Chapter 15 Within Us – an Additional Aspect of the Wartime Experience

Egyptian-born Moshe Mizrahi, one of the greatest, most creative and produc- tive filmmakers living in Israel, was born in Alexandria, in 1931. He spent his early years as a journalist and film critic in 1950s France, occasionally work- ing as a youth counselor for the Jewish Agency in France and in Tunisia, and later in Israel as a film critic and subtitle translator. By the end of the 1960s, after years of working as an assistant director for the French Tele France pro- duction company, he began writing and directing, constantly moving between France and Israel. His cultural education was deeply affected by French cul- ture. Mizrahi’s works conceal his intentions and ethnic background, and avoid directly touching upon the Holocaust; instead, Mizrahi attempts to create a universally human Holocaust experience, without accentuating the origin of his characters or their whereabouts during the war. Only on a second and third viewing does one detect the director’s hints and ques- tions of identity, Jewry, female status in a patriarchal society, and more than anything – man’s feeling of internal exile, the foreignness of his surrounding and himself. In The Customer of the Off-Season (1970), Mizrahi distances testimony and deals with what he allegedly cannot explore, a matter seemingly out of his historical jurisdiction, on account of his being Mizrahi, stranger to this cor- ner of history. Still, he wishes to tell the story of the Holocaust as it had never been told onscreen: the story of an ex-Gestapo official who has been hiding in Eilat for twenty years. Such concepts had not been touched upon in the cinema of the period, neither in Israel nor worldwide; most films of the 1960s and 70s depicted postwar life and the miraculous establishment of the Jewish state.1 None, including Israeli films, conjured up Nazis masquerading as Jews, or Nazis-turned-Jews who had come to live in Israel, despite rumors of such

1 See Otto Preminger’s Exodus (USA, 1960), written by Dalton Trumbo; France Štiglic’s The Ninth Circle (Deveti Krug) (Yugoslavia, 1960); Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg (USA, 1961); Peter Brook’s Pawnbroker (USA, 1965); Melville Shavelson’s Cast A Giant Shadow (USA, 1968). The first Israeli feature film Hill 24 Does Not Answer (1955), directed by Thorold Dickinson, indirectly touches upon this issue.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395626_017 Within Us – an Additional Aspect of the Wartime Experience 191 men and women.2 Mizrahi did. Removed from the Holocaust discourse and forbidden from touching upon the Holocaust experience, to speak of or for the survivors, Mizrahi employs covert writing, directing and photography, both close to the subject but removed from it, by focusing on the aggressor rather than the victim. Mizrahi stands on the shoulders of giants, earning valida- tion to his choice. The film corresponds with Melville’s The Silence of the Sea (1949), a Nazi officer’s tale of disillusionment with Nazism after living among the French during the occupation. Mizrahi’s film seems like an extension of Melville’s. The same officer, now aware, takes up a new religion in the wake of the war as he changes his name to the sabra moniker Tal and begins his new life in the Israeli desert, bordering Sinai, in a land created by western civiliza- tion. The viewer knows nothing of what befell him between the end of the war and the beginning of the film, apart from his being in Eilat for 20 years (i.e., he came to Israel in the 1950s). Unlike Melville’s officer whose term in France ends with an air of silent, hesitant remorse, Mizrahi’s hero is haunted by his past as a Gestapo interrogator. He is trapped by the sea on one end and the mountains on the other. Only a narrow, winding path connects him to the city seen at the beginning of the film. Between them are two buildings, reminiscent of a concentration camp, as they are filmed from above. One is a guest room, the interior and exterior of which are not unlike a residential block at Birkenau, with exposed, dirty walls, a clunky metal bed and a ragged, bare straw mattress. The room is bare, like an interrogation room. Tal’s wife, Miriam, her origins unknown, is trapped in the compound. He guards the place, coming and going, checking the earnings of his failing inn. He and his wife share no intimacy. She serves him and works at the inn, but the nature of their relationship is vague, and her dependence on him is unclear. The fact that she is kept far from human contact and is forbidden from setting foot outside lest she be seen, raises questions of their relationship. She is akin to the heroine of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1960) – the Jewish girl in a concen- tration camp who becomes a sex slave to the guards and gradually a part of the Nazi operation, until her ideological awakening. The inn is visited by a young man, a scar-backed vagabond. He does not say where he came from, what he desires, or what his plans are. He has come “to search,” but what for, he does not say. The sight of the man awakens some- thing in Tal. He begins to wonder if the man who had come to his refuge is the very same man he had tortured deep in the Gestapo basements, and if that is indeed the truth, did he come to settle a score? He gradually convinces himself

2 The character of the Nazi in the film Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer came to the country with the intention of murdering Jews and had no desire to remain there.