I studied Holocaust Cinema at Florida International University as part of my Religious Studies program. This course was led by the brilliant Dr. Oren Stier, author, professor, and director of the Holocaust Studies Initiative. I was challenged to critique a selection of films through a multi-faceted lens of ethics, history, morality, and my own personal truths. The key question that I posited for each assignment was: Does this film exploit or honor the Holocaust? My reflections are found in this collection of essays...
NAZI PROPAGANDA
The main goal of the Nazis was to erase the Jewish people off of the planet and out of history. A means to this end was through the Nazis’ calculated, strategic, and deliberate propaganda tactics that sought, through both malicious cunning and outright flagrancy, “…to destroy the very notion that a Jew was a human being.” (Insdorf, xvii) Bearing this in mind, the very nature of Nazi film-making was unethical, as its lurid imagery and messages exploited Jewish stereotypes all as part of the Nazis’ plan to diminish, dehumanize, and eradicate the Jews.
The Nazis’ strategy is deployed in the 1940 film Jud Süss, commissioned by Joseph Goebbels under the guise of a historical drama but with the full intention of antisemitic propaganda. In order to maintain a clear conscience, I had to view this film with the understanding that I was watching it through the lens of scholarly observation. One could be carried away by the period setting and costumes; the acting and music; the drama and intrigue of the story, and perhaps that is the most insidious danger of Jud Süss – that it could be misinterpreted as a film meant for entertainment rather than for its true purpose, to dehumanize the Jews.
The film is set in the 1730s, loosely based on historical events involving Joseph Süss Oppenheimer and the Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart. At the start of the film, exuberant music at the Duke’s coronation becomes sinister as the scene shifts to the Jewish Quarter. This was the first whiff of antisemitic propaganda, cleverly concealed through the psychology of sound. The rest of Jud Süss followed in suit, depicting the Jewish characters as cunning, conniving, greedy, lascivious, manipulative, and untrustworthy. Select phrases used by Jewish characters further the stereotype of greed: “…take, take, take…”, “money-making Jew,” “Pay! Pay! Learn to calculate!”, “If you want to rule the goyim, then rule their money.”
Facial expressions and body language in Jud Süss were also part of the propaganda, as Oppenheimer and his assistant Levy were repeatedly shown smirking, sneering, and gesticulating with great exaggeration. Oppenheimer is portrayed as lewd and leering with young Christian girls, whose fathers lament “Once again the Jew has organized a meat-market and our daughters are good enough to be the merchandise.” (Jud Süss)
Dehumanizing language was used against Jewish characters throughout the film in such insults as “pigsty”, “ass”, “locusts”, “dog” – along with the warning: “…the Jew wants to contaminate our women with his filth.” (Jud Süss) The word “Jew” itself was often used as a pejorative: “The Jew has got his hand on money, on salt, on beer, on wine, even on grain.. also our wives and daughters.” (Jud Süss)
The Nazis exploited fear of Jews being diabolical and lascivious by including in the film’s propaganda strategy this denouement: Oppenheimer rapes a young, married, Christian girl who then kills herself, prompting the angry mob to seize and kill him based on the law “Whenever a Jew mingles his flesh with a Christian woman, he should be hanged at the gallows as well-deserved punishment and a warning to all.” (Jud Süss) – it was also decreed that all Jews must leave Württemberg and future entry for Jews was prohibited. It is clear that Jud Süss was intentional and insidious antisemitic propaganda.
Similarly, the Nazis created a film called “The Ghetto” which was the subject of the documentary A Film Unfinished. The intent of the Nazi film was to depict “…the extreme differences between the rich and the poor Jews…” (A Film Unfinished) in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1942, which held about half a million Jews in less than three square miles of deplorable conditions. The Nazis used Jewish actors and manipulated scenes to paint a sharp contrast of living conditions and lifestyles “…to show that while the Jews live in luxury, they share nothing with the hungry.” (A Film Unfinished)
It was more difficult for me to watch A Film Unfinished than Jud Süss because the documentary contained graphic images of suffering that were horrifying and heartbreaking to behold. However, I do feel that A Film Unfinished took the unethical Nazi propaganda film and presented the content in an ethical manner through scenes “…representing the unimaginable whole…” (Insdorf, 248) that shed light on the truth of the Warsaw Ghetto and not the contrived falsities the Nazis devised to concoct their own version of reality. Through this sensitive approach, the documentary was an example of ethical film-making as it honored the actual experiences of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and exposed the cunning deceit of the Nazis who twisted the situation into propaganda for their film. Though I was challenged by the imagery and admittedly had to look away during certain scenes involving extreme suffering and death, I must give credit to the ethics of A Film Unfinished and the documentary’s ability to respectfully engender empathy through awareness.
SHOAH
Death Mills, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), and Shoah are similar in that all three are Holocaust documentaries, but there are key elements of significant difference between the short films Death Mills and Night and Fog and the nine-and-a-half-hour long epic Shoah. It is within this contrast that the viewer finds the essence of what makes Shoah a singularly unique Holocaust documentary, and more effective than its predecessors in presenting the subject matter.
Death Mills was directed by Billy Wilder in 1945, commissioned by the United States Department of War with the intention of revealing to German audiences the atrocities of the recently ended World War II as “a reminder that behind the curtain of Nazi pageants and parades, millions of men, women and children were tortured to death – the worst mass murder in human history.” This was the first documentary to reveal what the Allied troops discovered when they came upon the Nazi concentration camps, incorporating archival footage with voiceover narration and dramatic music.
Death Mills also contains scenes of local Germans who lived near the Nazi death camps being forced to walk past the corpses and mass graves to “see with their own eyes crimes whose existence they had indignantly denied.” The name of the documentary is alluded to during a scene that shows footage of a triumphant German parade with a cacophony of voices cheering the Nazis overlaid with footage of Germans bearing crosses representing the millions “crucified in Nazi death mills.”
Death Mills is comprised of a musical score and scenes of concentration camps, prisoners, military, the 1945 liberation, as well as graphic footage and descriptions of torture, and the Nazis’ dead and dying victims. Curiously, never once is the word Jew uttered in the entire film. Rather, the phrases “human beings” or “human beings, like you and me” are repeated in the voiceover narration throughout the documentary.
Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) contains fundamental elements similar to Death Mills. This 1956 French documentary was directed by Alain Resnais, who categorized the film as “something more lyrical [than documentary] – an evocation.” (Insdorf, 201) Night and Fog was one of the first documentaries to primarily focus on the concentration camp experience of the Holocaust by employing narrated descriptions and depictions of the Jews’ arrival to the camps and their experiences there: the dehumanizing processing, merciless labor, relationships with the kapos (prisoners selected by the SS to supervise the other prisoners), as well as graphic footage of torture and death.
