Holocaust films are everywhere, spanning more or less every genre. Many are industry darlings. In his 2021 book Holocaust Cinema Complete, Rich Brownstein notes that “of the 77 American-produced or co-produced Holocaust-related feature films, 21 have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar, with a grand total of 109 wins or nominations.” There is nothing quite like encountering these well-regarded echoes of historical atrocity under the banal circumstances of everyday film viewing: the streaming service, in-flight entertainment, the family home movie night. Yet, these are the settings under which Holocaust representation is most often consumed—even for me, as someone whose grandmother survived Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” and critics and scholars have spilled a lot of ink probing the nuances of the so-called limits of representation. I have never been interested in such conceptual questions, as they rapidly become the territory of intellectuals with the luxury of emotional distance from Auschwitz (my grandmother would have called such questions “mental masturbation”). Plus, no amount of critical theory can speak to my experience of being confronted with fictionalized renderings of Auschwitz-Birkenau during boredom-induced channel surfing.
Over the years, I’ve watched many of these films under varying circumstances: out of genuine intrigue; in sublimated efforts to intellectualize my family history; as premeditated acts of masochism; out of fear of being expected to have a well-formed opinion; in a sense of duty to bear witness alike.
I rewatched as many of these films as I could over the course of six weeks and watched some more that I’d previously done my best to avoid. What follows are reflections on my viewing encounters for a subset of these films, and a couple of TV shows to boot. If I learned anything from this pursuit, it is that many had already been filed away in my memory, and even more I will never forget.
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Holocaust Films Available as In-flight Entertainment on Cross-Country Delta Flights
I received the call that my 95 year-old grandmother had passed away while I was in the Sea-Tac airport waiting to board a cross-country flight in a frantic attempt to see her one last time. An hour later, I was in the air and browsing Delta’s in-flight entertainment. Next to my favorite childhood movie, School of Rock, was Schindler’s List, its thumbnail poster featuring Oskar Schindler’s typewritten list of Jews to be saved, superimposed over arms of two people clasped together. When I see that poster, I see the typewritten lists in the archives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum listing my grandmother as a number.
Schindler’s List (1993)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley
12 Academy Award nominations (7 wins); 6 Golden Globe nominations (3 wins)
“From people I know who have seen [Schindler’s List] and have come up to me, they have all agreed they were uplifted afterwards. It states the power and importance of the individual,” waxed Liam Neeson. The most well-known Holocaust film, and one that brought unprecedented attention to Holocaust memory, is an exercise in sentimentality. Spielberg’s emphasis on the triumph of the human spirit garnered the film a third-place finish on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years 100 Cheers” list of “Most Inspiring Films Of All Time.” More remarkable was Spielberg’s decision to make the protagonist Oskar Schindler, a “righteous gentile” and savior of the Jewish people. The heaps of praise thrown on the movie (“I implore every one of you to go see it,” said then-president Bill Clinton) reinforced that the Holocaust was just as much about those who felt for the victims as it was about the victims themselves. Spielberg filmed Schindler’s List on the heels of Jurassic Park, both shoots compressed in a single year. Despite the contrast of genres, I wonder whether the call and response of audience suspense represented a certain kind of slippage – the electric fences of Jurassic Park and the concentration camp one and the same.
Schindler’s List ends by transitioning from black-and-white into living color, showing a line of real-life Schindlerjuden saved by real-life Oskar Schindler, accompanied by their descendants. One family at a time, the Schindlerjuden place rocks on the real-life gravestone of Schindler in an act of remembrance following Jewish tradition. Throughout her life, my grandmother felt indebted to Berthold Beitz, a German industrialist who saved hundreds of Jews and helped her survive. I picture my mom and me standing in a long line carrying rocks to be placed on Beitz’s grave in take after take, finetuning our sorrow and deference based on Spielberg’s directorial cues, and can’t help but think that our version of continuity would be woefully insufficient for Spielberg’s calculus. After all, Schindler’s goodness was quantified by the number of names on his list, and the length of the rock-placing line at his grave, perversely rendering the Jewish people of the Holocaust into another statistic.
