Films Show Skewed Version of the Holocaust

Wall Street Journal. 9 Jabuary 2003
By THANE ROSENBAUM

Ever since Steven Spielberg's ‘Schindler's List’, the Holocaust in film -- actually the Holocaust itself -- has never been the same. For decades it had been virtually a silent movie -- images in our heads with no sound, a secret but unspoken language, even within the Holocaust survivor community. Everyone was awed by the moral implications of mass murder on such a grand scale. To speak of the Holocaust demanded great humility, which almost everyone exercised -- artist and layman alike.

But ‘Schindler's List’ slowly domesticated and democratized what had once been forbidden. Suddenly the Holocaust was on everyone's mind, and a source of inspiration for every artist. Even the survivors themselves began to speak, their testimonies filmed for archival purposes. (Ironically, many of these films were funded by the proceeds from ‘Schindler's List’, which spawned an intensive effort to collect survivor testimonies, a project that was distinct from Claude Lanzmann's earlier documentary, ‘Shoah,’ which combined both artistic and archival elements.) Everything about the Holocaust was now fair game in either educating the public or firing the imagination. The Italian comedy ‘Life Is Beautiful’ and the commercial success of the Broadway musical ‘The Producers’ were offspring of this fertile, if not impious, era.

Now there are several new Holocaust films: Werner Herzog's ‘Invincible’; Tim Blake Nelson's ‘The Grey Zone’; Roman Polanski's ‘The Pianist’; and opening on Jan. 24 in New York and Los Angeles, Costa-Gavras's "Amen." Each represents a slightly new shift in the direction of the genre and the moral challenges that Holocaust narratives invariably represent.

The problem with ‘Schindler's List’ is that the Holocaust is not about rescue and redemption, while the movie is. Indeed, there were rare occasions of virtue, but the calling card of the Nazis and their abetters was one of mass murder and moral failure. You can't claim to make a Holocaust movie if an audience leaves its seat feeling hopeful about humanity. The impulse to honor the good in man is noble, but disingenuous and misapplied when depicting an atrocity.

Unfortunately we live in an age where people learn their history from feature films. This has not served our memories well. It may be too much to ask film makers to tell the most complete, unwholesome aspects of a story. But it's worse when they focus instead on a more palatable, yet unrepresentative slice. The risk is in misleading the audience, trivializing the horror, and reducing the madness into something mundane. These new films are each largely original, ambitious undertakings by acclaimed directors. But they suffer from the limitations of ‘Schindler's List.’

‘Invincible’ is actually a pre-Holocaust tale, set right before the Nazis come to power. It is the story of a Polish-Jewish strongman who arrives in Berlin billed as a Teutonic god in an occult cabaret act. Later he announces his origins and eventually returns home with a sense of doom, certain that the answer to Jewish continuity is not in assimilation, but in the training of a new generation of Jewish Samsons.
‘The Grey Zone’ takes a similar position on Jewish empowerment, though in Auschwitz, of all places, and among already condemned men. The film is a moral examination of the Sonderkommando, squads of Jewish prisoners who worked the gas chambers and crematoria, essentially doing the Nazi's dirty work in helping to exterminate Jews.

The film, however, focuses on a group of street-hustling, foul-mouthed Hungarians who are planning to revolt but are foiled by the impossibility of their task and their own moral quandaries. Aside from setting the film in Auschwitz, which few have dared, ‘The Grey Zone’, with its gray visual look, features an unusual portrait of those killed in the camp, shifting the moral choices away from the Germans, and onto the Jews themselves. And while uprisings make for compelling drama, they were impossible to orchestrate, which is why there were so few. Finally, those who survived the camps were generally the ones who possessed the cunning and street-smarts of Nelson's characters, and not the other way around.

Mr. Polanski's film is perhaps the most personal of the four, largely because he himself is a Holocaust survivor. Based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir, it is the story of one of Poland's most accomplished pianists, a Jew who survived the entire occupation in Warsaw -- first in the Jewish ghetto, and then on the other side of the wall. The film is visually stunning, and there is a real authenticity to the brutality and inhumanity of life inside the ghetto. But perhaps because the film is a valentine to Polanski's Poland, non-Jewish Poles are depicted only as freedom-fighters and rescuers. The Germans are shown as barbarians, but the attitudes of Polish citizens, most of whom were either complicit or indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors, aren't represented in this movie at all. This skewed vision of Polish history is perhaps related to the fact that both Mr. Szpilman and Mr. Polanski himself -- in their special, rarefied cases -- would not have survived without the assistance of Polish Catholics. But in their gratitude lies a distortion that favorably colors the anti-Semitic attitudes that the vast majority of Poles had toward Jews.

