Nov 16, 2025
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Holocaust Films/Books II
by Doniphan Blair
A typical inside page Holocaust article, this one from Pittsburgh Press on May 14th, 1945. photo courtesy Pittsburgh PressContinued from Chapter I
To be sure, the NY Times ran 26 wartime articles on what was later called the Holocaust. (The lower case "h" holocaust was used for centuries for large fires or book burnings, both also popular with Nazis, but the capitalized form became the term of art after “Nazi Holocaust” appeared in the English translation of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948.) Alas, those articles were a tiny fraction of the war news, as noted in the critical documentary short, “Reporting on The Times” (2014), which also points out that they NEVER appeared on the front page, tried not to sound too alarmist and often didn’t include the word “Jew”—Kafkaesque, if not for Kafka’s reasons. The excuse of the paper’s Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger: he didn’t want to appear biased or “a special pleader for Jews.” Admittedly, that might be misconstrued by middle Americans expert in firearms, who were needed for the army but were being swamped by the isolationist, anti-Semitic rants of Father Coughlin (a Catholic priest and Canadian, no less), in his popular, Sunday-evening radio show, or the speeches by Charles Lindbergh, the first celebrity of the Radio Age (for his solo, trans-Atlantic flight, 1927, and then the kidnap-murder of his son by a German-born carpenter), or others in the first "America First" movement.
As the Third Reich went down in flames and final paroxysms of evil, Holocaust rumors and actual news raced across and out of Europe, regardless of the cancelling of “Camps Factual Survey”. Alas, after the biggest war in history, with over double the deaths of the previous biggest war, only 25 years earlier, the wounds were too big for easy reopening and examination. As with injuries suffered by children, the trauma had to be repressed until the patient healed and matured enough to contemplate it dispassionately, without triggering post-traumatic stress or other disorders.
Still, some of the most-esteemed exemplars of eye-witness Holocaust reports, literature—poetry, even—arrived right after the war, starting with the Viennese Auschwitz-survivor and psychiatrist Victor Frankl (1905-97), who composed most of his “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946) inside Anus Mundi. In a mere 134 pages, Frankl not only summarizes his camp experience and subjects it to psychological analysis but introduces a new philosophy, "logotherapy" (from “logos,” Greek for meaning), and what he calls “tragic optimism.” Say yes to life, Frankl exhorts his readers, despite the radical nature of the injury to humanity as well as the individual, in what he views as an extreme example of the “‘tragic triad’… (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death.” It’s not WHAT one suffers but HOW and the meaning one imbues it, an epistemological and metaphysical quest Frankl elevates to THE primary life force, contradicting the “pleasure principal” of colleague Sigmund Freud, also from Vienna (psychiatry’s central city, perhaps due to its many languages, cultures and levels of modernity). Alas, the Auschwitz Particle Accelerator proved Frankl right. Absent any pleasure—overwhelmed by the “pain principle,” in fact, many people sutured body and soul together by imagining happier times or deeper issues, even as they strove to satisfy their most basic needs. “Man’s Search for Meaning” sold ten million copies (tying "Mein Kampf", if across 24 languages) and, in 1991, the Library of Congress rated it one of America's "most influential books."
A year after Frankl, “Survival in Auschwitz” (1947) delivered a more bug’s eye view, so to speak, of the camp’s Kafkaesque grotesquerie, albeit in a clear, scientific tone, since its author was yet another Jewish chemist, the Italian Primo Levi (1919-87). “I believe in reason,” Levi wrote (New Republic, 1986). “Thus, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm and sober language of the witness, not the lamenting tones of the victim or the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge.” Regardless, “Survival” periodically waxes poetic: “Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.” Fully contradicting Adorno's "death of poetry," the Romanian-Jewish-French survivor, Paul Celan (1920-70), remarked, as he was being awarded a German poetry prize in 1958: “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language… But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech… It gave me no words for what was happening, but it went through… and could resurface, enriched.”
'Man's Search for Meaning', one of the first books released on the camps, made Vienna psychiatrist Victor Frankl a guru of sorts. photo courtesy V. FranklNot all master camp wordsmiths were men, of course. Indeed, some of the bleakest and most heartbreaking, on the one hand, and most shamanist and transcendent, on the other, truths I encountered during my decade-and-a-half of research were from women, primarily my mother, with her revelations about wartime romance and human relations, including with a "perpetrator," but also many others, in person and print. Take the young schoolteacher, Sheina Sachar Gertner: wracked by guilt over abandoning her parents, she and her new husband, Chiam, fled to the fields, forests and swamps of Lithuania to eke out a shadow-life, wandering in rags, begging for food and doing odd jobs, a lot like the travails of Jerzy Kosinski (1933-91), according to his "autobiography." A Polish Jew who immigrated to America after the war and authored popular books and screenplays, notably "Being There" (1979, with Peter Sellars), Kosinski's "The Painted Bird" (1965) was shockingly wild and sexual, on top of vicious, bleak and surreal, even though he spent the war hiding with his family among decent Poles. Although the horror raged all around, Kosinski obviously felt such domesticity was insufficient to dramatize his Holocological vision; that anything he invented could hardly exceed what actually happened somewhere across an Auschwitz-accelerated Europe; and that calling it an autobiography and getting an introduction from Elie Wiesel, the famous Holocaust author, was just good marketing. Getner, on the other hand, reeks of absolute truth, rendered poetically. Although she also didn't encounter a single German soldier the entire war, she was tortured by Lithuania’s small farmers (read peasants), their hateful gaze and callous disregard as well as outright abuse. While traipsing house-to-house, begging for refuge one time, at night and in the snow, she got so angry, she started screaming, “You murderers, you murderers!” and thinking, “Why live if nobody likes me;” and, finally, considering turning herself in to a camp simply to pass from this mortal coil among relatives, shielded somewhat from ALL THAT HATE (“The Trees Stood Still”, undated but probably 1950s).
While Gertner provides the underworld dispairing view, Michilene Maurel (1916-2009), the non-Jewish scion of a Southern French architectural dynasty deported to the Ravensbruck camp for underground activities, found a philosophical takeaway and mantra as boldly optimistic as Frankl’s: "BE HAPPY, you who live in fine apartments, in ugly houses or hovels. BE HAPPY you who have your loved ones, and you also who sit alone and dream and can weep. BE HAPPY you who torture yourself over metaphysical problems, and… BE HAPPY, oh how happy, you who die a death as normal as life in hospital beds or in your homes," (from “An Ordinary Camp”, 1957, my emphasis).
After liberation, Buchenwald survivors had no where to stay but the camp, including writer Elie Wiesel, 2nd bunk from bottom, 7th from left. photo: US ArmyTwo years before Maurel's succinct solution to humanity's perennial "happiness problem," a Romanian-Jewish-American man, Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel (1928-July 2, 2016), unleashed what is widely considered the camps’ heaviest literary hit: the monumental AND brief, 107-page “Night” (1955), its short, declarative sentences (originally written in Yiddish) marching down to terse philosophical conclusions and severe Greek tragedy. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival and worry only about my self,” Wiesel writes about his father, as they staggered the hundreds of miles from Auschwitz back into Germany proper on a “death march,” an odd tactic concocted by the SS to avoid having to fight Russians. “Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ASHAMED FOREVER” (my emphasis). For Wiesel, sons abandoning fathers soon expands into the death of civilization and then of god, echoing Job's existential queries in the "Old Testament". A common concern given the moral collapse of the Holocaust, the rabbis elided this theological critique of the catastrophe with the claim that questioning the existence of god actually presupposes one. Wiesel disagrees, notably in his 1979 book "The Trial of God", based on a mock trail held by inmates in Auschwitz he supposedly witnessed. In point of fact, the Holocaust inspired almost equal portions of survivors to embrace atheism as to become orthodox Jews, with Wiesel considering himself agnostic.
Primo Levi's “Survival in Auschwitz" has only been filmed once, as an arty, one-man performance piece, "Primo" (2005), and Wiesel's masterpiece suffered similarly after he declined Orson Welles's 1950s offer to option "Night”, telling him that the narrative could only live on paper with the “silences between the words.” A truncated “Night” with scarily skinny actors did appear out of Romania a few years ago but with only a trailer and no additional documentation online, it's obviously unauthorized and largely inadequate. After living in France, where he became a journalist, and then Israel, Wiesel moved to the United States in 1955 while continuing to travel, including to the Soviet Union (1965), where he exposed the distinctly non-socialist oppression of its Jewish citizens in "The Jews of Silence" (1966), helping bring awareness and facilitate their mass exodus in the 1970s. For these literary and activist achievements, Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986 and “Night” remains a bestseller today, read by high schoolers around the world as well as across the country. As America’s best-known camp survivor (or survivor in general, after Levi died by his own hand in 1987), Wiesel pleaded with President Ronald Reagan not to visit a German cemetery which included some SS graves (he went anyway, 1985), and returned to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey to tape an episode of her show in 2006. Even as an octogenarian, Wiesel remained dedicated to teaching children, advocating for tolerance and moving beyond “bystander mentality,” especially poignant after he was attacked in a San Francisco luxury hotel in 2007. As an unarmed neo-Nazi beat him, attempting to force a confession that the Holocaust was a hoax—among other inanities, Holocaust deniers claim he lacked the iconic number tattoo, since it didn't seem to appear in one photo (he had one: A-7713)—Wiesel screamed for 20 minutes. Not a single door on the hotel floor opened.
