What is Cinema?

There is one book about the Holocaust that has remained indelible to me until now (I first read it back in 1999): "The Informed Heart," written by the Austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. The book is a vivid, unsettling and insightful first-person account of the author's experiences in the Nazi concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald during World War II, when Adolf Hitler's totalitarian rule and so-called "Final Solution" were in full swing. "The Informed Heart" is not simply a memoir;it is also a psychological study of how it is to live in extreme situations, where inhumanity is at its peak and death seems to be the only escape from such an abyss. While the book is admittedly difficult to sit through, with such detailed descriptions of the horrors and sufferings of being a prisoner in a concentration camp (regardless of age, gender and social status), it is ultimately a searing call for compassion, understanding and acceptance of human di...