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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| The end of the ordeal: The Pianist |
Genug;
'nuf said.
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Three good Books on Holocaust Film:
Aaron Kerner Film and
the Holocaust, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011
Annette Innsdorf, Indelible
Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, (3rd edition), Cambridge
University Press, 2002
Laurence Baron, Projecting
the Holocaust into the Present, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005
Watching some films:
Escape from Sobibor
You can watch Pianist for a small fee at Amazon.com
For a contemporary review of Border Street (it opened in the U.S. in 1950)
