3x18 A Class Divided - Frontline Episode Guide

Frontline

- Episode 03x18

Episode: 03x18
Title: A Class Divided
Type: Regular Episode
Production Code: N/A
First Aired: Mar. 26, 1985

Season 3 » Episode #18 - A Class Divided

Summary: Almost 20 years ago, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to children with brown eyes. Frontline explores what those children learned about discrimination and how it still affects them today.

Who appeared in this episode?

[no credits found]

Guest Stars:

Narrator

played by Trevor Howard

Episode Quotes

Season 3 / Episode 18: - A Class Divided

Narrator: Here Schoker, the camp commandant, said, "I want at least 600 Jewish deaths reported in the camp office every day." Thugs were appointed as overseers or block leaders. There was no efficient distribution of food. One prisoner collected the rations for ten or fifteen men. Hunger and hopelessness turned some of them into beasts. Sometimes, a prisoner carrying rations back to the hut was waylaid and robbed by other prisoners. Sometimes, he ate the best part of the food himself. Sometimes, he sold it. Corruption was fostered, for it gave another excuse for killing. All this seemed so remote from humanity, so far beyond the behavior of man. British Members of Parliament came, and saw, and were sick at heart. It had to be seen to be believed.

Season 3 / Episode 18: - A Class Divided

Narrator: The dead have been buried. It remains for us to care for these, the living. It remains for us to hope that Germans may help mend what they have broken, and cleanse what they have befouled. Thousands of German people were made to see for themselves, to bury the dead, to file past the victims. This was the end of the journey they had so confidently begun in 1933. Twelve years? No, in terms of barbarity and brutality they had traveled backwards for 12,000 years. Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But, by God's grace, we who live will learn.

[More Quotes]

MISTAKES/GOOFS

[none added]

TRIVIA

This film was planned to be six reels, but the sixth reel - made by Soviet cinematographers filming the liberation of concentration camps near the Russian front - was taken back to the USSR in 1945 and not included in the 1985 release.
This film was unreleased when it was originally made in 1945 and was know only by its archival file number in the Imperial War Museum - F3080.

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