Resnais uses a technique throughout the documentary that flips sharply between contrasting elements: black and white archival footage vs. present-day color scenes, still vs. moving images, sound vs. silence. A musical score sets a strange tone in Night and Fog – at times dramatic; at other times oddly plucky – horns and strings and wind instruments that often feel out of place with the grim visuals. Some of the footage of the suffering, dying, and dead prisoners is so gruesome that it is almost impossible to behold, let alone comprehend. Resnais seemed aware of this, as the narrator addresses the viewer: “What hope do we have of truly capturing this reality? We can but show you the outer shell, the surface. Useless to describe what went on in these cells. No description, no image can reveal their true dimension. Endless, uninterrupted fear. Words are insufficient.”
The name of the film is a reference to the 1941 decree from Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of the Nazi SS, who ordered that prisoners deported to camps would disappear “into the night and fog” without a trace left behind. The phrase is also used metaphorically, paired with footage of a transport train, to symbolize the ominous uncertainty and dark fate that awaited the prisoners. As in Death Mills, there is no mention at all in Night and Fog that these innocent souls are Jewish – they are referred to in general terms such as men, inmates, and prisoners.
Contrasting with Death Mills and Night and Fog are key elements in the epic documentary Shoah. Just from the title, (a Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe”) one picks up on a significant difference that sets this film apart: the focus on the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years creating this nine-and-a-half-hour long documentary, recording 350 interviews of “privileged testimony… [and] evocative places and faces” (Insdorf, 239-240) in 14 countries. This depth and breadth certainly make the film unique and, unlike many other documentaries including Death Mills and Night and Fog, there is no archival footage, narration, or musical score in Shoah. Lanzmann focuses entirely on present-day footage of interviews and relevant locations, and preserves the integrity of the dialogue and translations in French, German, Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish.
Shoah begins with a pastoral, peaceful view of Holocaust survivor Simon Srebnik singing in Polish while rowing down a river in Chelmno with Lanzmann. They walk through the countryside, amid the quiet sounds of birdsong and trilling insects. As the camera pans the entire field, Srebnik reflects “No one ever left here again.” For here in the Chelmno forest, there were once furnaces where Nazis incinerated the Jews that were murdered in gas vans.
Again and again, Lanzmann takes the viewer into landscapes touched by atrocity – Chelmno with Simon Srebnik and Michael Podchlebnik, Sobibor with Jan Piwonski, Vilna with Motke Zaidel and Itzak Dugin – as these survivors of the Holocaust give testimony of “horror recollected in tranquility.” (Insdorf, 240) Sweeping views of farmland, sleepy villages, dense forests, and vast fields belie their history – the beauty and silence in Lanzmann’s present-day footage perversely juxtapose with the suffering and evil that took place here in the past. The Nazi atrocities are a desecration; a violation of nature.
The environments and visual elements play an integral role in the storytelling of Shoah. When Paula Biren and Richard Glazar share their respective memories, the documentary ushers in testimonial stories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The modern-day landscapes are snow-covered, barren and bleak. The muted color feels oppressive; the despair and lifelessness feel palpable. Lanzmann also uses repeated footage of trains, foreboding and often claustrophobic in the viewer’s perspective, billowing black smoke as villagers, railway workers, and survivors testify that these were the conveyors of death, transporting Jews to the Nazi camps. The viewer follows ominous tracks slowly, dreadfully, up to the entrance of Auschwitz. A black train comes impossibly close to the camera, stifling; death approaching, merciless.
Abraham Bomba gives testimony from Israel, against a backdrop of brilliant blue sea and sky. His setting is a striking contrast against the footage of the death-black train cars and the Treblinka field covered in jagged slabs of gray stones – 17,000 symbolic gravestones memorializing Holocaust victims who arrived by train.
At this point in Shoah, scene cuts alternate between Bomba, Glazar, and fellow survivor Rudolf Vrba and desolate views of the rail tracks, death camps, and crematoriums. There is also grainy black-and-white footage of a secret interview between Lanzmann and Franz Suchomel, former SS guard at Treblinka. As a black train billows smoke in the fading blue light of descending night, Suchomel recalls that “more people kept coming.” Part One concludes with a chilling approach through the trees toward the Treblinka crematorium.
The word compassion is rooted in Latin with the term passio (to suffer) and the prefix com (together) – meaning “to suffer together.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is a more effective documentary than Death Mills and Night and Fog because the viewer is connected in compassion with the Holocaust survivors being interviewed. “Films that depict a character’s memory of a horrific past – and that character’s enslavement by it – can have more consistency and integrity than a movie that purports to show the past in an objective way.” (Insdorf, 27) There is no graphic imagery that shocks, horrifies, or forces the viewer to look away. There is no distraction with musical score or voiceover narration. Rather, Shoah is a journey through testimony, juxtaposed with evocative present-day footage, specifically focused on the Jewish experience of the Holocaust relived through emotionally-charged storytelling.
REVENGE
The origin of the word “revenge” comes from the Latin verb “vindicare” which means not only to avenge or punish, but also to protect. In a general assessment, one could argue that the World War II films Defiance and Inglourious Basterds are centrally focused on revenge. This vengeance could even be justified as “God’s law” by citing the infamous “eye for eye” passage in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. But underneath the surface layer, both films are about more than revenge – in the case of Defiance, themes of community and survival are explored, whereas Inglourious Basterds inexhaustibly fetishizes WWII tropes and violence.
Defiance, a 2008 film directed by Edward Zwick, is based on the true story of the Polish-Jewish Bielski brothers who survived the paramilitary death squads that murdered their parents and other European Jews during the Nazi occupation of Belarus in 1941. The Bielski brothers fled to the Naliboki forest where they established a kibbutz and recruited other Jews from the ghettos, turning no one away from their community stronghold.
In this way, one of the root meanings of “revenge” is exemplified, as the Jews band together in partisan union to protect each other from the Nazis. These “Jews with guns” (Stier) survived in the woods for two years, with only fifty of their group lost, and 1200 souls surviving in this “largest and most successful act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.” (Gonshak, 287) While the film depicts some tension between the Bielski brothers Tuvia and Zus, their shared purpose was keeping themselves and their fellow Jews alive. As noted by film critic Gene Newman in Premiere, “survival, hope and honor” were resounding themes in this inspiring story. (Gonshak, 292)
Defiance turns the typical Hollywood film about Holocaust-era Jews on its head, depicting characters that were willing to die fighting. What may have started as vengeance for the murder of the Bielski parents became a collective dedication to willful defiance and survival. These “Jews who fought back… [did] not need a Righteous Gentile to ‘rescue’ them.” (Gonshak, 288) This partisan community relied on each other; cohabitating, fighting, and surviving side-by-side. As Tuvia Bielski proclaimed, “Our revenge is to live.”
