Humanism Ireland • No 116 • May-June 2009

Imagining the Holocaust

Brian McClinton The Holocaust has to be retold for every new generation, but how does the current batch of movies match up to the best? AN’S INHUMANITY to caust became a taboo. Theodor Adorno fa- ished shield she has given him. Films made man reached its nadir in the mously remarked that ‘writing poetry after of the Nazi death camps could, like Per- MShoah – the mass slaughter Auschwitz is barbaric’. To write about the seus’s shield, mirror unspeakable horrors of about 6 million European Jews, Holocaust would ‘violate the inner incoher- and thus incorporate into the memory the about 1.5 million of whom were chil- ence of the event, casting it into a mould too real face of things too dreadful to behold in dren, between 1941 and 1945. The pleasing or too formal’. In his memoirs reality. The film screen is Athena’s polished scale of this Holocaust was unprece- about Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote: “Our shield. dented, and so too was the manner of language lacks words to express the offence, Moreover, there are many Holocaust den- its execution. Nearly two thirds of the the demolition of a man’ (Survival in Ausch- iers including historians, professors and victims died in gas chambers, about witz: The Assault on Humanity). Thus we can bishops who argue in print that the gas 3.8 million in total, with the largest argue that the Holocaust, being so horrific chambers did not exist, and in these cir- numbers being gassed in the 6 exter- and so unique, is beyond intelligibility or cumstances the luxury of forgetfulness is mination camps in Poland, including cultural representation. Silence is the only not an option. It happened and could hap- Auschwitz (about 1.5 million), Treb- appropriate response to the tragedy. pen again. Indeed, to some extent it has, in linka (about 800,000), and Belzec As for pictorial images, how can this places like Cambodia under the Khymer (400,000). Thus the gas chamber ‘scourge of the century’ – as Levi called it in Rouge or in Rwanda under the Hutus. As became the ultimate horror icon of the The Drowned and the Saved – ever be ade- Annette Insdorf suggests, “In recognising modern age. quately portrayed in film or art? Saul Fried- our ability to identify with characters, lander, whose parents were gassed in Ausch- whether Jewish, German, Kapo, or Commu- THE POLISHED SHIELD witz and whose works include Pius XII and nist, we move one step closer to guarding At the start of this nightmare, there the Third Reich, coined the phrase about ‘the against that which permitted the Holocaust was a natural desire for Jews to tell the limits of representation’, and Claude Lanz- to develop – indifference” (Indelible Shad- world what the Nazis were doing to mann, the maker of Shoah (see below), has ows: Film and the Holocaust). them. Shortly before he was killed in gone further, arguing that it is wrong to give 1941, the Jewish historian Simon an image of the unimaginable. The Holo- NIGHT AND FOG Dubnov cried out to the people in the caust is “unique in the sense that it erects One of the first films was the 30-minute Riga ghetto: “Jews, write and record”. around itself, in a circle of flames, a bound- documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Thousands did indeed try to keep ary which cannot be reached because a cer- Fog), made by Alain Resnais in 1955. The some record of what was happening to tain absolute degree of horror is intrans- ‘night’ may be said to refer not only to the them – in diaries, letters, notes, missable: to pretend it can be done is to darkness that the deportees arrive in but poems, paintings, sketches, photo- make oneself guilty of the most serious sort also to the certain death of most of them or graphs. But the world wasn’t listening of transgression”. Lanzmann has even said the secrecy of the atrocities. The ‘fog’ is ar- very closely even when, by 1942, re- that if he found an actual film, a secret film, guably the cloak that makes the fate of ports of the gas chambers reached made by an SS man and showing how 3,000 some of them uncertain or possibly the in- western governments and churches. Jews were asphyxiated in a gas chamber of difference or ignorance of the world to their When the war ended, and two thirds the crematorium 2 in Auschwitz, “not only fate. of Europe’s Jews had been wiped off would I not have shown it but I would have The film begins with a pastoral scene in the face of the earth, western viewers destroyed it”. colour, but soon we realise that we are fol- saw appalling newsreels appropriated It is also easy to