Do Holocaust Movies Help Or Hinder Our Understanding?

Posted on December 28, 2008 at 8:00 am

Stuart Klawans, movie critic for The Nation for 20 years, has written a provocative essay about Holocaust movies for the website Nextbook.
Like so many other Jews, I have made my contribution toward the multiplication of Holocaust films. On New Year’s Eve 1985, I chose to spend my money at a movie theater, watching Part One of Shoah. A few years later, when asked in the wake of Schindler’s List how many more Holocaust films the world needed, I snapped, “We can stop at six million.”
But now, some dozen years and perhaps hundreds of movies later–in a season swollen with no fewer than six such releases–I respectfully request a moratorium on Holocaust films. By continually replaying and reframing and reinventing the past, these movies are starting to cloud the very history they claim to commemorate. Call it the law of diminishing returns–or call it a paradox that mirrors the Torah’s famously self-contradictory commandment at the end of Parshat Ki Tetze, concerning the people who were the prototype of Nazi Germany: “Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.” Very soon, with Holocaust movies, we’ll need to forget if we want to remember.
This issue has been on my mind as well. While others on Beliefnet have written approvingly about the recent film “The Boy in Striped Pajamas,” I found it to be superficial and manipulative. A lot of WWII movies are. As our world is increasingly troubling and complex, it is too easy to return to the Holocaust and portray Nazis as the last unambiguously evil villains, and just as important, unambiguously defeated. And yet, the very magnitude of the Holocaust requires a mosaic of stories for us to understand it even imperfectly.
According to Klawans, the number of Holocaust-related films is increasing as the few left who were there to witness it are dying out. He describes a recent screening of the upcoming film “Defiance,” based on the true story of The Bielski Partisans, three brothers who hid more than 1000 Jews from the Nazis. But it seems to me he makes a powerful point against his argument when he describes the reaction of the audience.
This audience, with its special moral authority, clearly did not care that the true story of the Bielski brothers was being filtered through calculated performances, invented speeches, dramatic conventions, and cinematographic effects. What mattered to them, as people irrevocably claimed by these events, was that their past was real, and so was the movie that acknowledged it.
This alone is a valid enough reason to make movies about the Holocaust, to reassure the survivors who saw so many stories lost forever that at least their stories will be told. We will not ever know all the more than six million stories of the Holocaust, but each succeeding generation has something to learn from the moral failings and moral triumphs of the era. That may not always mean dramatic re-enactments, however. The Holocaust movie I have found most insightful and affecting in recent years is Paper Clips, a touching documentary about a Holocaust curriculum in an almost all-white, all-Christian elementary school.

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Interview: “The Counterfeiters” writer/director and star

Posted on February 21, 2008 at 8:00 am

“The Counterfeiters” is the Oscar-nominated true story of the biggest counterfeiting operation in history — one that was run out of a concentration camp during WWII. The Nazis took prisoners who were expert in engraving and printing and put them to work counterfeiting British pound notes, so that they could destabilize the British economy. The film is based on a memoir written by Adolf Burger, a printer and communist who worked on Operation Bernhard and helped to sabotage its efforts to counterfeit dollar bills.

I spoke with writer-director Stefan Ruzowitsky and Karl Markovics, who played the leading character, master forger Salomon (Solly) Sorowitsch.

It seemed to me that the title of the movie had many layers of meaning. The prisoners were making counterfeit currency but everyone in the movie was counterfeiting in some way. The prisoners and even the Nazi in charge of the operation were all pretending to be something they were not.

SR: This is something interesting, the thing that intrigued me for the first time about the story and the main character of Solly: Will he be able to counterfeit reality himself?

How did the idea of this movie get started?

In Germany and Austria this is not a well known story. It was a strange coincidence. Two producers within a couple of days approached me with the same story, each not knowing about the other. I felt this was destiny. This is how this German-Austrian co-production came about. The German producers bought the memoir of Berger but I right away loved the idea of , a crook, a jailbird in a concentration camp; this is a perspective that I don’t know yet that would be interesting.

The memoir is from the young communist, who was one of the youngest inmates and was a good friend of Solly’s and for the last decades been traveling doing lectures, to tell his story.

Why did you decide to begin the movie the way you did, letting the audience know that Solly survives the concentration camp?

SR: I did not understand why I did it myself at first. It was instinctive. It starts with the ultimate happy ending, a guy after six years of a concentration camp arrives in a beautiful resort, meets a beautiful woman, with pockets full of money, and asks himself “did I deserve it, did I compromise too much, did I get too close to evil?” I wanted it to be compelling and suspenseful but not about whether he will live or go to the gas chamber. I wanted to make the suspense in how he will survive.

How has the movie been received in Germany?

SR: They don’t . The only country where it does not work is Germany. It made three times as much box office in the UK as it did in Germany, which is remarkable given that it is a German movie, German language, German actors. It is a misconception to say that they do not want to face the guilt. These are the grandchildren. Our generation is aware of the dimension of the crimes. We know there is a responsibility but it is difficult to know how to deal with it. “What do I do with this knowledge?”

Karl, tell me about Sally, the character you play.
KM: I loved him at once. Really, I loved the script and I loved the character, as if I had waited a lifetime to get a character like this one, a real gift. Normally you get even in good scripts a raw model and you have a feeling there is much room to create. Here it was rather “Can I get familiar with the person which is done? It is really here in front of me. How can I be able not to seem but to be this character?”

And how do you approach that task? Do you do a lot of research?

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Interview