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.