Finally, ‘Amen’, adapted from Rolf Hochhuth's play, ‘The Deputy’, is another examination of the risks of moral choice. A German scientist recruited by the SS, and a young Jesuit priest -- both religious men of conscience -- learn that the Jews of Europe are being gassed. They seek to warn the Allies and the pope, and are met with silence and indifference. The murder machine grinds on, with so few willing to stand in its way. Mr. Costa-Gavras never shows the camps or the dead bodies, just the futility amid all the surrender. The impulse toward focusing on the redemptive, heroic rescuer is there, but at least the film doesn't sugarcoat the ultimate result.

As a group, these films are visually daring and morally complex, and have expanded the images and messages that Holocaust films normally project, without winning, as of yet -- certainly in the case of ‘Invincible’ and ‘The Grey Zone’ -- any significant audiences. (‘Max’, which opened recently as well, has peripheral Holocaust implications, focusing on Hitler in his youth and his friendship with a sympathetic Jewish art dealer. Of course, anything that humanizes Hitler and his prior friendships with Jews is like fictionalizing Osama bin Laden as a former struggling waiter in Windows on the World, waiting to get home to his MTV.)

Yet authenticity and history is a hard sell in a motion picture. Each film owes its allegiance to ‘Schindler's List’ for widening the lens. The question is whether that is such a good thing.

Mr. Rosenbaum is a novelist and essayist. His most recent novel is ‘The Golems of Gotham’

Reply to the above article

by Ewa Wypijewska Clarke

Righteous Among Nations: Poles Who Rescued Jews

The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2003

Polish Catholics helping Jews were not ‘special, rarefied cases’, as Thane Rosenbaum states in his essay ‘Films Show Skewed Version of the Holocaust’ (Leisure & Arts, Jan. 9). Polish Catholics and Polish Jews were neighbors and friends facing the same terrors inflicted by the invading German and Russian armies during World War II. In fact, Polish Catholics were the first victims of the concentration camps. Eleven million lives were lost during the Holocaust -- six million of those were Poles, and half of those were not Jews.

All Polish people suffered enormously during the war, Jews and non-Jews. My Catholic family was no exception. One part of our family was deported to Siberian workcamps. The relatives who stayed in Poland became prisoners in their own villages along with their Jewish friends and neighbors. My aunt, Maria Frackowiak, risked her life and that of her family by smuggling food into the ghetto, and then hiding 16 people in her laundry building. When Jewish strangers showed up seeking a safe haven, she convinced her sister and other neighbors to provide hiding places too. They did this because ‘it was the right thing to do’.

My aunt is one of 5,624 Polish people remembered for their heroic actions during the war by Yad Vashem. Her name is one of 16,542 remembered heroes called Righteous Among Nations inscribed in the memorial at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Poland was the only country where helping a Jew was a crime punishable by death to the helper, as well as his or her entire family. Yet Poland has the largest number of recognized ‘righteous among nations’.

Eva Wypijewska Clarke
Richmond, Va.

January 21, 2003

Mr. Paul E. Steiger
Managing Editor
Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

Dear Mr. Steiger:

The National Polish American-Jewish American Council, which for more than two decades has been working to facilitate dialogue and cooperation between the Polish and Jewish communities in the U.S., has read with sadness and dismay Thane Rosenbaum’s review of Roman Polanski's film "The Pianist" (Leisure & Arts, January 9, 2003).

Mr. Rosenbaum’s asserts that the film presents a "skewed vision of Polish history" and that most Poles were either “complicit or indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors”. These simplistic statements are offensive and misleading and ignore the realities that are far more complicated.

The reaction of the Polish population to the extermination of their Jewish countrymen covered the whole spectrum of human responses. On the one hand, there were Poles who harbored and rescued Jews and actively participated in Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, which was established by the Polish government-in-exile. On the other hand, there was approval and even complicity.

While under the ruthless occupation of Nazi Germany, the majority of Poles did nothing—neither aiding nor harming Jews. Was this inaction proof of callous indifference or were there possibly other contributing factors? Certainly, helplessness played a part. And fear! The Nazi killing apparatus, which murdered some three million non-Jewish Poles, made aiding a Jew a crime punishable by on the spot execution of the ‘transgressor’ and his or her entire family. This was true nowhere else in Europe.

Respectfully,

Martin I. Bresler Co-Chairman	John J. Pikarski, Jr.