In sharp contrast to the serious and (mostly) historically-accurate tone of Defiance, we have Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. It was his highest-grossing movie (until Django Unchained in 2012), making over $321 million in theaters around the world, winning multiple awards, and receiving nominations for eight Oscars. This would be baffling when considering how the film makes a mockery of World War II, but people love their Hollywood tropes and relish the opportunity to take place in “sadistic voyeurism” as critiqued by Dana Stevens in Slate. (Gonshak, 307)
Like Defiance, traditional focus is flipped in Inglourious Basterds which depicts Jewish characters fighting back and taking revenge against the Nazis. The similarity between the two films ends here. Tarantino throws any semblance of a plausible narrative out the window to embark upon a comical farce of gratuitous violence in an alternate reality that “exploits [the Shoah] without ever acknowledging the painful history that inspires [the film].” (Gonshak, 308)
Inglourious Basterds focuses on the classic good versus evil trope, pairing heroes (Lieutenant Aldo Raine and his Jewish-American commando unit, the Basterds) against villains (SS Officer Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa and other Nazis). The film starts with music reminiscent of classic Westerns and introduces us to Colonel Landa, who is portrayed in the style of a comic baddie as he drinks milk, smokes an absurd pipe, and interrogates a French farmer suspected of harboring Jews. When the tearful farmer admits to Landa that the Jews are hiding under the floorboards, and the Nazi soldiers are ushered into the house to murder them, the music becomes swelling and operatic, an oversensationalized melodrama that does not respectfully portray the horror of this betrayal and murder.
Tarantino’s self-aware, self-gratifying style of filming (close-ups, panning, stylized cartoonish characters) makes this a splashy, flashy fetishization of World War II themes and graphic violence. Rather than focusing on actual facts, historical context, or the Jewish experience, Tarantino instead opted to “take the fun of action movies and apply it to this situation” as he told Atlantic Monthly. (Gonshak, 306) Ah yes, what could be more “fun” than a World War and genocide that resulted in the loss of millions of lives, right? The audacity of Tarantino’s enthusiasm for violence (using WWII and the Shoah as a springboard for an “action movie”) abounds throughout the film.
Inglourious Basterds contains an “intricate revenge fantasy” (Stier), not just from the perspective of Lt. Raine and the Basterds, but also from the Jewish resistance – namely Shosanna Dreyfus, the daughter who escapes her family’s slaughter in the farmhouse at the beginning of the film. While the Basterds employ brutal techniques of gratuitous violence, such as the scalpings gleefully portrayed in graphic detail through Tarantino’s film, Shosanna plays the long game by taking a job in a Parisian cinema and enacting her revenge on Nazis leaders who attend a screening of a propaganda film.
The film concludes in a blaze of flame and gunfire in the theater (resulting in the demise of Goebbels and Hitler) and Raine carving a swastika into Landa. Just as Raine called this last act his “masterpiece,” it is clear that Tarantino’s goal with Inglourious Basterds was not to depict a story of plausible vengeance (as portrayed in Defiance) but to create a self-serving “masterpiece” of violence, employing farcical parody that dishonors the historical truths and legacies of the Shoah.
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
One could argue that the concept of “appropriateness” will always be fluid; based on the subjective opinion of the person who is projecting their own defining terms. When one considers if there are limits to representing sensitive subject matter, one must also ask who is defining and establishing the lines that should not be crossed. Is there a collective consensus on the borders between good taste and decency and disrespect and repugnancy, and a mutual agreement that those borders should not be breached?
In my humble purview, I do believe that there are boundaries to what should be represented in media. I have heard song lyrics that explicitly describe the singer’s fantasy of abducting his infant daughter and murdering her mother. I have read narrative passages in novels that explicitly detail the physical and sexual torture of children. I have seen Hollywood films that explicitly depict rape and graphic violence. All of the aforementioned music, books, and films (some award-winning) can be readily accessed in any public library, streaming service, or store, but cross the boundaries of appropriateness in “entertainment.”
I believe that graphically depicting fictional representations of events tied to the Holocaust crosses a clearly defined line of decency. The Grey Zone is a 2001 film written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, based on the memoir of Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner who worked with Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. The film’s title is based on a phrase from Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, and symbolizes the morally ambiguous position of the Sonderkommando – prisoners who worked for the Nazis in the camps, abusing and murdering their fellow Jews. Film critic George Robinson noted that “they did what they did in order to stay alive another day, fully aware that their lives were forfeit anyway.” (Gonshak, 222)
The posthumous voice of a girl describing her demise alludes to another interpretation of Levi’s phrase – the ashes of the cremated Jews. The film itself is gray – with stark, bleak realism that leaves nothing to the imagination. Again and again we see the fire, smoke, and victims of the crematoriums. We see the showers, those murdered within, and the Sonderkommando washing the area clean for the next round of death. We see the naked bodies of the murdered Jews being piled and pushed into the flames by the Sonderkommando, and the ash that remains. We see the brutality and cruelty of the Nazis, and the graphic death of a prisoner on the electric fence of the camp. My question is… why?
Why depict such gruesome imagery? Is it not enough to see the camp, to see the prisoners, to see the smoke, to know what occurred in this hellish time in history? What purpose was served by the repeated use of graphic imagery? Was the end goal of these visuals to push the audience from empathy to shock? I felt numb at a certain point, and offended. The gratuitous images of murder and corpses was distasteful and unnecessary, going well beyond the limit of appropriate representation. Indeed, these “graphic re-creations of the worst horrors of the Holocaust cross a moral line.” (Gonshak, 223)
While I believe that filmmakers have a moral obligation with the limits of representation, the same cannot always be said for historical truth. Even if a film is “based on events,” it is generally made clear to the audience that it is not a documentary. If the audience is concerned about accuracy and relevancy, the filmmaker’s defense is that they were creating fictional cinema, categorizing and marketing the movie as such. The exception to this would be the depiction of an historical event of such magnitude that there can be little ambiguity or argument about the appropriateness and importance of accuracy.
In the case of the 1997 Italian film La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful), the line crossed is calling into question the appropriateness of representation through the lens of historical truth. One can barely call this a Holocaust film, but that is the plot device exploited in this “fable… about love” (Insdorf, 286) written and directed by, and starring the comedian Roberto Benigni as Guido Orefice. This is an award-winning film, universally beloved and lauded, including praise from critic Edward Rothstein who said of the film: “Fascism met its match in farce.” (Insdorf, 291) I will pause here and note the significant difference between farce like the Jewish comedians The Three Stooges mocking Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and Mussolini in the 1940 comedic short film You Nazty Spy! and the pervasive, often out-of-place humor in Life Is Beautiful.