No wonder so many survivors have tried to forget or, at least, not talk about what is, in any case, nearly indescribable. For a couple who held their story very close to their vest for a very long time read the excellent and mysterious "After Long Silence" (1999) by their daughter Helen Fremont, who slowly and cinematically unearths that her parents were not only not devout Catholics, as she had been brought up to believe (one clue: they never took communion), but that her vivacious aunt was a Women's Way of War warrior. Indeed, her aunt talked, seduced and bribed her way through a series of trips, traps and hiding places, shepherding Fremont's mother and grandparents over a thousand miles through Nazi Europe, from the Ukraine to Italy and, finally, safety. While her aunt stayed in Italy, marrying the Fascist official who helped them (a common WWW conclusion), Fremont's mother immigrated to the US, where she met a Jewish survivor of six years in a Soviet "gulag" (concentration camp). After their marriage, the new couple rationalized it would be healthier to erase their histories entirely simply because: Raising children as Jews after the Holocaust amounts to child abuse. For many others, however, notably Fremont herself and other survivor children—eventually labelled "second-generation survivors" and introduced to the public in Helen Epstein's revealing and humanizing "Children of the Holocaust" (1988), psychological relief starts with the telling and learning of secrets. Of course, so does political healing, as evidenced by the world-wide need for journalistic exposes,"truth and reconciliation" commissions and artistic explorations after the civil struggles in South Africa, El Salvador and elsewhere.
Elie Wiesel and Oprah Winfrey go to Birkenau in 2006 to shoot an episode of her show; Wiesel had been there at age 15. photo courtesy O. WinfreyIndeed, many survivors felt compelled to “bear witness"—Wiesel made it his life project, and they often cited that drive as their sole impetus to endure. The main report on the Chelmno death camp, one hundred miles north-east of Warsaw, where some quarter-million Jewish men, women and children were gassed to death and burnt to ashes, was delivered by its two sole escapees: Anus Mundi’s Adam and Eve. Tens of thousands of survivors went on to give soul-scorching eye-witness reports to resistance leaders during the war, at war crimes trials afterwards (notably Eichmann's televised Jerusalem trial in 1961), through books (like the plethora published in the mid-‘50s), in film and television documentaries, and then in personal presentations at schools (which got going in the '80s), or in scholarly research interviews, like by the Shoah Project. Founded by Steven Spielberg, after the success of the film "Schindler's List" in 1993, the Project has filmed over 50,000 "ordinary" survivors, whose stories had not been sought out nor even recorded, in many instances, but which almost always included one, two or more acts of monstrous barbarism as well as altruism and bravery, even romance and humor, the latter's humanity highlighting the former's depravity. ("Yes, there was joking in the camps, 'gallows' humor' on steroids...") Conversely, on the single Shoah Project interview I filmed, the subject, an Austrian-American male engineer, had little to report and less ability to do so. Nonetheless, almost all the other interviews I viewed feature some heart-stopping statements, all the more revelatory 50 years after the horror with the speakers at the height of their powers and in the comfort of their own homes.
When survivors did elect to bear detailed witness, they generally did so through books, which often start clunky and clichéd, especially the self-published volumes, with tender reminiscences of familial idyll in the peaceful penumbra before the war. With its shocking arrival, however, which brought the terrorizing threat of death and then its deeply demoralizing enactment, many amateur authors rose to the occasion, much as their subjects did to theirs, revealing heretofore unimaginable truths while stripping their prose down to Hemingway- or even Burroughs-esque levels. After her prosaic opening chapters, Sara Selver-Urbach renders arrival in Auschwitz as: "[W]e felt like we were were falling, amidst a most terrible commotion, straight down into a bottomless pit without any stages or transitions, that we were hurtling and pitching down, down, down at a dizzying speed," ("Through the Window of my Home", 1986).
Of course, there are also many brilliant books by gentiles (another term for non-Jew), who sometimes faced the same personal, familial and even community devastation, just not the extreme existential angst of having your entire tribe, people and culture in the meat grinder of extermination. In addition to Wiesław Kielar's "Anus Mundi", with its nuanced Auschwitz—punishing work and periodic butchery contrasted with devoted networks of friends (which rise rapidly in life-or-death situations), rampant black marketeering or women from the Gypsy camp dancing for tips (from inmates as well as guards), there's “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (1959), by his fellow Pole Tadeusz Borowski. Preternaturally romantic, Borowski actually allowed himself to be arrested to follow his beloved girlfriend, who had already been seized, across the River Styx into the sepulchral underworld. Although Borowski behaved decently in Auschwitz, according to witnesses, he responded to his terrible travails with biting black comedy, Kafka-esque metaphors and unvarnished atrocity in stories about a tough, cynical kapo named Tadek. Among other horrific duties, Tadek empties the cattle-cars of "squashed, trampled infants... like chickens, holding several in each hand." At the other end of the style spectrum, but with an equally striking title, is “The Theory and Practice of Hell” (1950, "The SS State" in German) by Eugen Kogon, a Russian Jew who became an Austrian anti-fascist journalist, converted to Catholicism and endured six years in Buchenwald’s “medical” barracks. Although criticized for reading Plato at night while others suffered, Kogon managed to remain pretty descent and save many lives before getting shipped out of the camp IN A BOX by the Nazi head doctor to the latter's home address! Along with ironic undertones, Kogon’s full-immersion sociology includes a surfeit of details on camp departments, mortality rates, even the Nazis' mind set, such as it was. “The only form of soul-searching to which they submitted…amounted to no more than a check-up as to whether the directions of their instincts corresponded to prescribed SS goals,” he writes. “[T]hey called this, ‘Licking the inner son of a bitch.’”
Eugene Kogon opposed Nazism, spent six years in a camp and helped found modern West Germany, at a book signing. photo courtesy E. KogonNo matter how many books were published, however, they were not mass media. In the early ‘50s, millions of WWII's over-twenty million refugees were still trying to find a home, if not a country, while most of their neighbors were also too busy re-establishing regular life to catch up on their reading. Public intellectuals and educators, even if not besmirched by anti-Semitic bias, felt they lacked the necessary research or perspective, not to mention stomach, given that: A horror hidden in the bush looms larger in the imagination than one in the hand. In point of fact, the rapidly expanding psychological profession, despite being disproportionately Jewish, didn’t designate survivor trauma as a mental illness until 20 years after WWII. Nor did the schools of New York City, with its many psychiatrists and survivors, as well as survivor-psychiatrists, teach Holocology much beyond Anne Frank in the high schools, or even the universities, until the ‘70s or ‘80s. Nor did a lot of New Yorkers, Jews or not, talk about it; my family didn't, for example.
Some people are struck by the word "Jew," to describe a Jewish person, and even more by "Jewess," for a Jewish woman. Admittedly, Jew is a meaning-ladened noun (the verb, an ethnic slur, we'll get to below), referencing a person belonging EITHER to the religion, the overall tribe (or so-called race), or general culture (the "lapsed" or "lox-and-bagel" Jew, the "Jew lover" or "philo-Semite"), as well as, at various times in history, a nation—with arguments still raging about what confers which status where. This makes the generalizing adjective "Jewish" more accurate as well as palatable. "Jew" comes from "Yehudi," meaning someone of the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve tribes of Israel founded by the dozen sons and grandsons of the patriarch Jacob, who, in turn, generated the term "Israel," which means "one who prevails with god." Jacob earned that appellation after a night wrestling with an angel (symbolizing struggles with self as well as god) but conferred it on the nation when, during a severe drought, he moved his family to Egypt. That sets up "The Bible"'s second book, "Exodus", the enslavement of Jacob's descendants and their liberation by Moses, who leads them back across the desert to what is now called Israel, issues the Ten Commandments and converts them from ancestor-worshippers to "people of the book," which he supposedly wrote, devotees of a universal law and civilization as well as deity. When the Judah Tribe started the first Jewish state around Jerusalem (9-7th century BC), Middle Eastern usage evolved from Hebrew and Israelite to Jew, a transition only completed after the Romans brutally suppressed their first and second century AD rebellions, triggering the "diaspora," or great dispersion. While the Romans were comparatively decent conquerors of polytheist peoples, since the gods of either side could be easily integrated into the other's heavenly host, the monotheist Jews simply could not abide the blasphemy of worshipping the Roman emperor as god nor could the Romans brook the rejection of their divine royalty. After a 40 AD Roman attempt to erect a statue of Caligula (no less!) in Jerusalem's holiest of holies was protested massively by the Jews, desecrations and attacks escalated culminating with the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE), including the raising of Jerusalem as well as its temple and the famous siege of their Masada fortress. Betting on better opportunities elsewhere, and an eventual marriage of Judeo-Christian and Hellenic-Roman civilizations, Jewish men (mostly) journeyed the Roman Empire from Constantinople to Cologne, but also to Nigeria, Kenya, Yemen, even Bangladesh, often marrying daughters of prominent families, convincing them of the logic of one god and founding communities of Jews or "crypto-Jews" with Jewish practices syncretizing with local cultures. See Ken Blady's "Jewish Communities in Exotic Places" (2000) for an eye-opening survey, the Persia chapter of which helps explain why Iranians remain obsessed with Jews, despite their immense sophistication in poetry, the arts and science and the latter's arrival in Iran 3000 years ago! "The Old Testament" tells of the triumph of Queen Ester, the loving new wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus, who revealed a plot against both him and her fellow Jews, inspiring him to kill his anti-Semitic vizier, Hamam, and hire her cousin Mordecai instead. Employing Jewish advisors was standard to many subsequent kings and Muslim rulers both in Iran and across the Middle East. Blady also notes the colorful 6th century story about when a Persian king and many Jews joined a Zoroastrian cult advocating communalism and free love! Although historians differ, it was probably overthrown by the chief rabbi, Mar Zutra ben Tuvia, trying to win back his flock, who formed the Jewish principality of Mahoza, until his capture and crucifixion seven years later. Amazingly, many of Blady's exotic communities are extant or traceable today.