understand the reluctance lowing the railroad tracks that lead directly from Nazi archives or filmed by allied to take on the subject on the part of Holly- into Auschwitz. The colour is replaced by liberators of skeletal prisoners scrap- wood. It thrives on escapism from the hard- black-and-white collages, many of which ping rubbish piles for food, faces ships of the real world, but the Holocaust are from the Nazi archives: Jews herded into peering through slits in the boxcars of was all too real and afforded little opportu- freight cars; a gas chamber ceiling clawed trains destined for the camps, naked nity for triumphant displays of the human by victims’ fingernails; soap and lamp- lines waiting for selection, mountains spirit. How would it be possible to make a shades made from human skin; mass graves of women’s hair, and bodies being feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad containing skeletal bodies. bulldozed or slung into pits. Some of experience of the 20th century, a film with 6 As François Truffaut has said, the power the images became iconic, like the million victims and no heroes? of the film is rooted in its tone of ‘terrible capped boy in the Warsaw ghetto with Yet there is another view. In his Theory of gentleness’. The violent images are backed his hands up and fear written all over Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, by a soft and peaceful soundtrack and the his face (see p23). There is no doubt Siegfried Kracauer recounts the myth of the quiet, monotonous voice of the narrator, that these pictures are among the most Gorgon Medusa, who is so horrible to look who points to the present: “We who pretend obscene and gruesome ever filmed. at that when Athena orders Perseus to slay to believe that all this happened in one time Partly as a result, Dubnov’s 1941 her, she advises him never to look at her face and one place, and who do not think to look plea was stood on its head. The Holo- itself but only at its reflection in the pol- around us, or hear the endless cry”. ➤ 21 Humanism Ireland • No 116 • May-June 2009

ANNE FRANK AND NUREMBERG largely black customers as rejects or scum The Sorrow and the Pity makes it clear Hollywood began to deal with the sub- – an ironic reflection of the Nazi attitude that the majority of French people were ject in the late 1950s. The Diary of Anne towards Jews. neither supporters of the Germans nor of Frank (1959), directed by George Stevens, For much of the film Nazerman wears an the Resistance but went along with the is a film adaptation of a Pulitzer-prize armour of cruel indifference towards the status quo because it was the ‘easy way’ winning play based on the diary of the people in his life, including his Puerto Ri- to their own comfort and survival. Many young German Jewess who was forced to can assistant Jésus Ortiz (Jaime Sanchez), of the middle class thought that it was a hide from the Gestapo in a factory attic in the social worker Marilyn Birchfield choice between fascism and communism Amsterdam for two years, along with her (Geraldine Fitzgerald), and his mistress and opted for the former because they had family and the Van Daans. It is well mean- Tessa, a fellow camp survivor whose hus- more to lose from the latter. Ophüls has ing and effectively conveys the frighten- band was a victim of the Nazis. Their tor- himself commented on “the terribly bour- ing claustrophobia of the situation, but it mented memories are apparently what keep geois attitude which consists in believ- is overlong at nearly three hours and suf- them together. ing that you can separate what is conven- fers from the miscasting of Millie Perkins, Nazerman’s nightmare is heightened by iently called ‘politics’ from other human who is clearly much older than the events which trigger memories of the past, activities – like a profession, family life thirteen-year-old whom she plays. shown in flashbacks that initially last or love – this popular attitude consti- Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by barely seconds but are later sustained into tutes the worst evasion imaginable in life, Stanley Kramer in 1961, was well summed painful scenes. Thus an attempt by a and of the responsibilities of life”. up by Gavin Lambert: “an all-star concen- hooker to offer her body to him precipi- tration camp drama, with special guest- tates the vision of his wife Ruth being CABARET victim appearances”. It needs to be stripped and raped by prison guards. In the 1970s and 1980s the Holocaust stressed that this is not about the trials of Nazerman’s armour is finally stripped was either touched on or featured