The use of slapstick is obnoxious and persistent. Though the audience is teased with glimpses and clues of what is looming, it takes one-third of the film to actually address the specific threat to Jewish life in 1940s Italy. This very real danger is parodied – up to and including the “game” that Guido concocts for his son Joshua to disguise the reality of the cattle car transport and mask the experiences in the unnamed concentration camp.
Benigni’s father was a German work camp prisoner for three years. When he was released after the war ended, he weighed less than 80 pounds. “To console both himself and his children… [he] turned his camp experiences into comic stories.” (Gonshak, 232) One might assume that Benigni was inspired by his father’s ability to transform grief into levity, using this as the basis of the film’s tone. But in an interview with Alessandra Stanley, Benigni remarked that he hoped Life Is Beautiful “helped people to get over [the Shoah]” and allowed them to “smile at the Holocaust.” (Gonshak, 241) It is obscene to trivialize the trauma of an event that encompassed the abuse, torture, and murder of millions of innocent people.
In sharp contrast to The Grey Zone and its pervasive grim images, Life Is Beautiful offers only a few muted glimpses into the true horror of the camps. The most heart-wrenching of these scenes to me was the kitten mewing sadly on top of the pile of clothes – earlier in the film, we saw a young girl clutching this little cat in the train on the way to the camp, so we know this child perished. This brutal reality supports the understandable admonishment from writer Thane Rosenbaum: “The camps were foremost about death… on no occasion should they be used as a soundstage for slapstick.” (Insdorf, 289)
Realism is nonchalantly dismissed and replaced with inexhaustible comedy, insufferable sentimentality, and innocence that demands the suspension of disbelief. From the jump Benigni establishes his film as a fairy tale, but this treatment reeks of disrespect as it is “falsifying the essence of the Shoah.” (Gonshak, 236) The true concentration camp experience is absent from the narrative as Benigni “dilutes the horror… [and] fails to address the reality” (Gonshak, 236-237) that the prisoners actually endured. The audience is expected to believe that the power of love is strong enough to outwit the Nazis and that a father’s silly games are enough to shield his young son from the depravity surrounding him. We are also expected to believe that all of the other prisoners in the barracks went along with the game – every one of those scenes had me waiting for someone, anyone to scream at Guido to shut up so they wouldn’t get caught and punished by the Nazi guards. When Joshua confronts his father about what’s really happening in the camp, Guido laughs it off as if the very notion is ridiculous – and is a clown to the end as he makes a game of being marched to his imminent death.
While The Grey Zone illustrates a “morally complex view of the Holocaust” (Gonshak, 220) and Life Is Beautiful claims to be a fable about the indomitable power of love even in the face of fascism and Nazi concentration camps, both movies cross the line of decency in their representation of the Shoah – the former with gratuitous graphic imagery and the latter with inappropriate comedy. This historical event which impacted millions – the victims, the survivors, and their descendants – deserves a respectful treatment that was not afforded in these films.
HOLLYWOOD & THE HOLOCAUST
Lights, camera, action… Holocaust? If the idea of going to the theater and settling in with a tub of popcorn to watch a dramatization of one of the vilest atrocities in the history of humanity strikes you as odd, you are not alone. There is a swath of critics, historians, professors, and filmmakers such as Claude Lanzmann (creator of the epic documentary Shoah) who argue that giving this subject matter the Hollywood treatment is repugnant, and that “any attempt to represent the Holocaust is a betrayal.” (Insdorf, 259) A Hollywood film is designed to entice and entertain… with the primary goal of making money: big production = big egos who want big paychecks. And if the goal is to make money, then the movie has to hook a mass audience. So how does a film get ticket sales with a subject as horrifying and tragic as the Holocaust?
First and foremost, the director must “distance viewers from the full horror of the Holocaust through myriad strategies of sentimental distortion.” (Gonshak, 5) And nobody does sentiment or distortion better than Hollywood. Think extreme close-ups and dizzying panning, sweeping musical scores or evocative notes at precise times, and pitch-perfect dialogue delivered by larger-than-life (and physically attractive) stars. All of these elements were the formulaic framework of The Diary of Anne Frank, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Schindler’s List – a few of the most well-known, award-winning Hollywood films about the Holocaust.
Don’t forget the romance too – yes, these filmmakers found a way to inject titillation into the subject matter. Shrewd script-writers and directors know that they will “lose the average viewer [or] mass audience” (Gonshak, 5) if their film is too real… after all, they’re making a Hollywood film; not a documentary. It’s interesting that Steven Spielberg said “I made Schindler’s List thinking that if it did entertain, then I would have failed.” (Gonshak, 193) – and yet included in the film a scene of Schindler having a playful, impassioned romp in bed with his mistress. This humble viewer is failing to see what that scene had to do with the Holocaust… unless, of course, its true purpose was to use nudity and sex to entertain the audience.
Perhaps the greatest offender of the three aforementioned films is The Diary of Anne Frank which is laden with Hollywood conventions (comedy relief, effusive optimism, and coming-of-age romance) that are engineered to divert, distance, and entertain. This feel-good melodrama concluded with a saccharine ending that leaves viewers wondering if it was truly ever about the Holocaust at all. This is clarified by Spyros Skouras, president of 20th Century Fox, who asserted “This isn’t a Jewish picture, this is a picture for the world.” (Gonshak, 86) So The Diary of Anne Frank, based on the private journal of a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis, who is an eventual victim of the Holocaust, is not intended to be a Jewish film… baffling.
Shifting to docudrama Judgment at Nuremberg, we have director Stanley Kramer who is forthright about his approach: “I studded it with people to get it made as a film… that… would reach out to a mass audience.” (Gonshak, 101) Indeed, the intention was never to create a documentary or ensure that there was historical accuracy in the script. Rather, this film beefed up the dramatization and punctuated the lengthy courtroom scenes with interludes injected with comedy and romance… perhaps to offer respite for the viewer?
Schindler’s List is based on a “highly anomalous Holocaust narrative” (Gonshak, 202) that contrasts feel-good Hollywood tropes with lurid dramatizations of the horrors of the event. The focus of the film is really on Viktor Schindler, entrepreneur and savior of his Jewish factory workers. Here we have, according to historian Richard Wolin, “a figure with whom a mass audience could readily… sympathize.” (Gonshak, 202) Schindler symbolized the “Good Nazi” trope, in harsh contrast with the ruthless Göth, and this good vs evil morality play is the lifeblood of the film.