Other New York Jews did talk about the Holocaust, of course. Paul Pavel (1925-92), a Czech Auschwitz survivor, became a city-wide language expert and a shrink, who specialized in artists and worked with actor Spalding Gray and cartoonist Art Spiegelman, among others. Spiegelman's comic book "Maus", about his father's vast and vicious peregrinations, became the fresh Holocaust interpretation of 1986 (released in installments, in his edgy comic magazine Raw, starting in 1980) and the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize (1992). Somewhat superseding "Night", "Maus" is the perfect primer for teenage boys (Frank's "Diary" remains that for girls) due to Spiegelman's appearance as the son interacting with his father; the latter's conversational, no-matter-how-brutal portrayals in perfect Yiddish-inflected English; and panel after panel of lovely drawings, with simply-rendered yet evocative animal characters—Jews as mice, Nazis cats, Poles pigs. Pavel also analyzed some of my cohort and, when my brother secured me a one-time, full-immersion session—a controversial technique Pavel endorsed, I found him astonishingly at ease and enlightened (if dismissive of my romantic needs), making him an Auschwitz guru of sorts, much like Victor Frankl. How had he achieved this? In addition to innate abilities, Pavel nurtured aggressively. Despite being denied refuge in England, where his parents shipped him for safekeeping, and his enslavement at age 13, a soul-killing turn of events, to say the least, "[h]e survived by learning skills like welding and plumbing to make himself useful," (NY Times obituary, 7/17/92). His post-war experience was phenomenally diverse: after the Soviets socialized his family's brick factory in Czechoslovakia, which he was running at the time, "[h]e fled to Israel, where he enlisted in the war of independence. Afterward he helped found a kibbutz, worked with juvenile delinquents and developed therapy techniques. Then he went to Germany to direct the Foundation for Redemocratization of German Youth, a war rehabilitation program. Next he studied at the Swiss Institute for Applied Psychology, and lived briefly in Paris." Although he didn't author a book, unfortunately, he did in a manner of speaking through Spiegelman, whom I also met once in the '80s. Surprisingly open to a cold call and Holocological rumination over equally-temperatured beers, Spiegelman was similarly astute and understanding, even enlightened, in part by his work with Pavel, who appears as a character in "Maus II" (1991), but also by the catharsis of Bearing Witness through high art comics—save for his constant chain-smoking and the large, black bags under his eyes, suggesting something amiss (happily, Art's still with us, 1948-).
Orson Welles (lf), as the Nazi, and the Jewish Edward G. Robinson, as the Nazi hunter, in the former's '46 'The Stranger'. photo courtesy O. WellesDespite the reluctance to discuss the Holocaust, almost a year to the day after V-Day, the first feature with Holocaust footage, “The Stranger” (1946), arrived in theaters, directed by none other than Orson Welles (1915-85), who also starred as a Nazi living incognito with an unknowing wife in Connecticut. Camp imagery makes a well-motivated appearance when the war crimes investigator pursuing Welles's character projects a newsreel to prove to the wife her husband's past. Coincidentally, “The Stranger” (1942) was already the brilliant, bestselling-to-this-day novel (but titles are not copyrightable) by Albert Camus, who wrote it four years earlier, in occupied Paris, under the nose of the Nazis, amazingly, even as he was doing armed actions with the resistance group Combat AND editing their newspaper of the same name. That "Stranger" also addresses the brutal disregard for life—the protagonist shows no emotion at his mother's funeral, in a romantic relation and, finally, after killing an Arab man who threatens him—albeit in colonial French Algiers, where Camus was born and raised and which served as the perfect symbolic stand-in for Nazi Europe. Welles's primacy in tackling the Holocaust in mass media—oddly, "The Stranger" was his ONLY big box office hit—should come as no surprise given he was a remarkably radical thinker, as well as a talented actor, writer and director, facts obscured by his long, overweight decline, admittedly hard to avoid when you become famous at 22 and make your masterpiece at 26, “Citizen Kane” (1941). Yet another mid-WWII movie addressing Hitlerian issues, it follows a newspaperman—so similar to publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, he forbade mention of it in his many papers, which naturally stimulated interest—as he goes from idealism to success but then degenerates into tycoonery and megalomania. Initially panned, "Kane" came to be considered the greatest film of all time by a majority of critics (until its 2012 dethronement by Hitchcock's "Vertigo", 1958). Ironically, Welles preferred his own, rather bleak, Kafka’s “The Trial” starring Anthony Perkins, which he screenplayed and directed at 47. Obviously touched by the Jewish tragedy—remember, he tried to convince Wiesel to let him film "Night", Welles narrated, along with Elizabeth Taylor, the 1981 documentary “Genocide”, an early entrée to the now familiar genre, which followed the explosion of interest triggered by NBC’s nine-hour mini-series, “The Holocaust” in 1978.
“The Holocaust” entails the tendentious, interlocking stories of two families, one Jewish, one German—it was a mini-series, after all, directed by Jewish-American Marvin Chomsky (known for “Star Trek” and “Gunsmoke” episodes)—but it had moving moments and aired nationally and internationally, including in Germany, to devastating effect. It also featured, as the German gentile wife of a Jewish artist, Meryl Streep, who became a hallowed Holocaust icon four years later for her eponymous portrayal and Oscar-winning accent in the excellent “Sophie’s Choice”, directed by Jewish-American Alan J. Pakula. The larger laurel, however, should go to the 1979 book of the same name by William Styron, also author of the acclaimed “Confessions of Nat Turner” (1967), a historical novel about the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion. Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice” is a gripping, literary mash-up of hipster ‘50s Brooklyn, X-rated sex and Auschwitz, all overarched by unfathomable guilt—one of Frankl’s big three—embodied in the three central characters. First there’s the Polish-Catholic Sophie, who not only has to select one of her children for the gas but whose father is an anti-Semitic activist, which, in turn, means absolutely nothing when she pleads for mercy with Auschwitz’s Commandant Hoss. Then there’s Sophie's charismatic but certifiably insane Jewish-American lover, Nathan, who neither suffered physically nor fought, sitting out the war in the safety of New York—a guilt goldmine. Finally, there's the narrator, Stingo, a Southerner like Styron, with all the excess, oversize baggage slavery entails. So striking and story-encapsulating was Styron’s title, “Sophie’s Choice” soon entered the lexicon for “choice-less choice,” a day-one concept in Anus Mundi, where logic was annihilated alongside civilization and “There is NO why!” as Primo Levi was "helpfully" informed by a guard, shortly after his arrival in Auschwitz.
Mass Union soldier graves at the Andersonville concentration camp, Georgia. photo courtesy Andersonville MuseumThat Nazism is a direct descendant of the Confederate “cause,” as emphasized by Styron, has been little noted by historians, despite the conspicuous parallels of white supremacy, enslaving others and extreme bellicosity. Indeed, European and American race-psychos read the same books and, when composing their racial laws, the Nazis drew directly from the South's. This makes WWII not just a continuation of WWI, as has been MUCH noted, but of the American Civil War, which also bequeathed us modern warfare replete with railroads, machine guns (the Union's hand-cranked Gatling gun), trenches, submarines, air power (reconnaissance balloons), total war (the infrastructure destruction and civilian punishment of Sherman's March to the Sea, recommended by Clausewitz 30 years earlier) and concentration camps (one, Andersonville, Georgia), not to mention the liberation of the slaves, the war's main bone of contention, despite what South-sympathizers may try to tell you. President Lincoln was a generous compromiser who could stomach slavery in the Old South but adamantly, vigorously—monomaniacally, even—opposed it, legally and morally, from the 1840s on, when, as a lawyer, he defended a freed slave from seizure and a person who helped slaves escape, and politically, from shortly thereafter. Indeed, Lincoln opposed slavery in Washington, D.C. and on land conquered in the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and attacked the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed territories entering the union to vote on whether to become slave states. In point of fact, the American people agreed with Lincoln about ending slavery's expansion and gave him a landslide mandate in the 1860 election (40% in a four-way race). Alas, a majority of Southerners refused to compromise, recognizing that ending slavery's expansion was a harbinger of their culture's demise and preferring decision by force of arms, while neglecting to fully examine on whom they were declaring war. Lincoln soon metamorphosed from a jocular if genius politician into the great warrior democrat (despite being a Republican and suspending habeas corpus) and intellectual commander-in-chief, pushing the envelope both militarily and Art War-wise with crystalline moral poems, like his Gettysburg and second inaugural addresses (1863, 1865, respectively). He also issued long letters of hectoring advice and strategy to his generals, which they fully warranted, until he found officers able to prosecute the war to its final arbitration: Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. In fact, the beleaguered Allies of WWII, not to mention modern humanity, owe that triumvirate a deep debt. If Abraham (the name of the first Biblical patriarch, as it happens) Lincoln (who was also cordial with contemporary Jews—immediately reversing the one war-time edict against them), Grant, Sherman and the rest of the Union soldiery, which included BOTH African-Americans AND white brigades from every SINGLE Southern state—except South Carolina (whose citizens' harsh ideology and actual shelling of Fort Sumter started the war)—had not made the blood sacrifice needed to keep the “house undivided” and insure “that government of the people… shall not perish from this earth,” the South would have survived and supported the Third Reich, which probably would have conquered England and perhaps the Soviet Union, both dependent on a massively industrialized and, therefore, unified America. That the South fought to the last draught of destruction, just like the Nazis did 80 years later, indicates a severe ethical and gestalt antagonism, much more than politics. The South was also a democracy of sorts; and fighting to exhaustion and unconditional surrender was obligatory to quell the will to fight, to complete the psycho-social surgery, and to start the healing, as recognized by the South's brilliant lead general, Robert E. Lee, although recuperation remains a work-in-progress 150 years later. One beguiling difference: while a slave in the South fetched up to a thousand dollars, the equivalent of hundreds of thousands today, the Nazis sold their slaves for under ten marks each, or worked or gassed them to death, and then incinerated them, suggesting the more precise term might be "firewood."