My mom only had one child due to health complications. If only she could have pumped up Beitz’s third-generation numbers a bit more, maybe we would be talking about Beitz’s List.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl
8 Academy Award nominations (1 win); 4 Golden Globe nominations (1 win)
On the flight back to Seattle after my grandmother’s shiva, I rewatched the much-acclaimed Tarantino revenge film on the 11-inch screen behind somebody’s resting head. When I saw Inglourious Basterds in theaters with my parents, I was in the eighth grade and desperately trying to raise my multiplayer kill/death ratio on Call of Duty: World at War on my Xbox 360. The game had a new online mode called “Nazi Zombies,” where players could band together to stave off infected Nazis by firing increasingly absurd guns with reckless abandon. I spent a lot of time playing it with friends.
A decade and a half later, the video game and the Tarantino film are fused together in my mind, and not just because I encountered them around the same time. Both are framed around the premise of, in the words of Brad Pitt’s Inglourious Basterds character, “doin’ one thing and one thing only… killin’ Nazis!” It doesn’t really matter that in Inglourious Basterds, you always win, and in Nazi Zombies, you always lose; the point is the exploration of the fantasy itself.
In Cinema Beyond Territory, Stephen Groening reminds us that “the airline passenger is not going to a movie, but is on a vehicle going to a destination. In other words, inflight cinema is not the goal of the passenger, the realization of a financial transaction or even the fulfillment of a desire to be entertained.” The choice to watch one of these films mid-flight is likely spontaneous, which makes me wonder if Schindler’s List is watched by passengers who don’t know much about the Holocaust. In this sense, I’m not its target audience, or the target audience for any of these Holocaust films with pedagogical intentions. Encountering these films everywhere I turn, I am persistently a sort of collateral damage.
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Lee Family Movie Night
Inside Man (2006)
Director: Spike Lee
Starring: Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Willem Defoe, Christopher Plummer
Some years ago, my parents and I rented Spike Lee’s thriller from the comfort of our living room. The movie opens with a heist scene. A masked Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and co-conspirators instruct the patrons-cum-hostages to lie on the ground. “You get the same treatment as everyone else, Rabbi!” Russell yells at a man wearing a Yarmulke, shoving him to the ground. The men and the women are separated and told to undress. A terrified older woman resists the order in a panic using Yiddish. “This is about the Holocaust,” my mom insisted without missing a beat. I thought there was no way, but my mom was spot-on: the bank’s founder and chairman (Christopher Plummer) is eventually exposed as a Nazi profiteer, and the heist itself is to reclaim Nazi loot, an act of extrajudicial restitution.
Remember (2015)
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Bruno Ganz, Dean Norris
My mom and I stumbled across this one while channel surfing late one night many years ago. I wish we hadn’t. The 2015 film follows an Auschwitz survivor played by none other than Christopher Plummer in an examination of memory through memory loss, i.e., dementia. Dealing with the recent death of his wife, he is convinced by another resident of the assisted living home (also an Auschwitz survivor) to track down the Blockführer who had murdered both of their families. As we cheer him on, his cross-country journey leads him to kill a neo-Nazi and culminates in a confrontation with the Blockführer. In a twist, the Blockführer reveals that Plummer’s character was also a Blockführer. Both had impersonated Jewish survivors to escape prosecution. “I remember,” proclaims Plummer’s character while killing the Blockführer and himself. We learn that the bloody ending was the goal of the other assisted living resident all along: he had recognized Plummer’s character as the other Blockführer who had murdered his family and had carefully planned revenge.
Atom Egoyan’s films are appreciated for their nihilistic qualities, but Remember is something entirely different. Its inversion is lazy at best, soft Holocaust denial at worst. In deceiving the viewer, the film cheapens real suffering by asking us to approach it with implicit skepticism. Who is to be trusted?