There are some qualities that set these three Oscar-winning films apart from traditional Hollywood fare. First is the length, as each film clocks in at around three hours, and the average film is around 100 minutes. This might explain the peppering of comedy and romance, to keep the viewer engaged and in their seat. These films also take on heavy historical subject matter, and most audiences go to the movies to be entertained and not educated. And while The Diary of Anne Frank keeps things surface-level (and de-Judaized), Judgment at Nuremberg and Schindler’s List take the viewer deeper into the horrors of the Holocaust. For the first time ever in Hollywood, Judgment at Nuremberg employed graphic archival footage of concentration camps, mass graves, and the Jewish victims of these Nazi atrocities. Lawrence Baron, Professor of Modern Jewish History, notes that in Schindler’s List, “Spielberg heightens the revulsion of the audience by turning his lens on the most vulnerable victims” (Gonshak, 194) in blood-chilling scenes of ghetto deportation and what the audience at first thinks is a gas chamber but turns out to be a water shower.
Producer-director Dan Curtis reflects that “To put on film the true horror was impossible.” (Insdorf, 24) Perhaps that is why when the Holocaust is portrayed in Hollywood films, it is buffered with triviality, sentimentality, and romanticism. It is Americanized, or made a universal experience, casting a wide net that encompasses basic moral arguments of good and evil; accountability and justice. Stanley Kramer, director of Judgment at Nuremberg, asked “Who among us is so innocent that we are… sure of the guilty?” (Gonshak, 107) The answer is obvious: the millions of murdered Jewish people were innocent and the Nazis were guilty. When Hollywood gets its gold-dusted hands on the Holocaust, the depth and gravity of the Shoah is distorted through manipulation that seeks to attract and entertain audiences, and this calculated melodramatic treatment “has betrayed the event.” (Gonshak, 188)
In the BBC sitcom Extras, comedian Ricky Gervais portrays Andy Millman, an extra who works on films with parodied versions of real Hollywood stars. In the first episode, Andy’s background role is a German soldier in a Holocaust film starring Kate Winslet as a Catholic nun resisting the Nazis. Andy butters up Kate behind the scenes, saying “You doing this is so commendable – using your profile to keep the message alive about the Holocaust.” Kate scoffs and retorts, “I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar.” Andy is clearly uncomfortable about this admission, but oddly enough this exaggerated scene actually proves to be a prediction, as the real Kate Winslet won her first Academy Award for her portrayal of a Nazi concentration camp guard in the 2008 Holocaust drama The Reader.
This irreverent exchange prompts important questions about why Holocaust films are award-winners and how achieving the Oscar impacts the viewer’s relationship and response to the films. The Oscar is considered to be the most prestigious award in global entertainment, a symbol of cinematic excellence awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But who makes up this elite cabal? Do they represent the average viewer? Do they have an internal agenda that influences their decision-making? Has the Holocaust, as the parodied version of Kate Winslet suggested, been exploited as a Hollywood trope to guarantee the Academy Award?
Oscars certainly do abound in the world of Holocaust films. The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) received five nominations and won three awards, including Best Cinematography. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) received nine nominations and won three awards, including Best Actor for Maximilian Schell’s portrayal of defense counsel Hans Rolfe. Schindler’s List (1993) received five nominations and won seven awards, including Best Picture.
I am reflexively skeptical when I know that a film has won an Oscar. After all, this is the same Academy that nominated Robert Downey, Jr. for his role in blackface in the 2008 spoof comedy Tropic Thunder. This skepticism influences my perception and opinion of award-winning films, particularly those about the Holocaust. I scrutinize all of the elements of the film with a dogged determination to make up my own mind about the quality of cinematic art and execution without being influenced by the decisions of Academy members who don’t know me and don’t necessarily represent me in their judgment of what constitutes being Oscar-worthy.
My resounding question was: Would these films have received Academy Awards if they were not about the Holocaust? I’m not convinced that Maximilian Schell’s over-the-top dramatic yelling would have earned him an Oscar in a film about any other subject, or that the Academy would have awarded another three-hour-long coming-of-age drama if the protagonist wasn’t representing the infamous Anne Frank. As for Schindler’s List (dismissed by Shoah director Claude Lanzmann as being “kitschy melodrama”), created by the already-renowned Steven Spielberg, one could easily ascertain that accolades and awards were inevitable.
I was not moved by the overtly melodramatic tactics employed in The Diary of Anne Frank, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Schindler’s List. The filmmaking strategies felt obvious and calculated: extreme close-ups and panning, sweeping musical scores, romantic intrigue, and proliferation of tropes – I will explore these manipulative elements further in my forthcoming essay “Hollywood and the Holocaust.” It seems that the viewer is presumed to accept at face value that any film about the Holocaust is, by nature of the subject, inarguably worthy of distinction, and to criticize the quality of the film would be to dishonor the Holocaust itself. I refute and reject this notion. My overall impression of these films is that they were pandering to the audience and to the Academy by exploiting the Holocaust as a historical event and as an emotional trigger.
SOPHIE’S CHOICE AND THE BOOK THIEF
Film critic Roger Ebert described movies as “empathy machines.” Cinema has the unique ability to enthrall our senses and exploit our emotions. From joy and sorrow to awe and disgust, movies are carefully crafted to capitalize on our humanity and elicit responses. That’s what keeps audiences captivated and the film industry in business. I struggle to keep an open mind about Hollywood’s take on the Holocaust because it feels disrespectful and inappropriate for people to profit off this subject matter. I’m coupling the humility to learn with critical discernment as I review the award-winning films Sophie’s Choice and The Book Thief.
I first saw the 1982 film Sophie’s Choice many years ago, admittedly because it starred Kevin Kline whom I adore. I was not aware that it was a “Holocaust film” – I thought it was a period-piece romantic-drama. I was not a mother yet at the time, but the climatic reveal still deeply disturbed and haunted me. The more recent film The Book Thief, made in 2013, was familiar to me only in name, as I recall seeing a novel with the same title. I chose the former because of the long-lasting effect it had on me, and I wanted to revisit it and explore it in the context of this course. I chose the latter because, based on the synopsis and still images, it seemed so innocuous and so “Hollywood” and I was curious about how deep the thematic waters would go.
Sophie’s Choice was written and directed by Alan J. Pakula, who studied the Holocaust documentary Night & Fog while scripting the film – the influence is clearly seen in the contrasts between “past and present, stasis and movement, despair and hope.” (Insdorf, 36) Sophie’s Choice takes place mainly in 1947 Brooklyn and centers on three main characters: Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish-Gentile; Nathan, a “charismatic but psychotic” (Gonshak, 167) Jew; and Stingo, a naive young man from the South who has come to New York with a little money and a lot of determination to write his first novel.