promi- 24 of the key figures in the Nazi leader- off when Jésus is shot dead by holdup nently in many movies. Cabaret (1972) ship held in 1945-46 but the 1948 trials hoodlums during a courageous attempt to is a great musical, in no small part be- in which 4 judges in the Nazi period were save him. The impotent pawnbroker can cause it so chillingly portrays the rise of prosecuted for sentencing innocent peo- only open his mouth to scream, but no Nazism. Set in early 1930s Berlin, it por- ple to death for their political beliefs or sound emerges. Here Lumet uses the rhe- trays the lives of Sally, Brian and Max, ethnic heritage. torical device of aposiopesis, in which and their sojourns in the Kit-Kat Club. The film is a thoughtful courtroom speech stops and the listener must supply We may enter this musical world to forget marathon of three hours – which includes the rest. This silent scream can be seen as about reality, but it cannot be kept out- footage of the Holocaust – and has excel- an emblem of the Holocaust survivor, the side, as the worsening condition of Jews lent performances by Spencer Tracey, witness of a horror so awful that it cannot infiltrates the gentile decadence. One of Maximilian Schell and Burt Lancaster in be told. It is a powerful image, made all the the most chilling scenes is in a beer gar- particular. Essentially, it considers the ac- more unforgettable by the towering pres- den where an angelic-looking young Nazi countability of all citizens who acquiesce ence of Steiger in the lead role, one of the gives a passionate rendition of in their government’s policies. Neverthe- greatest performances in the entire history ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ and the drink- less, the judge indicts the four men be- of cinema. ers rise and join in the singing. Bob cause, even if many more people were Fosse, the director, skilfully draws the guilty, these individuals were responsible THE SORROW AND THE PITY audience into the emotion of the song, for their actions. Marcel Ophüls’s 265-minute epic 1970 making us understand how Nazism ini- documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (Le tially made so many Germans feel impor- THE PAWNBROKER Chagrin et la Pitié) was originally made for tant and offered them a hopeful future. French TV, but ORTF thought it was too inflammatory, and it wasn’t until a year THE TIN DRUM later that it was shown in French cinemas The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) is a (it was finally shown on French TV in 1979 adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff 1981). Subtitled ‘Chronicle of a French of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel about Os- City under the German Occupation’, and kar, the child who at the age of three re- using a mixture of contemporary inter- ceives a tin drum for his birthday and de- views, newsreels and propaganda, Ophüls cides, after observing the hypocrisy and focuses on Clermont-Ferrnand in the duplicity of his German-Polish family Auvergne, 20 miles from Vichy, the seat of (his mother shares two lovers, one Ger- the collaborationist Pétain government. man and the other Polish), that he doesn’t Anti-semitism was rampant in 1940s want to grow up. When Alfred, his German France. Evidence is piled upon evidence. ‘father’ who later becomes a Nazi, tries to To mention a few incidents: a shopkeeper take away the drum, Oskar discovers an An individual’s enslavement to the called Klein took an ad in the local paper ability to scream at such a high pitch that living hell of an horrific past is the sub- to assure his customers that he was not glass shatters, and so he learns how to ject of The Pawnbroker, Sidney Lumet’s Jewish; Pierre Laval, the head of the gov- control those around him. The gradual shattering masterpiece made in 1965. Rod ernment, is accused of offering the Ger- rise of the Nazis occurs without causing Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, a displaced mans four thousand Jewish children whose alarm amongst the people of Oskar’s European Jew who has lost his family in deportation had not even been requested; home city of Danzig. The only one who the Shoah and now runs a pawnshop in and a clip is shown from Le Juif Süss, a seems to notice, the voice in the wilder- New York’s Harlem. Having lost faith in racist German film dubbed and presented ness, is Oskar, who turns a Nazi rally into God, humanity and culture, Nazerman is as a French film, which became one of the The Blue Danube Waltz with the over- emotionally benumbed and treats his most popular movies of 1943. whelming tattoo of his drum. ➤ 22 Humanism Ireland • No 116 • May-June 2009

