Holocaust Films - Drama

Black Book (2006)

Directed by:

• Paul Verhoeven

Cast:

• Halina Reijn
• Sebastian Koch
• Waldemar Kobus
• Carice van Houten

This is a dramatization of various historical events. It is one sexy thriller! It underscores the vicious greed that was one of the main motivations for the Holocaust. In this film the one characteristic shared by all the villains is an overwhelming desire to rob Jews, kill them and any witnesses to the deed, place the blame on someone else and abscond with the loot.

Films about Holocaust Survivors

Stronger Than Fire; The Eva Olsson Story  (2008)



This is a very moving film about the experiences of Holocaust survivor, Eva Olsson. She regularly visits schools to teach children and adults about the Holocaust. Then she gets them to relate to her story by showing that Nazism was a form of bullying. She encourages her listeners to not put up with bullying.Her message is one of forgiveness for the past. However her main goal is to change people's behaviour in the present and future so that this evil will not recur.

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The Boys of Buchenwald
Directed by	Audrey Mehler
Produced by	David Paperny
Narrated by	Saul Rubinek
Distributed by	National Film Board of Canada
Release date(s)	2002
Running time	47 minutes
Country	Canada
Language	English

http://www.ipexview.com/solution/videos/National_Film_Board_of_Canada/The_Boys_of_Buchenwald/75/
Synopsis

Robbie Waisman, Elie Wiesel and Joe Szwarcberg were three Jewish boys who knew the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp. Their friendship began in 1945, soon after the American troops liberated the camp. As the trains left Germany, full of orphaned children, the boys began to create a fraternity based on need, banded together against a world they did not trust. Their new life began at a children's home in France. Two of the former staff members recall the boys' struggle to adjust. They hoarded food, burned mattresses and fought, leaving many adults to regard them as damaged beyond repair. But slowly, the boys began to find good in people. Elie Wiesel, who went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize, explains: "We had to learn how to rediscover joy and affection." Almost 60 years after their liberation from Buchenwald, the "boys" meet again, touring the homes in France and attending a reunion in Jerusalem. The bonds of friendship that helped them to rebuild lives after the Holocaust are still strong. A treasure of archival footage and photos, seamlessly blended with the present, tells a remarkable, personal story.

This is a truly inspiring story of the resilience of the human spirit. Even though these children had lost most if not all of their families and had been brutalized beyond imagination they were able to learn to trust again and form deep, positive human connections.

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Fateless (2005)

Fateless is based on a a semi-autobiographical novel written by Imre Kertész, a Hungarian concentration camp survivor, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2002.

A young Hungarian boy, Gyuri, on his way to work is taken off a bus and sent to Auschwitz. On his arrival fellow internees urge him to lie and say that his age is sixteen. This advice saves his life. Through the support of others he is enabled to survive the war. We see the brutality of the guards and the sweet comradeship of the inmates through the eyes of a boy becoming a man.

He had difficulty adjusting to regular life after liberation. A hungarian citizen asks him if he ever saw the gas chambers. Gyuri says of course not or he would be dead. The woman living in his childhood flat slams the door in his face. A few neighbours who recognize him. They greet him warmly at first and ply him with food and questions. But they are not interested in his replies and quickly send him to meet his mother.

Gyuri misses his friends from the concentration camp.

This is a beautiful and dream like film. The tender love of a father and his sons as they try to survive the war as a family is very touching.

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Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (2004) 

This is a fascinating documentary that follows Hollywood's attempts to deal with the Holocaust in the sixty years following the end of WWII. Mostly it deals with the reluctance to face it fully.

Essentially the heads of most film studios were Jewish but they did not want to be identified as such. The USA wished to quickly rebuild post war Germany as a democratic nation. And Hollywood usually wants to audiences to leave theatres feeling good. So the Holocaust was downplayed after the war. I think that the film fails to mention that Nazi Germany was seen as a counter balance to the dreaded communistic Russia. This may account for the early "kid gloves" treatment of Nazi atrocities by Hollywood and the US government.

Gershon Iskowitz, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor who painted concentration camp scenes (secretly as an inmate and later from memory), referred to most Hollywood Holocaust films as 'Oylem Goylem'. Yiddish for 'world of mindless lumps of clay'. He would say that if a film showed the reality of the Holocaust then most people could not watch even a single minute of it.

Still this is an intriguing film and helps explain why even informed people like Conrad Black have so many misconceptions about Holocaust Jewry.

"A meticulously argued piece of work that illuminates not just the Holocaust, but the modern imagination's attempt to process it."
Newark Star-Ledger

Inglourious Basterds

This is the worst film about the Holocaust that I have ever seen. It manages to misrepresent every detail large or small about Nazi Germany. From the effete way most of the Germans say  "Heil Hitler" (which would have earned any Nazi a severe reprimand or even a visit with a firing squad) to the characterization of Hitler as the stooge Moe minus his wit. 

Tarantino trots out one Hollywood cliche after another. He seems to feel that enough pseudo violence (the scalping scenes are badly done and disparaging of North American First Nations) and bad accents makes up for lack of depth in the characters and quality in the screen play. Every joke is telegraphed well in advance and lands as flat as a pancake. 

It is extremely disrespectful to the more than twenty thousand Jewish partisans who risked their lives to fight the Nazis. Every one of their  actions was taken in knowledge that there would be severe reprisals. The Bielski Brigade in Belarus - Defiance 2008- quickly learned that revenge killings endangered their group and served no tactical advantage. 