When Stingo arrives at the Brooklyn boarding house that is to be his new home, he crosses the threshold into a startling new world of dysfunction, witnessing a dramatic and disturbing fight between Sophie and Nathan. It’s interesting to note that at this pivotal moment, Stingo forms a “triangle” with Sophie and Nathan – this is a concept popularized by psychologist and prolific writer Harriet Lerner, who coincidentally grew up in Brooklyn in the 1940s as the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants.
Throughout the film, we see the dynamic impact of this triangle. Stingo is not only a surrogate for the electric and destructive emotions that fly between Sophie and Nathan in their toxic and codependent relationship, but he is also a voyeur – and we, the audience, are watching him watching them. This often feels awkward and uncomfortable – not only when Sophie and Nathan are fighting, but also when they are passionately romantic and affectionate. Stingo observes everything, wide-eyed and child-like in his adoration for angelic Sophie and his awe for Nathan, in all his “demonic rage and irresistible charm.” (Maslin)
Stingo also observed a clue to the enigmatic Sophie’s background the first night he met her: a number tattooed on her inner arm – a physical reminder of her imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. Beneath this marker on her skin, we see that the Auschwitz experience is tattooed deep into Sophie’s mind. She is “a survivor who hasn’t really survived” (Gonshak, 168) and is haunted by guilt, secrecy, and shame.
On the surface, Sophie’s aesthetic is striking and sensual. Flowing hair, porcelain skin, and most notably her trademark red lipstick and nails. I believe that Sophie’s vivid makeup was both a literal and a figurative mask, symbolizing vitality and life but as an illusory glamor to cover up the ugliness inside. Throughout most of the film, Stingo is swept up in Sophie’s and Nathan’s “manic ebullience” (Maslin) – alcohol, fancy clothes, music, picnics, even a thrilling day at Coney Island – all a charade to mask their unprocessed trauma, emotional and spiritual millstones that are suppressed and unhealed. Sophie and Nathan attempt to escape from reality and grief, and desperately try to feel alive.
Stingo is so enmeshed and entangled with Sophie and Nathan that he investigates them behind their backs to find out their real stories, learning their secrets and lies. Nathan is in fact not a biologist working at Pfizer but a paranoid schizophrenic and cocaine addict. (This explains but does not condone his emotional and verbal abuse of Sophie.) The stories that Sophie tells about her past are compounded with falsehood, until we learn the secrets and trauma she has buried that reveal themselves in her terror of abandonment and dependency in her toxic relationship with Nathan.
Stingo learns that Sophie’s adored father was arrested and murdered by the Nazis not for being a Jewish sympathizer but simply because he was rounded up with all the other academics at the university in Poland. In fact, Sophie typed up a speech for him to present in which he proposed that the solution to the problem of the Jews was “extermination.” This reveal opens the door for Stingo to sit in vulnerability with Sophie as she tells (most of) her (mostly) true story. It’s interesting to note that this flashback related to the Holocaust happens about 120 minutes into the film in a sequence lasting only about 30 minutes.
Sophie’s recollection is filmed in “desaturated color” (Insdorf, 35) with one exception – the vivid garden of the Nazi Commandant in the midst of the death camp. Sophie opens up and shares that her first husband was an academic along with her father, who was also taken and murdered. She was having an affair around this time, and her lover Józef and his sister were members of an underground resistance. They implored Sophie to help them in a mission to save children from the Nazis but she refused. Soon after, Józef and his sister were discovered and killed by the Gestapo.
Sophie’s mother was dying of tuberculosis and Sophie was caught trying to smuggle a ham to bring home to her. For this infraction, Sophie and her children were detained and put on the train to Auschwitz in 1943. In a poignant moment, the connection is made between a haunting melody repeated in the score of the film and the recorder that Sophie’s daughter is playing on the train. In this segment, Sophie tells Stingo that both of her children are sent to the children’s block of Auschwitz and she goes to the adult side.
Sophie recollects some of her time in Auschwitz. Because of her proficiency in German and her typing skills, she is selected to assist the Nazi Commandant with secretarial functions. It’s a deliberate choice to shift from muted to vibrant color as Sophie enters the lush garden and well-appointed home of the Commandant and his family. Here in the epicenter is a microcosm of healthy, bustling children and their parents, surrounded by the horror and death that is just outside their home within Auschwitz.
Sophie seizes an opportunity alone with the Commandant to use various tactics (sexuality, her father’s stance on Jewish extermination, debased imploring) to appeal to his power in hopes of saving her son who is in the children’s block of Auschwitz that is plagued by a deadly illness. He finally agrees to help her, and she leaves with joyful hope. Soon after, Sophie realizes that the Commandant did not keep his word and that her son is sure to perish, if he wasn’t already dead. We then see glimpses of the harrowing reality of the concentration camp: prisoners standing naked without water for days awaiting extermination, the chimneys of the crematorium billowing foul smoke, and throngs of prisoners gathered around the gallows forced to witness a hanged man.
After Sophie recounts this tale to Stingo, Nathan flies into another one of his paranoia-driven jealous rages. This time he has a gun and threatens to use it, so Stingo and Sophie flee Brooklyn for a modest hotel in Washington D.C. where Stingo, in all his hopeful naivete, tells Sophie that he loves her and wants to marry her and have children on his family farm in Virginia. This is the crucial moment – the “climactic revelation Sophie has fled for the entire story.” (Phipps) She finally tells Stingo the truth she has kept buried, locked away, and hidden from everyone else – the secret that haunts and defiles and sickens her.
When Sophie and her children arrive at Auschwitz, a Nazi soldier approaches her and remarks upon her beauty. Clutching her young daughter in her arms and her young son beside her, Sophie tries desperately to explain that there must be some mistake for them being there; that she is a Christian. The Nazi, with cold cunning, asks her did not Jesus say “Suffer the little children to come unto me?” Confused, Sophie says yes – and the soldier tells her that she must choose: one of her children to be sent to the camp, and the other to be sent to the gas chamber. If she does not choose, they will both be killed.
The next few minutes are torturous for both Sophie and the audience – panic, desperation, bewilderment, terror. Sophie finally makes her choice: “Take my little girl!” And the Nazi wrenches the child from Sophie’s arms and takes her away as the girl screams and cries hysterically. After this shocking revelation, Sophie and Stingo make love. When Stingo wakes the next day, he finds a note from Sophie that she has gone back to Brooklyn to be with Nathan. Stingo follows and returns to their boarding house, swarming with police, and goes upstairs in tears, knowing what he will find: Sophie and Nathan curled up together in bed, a mutual suicide.