As my grandmother neared the end of her life, she would occasionally slip into and out of moments of deep lucidity, thrust back into her adolescence, speaking Polish and fearing for her life. I am confident in few things, but it is beyond doubt that my grandmother was a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau. If only Atom Egoyan and writer Benjamin August had actually met a survivor in the throes of dementia, trapped in time, forced to relive the worst parts of a life that had already been stolen from them.
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An Interlude
A strange phenomenon I discovered while binging these Holocaust movies is the sheer number of famous actors and directors who have tackled the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg? Sure. But Judy Garland (Judgment at Nuremberg)? Robin Williams (Jakob the Liar)? Jerry Lewis (The Day the Clown Cried)? Then there are those like Christopher Plummer who have done multiple Holocaust films, including Meryl Streep (Holocaust, Sophie’s Choice), Laurence Olivier (The Boys from Brazil, Marathon Man), Harvey Keitel (The Grey Zone, Taking Sides), Ben Kingsley (Schindler’s List, Shutter Island, Operation Finale), and Liev Schreiber (Jakob the Liar, Everything is Illuminated, Defiance).
I wonder why so many have chosen to participate in Holocaust films. Many have direct connections;1 even more don’t. Is it a sort of acting proving ground due to the emotional demand of these roles? Is it because it’s an easy way to punch a ticket to the Academy Awards? Do the actors and directors feel a sense of moral responsibility? One realizes that Holocaust cinema is shaped by balance sheets and commercial rights, where accolades and critical responses have economic implications. “There’s no business like Shoah business,” goes The Producers line.
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Trolley Problems
“Edward is the driver of a trolley, whose brakes have just failed. On the track ahead of him are five people; the banks are so steep that they will not be able to get off the track in time. The track has a spur leading off to the right, and Edward can turn the trolley onto it. Unfortunately there is one person on the right-hand track. Edward can turn the trolley, killing the one; or he can refrain from turning the trolley, killing the five.”
– Judith Jarvis Thomson, Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem (1976)
Sophie’s Choice (1982)
Director: Alan Pakula
Starring: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol
5 Academy Award nominations (1 win); 3 Golden Globe nominations (1 win)
Sophie’s choice—a split-second decision surrounding which of her two children to send to death in response to an SS Officer’s “offer” to save one of her children rather than neither—is, in the words of Lawrence Langer, a “choiceless choice,” rendering the sadism of the Holocaust explicit. Yet, the film privileges this dilemma over “normal” Holocaust suffering and even fetishizes it by making it the shocking reveal that the film builds toward suspensefully and distastefully.
In chatting with friends, I learned that the term “Sophie’s choice” is so ingrained in our vernacular that many people aren’t aware of its Holocaust connection. A shame, because it’s the kind of moral dilemma that many utilitarians would salivate over if they knew the context.
I poked around online and quickly found some of the most unhinged musings I’ve ever read on Reddit and Quora. “Although it may seem unethical, it’d be more logical to pick the weaker one for the gas chamber, because if the stronger one survives, they’d never forgive you and would definitely hold a grudge and it could come haunt you later on,” writes one commenter. It’s not just terminally online people who seem to flirt with transgression. A friend recalled meeting someone who bragged that he knew which child of his he would pick if he were in Sophie’s place. Then there is the academic literature. Scholars spanning philosophy, literature, and law have scrutinized and re-scrutinized the dilemma in papers replete with diagrams explicating the morality of each branching decision.
Spend some time reading about trolley problems and moral dilemmas, and you’ll find endless variations on the Holocaust theme, like smothering one’s own crying baby in order to protect a cellar full of people from discovery. There are few conversations I have less patience for than turning atrocity into an indulgent game.
Last of Us (Season 1) (2023)
Created by: Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin
Starring: Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey
24 Emmy nominations (8 wins)
Despite my teenage foray into Call of Duty’s Nazi Zombies, Last of Us’s zombie apocalypse is the kind of premise I usually avoid. But someone insisted I watch it, and I found myself watching Last of Us late at night while living alone last year.
