Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, falls this year on the evening of May 1, until nightfall, May 2nd. (There are slight overlaps in this post with the online essay I wrote for Tikkun‘s 25th anniversary and what I’ve posted earlier today at the Meretz USA Blog.)
Last year, within the space of a few days, I saw two very different films related to the Holocaust: A Film Unfinished is a documentary about a Nazi faux-documentary; the other is the 2009 Quentin Tarantino sensation, Inglourious Basterds, which I saw on the Showtime cable network. The former makes the Nazi cameramen into honest documentarians despite their intentions; the latter fictionalizes World War II in an outlandish way, to make Jewish characters into uber-avengers who shorten the war by wiping out most of the Nazi leadership, trapped in a burning cinema.
'Inglourious Basterds' Poster
If Inglourious Basterds were simply a spoof, it would be in exceptionally poor taste and not worth commenting upon. Instead, it is surprisingly serious and even riveting. Fortunately, it is not just about the buffoonish squad of Jewish “Golems” (the Hitler character even uses this term in describing them) commanded by Brad Pitt as a cartoonishly-crude Tennessee gentile who has them scalp their German victims. Its more compelling revenge fantasy is that portrayed by the French actress Mélanie Laurent as the sole survivor of a French-Jewish family slaughtered three years before by the “Jew hunter,” SS Colonel Hans Landa.
Ms. Laurent perhaps deserved an Oscar as much as Christoph Waltz, who won in the Best Supporting Actor category for his bravura role as Col. Landa — the brilliant, charming, cruel and ever-conniving SS officer. Part of what makes the film so engrossing is the intelligent and emotionally-fraught dialogue (often in French or German) of major characters—including the role portrayed by Daniel Brühl as the handsome German war hero, Private Fredrick Zoller, who takes a fancy to Laurent’s Shoshanna character (not knowing that she’s Jewish), and of Diane Kruger, playing the German actress turned Allied agent, Bridget von Hammersmark.
Yael Hersonski, the creator of A Film Unfinished, takes the raw footage of what was intended to be (but never released as) a Nazi propaganda film, found in an East German archive, and uses it to strain truth out of what was meant to be a lie. The Nazis documented life in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, a couple of months before massive deportations began to the gas chambers at Treblinka. But their purpose was to show how well “rich” Jews were living, and how callous they were to the impoverished, starving masses in their midst—a patently false premise, given that all were imprisoned and starving to varying degrees, and all were equally slated for death.
This is reminiscent of the 1944 Nazi propaganda film about the showcase concentration camp, Thieresenstadt, commonly known as The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews (officially called Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement), which similarly distorted the truth.
Hersonski privately screened the Nazi footage for a group of elderly Warsaw Ghetto survivors who now live in Israel. They are shown grappling painfully with what they see. One exclaimed, “My mother had a nice coat and wore it. So what?” Another commented upon seeing a woman place a flower in a vase: “If we had a flower, we’d eat it.”
The reality of the Holocaust as seen in A Film Unfinished (click here for online trailer) underscores the emotional validity of the fantasy scenario of Inglourious Basterds. A half million Jews were crammed into a tiny space where many died of disease and starvation, before they would have been shipped off for extermination.
A few years ago, I engaged in an inexact but illuminating exercise to get at the enormity of the Holocaust. Using the approximate start date of June 22, 1941, the beginning of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union – when the Einsatzgruppen began their mass shootings of whole communities – I calculated that an average of over 29,000 Jews were murdered each week until the war ended on May 8, 1945. This was over 4,000 per day; in other words, the European Jewish population of 11 million suffered the equivalent of more than one and a third 9/11 size catastrophes everyday for three years and ten months. (The Jews of the world have still not quite recovered to equal the pre-Holocaust population of 18 million.)
The height of this slaughter occurred during the summer of 1944, with the gassing of 12,000 Hungarian Jews per day (over 300,000 in total) in Auschwitz. This occurred despite the Herculean efforts of two escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolph Vrba and Fred Wetzler, who reported in great detail on the death camp’s operations and the fact that the Jews of Hungary were the Nazis’ next target. This entire incredible tale is depicted in an hour-long documentary telecast this past week on the PBS television network.
Israel’s strength & vulnerability
History provides Jews with every reason to want to revisit such events, this time witnessing the acts of Jewish avenging angels. In a real sense, this is what Israel has become to many of us. Back in 1948, and for me as an 18 year old in 1967, Israel’s exceptional military prowess was a tremendous source of pride.
Israel’s failure to use its military advantage to try harder to forge peace in the early 1970s, began to intervene in my consciousness when I realized that Prime Minister Golda Meir had not engaged with very public peace overtures from Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Later I learned that Meir may also have missed the possibility of a peace treaty with Jordan’s King Hussein, then a de facto ally of Israel, who had offered a peace treaty, but not on terms that Israel saw as sufficiently advantageous at the time.
I do not question the need for Israeli military power to prevent the country’s destruction at its birth, and to ward off very real threats from the Arab world in ensuing decades. But the wars in Lebanon and Gaza in more recent times, although at least partially provoked by the other side, illustrate the limited utility of Israel’s military strength. We should also by now have gone beyond the emotional needs of a historically oppressed people to only have faith in physical power; diplomacy and compromise must also have their place.
More than two years ago, in Dec. 2008, I wrote a review for The Forward of Hollywood’s depiction of the amazing story of the Bielski brothers and how they created a Jewish partisan unit in Nazi-occupied Belorussia, saving over a thousand Jews in the process. I dared to suggest that Edward Zwick’s Defiance, starring Daniel Craig (the latest incarnation of James Bond), had cheapened their saga by mostly reducing it to a shoot ’em up. It’s not that the Jewish partisans didn’t kill Nazi soldiers and their collaborators (and justifiably), but the plot was wildly fictionalized to emphasize such events. Perhaps the vociferous comments protesting my review should not have surprised me, as readers responded with indignation at my nuanced perspective.
Curiously, the Holocaust did not initially figure as prominently as one might think in Israel’s early collective psyche. In his first book, The Seventh Million, Tom Segev documented the difficulties that Holocaust survivors experienced living in Israel in the early years of the Jewish State. Survivors were harried by a “sheep to the slaughter” image for their allegedly passive behavior in the face of genocide. The 1961 show trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the prime bureaucratic engineer of the Holocaust, was designed in part to educate Israelis on what actually happened.
The concrete threats and hateful propaganda from parts of the Muslim world–and especially the Nazi-like rhetoric emanating from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah–have the understandable effect of making Jews feel frightfully vulnerable again. In fervently advocating a peaceful path for Israel, I want not to excuse these Jew-hating adversaries, who make my work as a peace activist so much more difficult.
The ongoing fanatical hatred of Israel’s enemies blind Jews today to the very real power that Israel currently has to defend Jewish lives, in contrast to what was true during the 1930s and ’40s. But in the absence of peace, this capacity of a very small country (the size of New Jersey, with a population smaller than that of the City of New York) cannot be forever guaranteed.