Getting back to Welles’s groundbreaking “The Stranger” (1946): it starred, as the war crimes investigator, Edward G. Robinson (1893-1973), a Romanian-Jewish-American who was an outspoken critic of Nazism and fascism; it was set in a quintessential New England town (“It could happen here…”); and it was one of the few film noirs to feature actual Nazis—even though ALL film noirs are, in a sense, about Nazism. While most film historians have missed this deeply moral, almost metaphysical, point, film noir in fact emerged in the early 1940s because it was nothing less than the cultural means wherein Western Civilization could sublimate Nazism and its over-the-top atrocities, while examining its cruelty, corruption and motivations, up-close and personal, through stories about comprehensible characters, not accented, inscrutable foreigners or outright monsters, although there were a few of those, too.
Caligari (Werner Krauss) reveals his Frankenstein (Conrad Viedt) in 'The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari', plumbing Germany's soul and predicting a Nazi future. photo: Decla-Bioscop StudiosIn addition to providing such crucial psycho-social services, film noir's artistic provenance is almost as astounding. Germany enjoyed a spectacular film boom in the '20s, driven by its exclusion from the international film scene during WWI, which was when Hollywood got going, its desperate need for entertainment after the war, and the post-war fecundity of its fine arts. On top of the Europe-wide Dada and Surrealist movements, which were well-represented in Germany, German Expressionism established itself with world-famous painters like Max "Black Lines" Beckmann (1884-1950) and the romantic and hallucinatory Ernst Kirchner (1880-1938). Soon tiring of imported foreign fare to feed their film frenzy, native studios sprang up, and their owners, fingers on the box office pulse, started divining their audience’s deepest desires and fears and, thereby, their futures. In a few short years, they turned a Berlin suburb, Weissensee, into Germany's Hollywood, a film innovator and exporter rivaling if not exceeding the original. One opulent Expressionist masterwork is “Metropolis” (1927), Fritz Lang’s big budget, two-and-a-half hour silent about futuristic cities, abused workers, lush bordellos, evil robots and visionary women. Lang also wrote and directed "M" (1931), which he preferred, about a serial killer of girls, played by Peter Lorre (a Hungarian Jew and eventual American, where he was typecast as a murderer), who is hunted and captured by a team of beggars and criminals for trial in a kangaroo court. Evidently, criminals also revile psychopathic pederasts, both morally and for the heat they bring, policing themselves until the arrival of the inept authorities. Another film zooming in on the German zeitgeist was F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) about the legendary Romanian Count Dracula. Not only a bone-chilling horror film for its day—or any day, it concludes that great evil can only be vanquished by even greater innocence and love: Dracula is destroyed not by the man who visits his castle and ferrets out his secrets but that man's adoring wife, who seduces the vampire to stay out past sunrise, killing him while sacrificing herself. Sadly, Mernau lost the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the wife of the author of the book "Dracula" (1897), Irishman Abraham "Bram" Stoker, leading to the destruction of all prints, save a few bootlegs. Undeterred, the six-foot-eleven (and gentile) Murnau went on to the acclaimed "The Last Man" (1924), where he developed an early cinéma vérité he called "unchained camera technique," and move to Hollywood where he did both the feature "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" (1927), which took Oscars at the first Academy Awards (1929) and remains a film for the ages, and "Tabu". About tribal life in Bora Bora and co-created with the inventor of the documentary form, Robert Flaherty, it was completed in 1931, shortly before the fatal crash of his Rolls Royce, while being driven by his 14 year-old, Filipino boyfriend.
Long before such stellar cinematic achievements came “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), considered THE first horror film, the jewel in the crown of Expressionist cinema and one of the greatest films of all time, despite being a rather raw and an odd amalgam of artistic and commercial methods. With its surrealist sets and heady brew of romance, murder and mysticism, not to mention literary plot twists, “Caligari” not only captured the German imagination but their inner world, essentially predicting Hitler (see CS article). After “Caligari”'s writers Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz—true bohemians, given Janowitz was from Bohemia, Czech Republic, and both became pacifists after serving in WWI—went to a country fair where a girl had been murdered, they concocted a story about a carney hypnotist who keeps a narcoleptic ("sleeping disease") in the proverbial "cabinet," waking him by day to answer questions about the fair goers' futures and, by night, to sneak around and murder his enemies—terrorizing the town. When the narrator Francis and his friend Alan stop by the hypnotist's booth, the somnambulist predicts Alan's death and the following dawn—what do you know?—does the deed by stabbing him. As his love interest, Jane, and the police search for the murderer, Francis spies on the hypnotist and discovers he keeps a dummy of the somnambulist in the cabinet at night as an alibi. Sleuthing further, Francis tracks him to an insane asylum, where he's the institution’s director, it turns out, conducting “forbidden experiments” on patients while obsessing over an evil, medieval mystic named Caligari. Although the doctor was arrested and Francis got the girl in the writers’ version, the film's Weissensee producers thought they might do better box-office if the conclusion was a less anti-authoritarian. Following a suggestion from Lang, who didn't go on to direct (that would be Robert Wiene), they "flipped the plot" and added a "framing story," turning Francis into an "unreliable narrator." The entire film is a figment of his imagination, it turns out, given he is in the asylum; Jane and the narcoleptic are simply other inmates; AND the doctor trying to cure him is none other than the hypnotist Caligari! While the studio rewrite shattered Mayer and Janowitz, it forced German viewers to decide who, in fact, was crazy, as they would be obliged to do 13 years later, when the Nazis seized power, and it foreshadowed the twelve following years, when lunatics WERE running the asylum. On top of which, its surrealist, cubist sets imbued a visceral sense of derangement. And the hypnotist and somnambulist? No less than Hitler and the German people, as indicated immediately after the war in the title of “From Caligari to Hitler” (1947) by the brilliant German-Jewish critic and circus aficionado, Siegfried Kracauer. After fleeing Hamburg for Manhattan, where he soon garnered Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, Kracauer cognized what is common knowledge today: pop culture is not just déclassé celebrity adoration, low art and suggestive dancing, but a way to palpate the masses' subconscious. A remake focusing on Jane, "The Cabinet of Caligari" (1962), however, has little redeeming value, despite the work of some of "Psycho"'s creative team, while a recent German documentary (2014), titled like Kracauer's book, talks about but doesn’t cinematically show his insights, although there are some great films clips and director interviews.
Wanda Jakubowska's Polish-produced 'The Last Stage', 1947, was shot in Auschwitz, and considered the 'mother of all Holocaust films.' photo courtesy of W. Jakubowska Film noir is considered by many to be Hollywood’s only original invention, given that the Western had long precursors in pulp fiction and German Expressionist cinema lacked noir's triumvirate of sympathetic low-life, mundane but malevolent reality and cynical happenstance. But this is splitting hairs given that most American noir was created by the hundreds of German and Austrian artists who fled Hitler for Hollywood, Jews and gentiles alike—or both, as with Lang (1890-1976). (Lang's Jewish mother’s devout conversion to Catholicism and marriage to a Catholic would have meant nothing to the Nazis but she had the “good fortune” to die from natural causes before they arrived.) Indeed, Lang made 23 features in California including the mid-war “Hangmen Also Die” (1943), a frontal assault on Nazism, a style often less memorable than the satires. "Hangmen Also Die" concerned the Polish underground's attempt to assassinate Heydrich, a principal architect of the Holocaust, even though, by 1942, he had been killed by Czech resistors, resulting in the notorious massacre of an entire Czech village, Lidice, 1,300 men, women and children, and the deportation of 13,000 more, most to their death. Lang’s most famous Hollywood outing was “The Big Heat (1953, 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating), an especially brutal noir, evidently fueled by his growing pessimism in the face of old age and the burgeoning Cold War. Given its ability to reflect the grim tenure of the times and examine its underlying malaise, without getting preachy or specific, film noir became wildly popular in France, where the term was coined in 1946 by film critic Nino Frank, in England and the rest of Europe, even Japan—albeit not so much in Germany long-steeped in Expressionism, all too familiar with those tropes and in desperate need of lighter fare. Notably, the most popular and critically-acclaimed noirs are almost all American: “Double Indemnity” (1944), "The Big Sleep” (1946), “The Third Man” (1949) and "Touch of Evil” (1958, replete with Marlene Dietrich).
Many of Hollywood's film noirs were set in San Francisco, starting with the genre’s first, fully-realized offering, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), from Dashiell Hammett’s creatively written, private-eye procedural (1929), because it was the closest real city to sunny, suburban Hollywood and producers could save on fog machines as well as travel. The freshman film from eventually world-renown John Huston, who started as a painter and didn't set out to create noir, “Falcon” is talky and set-bound but still works wonderfully. Not coincidentally, its star, Humphrey Bogart, returned the next year to lead in the classic "Casablanca" (1942), directed by Hungarian-Jewish-American Michael Curtiz and shot by "Falcon”'s cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, using the chiaroscuro lighting that identifies noir, although "Casablanca", also shot on Hollywood sound stages, was more a romantic drama, especially given it debuted shortly after the US declared victory in the North African campaign in that actual city. Like Welles's "The Stranger", it addresses Nazism directly—indeed, it involves desperate refugees, Nazi sympathizers, collaborating French, concentration camp survivors and resistance leaders, although Jews are not mentioned. Taking place during the war but in neutral Morocco, it tells the story of a sympathetic American, Bogart's Rick Blaine, who evolves from neutrality, criminality and corruption to progressive politics, romanticism and finally sacrifice. In fact, Rick ran guns for Franco's fascists in Spain's Civil War (1936-39), which is considered by most historians to be the opening battle of WWII and one the Axis won. Indeed, Bogart's career-famous line is the notably mature, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," which concerns getting his old girlfriend Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, on the plane with her husband, the camp-surviving resistance leader, so she can continue the good fight of her Women's Way of War. Bogart slips in the romantic knife, however, with his earlier, "We'll always have Paris," and his parting, "Here's looking at you kid." Paradoxically, San Francisco soon became the premier location for the ‘60s' Romantic Revolution, which wiped away the film noir ‘50s, switching out its graphic black and white for colorful psychedelia and its cynicism and grit for free love and having fun. Although noir was an essential series of tropes for civilization to process Nazism, two decades was evidently enough and those dark journeys were eclipsed by the beats and the hippies and '60s' activism and romanticism. Largely triggered by The Beatles singing for American soldiers in Germany, oddly enough, the world’s attention turned 180 degrees to themes of love, nature, dreams and freedom, notions first articulated in that unified manner in the late 18th century by romantic poets from no other place than... Germany!