Sophie’s death must have been a relief for her because she believed that she did not deserve to live. She was haunted by the dead and damned by her choice – the survivor who didn’t want to survive. Nathan had even asked her, in a moment of sheer cruelty, out of all the millions who died in the Holocaust, why did she live? Sophie punished herself with the same question – she lost her faith in Christ and in God, raged against them, and tried to kill herself after the liberation of Auschwitz. Beneath her veneer of oft-mentioned beauty lurked the ugliness of insidious secrets and malignant shame. Sophie is “a woman who has seen so much hate, death, and dishonor that the only way she can continue is by blotting out the past, and drinking and loving her way into temporary oblivion” (Ebert) and then finally ending her tortured existence.
Alan J. Pakula scripted and directed Sophie’s Choice with “integrity and truthfulness” (Insdorf, 35) and purposefully did not write a happy ending. What sets this film apart from typical Hollywood tropes around this subject matter was the exploration of vulnerability, shame, and mental illness. The scene with Sophie and her children at Auschwitz was engineered to elicit emotion, but the typical exploitation of the Shoah found in most other Hollywood films was absent from this narrative. The focus was not so much on the Holocaust experience, but on its aftermath – the complex humanity of the character triangle; how they were feeding off and impacting each other, and, most notably, how the ghosts of trauma sicken the mind and soul.
If it’s a stretch to categorize Sophie’s Choice as a film about the Shoah when only about 30 minutes was devoted to that horrific experience, then it’s almost absurd to consider The Book Thief a Holocaust movie – but it reeks of the kind of exploitation that only Hollywood can render from “historic horror enlisted in the cause of facile fantasy.” (Cheshire) Similar to Sophie’s Choice, the film The Book Thief was based on a fictional bestseller and received numerous awards and nominations. Critics seem dramatically polarized about this movie, and the observation from Peter Travers in his Rolling Stone review befuddled me once I watched the film. He called The Book Thief “a sweet, reflective fable about death and the Holocaust” – and yet the film barely touched on the Shoah.
The Book Thief focuses on Liesel, a cherubic adolescent girl who is sent to live with a childless middle-aged couple in 1938 Munich. The film begins with expansive shots of white clouds and immaculate snow, narrated in voiceover by “Death” who takes Liesel’s young brother while she travels by train with her mother – the child is buried in a simple ceremony and Liesel swipes a book from a gravedigger, the first of many thefts that gives the story its name.
By the time Liesel arrives in Munich, she is emotionally immobilized and mute, unable to process her brother’s sudden death and her mother’s unexplained abandonment. (It’s later implied that her mother was a Communist.) Her foster mother Rosa is harsh and contemptuous to both her husband Hans and to young Liesel. Hans on the other hand is gentle, kind, and tries to warm up and connect with Liesel. After she is humiliated at school for being a “dummkopf” who can’t read, Hans is determined to help her become literate, even going so far as to set up in the basement a wall-sized, ever-growing collection of words that Liesel is learning.
Liesel’s world begins expanding in concentric circles: language and books, friendship with her neighbor and fellow classmate Rudy (who is openly smitten with her), familial bonding with tender Hans, and a new social identification – the Hitler Youth movement. The neighborhood and school are festooned with Nazi flags and propaganda posters, culminating in a bookburning rally on Hitler’s birthday in which Nazi soldiers and the Burgermeister call for the “end of Jews.” Hans and Liesel reluctantly participate in the nationalist chants, and when the festivities have died down, Liesel tries to steal a book from the smoldering pyre – while being stealthily observed by the Burgermeister’s wife who later invites her into her private library to read the books that her beloved, deceased son was so fond of, and their friendship blooms.
There is a chilling juxtaposition of the Hitler Youth singing a pro-German / anti-Jew anthem with disturbing scenes of Kristallnacht in Stuttgart – the “Night of Broken Glass” when Nazi paramilitary and German civilians unleashed a violent pogrom against Jews. A young Jewish man named Max was able to escape and journeyed to Munich for refuge with Hans and Rosa. We learn that Max’s father sacrificed himself to save Hans in World War I so Hans pledged to protect Max, and set him up in the basement – an act of sedition punishable by death. Rosa becomes vulnerable and maternal with Max, and eventually Liesel and Hans as well.
Events overlap simultaneously at this crucial juncture in the film: England declares war on Germany. Nazi efforts and influence, along with anti-Semitism, intensify. Stress among the adults and excitement in the children builds. Liesel’s hunger for words and stories (including daring book thefts from the Burgermeister’s home) is insatiable. Her friendship with Max deepens as they bond over language, and so does the weight of the secret she must keep of his existence – which she eventually divulges to Rudy, who has become her best friend. Max eventually leaves to keep the family safe, and Hans (who never joined the Nazi Party) is conscripted into the war.
Liesel’s empathy developed, and in a harrowing scene when Nazis were forcibly marching Jews through the streets of Munich, she desperately searched and cried out for Max in the throngs of people. As The Book Thief continues to keep the Shoah at the periphery, we don’t see the inevitable next steps for these Jews – rather, “they remain vaguely wistful images divorced from the cruel reality of their corporeal fates.” (Cheshire)
Air raids had become routine in Munich at this point in the war. Before Hans was conscripted, he would play the accordion to lift the spirits of his family and neighbors sheltering underground. After Hans was deployed, Liesel used storytelling in the shelter to stave off the collective fear and dread, and to connect with the people down in the darkness with her. Hans was sent back home after being injured, but the reunion was short-lived. The Book Thief proceeded to “a rushed conclusion, which tempers the intended tear-jerking climax.” (Merry)
Due to an error on a military map, Munich is accidentally bombed in the night with no air raid warning. Liesel survives and is brokenhearted to see that Hans and Rosa have perished, and Rudy dies in her arms. She seeks comfort with the Burgermeister’s wife. Later when the Allies took over Germany, Max and Liesel joyfully reunite, and the film ends with “Death” reflecting through voiceover of Liesel’s long, rich life as a renowned writer with a loving family.
The Book Thief takes place during World War II and certainly features elements of this dark time in history, but like Sophie’s Choice, it focuses more significantly on the humanity of the characters rather than the Shoah. Ever-present is the naivete of the German children in Munich, whose government, parents, and teachers force indoctrinated Nazi ideals upon their impressionable young minds. It would not be accurate to assess Liesel’s story arc as “coming of age” because she retains a rosy innocence that is never fully developed, though her literacy and empathy do grow exponentially. The allegorical and Kabbalistic concept that “words are life” becomes literal, as the writing of a story in the basement at night result in Liesel surviving the bombing that killed her family and neighbors.
