effort.
JERRY FOWLER: To influence people’s opinions with the films that they were using.
JANE WELLS: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, so, as the war is nearing an end, the allied forces start encountering these concentration camps, which many people probably in our audience have seen some of the footage. It was the experience was horrific for the people who came upon these camps. And so your father decided to make a film primarily about Bergen-Belsen which was liberated by British forces, but then it brought in footage from other camps. Was this imitative or was this something that the British government asked him to do?
JANE WELLS: Well, from my understanding it was initiative that came very much from him. He was a bit of a maverick and he did not always beat to the drum of the establishment. So when he made up his mind to do something, he was incredibly determined and did not really work within the hierarchy of the army or even of the MI5 at that point. So what I understood was that he had seen this and that he, as a film maker and as a Jew, he was not going to let this one go. So he brought in other people he knew. He tried to get the American units to send their footage and the Russian units. And, in fact, they did. And then he spoke to his friends in Hollywood to help them try and make a better film than the typical news reel they would have been shooting.
JERRY FOWLER: One thing you mentioned, so he was responding to this as a Jew. He had been raised, I understand, as an Orthodox Jew.
JANE WELLS: Correct.
JERRY FOWLER: Was that the way that he saw what happened, as being primarily the destruction of the Jewish people? And was he responding to that, or did he see it as something broader on the part of the Nazis? Because in looking at the film itself, one thing I noted is that a lot of the narration, it refers to victims as being Jewish, but it also-- then it is quick to add that there were other victims as well.
JANE WELLS: Well, I think that there were two things at work with him. One was he was a socialist and a very liberal man at that point, so I think that he wanted to show that this was a genocide that had a-- he probably did not call it a genocide at that point-- but this was an atrocity that affected a wider range of people. But he had been raised as an Orthodox Jew. His older brother, who was a hero to him, had been killed in the First World War at Gallipoli. And when his brother was killed, his parents were so disturbed by the death of their son; he had actually changed his name from Bernstein to Burns in order to be able to enlist in the Army and tried to pass as a non-Jew. So it had been a big issue in the family that he did that and went to fight for England. So I think after that my grandfather would never have anything to do with anything German again in the house. And I think it was probably a buried emotional issue for my father because he was so disturbed, I guess the family-- by what happened to his brother-- then he grew up to be an active socialist and not a practicing Jew, but I think that emotional tie was always there, and a sense of responsibility to that.
JERRY FOWLER: One thing that you had mentioned earlier is that he saw the film that he was creating about the camps as being different from propaganda, different from what he had done earlier.
JANE WELLS: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: What was that line that he was drawing? He was obviously trying to convey a message about what had happened. What did he see as being from what he had done earlier?
JANE WELLS: Well, I think what he did earlier he knew was a type of manipulation. It was an emotional manipulation of Americans to get them engaged in the war. This time he did not want what was filmed to be seen as any kind of manipulation. He wanted to present this as hard factual evidence. I think he called it, Evidence for all Mankind. Those were his words. And I think that because he had been involved in the propaganda machine, if you like, he was adamant that this was not going to be the same thing. So they tried to film in ways that were, perhaps, less manipulative. And he was really sort of working against his previous skill set in doing this because he did not want what they saw there to be dismissed as propaganda.
JERRY FOWLER: And could you just expand on that. What are some of the things that he and his colleagues did when you say they filmed in a different way?
JANE WELLS: Well, one of the scenes that you see at the beginning of the film, a sort of bucolic scene of some young women and children playing, gamboling through a field with blossom at near Bergen-Belsen because, in fact, it was April and the trees were in bloom and they show how beautiful the surrounding countryside was. And, yet, when you get into the camp there is horror and destruction. So there are a lot of wide angled shots, panning shots that they filmed just to show a physical context for the bodies and the death and decomposition. They also filmed a lot of the local Mayors and Burghers from the town and the SS Officers with the bodies. So they tried to put the horror in a broader context of the surrounding countryside and the Germans who were present there and who lived with that. I mean, there is one bit that I particularly remember which is where they show the female SS officers who are incredibly well fed and rather broad of girth around the middle. And then you see them next to these women who are basically skeletons barely alive. And so that sort of thing.