'The Last Stage''s depiction of Auschwitz and its female guards has ferocious authenticity given Director Jakubowska was there two years prior to production. photo courtesy of W. Jakubowska The first film to actually show Auschwitz arrived only two years after V-Day, directed and co-written by Auschwitz survivor, Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998), a Polish-Catholic cineaste from Warsaw, who had been deported for political activities. Shot on location with endless mud and puddles, using actors in striped uniforms left over from the camp, and guards and prisoners speaking their native German and Polish (though the Jews don’t use Yiddish), “The Last Stage” (1947) achieves hard-to-match verisimilitude. The script follows a Jewess, who escapes selection for death, to become a translator, and then from Auschwitz itself, to bear witness to the partisans. In its dramatic denouement, the heroine has been recaptured and is about to hang in the camp's "appel grounds," or center, when the hangman clandestinely cuts her wrist ropes and slips her a knife. She starts shouting denunciations and, after the commandant tries to stop her, she slashes but does not kill him (see scene). Only modestly marred by such pyrotechnics and Soviet socialist-realist styling, like the low-angle shots of the lovely lead, Barbara Drapinska, “The Last Stage” has been called “the mother of all Holocaust films” by Austrian critic Hanno Loewy. Jakubowska went on to teach at Poland’s National Film School in Łódź, including to Roman Polanski, and to produce an Auschwitz trilogy (“The End of Our World”, 1964; “Invitation”, 1985), supporting her statement that thinking about telling her story while in Anus Mundi helped her survive—the curative power of art AND Frankl’s Search for Meaning.
A third early film of interest is “The Murderers Are Among Us” (1948) by Wolfgang Staudte (1906-1984). A West German who moved to East Germany, he was driven to direct that particular script in atonement for his below-the-line work on “Süss the Jew" (1940), the notorious anti-Semitic film produced by Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister. A complete perversion of the popular 1925 historical novel by the anti-Nazi Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, it concerns a medieval Jewish moneylender who seduces a German prince with gifts and low-interest loans and takes over his town as well as a local lass. “The Murderers Are Among Us” was also the title of the fascinating, if sometimes sickening, 1967 book about hunting Nazis after the war by Austrian-Jewish survivor Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005). Although filmed on sets and occasionally stilted, the early East German outing has strong moments: a chess player exclaiming, “Always protecting the king, never the little people!” or an alcoholic German doctor trying to kill the officer who ordered him to massacre women and children—on Christmas Day, no less! Dissuaded by his survivor girlfriend, who doesn't want to do to them what they did to her, the doctor turns the Nazi over to the police, making "Murderers" not a noir but the uplifting film needed by the German public after the war.
The diversity of survivor humanity depicted in 'Night and Fog' (1955) by French New Waver, Alain Resnais. photo courtesy A. ResnaisDespite these ambitious attempts, however, Shoah cinema got little traction until Alain Resnais’s alternative documentary, “Night and Fog” (1955), and the Hollywood hit, "The Diary of Anne Frank", four years later. “Night and Fog” emerged from a Parisian art exhibit commemorating V-Day's tenth anniversary, with a script by survivor Jean Cayrol, and a title from the Nazi decree to "disappear undesirables under the cover of night and fog." With its moody black-and-white mix of camp images (from shots of liberation to deserted buildings a decade later), introspective narration and eerie music by Austrian Hanns Eisle, it set the standard for visionary Holocaust investigations. Also half-Jewish and friends with Lang and Adorno, Eisler collaborated with poet/playwright Berthold Brecht, notably on "The Mother" (1932), from the same-named 1906 novel by Russian novelist and Judeophile Maxim Gorky. Premiering in Berlin, the popular play deployed a modern mix of irony, iconic truths, propaganda, comedy and optimism, while following a woman from the death of her son during WWI to her awaking to revolutionary action. Within a year, the Nazis were arresting its lead actors forcing both playwright and composer to flee Germany. A very versatile artist, Eisler went on to compose BOTH East Germany’s national anthem AND scores of scores for Hollywood films, including many of Lang’s, until he was deported for so-called “un-American” activities—yet another great talent lost to Red Scare idiocy.
Bizarrely, Resnais’s title was spoofed by uber-Jew and late-blooming intellectual Woody Allen in “Shadows and Fog” (1991), the director's star-studded homage to German Expressionist film. Festooned with intricate love affairs, odd circus acts and a Caligari-esque search for a serial killer, it doesn't mention the word Jew, a la Kafka. Nevertheless, when Allen’s Kleinman character stumbles on the town’s police chief and priest drawing up a list of names for nefarious purposes, including his own patently Jewish one, the film’s second-level metaphoring becomes all too clear, if not clearly put to more meaningful use, although it still rates the accolade of "decent Holocaust comedy."
After “Night and Fog”, Resnais drew on it for “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959), from a script by the mercurial and prolific Marguerite Duras (“The Lovers” 1984), whose first husband survived the camps. In existential conversation as well as explicit sex, the film pairs a Japanese architect, whose family was killed in Hiroshima, to a French actress, in Japan shooting a commercial. Her backstory includes a wartime affair with a German soldier, for which she had her head shaved, to publicly shame her for sleeping with the enemy—illustrating a morally complex, often condemned, but still "fighting for love" Women's Way of War action. ("If you give them enough love, perhaps they will stop fighting...") In fact, that's the "Old Testament" story of Esther, who saves both her country, Persia, AND her fellow Jews. “Hiroshima My Love” (its English title) became the first film in France’s acclaimed “new wave” of the early '60s, due to its artistic repetition, striking flashbacks and documentary footage, as well as big screen story arc and movie stars, not to forget empathy for the enemy. Indeed, it remains one of the best films ever on the moral complexities of war.
A slightly corny shot near the end of the commercially pioneering 'Diary of Anne Frank,' with Shelley Winters as another internee (2nd fr lft), Millie Perkins as Anne (bottom), Richard Beymer, as her love interest Peter (2nd fr rt), and Diane Baker, as her sister, Marlo (rt). photo courtesy G. StevensAlready focusing on the enemy’s experience, however, was “Hiroshima” (1946), by war reporter John Hershey (1914-93), based solely on his interviews with Japanese survivors, using a style dubbed “new journalism.” When “Hiroshima” filled an entire issue of the New Yorker, arguably America’s premier intellectual magazine, its readers were forced to consider both the strategic validity AND basic morality of their air force’s already massive "regular" bombardment (the fire bombing of Tokyo burnt to death almost as many people as the nuclear blasts) as well as their Manhattan “A-Bomb” Project, directed by Jewish-American J. Robert Oppenheimer, with assistance from numerous other European-Jewish scientists. Although Hershey protested the New Journalism label, he expanded on it in his first historical novel, “The Wall” (1950), about the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—the FIRST major rebellion in Nazi-occupied Europe, using diary-like entry headings and the fiction that his story was edited from notes by a Jewish journalist, much like the historical Emanuel Ringelblum, whose archives were found buried beneath the flattened Warsaw ghetto. Indeed, “The Wall”’s five weeks at number one on the NY Times' bestseller list belies the common claim that little was known in the '50s of the many Jewish uprisings. Alas, “The Wall” had to wait until 1982 and the Holocaust media surge to be filmed as a gut-wrenching television movie directed by Jewish-American Robert Markowitz and shot in Poland. Indeed, “The Wall” was honest enough to include scenes of a wealthy Jew, played by Eli Wallach, abandoning his family when he secured an almost-impossible-to-get visa to Palestine; a mini-amusement park just outside the ghetto, which seems like artistic license but actually happened and highlights the insanity of WWII Warsaw; and a moving evocation of the catharsis Jewish fighters felt when they were finally able to return a small portion of the boundless German firepower targeting them. One self-immolating scene has a group of Jews crawling through a sewer to escape the destroyed ghetto: when a baby starts to cry, they strangle it, annihilating the mother. The noise could have exposed the group to German soldiers or Polish “shmaltzovics” ("those who get their palms greased"), who hung around the ghetto walls watching for just such escapees to blackmail for big money or to denounce for small rewards. The movie was slightly diminished, however, by deleting the journalist character and shifting Hershey’s traditional focus on individuals to the drama of rebellion.
In 1959, the international film-viewing public finally came face-to-face with the unambiguous moral nut of WWII in "The Diary of Anne Frank", which won three Academy Awards (notably for supporting actress Shelley Winters) and was directed by Oakland-native George Stevens, famous for his Oscar-winning “Giant” (1956, with James Dean), who also made films for the army during the war and filmed and was shocked by the liberation of Dachau, the prototype camp, near Munich. The book, “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl”, was released to little notice in Amsterdam in 1947, but after publication in the US (1952) and adaptation to a Broadway play (1955), which became a hit, it was on its way to becoming the bestselling, most-translated title of ALL TIME, after “The Bible”—remarkable given it’s the personal musings of a very romantic young woman. “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” notes Frank, at the book’s end. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really GOOD AT HEART,” (my emphasis). An astute ethicist as well as writer, Frank entertained queer consciousness—pretty precocious for any fourteen year-old, let alone one in Holocaust hiding. Frank writes, “I remember that once when I slept with a girl friend I had a strong desire to kiss her and that I did so. I could not help being terribly inquisitive over her body.”