Also comparable to Sophie’s Choice is the theme of family that runs throughout The Book Thief in such saccharine-laced aphorisms as “Every mother loves her child.” and “A mother never gives up on her children.” Logically we know such generalizations cannot always be true, and we know from the dark secret in Sophie’s Choice that sometimes a mother does give up on her children – and must live with the consequences of that decision.
Choice was another theme with resonance in both films. Whereas Sophie’s choices haunted and ultimately destroyed her, the choices in The Book Thief reflected the integrity of the characters; their loyalty and love. Storytelling was another central focus with a sharp dichotomy: Sophie’s story was one of darkness, shame, and death; the stories in The Book Thief were full of empathy, hope, and life.
The key difference between these two Hollywood films was the portrayal of the Holocaust. Though the Auschwitz segment was brief in Sophie’s Choice, it showed the actual events of the Shoah and how they directly impacted Sophie. The Book Thief was heavy on the Nazi regalia and influences in Munich but never revealed the horror behind the politics and paramilitary, which is overshadowed by the larger story of Liesel and her relationships. There is no real suffering or depictions of the Jewish experience, as the Shoah is “reduced to the role of kitschy backdrop, a transposition of true obscenity.” (Cheshire) Most significant was the ending of both films, with Sophie’s Choice opting for tragic realism that honors the long-lasting trauma of the Shoah and The Book Thief concluding with the kind of happy ending that only Hollywood could churn out of the gristle of the Holocaust.
IDA AND POKLOSIE
The past is not a static moment frozen in time – it is an echo that reverberates from the cavernous recesses of history, resounding in the present and sustaining into the future. The past lives in our DNA, imprinted on our minds and our memories; in our brains and in our bones. In the words of psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, “The body keeps the score.” Coming to terms with the past means acknowledging that it’s still alive in the present, impacting and influencing us in ways both subtle and overt. The Shoah is an event that many wish to relegate to history, but this is futile – as we see viscerally portrayed in the Polish films Ida and Pokłosie, the pain and trauma from the past endure in the present.
The lifeblood of both films is identity – Poles, Christians, Jews, victims, survivors, murderers, and the silently complicit. Awareness and acknowledgment of history and how it shaped and continues to shape us is a way of coming to terms with the past. The Polish perception of World War II and the Holocaust is “competing narratives of persecution” – the murder of three million Jews (90% of the country’s pre-war Jewish population) is seen by their survivors and descendants as “evidence of Polish complicity” but Christian Poles see it as “shared sacrifice” since an equal number of Gentiles also perished. (Stier)
Ida (a stunning black-and-white drama set in 1962) and Pokłosie (a tightly framed mystery-thriller set in 2001) take place in Poland and focus on the dichotomous perspectives and experiences of the Shoah. Both films revolve around secrets, shame, and the conflict between those who wish to uncover and honor the past and those who want to keep it buried and silent.
The dismissal of history with such attitudes as “What happened happened.” (Ida) and “They’re gone now, what’s the use of talking?” (Pokłosie) is gaslighting, and has infiltrated the national consciousness in post-war Poland. This attitude is prevalent and pervasive among non-Jewish Poles throughout both films, and there is emotionally-charged resistance to those wanting to bring the truth of the past into the light of the present.
While both films focus on reckoning with the past, they also share the core theme of family. Ida explores the relationship between the title character, a pious Catholic orphan about to become a nun, and her brazen Aunt Wanda. Ida learns she is actually Jewish, which is an existential shock to her self-identity. The two very different women experience tense situations that come to a head one night when a drunken Wanda taunts Ida, “I’m a slut and you’re a little saint… this Jesus of yours adored people like me.”
Pokłosie unpacks the resentment between brothers Józef and Franciszek – the former who never left Poland and still farms their family’s land and the latter who just returned from 20 years in Chicago. Similar to Ida, there is pervasive smoking and drinking throughout this film – addictive rituals that aim to distract, distance, and numb the characters from their emotions and the bleak reality of their circumstances and surroundings.
Both pairs of relatives embark on quests to discover the truth about their respective families and in doing so raise the dead, both figuratively and literally. The paths of destiny for the Lebensteins in Ida and the Kalinas in Pokłosie lead them into the Polish woods – a place fraught with darkness, mystery, and violence; haunted by the ghosts of the past. Ida and Wanda unearth the remains of Ida’s parents and Wanda’s young son, murdered by the same (Christian) man who hid them from the Nazis during the war.
Based on an actual event in the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, Franciszek and Józef Kalina have a different but equally horrifying discovery – the remains of Jewish villagers on the grounds of their family’s charred cottage, along with the damning revelation that their father was instrumental in starting the fire, as their complicit (Christian) neighbors drank, laughed, and proclaimed “That’s for Jesus on the cross!” The Kalina brothers also discovered that their father and the other villagers then commandeered the farmland of the Jewish neighbors they murdered.
There was great importance placed in both films on the desire to validate the humanity of the Jewish victims, as the Lebensteins and the Kalinas take care with the skulls and bones they unearth and intend to properly bury the remains. In Pokłosie, Józef had even been salvaging Jewish headstones that were repurposed in the village, placing them in his farm for safety. When Franciszek incredulously asked him why he’d been doing this, Józef replied “I had to, they were human beings.” This had been provoking the wrath of their neighbors, who in turn harassed the brothers, defaced their home with anti-Semitic graffiti, and set their wheat field on fire. Pokłosie culminates with the villagers taking ruthless vengeance on the brothers for prying into the past and exposing their sinful crimes – they crucified Józef on his barn door. Ida also ends in death, as a grief-stricken Wanda commits suicide.
Compared to other Holocaust films, particularly trope-laden Hollywood blockbusters, Ida and Pokłosie are unique in their approach to coming to terms with the past and reflecting the relevance of the Shoah in present-day. Both stories focus on the lasting impacts of denial, shame, and trauma and how they shape national, cultural, familial, and personal identities. Both films also explore the polarizing conflict between self-justification and silence and the desire for justice and truth, as well as the opposing forces of anger and hate; grief and love.
These films also portray the ongoing anti-Semitism that is passed down generationally in families and communities – and, some might say, in societal attitudes. To this day, decades after the years that Ida and Pokłosie take place, we continue to see an attempt to refute, suppress, and retell history in political rhetoric, school curriculum, and across the Internet – proposing, for example, that the Holocaust didn’t really happen or that we should consider the event from the perspective of the Nazis. The title Pokłosie means “aftermath” – both this film and Ida illustrate in gripping, authentic ways the ever-present reality and relevance of the legacy of the Shoah that will endure in the minds, bodies, and collective consciousness of humans for all time.
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