Defiance (2008)

Defiance (2008) is an amazing film. It tells the story of the Bielski brothers who formed a partisan band in Belarus after the rest of their family was massacred by the Nazi invaders. They were the sons of a miller and had grown up on a farm. They had often played in the deep woods nearby. Thus they had the skills to survive in the bush. Being unable to turn away the Jewish refugees who asked for their help they retained their humanity in the face of overwhelming odds. Barely able to take care of themselves they treated all Jews as their brothers. This contrasts with the band of Soviet partisans with whom they make contact. The Soviets would not share their medicine with the Jews saying that it was only for fighters.

It is ironic that many of the refugees are intellectuals and professionals who in prewar times had looked down on the Bielskis as coarse, uneducated boors but are now dependent on them for their survival. In one scene the Jews are fleeing the Nazi hordes when they come to a marsh. This takes place on Passover as the Nazis chose religious celebrations as prime times to murder Jews. One of the Bielskis says that they must cross not by a miracle but by their own might. I wonder if the story of the parting of the Red Sea began with such an event.

The descendants of the people saved by the Bielski brothers now number in the tens of thousands. Yet the brothers never demanded any credit for their heroism.

No way that you can spin this as a victim story Mr. Black!

Holocaust Humour, Bittere Gelechter - Bitter Laughter - The Most Taboo Issue?

Jokes about the Holocaust? Oy, how could you!  A SHANDA (Yiddish for shame)!

When my mother, Gitel (may she rest in peace), was a refugee from the Nazi Hordes and interned in a Soviet Forced Labour Camp she would sing a Yiddish song that went like this if the enemy was present.
With a firm hand rules Stalin our land,
Our blood not to shed.
Among those she trusted she would sing:
With an iron hand rules Stalin our land,
Our blood not to shed.
This of course had the opposite meaning to the 'official' version. Even though she had risked her life to sing this song it would still bring a smile to her lips decades after the war ended.

John Morreall Ph.D. writes in Humor in the Holocaust:Its Critical, Cohesive, and Coping Functions 
"During the Holocaust, humor served three main functions. First was its critical function: humor focused attention on what was wrong and sparked resistance to it. Second was its cohesive function: it created solidarity in those laughing together at the oppressors. And third was its coping function: it helped the oppressed get through their suffering without going insane."

Sigmund Freud wrote extensively about humour and its value to the human psyche. In his 1927 essay Humour (Der Humor) writes "The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure".

Ricky Gervais has been widely criticized for making jokes about the Holocaust e.g. on the Golden Globes Award Show of 2009. I would like to wish him a Yasher Koach (More Power to You)! Most people find the Holocaust to be such a huge and tragic subject that they avoid it. He has enabled many people to engage with
the material on an informal basis. Whether you approve or condemn him you wind up thinking about the Holocaust in other than habitual patterns. This is a good thing. King Lear is considered one of the greatest tragedies. But take the fool out of the play and you would have another boring story of a dad robbed blind by his children. The play would probably close after one week and the critics would write "Lear minus the bozo is a snooze oh. Don't go!"



The brilliant and beloved cartoonist Sam Gross has been vilified for writing "We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons by Sam Gross." In gratitude I say to Mr. Gross "Yasher Koach" i.e. May You Be Strengthened!

Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust Expressed in Film

Holocaust Films
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films

My quick count of wikipedia's listings for Holocaust films by decade.

Decade	Narrative	Docum.	Total
1940's	5	9	14
1950's	6	1	7
1960's	12	8	20
1970's	22	3	25
1980's	31	24	55
1990's	50	66	116
2000's *	37	46	83
Total	163	157	320
* Only up to 2008 for Narrative and 2006 for Documentary films

Additional Films

As Seen Through These Eyes

http://www.asseenthroughtheseeyes.com/

[a Hilary Helstein film ; a Menemsha Films release].

Publication info: [Venice, Calif.] : Menemsha Films, c2009.

Performer: Narrated by Maya Angelou.

The story of a brave group of people who fought Hitler with the only weapons they had: charcoal, pencil stubs, shreds of paper, and memories etched in their minds. These artists took their fate into their own hands to make a compelling statement about the human spirit enduring against unimaginable odds.

 

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Adam Resurrected (אדם בן כלב, Adam Ben Kelev)

is an American-German-Israeli film, directed by Paul Schrader and adapted from Yoram Kaniuk's novel of the same name published in Israel in 1968. The book's original name literally means "Man, son of a dog". It was screened at several film festivals, including Telluride, Toronto, Mill Valley, AFI, Haifa Film Festival, Valladolid, The Palm Springs International Film Festival and the London Jewish Film Festival. It was released in Germany on January 22, 2009.

It follows the story of Adam Stein, a charismatic patient of a psychiatric asylum for Holocaust survivors in Israel, in 1961. Jeff Goldblum stars as Adam, alongside Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi and Ayelet Zurer. Several major German stars, including Moritz Bleibtreu, Veronica Ferres, Juliane Köhler and Joachim Król, play supporting roles.

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"The Reader"tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a teenager in the late 1950s had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in the later years of World War II. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past — a secret which, if revealed, could help her at the trial. (Wikipedia)

This is a brilliant film that explores nuances of German collaboration with and abhorrence of the Holocaust. I found it empowering and enlightening in that it portrayed individuals relationships with the Holocaust both before and during in a way that I had not seen before. Very well done!