Continued in Holocaust Film/Books Chapter 3
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Mar 03, 2016 - 09:43 AM
by Doniphan Blair
A typical inside page Holocaust article, this one from Pittsburgh Press on May 14th, 1945. photo courtesy Pittsburgh PressTo be sure, the NY Times ran 26 wartime articles on what was later called the Holocaust. (The lower case "h" holocaust was used for centuries for large fires or book burnings, both also popular with Nazis, but the capitalized form became the term of art after “Nazi Holocaust” appeared in the English translation of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948.) Alas, those articles were a tiny fraction of the war news, as noted in the critical documentary short, “Reporting on The Times” (2014), which also points out that they NEVER appeared on the front page, tried not to sound too alarmist and often didn’t include the word “Jew”—Kafkaesque, if not for Kafka’s reasons. The excuse of the paper’s Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger: he didn’t want to appear biased or “a special pleader for Jews.” Admittedly, that might be misconstrued by middle Americans expert in firearms, who were needed for the army but were being swamped by the isolationist, anti-Semitic rants of Father Coughlin (a Catholic priest and Canadian, no less), in his popular, Sunday-evening radio show, or the speeches by Charles Lindbergh, the first celebrity of the Radio Age (for his solo, trans-Atlantic flight, 1927, and then the kidnap-murder of his son by a German-born carpenter), or others in the first "America First" movement.
As the Third Reich went down in flames and final paroxysms of evil, Holocaust rumors and actual news raced across and out of Europe, regardless of the cancelling of “Camps Factual Survey”. Alas, after the biggest war in history, with over double the deaths of the previous biggest war, only 25 years earlier, the wounds were too big for easy reopening and examination. As with injuries suffered by children, the trauma had to be repressed until the patient healed and matured enough to contemplate it dispassionately, without triggering post-traumatic stress or other disorders.
Still, some of the most-esteemed exemplars of eye-witness Holocaust reports, literature—poetry, even—arrived right after the war, starting with the Viennese Auschwitz-survivor and psychiatrist Victor Frankl (1905-97), who composed most of his “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946) inside Anus Mundi. In a mere 134 pages, Frankl not only summarizes his camp experience and subjects it to psychological analysis but introduces a new philosophy, "logotherapy" (from “logos,” Greek for meaning), and what he calls “tragic optimism.” Say yes to life, Frankl exhorts his readers, despite the radical nature of the injury to humanity as well as the individual, in what he views as an extreme example of the “‘tragic triad’… (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death.” It’s not WHAT one suffers but HOW and the meaning one imbues it, an epistemological and metaphysical quest Frankl elevates to THE primary life force, contradicting the “pleasure principal” of colleague Sigmund Freud, also from Vienna (psychiatry’s central city, perhaps due to its many languages, cultures and levels of modernity). Alas, the Auschwitz Particle Accelerator proved Frankl right. Absent any pleasure—overwhelmed by the “pain principle,” in fact, many people sutured body and soul together by imagining happier times or deeper issues, even as they strove to satisfy their most basic needs. “Man’s Search for Meaning” sold ten million copies (tying "Mein Kampf", if across 24 languages) and, in 1991, the Library of Congress rated it one of America's "most influential books."
A year after Frankl, “Survival in Auschwitz” (1947) delivered a more bug’s eye view, so to speak, of the camp’s Kafkaesque grotesquerie, albeit in a clear, scientific tone, since its author was yet another Jewish chemist, the Italian Primo Levi (1919-87). “I believe in reason,” Levi wrote (New Republic, 1986). “Thus, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm and sober language of the witness, not the lamenting tones of the victim or the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge.” Regardless, “Survival” periodically waxes poetic: “Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.” Fully contradicting Adorno's "death of poetry," the Romanian-Jewish-French survivor, Paul Celan (1920-70), remarked, as he was being awarded a German poetry prize in 1958: “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language… But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech… It gave me no words for what was happening, but it went through… and could resurface, enriched.”
'Man's Search for Meaning', one of the first books released on the camps, made Vienna psychiatrist Victor Frankl a guru of sorts. photo courtesy V. FranklWhile Gertner provides the underworld dispairing view, Michilene Maurel (1916-2009), the non-Jewish scion of a Southern French architectural dynasty deported to the Ravensbruck camp for underground activities, found a philosophical takeaway and mantra as boldly optimistic as Frankl’s: "BE HAPPY, you who live in fine apartments, in ugly houses or hovels. BE HAPPY you who have your loved ones, and you also who sit alone and dream and can weep. BE HAPPY you who torture yourself over metaphysical problems, and… BE HAPPY, oh how happy, you who die a death as normal as life in hospital beds or in your homes," (from “An Ordinary Camp”, 1957, my emphasis).
After liberation, Buchenwald survivors had no where to stay but the camp, including writer Elie Wiesel, 2nd bunk from bottom, 7th from left. photo: US ArmyPrimo Levi's “Survival in Auschwitz" has only been filmed once, as an arty, one-man performance piece, "Primo" (2005), and Wiesel's masterpiece suffered similarly after he declined Orson Welles's 1950s offer to option "Night”, telling him that the narrative could only live on paper with the “silences between the words.” A truncated “Night” with scarily skinny actors did appear out of Romania a few years ago but with only a trailer and no additional documentation online, it's obviously unauthorized and largely inadequate. After living in France, where he became a journalist, and then Israel, Wiesel moved to the United States in 1955 while continuing to travel, including to the Soviet Union (1965), where he exposed the distinctly non-socialist oppression of its Jewish citizens in "The Jews of Silence" (1966), helping bring awareness and facilitate their mass exodus in the 1970s. For these literary and activist achievements, Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986 and “Night” remains a bestseller today, read by high schoolers around the world as well as across the country. As America’s best-known camp survivor (or survivor in general, after Levi died by his own hand in 1987), Wiesel pleaded with President Ronald Reagan not to visit a German cemetery which included some SS graves (he went anyway, 1985), and returned to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey to tape an episode of her show in 2006. Even as an octogenarian, Wiesel remained dedicated to teaching children, advocating for tolerance and moving beyond “bystander mentality,” especially poignant after he was attacked in a San Francisco luxury hotel in 2007. As an unarmed neo-Nazi beat him, attempting to force a confession that the Holocaust was a hoax—among other inanities, Holocaust deniers claim he lacked the iconic number tattoo, since it didn't seem to appear in one photo (he had one: A-7713)—Wiesel screamed for 20 minutes. Not a single door on the hotel floor opened.
No wonder so many survivors have tried to forget or, at least, not talk about what is, in any case, nearly indescribable. For a couple who held their story very close to their vest for a very long time read the excellent and mysterious "After Long Silence" (1999) by their daughter Helen Fremont, who slowly and cinematically unearths that her parents were not only not devout Catholics, as she had been brought up to believe (one clue: they never took communion), but that her vivacious aunt was a Women's Way of War warrior. Indeed, her aunt talked, seduced and bribed her way through a series of trips, traps and hiding places, shepherding Fremont's mother and grandparents over a thousand miles through Nazi Europe, from the Ukraine to Italy and, finally, safety. While her aunt stayed in Italy, marrying the Fascist official who helped them (a common WWW conclusion), Fremont's mother immigrated to the US, where she met a Jewish survivor of six years in a Soviet "gulag" (concentration camp). After their marriage, the new couple rationalized it would be healthier to erase their histories entirely simply because: Raising children as Jews after the Holocaust amounts to child abuse. For many others, however, notably Fremont herself and other survivor children—eventually labelled "second-generation survivors" and introduced to the public in Helen Epstein's revealing and humanizing "Children of the Holocaust" (1988), psychological relief starts with the telling and learning of secrets. Of course, so does political healing, as evidenced by the world-wide need for journalistic exposes,"truth and reconciliation" commissions and artistic explorations after the civil struggles in South Africa, El Salvador and elsewhere.
Elie Wiesel and Oprah Winfrey go to Birkenau in 2006 to shoot an episode of her show; Wiesel had been there at age 15. photo courtesy O. WinfreyWhen survivors did elect to bear detailed witness, they generally did so through books, which often start clunky and clichéd, especially the self-published volumes, with tender reminiscences of familial idyll in the peaceful penumbra before the war. With its shocking arrival, however, which brought the terrorizing threat of death and then its deeply demoralizing enactment, many amateur authors rose to the occasion, much as their subjects did to theirs, revealing heretofore unimaginable truths while stripping their prose down to Hemingway- or even Burroughs-esque levels. After her prosaic opening chapters, Sara Selver-Urbach renders arrival in Auschwitz as: "[W]e felt like we were were falling, amidst a most terrible commotion, straight down into a bottomless pit without any stages or transitions, that we were hurtling and pitching down, down, down at a dizzying speed," ("Through the Window of my Home", 1986).