15,000" – corroborating the testimony of belongings, including the family photos: former prisoners. We also learn that at its these people are being obliterated even most efficient, the process took about two from memory. In another, women in hours from the arrival of Jews in boxcars to Plaszow rejoice at having escaped the disposal of ashes. selection for extermination, only to see In one of the most chilling sequences, their children being enticed by piped he talks to Abraham Bomba, a barber in Tel nursery songs on to trucks that take them Aviv. Bomba, one of the Jewish barbers away, waving cheerfully, to Auschwitz. ordered to cut off the hair of Jewish women And in a third, naked women cling to each before they were gassed in Treblinka, other in abject terror in a shower room, describes with great difficulty how a fellow mistakenly believing that they are about David Bennent as the drummer boy barber saw his wife and sister in the gas to be gassed. Physical suffering is also chamber but was not permitted to speak to faced head on. We see overworked and As Oskar puts it: “Once there was a them. In another sequence, Filip Müller, a exhausted prisoners, brutal executions, credulous people who believed in Santa Czech Jew who worked in the 'special exhumations and burnings. In one Claus, but Santa Claus turned out to be detail' in the incineration chamber of the incident 10,000 disinterred Jewish the gas man”. This credulity also applies crematorium of Camp 1 at Auschwitz, corpses are cremated and their ashes drift to religion. In one scene Oskar hangs his undressing the corpses, feeding the ovens down on the town like grey snow. drum on a statue of Jesus and urges it to and stirring the bodies, relates how on Such an inventory of awfulness would join him in beating the drum of dissent. seeing a Czech family trying to resist their by itself render Schindler's List Of course, the statue does not, but instead fate, he himself stepped into the gas unbearable. Mankind, it has been said, the priest slaps Oskar across the face, an chamber, resolved to die. But a group of cannot bear too much reality. But hope is obvious metaphor for the failure of the women dissuaded him because they said he present in the form of an unlikely hero. Catholic Church to oppose Nazism. must live and bear witness. The man who would rather light candles The Tin Drum is a weird and wonderful Pauline Kael, reviewing Shoah in The than curse the darkness is Oskar mixture of earthiness, satire and New Yorker (30th December 1985), rather Schindler, chancer, playboy, profiteer - surrealism. Although Oskar may not be an unkindly described it as a long moan and and Nazi. A crook who profits from evil entirely sympathetic character and clearly added that, unlike The Sorrow and the Pity but also enjoys undermining it, Schindler has many of the weaknesses that he which sets your brain buzzing, Shoah is comes to Krakow from the Sudetenland in discerns in others, the film is redeemed exhausting to watch because it closes your September 1939 in search of big bucks. by the haunting facial presence of 12-year mind. Sure, it is a marathon and at times He buys an enamel ware factory at a old David Bennent as the dwarf who boring watch, but it remains one of the knockdown price from two dispossessed marches to his own peculiar drum beat. most unforgettable films about the Jews, staffs it with unpaid Jewish workers annihilation of two thirds of Europe's Jews. to make pots and pans for the German SHOAH army, and soon amasses a fortune. Claude Lanzmann, a French Jew who SCHINDLER'S LIST Yet, progressively and imperceptibly, fought in the Resistance, made Shoah in Lanzmann accuses Steven Spielberg of this selfish exploiter is transformed into 1985. As implied earlier, he uses no trivialising the Holocaust in Schindler’s an altruistic saviour. When the Jews are archival footage but presents over nine List (1993) but, although it has flaws, it is removed to Plaszow, he persuades the hours of interviews with Polish peasants, surely one of the most powerful films ever camp commandant, with whom he has Jewish survivors and former Nazis, made. It sweeps us along by a tide of cultivated a friendship, to allow his juxtaposed with his visits to some of the torment through the liquidation of the workers to continue production. And scenes of the crimes – Auschwitz, Krakow ghetto, the removal of survivors to when Plaszow itself is closed down and Treblinka, Chelmno and Sobibor. Plaszow labour camp, and then finally to most of the Jews are destined for Gross One of the most telling interviews