JERRY FOWLER: I guess one thing that any filmmaker, any documentary maker faces, especially one who is trying to convey some political point, is this line between presenting the facts, but presenting them in a way that is effective. And I am sure you encountered that to some degree with The Devil on Horseback. How do you draw that line between presenting evidence that will sway people without going too far in the direction of wanting to sway them, which seems to me is more where you are starting to manipulate the way in which you present it?
JANE WELLS: Well, I think that is pretty subjective. And I think some of the response to The Devil Came on Horseback has suggested that what we thought was tolerable in the film, some of the public do not. But in The Devil Came on Horseback, there were a lot of quick editing cuts. So the camera does not linger on the dead bodies in quite the same way. And recently I went back and saw my father’s footage, and I know Jerry you did even more recently, and it is very, very hard to watch because there are long panning shots that go on for what seems like an indecent amount of time today. And I think what we tend to do is then blink and cover our eyes and that becomes like a cut. But just going back to the techniques that my father did use if I may for a bit, he produced a film with Alfred Hitchcock called Rope in 1948, not long after this. And one of the things they did in that film was that they filmed a complete reel, or there were long, long shots in the film. So they started to play around in a fictional movie with what would happen if you did just roll the camera. And, in a way, this sort of predates that because the shots are gruesomely long to our modern tastes. But, you know, there they are and you see, you know, an SS officer carrying a corpse across, you know, a sand pit and burying, and you wish it would be cut, but it is not. And I think that is part of why it is powerful and also hard to stomach.
JERRY FOWLER: Yes, and there is also a tension that we found here at the Museum in all of the work that we have done on Darfur and the Holocaust and other issues is respecting the victims. There is a certain way in which the victims are being re-victimized with the type of imagery. But, at the same time, you do not want to sugar coat the truth of what it is, which is murder.
JANE WELLS: Yes. Well, I think that when they stumbled upon Bergen-Belsen and they had to film this, and they also had to deal with what they found because it was late spring, you know, corpses were rotting and it was a health risk. I do not think they, they probably, I mean, and the British Army were there directing what happened. I think they just had to go into a practical mode of trying to eliminate disease and so. We look at it now 60 years later and I do, when I look at this footage, I wonder, well, you know, why did not they identify the corpses, why did not they same them for the families, and I think about some of the issues that have come up with mass graves that have been found in Rwanda. But, at the time, they were just an advancing Army trying to do what they had to do.
JERRY FOWLER: Now, your father created this film, but then it was put in the archives, or it was put in a file someplace, it was never seen. What happened with that?
JANE WELLS: Well, there was a moment when the allied governments decided that this sort of film, which was made to show the German people what had happened in their country, was not going to serve the post war effort of rebuilding Germany. And I am just thinking that one of the things that they say at the beginning of the film is that they show the rise of Hitler, they say 17,152,000 or whatever million people voted for Hitler, but they make the point that 20,000,000 plus people did not vote for the National Socialist Party. And, you might argue that the allied governments decided that they needed to be conscious of helping the Germans who had not supported the rise of the Nazi regime. But it was decided that this film would not be shown and should be stopped, and the efforts to keep making it were halted.
JERRY FOWLER: And it was basically classified for decades.
JANE WELLS: It was classified, yes, for 40 years.
JERRY FOWLER: And, as you were growing up, did your dad talk about this experience?
JANE WELLS: He did not mention it once. I mean, at the time when the film became declassified and this documentary was made, I was a young adult, and I was working for Granada Television at that time. I had no idea that he had been there. I had no idea that this footage had been made. My mother had been married to him for 35 years or something by then, she knew nothing about it. He was silenced by what happened. He was so disappointed that the film was not shown that he never spoke about it again. So we had no idea..
JERRY FOWLER: So you think he did not talk about it because of his disappointment?
JANE WELLS: I think he was furious is why, yes.
JERRY FOWLER: And then when the film came to light, this was in the mid-1980s and Granada Television made kind of a documentary about his documentary. Did he talk about it then? Did you have a chance to ask him--?
JANE WELLS: Yes. Yes, we did. And that was the first time we as a family knew about that part of his life and the disappointment that he felt. And he was quite old, relatively old by then, he was about 85, 86. And he was sentimental about it and full of regret and--
JERRY FOWLER: Regret in what sense?
JANE WELLS: That he had not, perhaps, done more, that maybe he did not speak out, just emotional. I think it was still hard to talk about it. And that he had not done more to help those people through film. I think it was really one of the greatest disappointments of his life.
