Jude'sMusings: Holocaust and Genocide I: Yom Ha Shoah and All that

Yours Truly at Auschwitz, 2006

Today (April 24) is Yom ha Shoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, certainly not an anniversary I’ll ever be allowed to forget (I was born in 1941). And we became aware of it early: I was too young to be conscious of it during World War itself, but we used to go to a Jewish resort/summer camp in upstate New York, and in the years right after the war ended, we used to see Nobody knew what PTSD was then, but these folks certainly had it, and it freaked us kids out. Nobody could have gone through Concentration, let alone Death Camps, and gotten out unscathed. I was very glad that practically all of my family had emigrated to America before the first World War!

war refugee people with numbers on their arms and vacant wandering around the grounds from time to time.

I don’t really know if postwar-to-millennial generations feel or care about this horror, but I can say one thing about Jews, with an earlier history of being marginalized hot-wired into us, and because Judaism, whether religious or secular, makes us continually ruminate about and question things, the horrific memory still lives, although increasingly few of us were alive back then, and my guess is that the country of Israel, justifiable or not, would never have happened at all, except after the senseless sacrifice of millions.

Anselm Kiefer, Eisen Stadt (1986)

Maybe part of the reason that we can talk about it so freely is because in the post-war years, Germans have come forward and admitted their role—all you have to do is look at the paintings and installations of Anselm Kiefer, not Jewish and born in 1945. Or I can recall with affection a conversation I had early one morning on a Norwegian boat, with a young fellow from Germany also traveling—about the holocaust and the human condition. We can move on, and given the several genocides that have occurred since, or horrible die-offs before (such as the Stalin-induced great famine, or Ukrainian Holodomor of the early 1930’s, where so many millions died—and even more millions at the same time in other parts of the USSR), such slaughter seems to be one of the downsides of the human race.

Border Street: Poster

But maybe it was the cynical systematic bureaucratization with which the Holocaust was carried out during Hitler’s 12-year Reich that is the reason that so many films, plays, and documentaries have been made of it, beginning with the U.S. Army footage when the concentration By the late 1940’s fictionalized films were begun to be made too, such as the Polish Border Street, which may have included Sovietized polemics, but which certainly must have stirred the memories of those who had lived through—Jewish or not.

camps were liberated.

Since then, there have been so many Holocaust movies that they have become the fodder of academic scholarship. How can you present, within a film or even a miniseries, an event of such magnitude? Sometimes they are fictional, as in the case of the TV Miniseries Holocaust, in which various members of the Weiss family manage to have died at each major atrocity site, be it Babi Yar or Auschwitz. Over the years, movies have run the gamut from the epic of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, to the completely claustrophobic film of the stage play The Grey zone, dealing with the fiendish existence of the Jewish sonderkommandoes, working at the extermination centers. A movie can manage to be romantic and dewy in spite of the ghastliness, as in the 1950’s somewhat sanitized incarnation of the Diary of Anne Frank, to the soap opera of the Holocaust miniseries, even with the macabre black humor of Europa- Europa and the macabre goofiness of Life is Beautiful, not to mention trivializing it, as in Inglorious Basterds.. There are even films about Holocaust denial. There are, of course sober, longwinded and thorough documentary films like Shoah—all nine hours of it. In other words, something for everyone who needs to confront the topic. I could go on, but the best thing is to read one of the critical overviews mentioned at the end of this rant.

Meryl Streep in Holocaust

Some of these visual essays are about real people’s experiences, others have more dramatically invented Everyman/woman, and every time historians and military archeologists make new discoveries, they almost immediately become documentaries that soon appear on the Smithsonian (the discovery of remains at Treblinka), and Military History channels (most recently a multi-part series on the history of Auschwitz, and another really chilling one that h gave us several days of Einsatzgruppen, followed by an episode of NOVA on PBS just last week about similar activity around Vilnius (then called Vilna). As a matter of fact, I think that the Military channel is beginning to morph into the Everything Hitler Channel.

We can look forward and move on, which most of us have done. There was closure in admission of guilt. But it all seems to be a testament to the unavoidable human trait that results in flaring up of collective madness at different times and places in the world, when normal, ordinary people rise up against a selected portion of their own, for whatever reasons—evil mad, irrational “Strange Fire” that leads us to dehumanize a particular group of people for whatever reason, and slaughter them without compunction until the perpetrators burn themselves out and stop and wonder why they did it.

I’ve done the Holocaust thing to the best of my ability, including a visit to Auschwitz and visiting museums dedicated to it in Israel, Hungary and several in the U.S. I’ve even taught courses in Holocaust and Genocide film at my university. For myself, bringing the message home were most powerfully conveyed in three movies, two of them, I think, long forgotten among the sheer volume of product.

Aleksander Ford: Filming Border Street

The first of these is Border Street, a 1948 Polish film directed by Aleksander Ford. Though shot from the Sovietized polemical point of view, this film is really interesting because it portrayed events of the immediate past in the country where they filmed: Warsaw. The rawness of the immediate catastrophic past is so evident here. It’s in black and white, somewhat chaotic in its plot as it follows a fictional group of families, both Jewish and non-Jewish who lived around a single courtyard, but in its very lack of subtlety, has the ring of immediacy.

Escape from Sobibor: The Escape

Second is Escape from Sobibor, a made-for-TV movie from 1987, directed by Jack Gold, starring Alan Arkin (a Jewish actor playing a Jewish resistor), and Rutger Hauer (a Dutch non-Jewish actor playing a Russian-Jewish POW and resistor). This film was based on a true event—there have been documentaries interviewing the real survivors---and in spite of some inevitable modifications necessary to fit the conventions of a two-hour movie filmed for television and on an average budget and the fact that the actors were better-looking than their real counterparts, was amazingly effective. It managed to convey the horror of a death camp, and even though most of the escapees perished in their attempt, it was nevertheless inspiring in its message of the endurance of the human spirit.

My third candidate is Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, based on a real Warsaw Jewish survivor, the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. This film is the Holocaust in microcosm: one ordinary Jewish guy caught up in the macrocosmic event. Adrien Brody is amazingly poignant as a talented Everyman. But what knocks the film out of the park for me is Polanski’s direction. Whatever you might think about Polanski on moral grounds, it’s worth remembering that he himself was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, hiding out in Krakow. I think this movie is partially autobiographical (I wrote about this earlier, see my blog of 6/5/2015). I recently saw it again. If I was a survivor with his talent, this would be the movie I would make: distilling the story of millions into one.