is the obscenity to end all obscenities, Rosen or Auschwitz, he bribes the with Franz Suchomel, former SS Auschwitz itself. We see (re-created by commandant to allow him to take 1,100 Unterscharführer at Treblinka. Lanzmann Spielberg beside the original) its of these workers to a new factory making lied to gain access and used a camera Dantesque archway with snow falling over shell casings in his home town of hidden in a shoulder bag and connected those grisly words, 'Arbeit macht frei' Brinnlitz, on the Polish-Czech border. to a VCR van outside. Suchomel's details (work makes you free). And we see too its When 300 of the women and children on are precise, right down to the number of belching crematoria chimneys, the ultimate Schindler's list are sent to Auschwitz in Jews gassed daily – "18,000 is an icon of man's inhumanity to man. Only the error, he goes there himself and gets them exaggeration, it was more like 12 to gas chambers themselves are out, even snatching the children from the spared from us, for they are SS by convincing them that their tiny indeed perhaps beyond all hands are needed to polish the casings imaginings. from the inside. There are scenes in this film To rescue all these Jews, Schindler where we struggle bribes away his entire fortune. Why did unavailingly to hold back the the real Oskar do it? Why, when it came to tears. Some of the most the ultimate test of humanity, was it the harrowing have no bodies or exploiter and conman who proved to be bloodshed. In one, Jews are 'the good German', while millions of told to leave their suitcases on other hardworking, upright and law- the platform, and we cut to an abiding Germans were compliant with or office where Germans are indifferent to the Shoah. Spielberg does already making piles of their not give us a definite answer; instead ➤ 23 Humanism Ireland • No 116 • May-June 2009 he gives us a character study on the mys- camp's Commandant (Willem Dafoe). These tery of good and evil. Schindler (Liam harrowing memories torment Adam in Neeson is continually compared and con- 1961, when he is a patient at a special men- trasted with Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), tal hospital built for Holocaust survivors the Plaszow commandant. Goeth is a sa- in the Israeli desert. And there is also Ed- distic brute, whereas Schindler clearly ward Zwick’s Defiance (2008) in which hates physical cruelty and suffering; and three Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Goeth has imbibed the poison of anti- eastern Europe escape into the Russian for- semitism, whereas Schindler is a Nazi est and maintain a self-contained society of purely for convenience and cares little for 1200 Jews. ideology of any sort. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), Schindler’s List has been criticised for adapted from the novel by Irish writer John presenting Jews as merely pasteboard fig- Boyne, is an attempt to see the horror of the ures, a backdrop in a struggle between the Holocaust through the uncomprehending good German and the bad German, and as eyes of a child. Eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Kate Winslet and David Kross being concerned about survival when the Butterfield) has to move from Berlin to a Holocaust was primarily about death. But country house when his SS officer father Hanna receives life imprisonment. Mi- this is too simplistic. Itzhak Stern (Ben becomes commandment of a death camp chael goes back to university, marries and Kingsley), Schindler’s Jewish accountant, (unnamed in the film but called Auschwitz has a daughter. Many years later he gets plays a key role as his conscience, forever in the novel). Bruno is told that it is a farm, divorced, and his mind returns to Hanna. prodding him in the right direction. Other and his mother is also initially unaware of He decides to send her tapes of his read- Jews do have identities, and the boy its true nature. When she finds out, she ings. Through them, she learns to read Adam Levy shows considerable resource- breaks down. and then starts to explore books written fulness. The ending may be melodramatic, Meanwhile, bored and intrigued by the by Holocaust survivors. Just before her but if ever a work of the cinema testified farm, Bruno explores the forbidden back of release after 20 years, he visits her and to the power of the medium, to penetrate the house and a walk through the woods she tells him that only the dead can call ‘deep into the twilight room of the soul’, brings him to an electrified fence, on the her to account. Unable to live with the as Ingmar Bergman put it, this is it. other side