The Long Way Home Analysis

The documentary The Long Way Home was produced in the year of 1997. The documentary won the Best Documentary Oscar in 1998 because of the way the film documents the persecution the Jewish people were confronted with after they had been liberated from the concentration camps in 1945. The director of The Long Way Home directs the audience's attention to a somewhat mysterious part of Jewish history. The film shows the audience a horribly agonizing part of history that is being forgotten or simply not taught to students because of how bad the Jewish people were treated even after they were liberated. Many history books will state that the Holocaust was over in 1945, but for most Jewish people the Holocaust was not the end of their fight. And, the way this documentary illustrates this is through interviews with Holocaust survivors, news reports, journals, letters, and interviews with

For example, the director of the documentary uses interviews with US Army Chaplain Abraham Klausner. Klausner led Earl G. Harrison the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania on tours of the displaced person camps to see how the US Army was treating the liberated Jewish people. The firsthand accounts are essential to the effectiveness of the documentary because the audience is able to see and hear what the people living through this time were thinking. Whether it is an interview from survivors, the press, rabbis, or even the military personnel; the firsthand accounts throughout The Long Way Home range from actually having an interview with people such as Abraham Klausner an Army Chaplain, Livia Shacter an Auschwitz survivor, Harold Kats a Brichah Volunteer, and Ruth Gruber a Foreign Correspondent. Now, there are many other firsthand accounts besides those, but each person who has the firsthand account has a story to