Of course, there are also many brilliant books by gentiles (another term for non-Jew), who sometimes faced the same personal, familial and even community devastation, just not the extreme existential angst of having your entire tribe, people and culture in the meat grinder of extermination. In addition to Wiesław Kielar's "Anus Mundi", with its nuanced Auschwitz—punishing work and periodic butchery contrasted with devoted networks of friends (which rise rapidly in life-or-death situations), rampant black marketeering or women from the Gypsy camp dancing for tips (from inmates as well as guards), there's “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (1959), by his fellow Pole Tadeusz Borowski. Preternaturally romantic, Borowski actually allowed himself to be arrested to follow his beloved girlfriend, who had already been seized, across the River Styx into the sepulchral underworld. Although Borowski behaved decently in Auschwitz, according to witnesses, he responded to his terrible travails with biting black comedy, Kafka-esque metaphors and unvarnished atrocity in stories about a tough, cynical kapo named Tadek. Among other horrific duties, Tadek empties the cattle-cars of "squashed, trampled infants... like chickens, holding several in each hand." At the other end of the style spectrum, but with an equally striking title, is “The Theory and Practice of Hell” (1950, "The SS State" in German) by Eugen Kogon, a Russian Jew who became an Austrian anti-fascist journalist, converted to Catholicism and endured six years in Buchenwald’s “medical” barracks. Although criticized for reading Plato at night while others suffered, Kogon managed to remain pretty descent and save many lives before getting shipped out of the camp IN A BOX by the Nazi head doctor to the latter's home address! Along with ironic undertones, Kogon’s full-immersion sociology includes a surfeit of details on camp departments, mortality rates, even the Nazis' mind set, such as it was. “The only form of soul-searching to which they submitted…amounted to no more than a check-up as to whether the directions of their instincts corresponded to prescribed SS goals,” he writes. “[T]hey called this, ‘Licking the inner son of a bitch.’”
Eugene Kogon opposed Nazism, spent six years in a camp and helped found modern West Germany, at a book signing. photo courtesy E. KogonSome people are struck by the word "Jew," to describe a Jewish person, and even more by "Jewess," for a Jewish woman. Admittedly, Jew is a meaning-ladened noun (the verb, an ethnic slur, we'll get to below), referencing a person belonging EITHER to the religion, the overall tribe (or so-called race), or general culture (the "lapsed" or "lox-and-bagel" Jew, the "Jew lover" or "philo-Semite"), as well as, at various times in history, a nation—with arguments still raging about what confers which status where. This makes the generalizing adjective "Jewish" more accurate as well as palatable. "Jew" comes from "Yehudi," meaning someone of the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve tribes of Israel founded by the dozen sons and grandsons of the patriarch Jacob, who, in turn, generated the term "Israel," which means "one who prevails with god." Jacob earned that appellation after a night wrestling with an angel (symbolizing struggles with self as well as god) but conferred it on the nation when, during a severe drought, he moved his family to Egypt. That sets up "The Bible"'s second book, "Exodus", the enslavement of Jacob's descendants and their liberation by Moses, who leads them back across the desert to what is now called Israel, issues the Ten Commandments and converts them from ancestor-worshippers to "people of the book," which he supposedly wrote, devotees of a universal law and civilization as well as deity. When the Judah Tribe started the first Jewish state around Jerusalem (9-7th century BC), Middle Eastern usage evolved from Hebrew and Israelite to Jew, a transition only completed after the Romans brutally suppressed their first and second century AD rebellions, triggering the "diaspora," or great dispersion. While the Romans were comparatively decent conquerors of polytheist peoples, since the gods of either side could be easily integrated into the other's heavenly host, the monotheist Jews simply could not abide the blasphemy of worshipping the Roman emperor as god nor could the Romans brook the rejection of their divine royalty. After a 40 AD Roman attempt to erect a statue of Caligula (no less!) in Jerusalem's holiest of holies was protested massively by the Jews, desecrations and attacks escalated culminating with the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE), including the raising of Jerusalem as well as its temple and the famous siege of their Masada fortress. Betting on better opportunities elsewhere, and an eventual marriage of Judeo-Christian and Hellenic-Roman civilizations, Jewish men (mostly) journeyed the Roman Empire from Constantinople to Cologne, but also to Nigeria, Kenya, Yemen, even Bangladesh, often marrying daughters of prominent families, convincing them of the logic of one god and founding communities of Jews or "crypto-Jews" with Jewish practices syncretizing with local cultures. See Ken Blady's "Jewish Communities in Exotic Places" (2000) for an eye-opening survey, the Persia chapter of which helps explain why Iranians remain obsessed with Jews, despite their immense sophistication in poetry, the arts and science and the latter's arrival in Iran 3000 years ago! "The Old Testament" tells of the triumph of Queen Ester, the loving new wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus, who revealed a plot against both him and her fellow Jews, inspiring him to kill his anti-Semitic vizier, Hamam, and hire her cousin Mordecai instead. Employing Jewish advisors was standard to many subsequent kings and Muslim rulers both in Iran and across the Middle East. Blady also notes the colorful 6th century story about when a Persian king and many Jews joined a Zoroastrian cult advocating communalism and free love! Although historians differ, it was probably overthrown by the chief rabbi, Mar Zutra ben Tuvia, trying to win back his flock, who formed the Jewish principality of Mahoza, until his capture and crucifixion seven years later. Amazingly, many of Blady's exotic communities are extant or traceable today.
Other New York Jews did talk about the Holocaust, of course. Paul Pavel (1925-92), a Czech Auschwitz survivor, became a city-wide language expert and a shrink, who specialized in artists and worked with actor Spalding Gray and cartoonist Art Spiegelman, among others. Spiegelman's comic book "Maus", about his father's vast and vicious peregrinations, became the fresh Holocaust interpretation of 1986 (released in installments, in his edgy comic magazine Raw, starting in 1980) and the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize (1992). Somewhat superseding "Night", "Maus" is the perfect primer for teenage boys (Frank's "Diary" remains that for girls) due to Spiegelman's appearance as the son interacting with his father; the latter's conversational, no-matter-how-brutal portrayals in perfect Yiddish-inflected English; and panel after panel of lovely drawings, with simply-rendered yet evocative animal characters—Jews as mice, Nazis cats, Poles pigs. Pavel also analyzed some of my cohort and, when my brother secured me a one-time, full-immersion session—a controversial technique Pavel endorsed, I found him astonishingly at ease and enlightened (if dismissive of my romantic needs), making him an Auschwitz guru of sorts, much like Victor Frankl. How had he achieved this? In addition to innate abilities, Pavel nurtured aggressively. Despite being denied refuge in England, where his parents shipped him for safekeeping, and his enslavement at age 13, a soul-killing turn of events, to say the least, "[h]e survived by learning skills like welding and plumbing to make himself useful," (NY Times obituary, 7/17/92). His post-war experience was phenomenally diverse: after the Soviets socialized his family's brick factory in Czechoslovakia, which he was running at the time, "[h]e fled to Israel, where he enlisted in the war of independence. Afterward he helped found a kibbutz, worked with juvenile delinquents and developed therapy techniques. Then he went to Germany to direct the Foundation for Redemocratization of German Youth, a war rehabilitation program. Next he studied at the Swiss Institute for Applied Psychology, and lived briefly in Paris." Although he didn't author a book, unfortunately, he did in a manner of speaking through Spiegelman, whom I also met once in the '80s. Surprisingly open to a cold call and Holocological rumination over equally-temperatured beers, Spiegelman was similarly astute and understanding, even enlightened, in part by his work with Pavel, who appears as a character in "Maus II" (1991), but also by the catharsis of Bearing Witness through high art comics—save for his constant chain-smoking and the large, black bags under his eyes, suggesting something amiss (happily, Art's still with us, 1948-).
Orson Welles (lf), as the Nazi, and the Jewish Edward G. Robinson, as the Nazi hunter, in the former's '46 'The Stranger'. photo courtesy O. Welles“The Holocaust” entails the tendentious, interlocking stories of two families, one Jewish, one German—it was a mini-series, after all, directed by Jewish-American Marvin Chomsky (known for “Star Trek” and “Gunsmoke” episodes)—but it had moving moments and aired nationally and internationally, including in Germany, to devastating effect. It also featured, as the German gentile wife of a Jewish artist, Meryl Streep, who became a hallowed Holocaust icon four years later for her eponymous portrayal and Oscar-winning accent in the excellent “Sophie’s Choice”, directed by Jewish-American Alan J. Pakula. The larger laurel, however, should go to the 1979 book of the same name by William Styron, also author of the acclaimed “Confessions of Nat Turner” (1967), a historical novel about the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion. Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice” is a gripping, literary mash-up of hipster ‘50s Brooklyn, X-rated sex and Auschwitz, all overarched by unfathomable guilt—one of Frankl’s big three—embodied in the three central characters. First there’s the Polish-Catholic Sophie, who not only has to select one of her children for the gas but whose father is an anti-Semitic activist, which, in turn, means absolutely nothing when she pleads for mercy with Auschwitz’s Commandant Hoss. Then there’s Sophie's charismatic but certifiably insane Jewish-American lover, Nathan, who neither suffered physically nor fought, sitting out the war in the safety of New York—a guilt goldmine. Finally, there's the narrator, Stingo, a Southerner like Styron, with all the excess, oversize baggage slavery entails. So striking and story-encapsulating was Styron’s title, “Sophie’s Choice” soon entered the lexicon for “choice-less choice,” a day-one concept in Anus Mundi, where logic was annihilated alongside civilization and “There is NO why!” as Primo Levi was "helpfully" informed by a guard, shortly after his arrival in Auschwitz.
Mass Union soldier graves at the Andersonville concentration camp, Georgia. photo courtesy Andersonville MuseumGetting back to Welles’s groundbreaking “The Stranger” (1946): it starred, as the war crimes investigator, Edward G. Robinson (1893-1973), a Romanian-Jewish-American who was an outspoken critic of Nazism and fascism; it was set in a quintessential New England town (“It could happen here…”); and it was one of the few film noirs to feature actual Nazis—even though ALL film noirs are, in a sense, about Nazism. While most film historians have missed this deeply moral, almost metaphysical, point, film noir in fact emerged in the early 1940s because it was nothing less than the cultural means wherein Western Civilization could sublimate Nazism and its over-the-top atrocities, while examining its cruelty, corruption and motivations, up-close and personal, through stories about comprehensible characters, not accented, inscrutable foreigners or outright monsters, although there were a few of those, too.