of which is Schmuel, the ‘boy in truth and her part in genocide, Hanna the striped pyjamas’. The two of them commits suicide the day before release. THE READER strike up a friendship, which leads to trag- Many critics are annoyed that her illit- Clearly over the last 50 years the cin- edy for Bruno. The end, though predictable, eracy is used as an excuse for Hanna’s ac- ema has produced some fine works about is pretty harrowing and here the director tions. She became an SS guard simply be- the Holocaust. The above is only a sample Mark Herman does the ‘unimaginable’. Yet cause she didn’t have to read in the job. and others worthy of mention include: the in this end the story becomes the tragedy, But this misses several key points. Why 1961 Polish film Passenger, the story of a not of the Jews but of a Nazi family. What does Michael not speak in her defence? It holocaust survivor who meets one of the is that meant to say? might seem that the answer is because she camp guards after the war (the director The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a would not want him to. But it becomes Andrzej Munk died in a car accident on slight film, more suited to the classroom clear afterwards that he cannot understand his way home from filming in Auschwitz); than the adult cinema. The only movie in her actions or forgive her. How could she Playing for Time (1980), an excellent TV the recent batch which transcends its sub- think that her illiteracy was more shame- film starring Vanessa Redgrave as a Jew- ject matter and deserves to join the distin- ful than participating in genocide? The ish member of the orchestra of Auschwitz, guished ranks of Schindler’s List or The very question that plagues Michael is the with a screenplay by Arthur Miller; Es- Pianist is The Reader (2008). Based on the same that plagues the film’s critics. It is cape from Sobibor (1987), a TV film di- bestselling 1995 novel by Bernhard Hanna alone who has used her illiteracy rected by Jack Gold about a mass escape Schlink, the narrative begins when 15-year- as an excuse, and when she learns to read, from the death camp in eastern Poland; old Michael (David Kross) embarks on an it can no longer fulfil that function. and Roman Polanski’s harrowing film The affair with Hanna (Kate Winslet), a 36-year- Crucially, there is also Michael’s si- Pianist (2002), based on the autobiogra- old tram conductor. She habitually asks lence. He knows that a wrong is being phy of the classical pianist Wladyslaw him to read aloud to her before sex, any- committed against Hanna but refuses to Szpilman, a Polish Jew who survived the thing from The Odyssey to Tintin. help her. He remains silent in the face of a Holocaust. Then she suddenly disappears but turns wrong in court, just as she did, and just as And now we have a new wave which up 8 years later in a trial he attends as a law most Germans did, in the face of the seem to have taken the message that there student, when she is in the dock as a former Holocaust. Evil and injustice will tri- is no neat Hollywood ending in this sub- concentration camp guard accused along umph if people go along with it and say ject. It includes Valkyrie (2008), starring with 5 others of the mass murder of 300 or do nothing. Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauf- Jewish women locked in a burning church. Michael, of course, thinks that she is fenberg, the German officer who tried and A report is produced in court written by the guilty, if not in this particular case, yet in failed to assassinate Hitler in 1944, about defendants explaining their actions. The the broader sense as a war criminal. In- which the less said the better. Then there’s other women allege that Hanna alone wrote deed, in a discussion among the students, Paul Shrader’s Adam Resurrected (2008), it and the judge proposes that she give a one of them indicts the whole of the older in which Jeff Goldblum plays Adam Stein, sample of her handwriting. Hanna says generation of Germans, and this is one of a Jewish comedian of genius in prewar there is no need because she did write it. the strengths of The Reader: that it raises Berlin, who is unable to save his family The truth suddenly dawns on Michael some important questions and makes you when the Nazi genocide overtakes them about their pre-intercourse ritual: she is think about the past and about people’s and only survives a concentration camp concealing the fact that she is illiterate. But motives for their actions. It is a good film himself by becoming the pet dog of the he says nothing and she is convicted. and Kate Winslet deserved her Oscar. ❑ 24