JERRY FOWLER: You have been spending a lot of your time, obviously, in the past, I do not know, two years working on this film The Devil Came on Horseback. Why is that? Why have you devoted your time to this as opposed to any other thing that you could do?
JANE WELLS: Well, I think-- I like to say that maybe the Darfur genocide found me because at the time I became engaged actively in wanting to do something about Darfur, I was living with my husband and four kids in Aspen, Colorado living an idyllic life. And I started to think that I had to go and bear witness to this genocide partly out of the sense that when the Rwandan genocide took place, I did nothing. Maybe I was having babies, I do not know. But I took no responsibility for it myself, so I decided that I had to go to Darfur and bear witness. And I worked pretty hard to figure out a way to get myself into Darfur and see what was there to be seen. I went in March of 2005. And when I came back, I was not, for various to do with security of my host there, I was not really able to talk about what I had seen. So it raised the issue of what does it mean to bear witness if you cannot speak about your witness. And almost coincidentally Brian Steidle had come back and was speaking to Nicholas Kristof and here with you Jerry. And I knew Brian through his sister. And I started to see parallels between what had happened with Brian and what had happened with my father. And Gretchen and Brian had a vision to make a movie about what Brian had seen. Gretchen told me she wanted it to be like Born into Brothels. She wanted a feature movie. And they asked me to help them. And over the next few months, I helped them a little bit with some advice about where to go and try it and who my host them and different things like that. And then they asked me to become a producer. And I got actively involved in late 2005 because it seemed like a perfect opportunity to help, maybe not with my witness, but with Brian’s, which was a much more significant witness to this genocide than mine. And so it just fell into place and became my work and my passion for this stage of my life.
JERRY FOWLER: What do you think your father would have thought?
JANE WELLS: He would have been incredibly critical, probably, of everything he did and the way I did it, but I think he would have been very proud. I think he would have seen it as a continuation of some legacy that he had started. But he would have given me a very hard time along the way because he was a ferocious task master.
JERRY FOWLER: A perfectionist?
JANE WELLS: Yes, absolutely.
JERRY FOWLER: And how has the film been received? I mean, you finished it; it is starting to be shown in a lot of venues. Is it accomplishing what you hoped it would accomplish?
JANE WELLS: Well, I think I might have hoped, and I still do hope, that it would be more of a, have more of a commercial impact. But I think, you know, given the limited release it has, given how we have been able to use it, it is a powerful tool. It does move audiences to action, which is very important. But I wish that the whole issue of Darfur and this genocide were more on the front page. I, you know, it never ceases to amaze me how we can get excited or distressed about Britney Spears’ performance at the Video Music Awards two nights ago gets so much more coverage on all the TV stations than this genocide ever has. That a family who were raped and burnt to death in Connecticut a few weeks ago, which is horrible, I understand, but hundreds of thousands of women and families have been raped and burnt to death in Darfur. And it always disappoints me that we can focus in on, issues in America without much regard to what happens to many people elsewhere. So general disappointment about that, but that is our reality.
JERRY FOWLER: Well, we are getting near the end of the time that we have. You created an organization called Three Generations. And I suspect the generations are your father, yourself and perhaps your children?
JANE WELLS: My sons, both my sons.
JERRY FOWLER: Your sons.
JANE WELLS: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: What are you trying to accomplish with Three Generations?
JANE WELLS: Well, I think that, you know, obviously, we all say never again and again, and never again happens again. And I think that the responsibility for archiving genocide and trying to stop genocide now must pass from generation to generation because it, per force, has done. And I think I did take my older son to Rwanda when we filmed The Devil Came on Horseback, and he worked quite a lot on this film. And, I was thinking about something my father said, he said, after he made this film, “All we can do now is to honor the dead and try to battle for peace.” And I think that I am a middle-age woman, I am trying to battle for peace and the end of genocide now. I do not think that is happening exactly in this genocide. I hope it will happen in my lifetime, but we have to look to another generation, my children’s generation to make that a reality because we must try and put in place more measures to stop these genocides from occurring again and again.
JERRY FOWLER: Jane Wells is the producer of The Devil Came on Horseback. Jane thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
JANE WELLS: Well, thank you very much. It is wonderful to be here.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