Caligari (Werner Krauss) reveals his Frankenstein (Conrad Viedt) in 'The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari', plumbing Germany's soul and predicting a Nazi future. photo: Decla-Bioscop StudiosLong before such stellar cinematic achievements came “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), considered THE first horror film, the jewel in the crown of Expressionist cinema and one of the greatest films of all time, despite being a rather raw and an odd amalgam of artistic and commercial methods. With its surrealist sets and heady brew of romance, murder and mysticism, not to mention literary plot twists, “Caligari” not only captured the German imagination but their inner world, essentially predicting Hitler (see CS article). After “Caligari”'s writers Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz—true bohemians, given Janowitz was from Bohemia, Czech Republic, and both became pacifists after serving in WWI—went to a country fair where a girl had been murdered, they concocted a story about a carney hypnotist who keeps a narcoleptic ("sleeping disease") in the proverbial "cabinet," waking him by day to answer questions about the fair goers' futures and, by night, to sneak around and murder his enemies—terrorizing the town. When the narrator Francis and his friend Alan stop by the hypnotist's booth, the somnambulist predicts Alan's death and the following dawn—what do you know?—does the deed by stabbing him. As his love interest, Jane, and the police search for the murderer, Francis spies on the hypnotist and discovers he keeps a dummy of the somnambulist in the cabinet at night as an alibi. Sleuthing further, Francis tracks him to an insane asylum, where he's the institution’s director, it turns out, conducting “forbidden experiments” on patients while obsessing over an evil, medieval mystic named Caligari. Although the doctor was arrested and Francis got the girl in the writers’ version, the film's Weissensee producers thought they might do better box-office if the conclusion was a less anti-authoritarian. Following a suggestion from Lang, who didn't go on to direct (that would be Robert Wiene), they "flipped the plot" and added a "framing story," turning Francis into an "unreliable narrator." The entire film is a figment of his imagination, it turns out, given he is in the asylum; Jane and the narcoleptic are simply other inmates; AND the doctor trying to cure him is none other than the hypnotist Caligari! While the studio rewrite shattered Mayer and Janowitz, it forced German viewers to decide who, in fact, was crazy, as they would be obliged to do 13 years later, when the Nazis seized power, and it foreshadowed the twelve following years, when lunatics WERE running the asylum. On top of which, its surrealist, cubist sets imbued a visceral sense of derangement. And the hypnotist and somnambulist? No less than Hitler and the German people, as indicated immediately after the war in the title of “From Caligari to Hitler” (1947) by the brilliant German-Jewish critic and circus aficionado, Siegfried Kracauer. After fleeing Hamburg for Manhattan, where he soon garnered Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, Kracauer cognized what is common knowledge today: pop culture is not just déclassé celebrity adoration, low art and suggestive dancing, but a way to palpate the masses' subconscious. A remake focusing on Jane, "The Cabinet of Caligari" (1962), however, has little redeeming value, despite the work of some of "Psycho"'s creative team, while a recent German documentary (2014), titled like Kracauer's book, talks about but doesn’t cinematically show his insights, although there are some great films clips and director interviews.
Wanda Jakubowska's Polish-produced 'The Last Stage', 1947, was shot in Auschwitz, and considered the 'mother of all Holocaust films.' photo courtesy of W. Jakubowska Many of Hollywood's film noirs were set in San Francisco, starting with the genre’s first, fully-realized offering, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), from Dashiell Hammett’s creatively written, private-eye procedural (1929), because it was the closest real city to sunny, suburban Hollywood and producers could save on fog machines as well as travel. The freshman film from eventually world-renown John Huston, who started as a painter and didn't set out to create noir, “Falcon” is talky and set-bound but still works wonderfully. Not coincidentally, its star, Humphrey Bogart, returned the next year to lead in the classic "Casablanca" (1942), directed by Hungarian-Jewish-American Michael Curtiz and shot by "Falcon”'s cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, using the chiaroscuro lighting that identifies noir, although "Casablanca", also shot on Hollywood sound stages, was more a romantic drama, especially given it debuted shortly after the US declared victory in the North African campaign in that actual city. Like Welles's "The Stranger", it addresses Nazism directly—indeed, it involves desperate refugees, Nazi sympathizers, collaborating French, concentration camp survivors and resistance leaders, although Jews are not mentioned. Taking place during the war but in neutral Morocco, it tells the story of a sympathetic American, Bogart's Rick Blaine, who evolves from neutrality, criminality and corruption to progressive politics, romanticism and finally sacrifice. In fact, Rick ran guns for Franco's fascists in Spain's Civil War (1936-39), which is considered by most historians to be the opening battle of WWII and one the Axis won. Indeed, Bogart's career-famous line is the notably mature, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," which concerns getting his old girlfriend Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, on the plane with her husband, the camp-surviving resistance leader, so she can continue the good fight of her Women's Way of War. Bogart slips in the romantic knife, however, with his earlier, "We'll always have Paris," and his parting, "Here's looking at you kid." Paradoxically, San Francisco soon became the premier location for the ‘60s' Romantic Revolution, which wiped away the film noir ‘50s, switching out its graphic black and white for colorful psychedelia and its cynicism and grit for free love and having fun. Although noir was an essential series of tropes for civilization to process Nazism, two decades was evidently enough and those dark journeys were eclipsed by the beats and the hippies and '60s' activism and romanticism. Largely triggered by The Beatles singing for American soldiers in Germany, oddly enough, the world’s attention turned 180 degrees to themes of love, nature, dreams and freedom, notions first articulated in that unified manner in the late 18th century by romantic poets from no other place than... Germany!
'The Last Stage''s depiction of Auschwitz and its female guards has ferocious authenticity given Director Jakubowska was there two years prior to production. photo courtesy of W. Jakubowska A third early film of interest is “The Murderers Are Among Us” (1948) by Wolfgang Staudte (1906-1984). A West German who moved to East Germany, he was driven to direct that particular script in atonement for his below-the-line work on “Süss the Jew" (1940), the notorious anti-Semitic film produced by Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister. A complete perversion of the popular 1925 historical novel by the anti-Nazi Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, it concerns a medieval Jewish moneylender who seduces a German prince with gifts and low-interest loans and takes over his town as well as a local lass. “The Murderers Are Among Us” was also the title of the fascinating, if sometimes sickening, 1967 book about hunting Nazis after the war by Austrian-Jewish survivor Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005). Although filmed on sets and occasionally stilted, the early East German outing has strong moments: a chess player exclaiming, “Always protecting the king, never the little people!” or an alcoholic German doctor trying to kill the officer who ordered him to massacre women and children—on Christmas Day, no less! Dissuaded by his survivor girlfriend, who doesn't want to do to them what they did to her, the doctor turns the Nazi over to the police, making "Murderers" not a noir but the uplifting film needed by the German public after the war.
The diversity of survivor humanity depicted in 'Night and Fog' (1955) by French New Waver, Alain Resnais. photo courtesy A. ResnaisBizarrely, Resnais’s title was spoofed by uber-Jew and late-blooming intellectual Woody Allen in “Shadows and Fog” (1991), the director's star-studded homage to German Expressionist film. Festooned with intricate love affairs, odd circus acts and a Caligari-esque search for a serial killer, it doesn't mention the word Jew, a la Kafka. Nevertheless, when Allen’s Kleinman character stumbles on the town’s police chief and priest drawing up a list of names for nefarious purposes, including his own patently Jewish one, the film’s second-level metaphoring becomes all too clear, if not clearly put to more meaningful use, although it still rates the accolade of "decent Holocaust comedy."
After “Night and Fog”, Resnais drew on it for “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959), from a script by the mercurial and prolific Marguerite Duras (“The Lovers” 1984), whose first husband survived the camps. In existential conversation as well as explicit sex, the film pairs a Japanese architect, whose family was killed in Hiroshima, to a French actress, in Japan shooting a commercial. Her backstory includes a wartime affair with a German soldier, for which she had her head shaved, to publicly shame her for sleeping with the enemy—illustrating a morally complex, often condemned, but still "fighting for love" Women's Way of War action. ("If you give them enough love, perhaps they will stop fighting...") In fact, that's the "Old Testament" story of Esther, who saves both her country, Persia, AND her fellow Jews. “Hiroshima My Love” (its English title) became the first film in France’s acclaimed “new wave” of the early '60s, due to its artistic repetition, striking flashbacks and documentary footage, as well as big screen story arc and movie stars, not to forget empathy for the enemy. Indeed, it remains one of the best films ever on the moral complexities of war.
A slightly corny shot near the end of the commercially pioneering 'Diary of Anne Frank,' with Shelley Winters as another internee (2nd fr lft), Millie Perkins as Anne (bottom), Richard Beymer, as her love interest Peter (2nd fr rt), and Diane Baker, as her sister, Marlo (rt). photo courtesy G. StevensIn 1959, the international film-viewing public finally came face-to-face with the unambiguous moral nut of WWII in "The Diary of Anne Frank", which won three Academy Awards (notably for supporting actress Shelley Winters) and was directed by Oakland-native George Stevens, famous for his Oscar-winning “Giant” (1956, with James Dean), who also made films for the army during the war and filmed and was shocked by the liberation of Dachau, the prototype camp, near Munich. The book, “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl”, was released to little notice in Amsterdam in 1947, but after publication in the US (1952) and adaptation to a Broadway play (1955), which became a hit, it was on its way to becoming the bestselling, most-translated title of ALL TIME, after “The Bible”—remarkable given it’s the personal musings of a very romantic young woman. “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” notes Frank, at the book’s end. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really GOOD AT HEART,” (my emphasis). An astute ethicist as well as writer, Frank entertained queer consciousness—pretty precocious for any fourteen year-old, let alone one in Holocaust hiding. Frank writes, “I remember that once when I slept with a girl friend I had a strong desire to kiss her and that I did so. I could not help being terribly inquisitive over her body.”
Continued in Holocaust Film/Books Chapter 3
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on Mar 03, 2016 - 09:43 AM