Partway into the first episode, I had the same reaction that my mom had with Inside Man. It’s an unsettling realization to have while alone. It’s surprising to me that so few people realize that Last of Us is implicitly a Holocaust show, especially given that the video game upon which it is based is explicitly a Holocaust game, a fact I learned after googling “last of us holocaust.” Consider the abandoned synagogue scene in the game’s second installment:
Dina: “I like coming from a long line of survivors.”
Elle: “You mean after outbreak day?”
Dina: “That… And the Inquisition… And the Holocaust. My family always made it out alive… Barely.”
They then find a letter written by the synagogue’s rabbi: “Seventy years ago, my grandfather fled Germany with his family as World War II began. He escaped thanks to the kindness and bravery of a Polish family. And so the wheel turns, and the cycle continues: tonight, my family has packed our belongings, and due to your kindness we will be leaving this city, escorted by your brave men.”
About the show, Arielle Angel of Jewish Currents remarked, “I have really struggled with watching apocalypse art, or reading it, or whatever, consuming it, because of the overt Holocaust imagery.” I, too, am sensitive to this imagery. But what really makes Last of Us a Holocaust show in my mind is its series of escalating apocalyptic trolley problems with Holocaust resonances, culminating in a Sophie’s Choice-level dilemma about whether to sacrifice family in order to find a cure to the fungus that caused the zombie apocalypse. It is totalizing.
Both Sophie’s Choice and Last of Us could have tried to make viewers meaningfully engage with atrocity. Instead, their Holocaust trolley problems will remain the stimulating fodder for dinner table conversations that turn real atrocity into torture kitsch. What is always forgotten in these titillating thought experiments is precisely what is remembered by those who carry the inherited memories of what inspired them eighty years later: the inescapable sorrow that persists.
The Grey Zone (2001)
Director: Tim Blake Nelson
Starring: David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, Natasha Lyonne
I’ve generally resisted watching resistance movies because the genre is usually offensive to me, inadvertently buying into the logic of the perpetrators by suggesting that most Jews were sheep, and to resist was the only way to maintain one’s humanity and dignity. Based on the book Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account by Miklós Nyiszli, The Grey Zone draws its name from Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, in which Levi contends that the canonical framing of victims and perpetrator breaks down within the camp environment. Among the people whom Levi highlights within this “grey zone” are the Sonderkommando, prisoners who performed tasks such as removing the hair from victims and cremating the bodies. The Grey Zone follows Sonderkommandos as they plan to blow up the crematoria, complicated by their attempts to hide a teenage girl who miraculously survives the gas chamber and is found under a pile of dead women. One choiceless choice follows another, ubiquitous and accumulating, as they confront the realities of their certain deaths.
What stood out to me about The Grey Zone was its attention to historical accuracy. As reported in The New York Times:
“The British production designer Maria Djurkovic concentrated on hunting down period cigarettes and medicine bottles and studying architectural plans from Auschwitz, giving the film sets a sickening realism. Bulgaria’s inexpensive labor and materials enabled the filmmakers to build two model crematoriums … [including] working ovens with cast-iron doors. The lack of strict health and labor standards allowed them to burn hundreds of rubber corpses and to hire 800 extras…. The 200 female extras who were willing to cut off their hair and those who agreed to be filmed naked earned $50 a day – in a country where the average monthly salary is less than $100.”
I question whether it matters if The Grey Zone’s meticulously constructed barracks were the right dimensions. I then think of the abandoned movie set, long after filming had wrapped and the extras’ hair had grown back, and I imagine the reconstructed gas chambers succumbing to the elements like a decrepit theme park waiting to be explored by teenagers, with no explanation as to why it had to exist to begin with.
When I visited the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau at age sixteen, I had no idea as to how I felt or how I was supposed to feel. I don’t remember anything about the physical dimensions of the barracks or the spatial layout of Birkenau. What I do remember is watching my mom throughout the day and seeing the enormity of her pain.
That day, I felt compelled to take photo after photo as some sort of documentary evidence of our trip. Somewhere in iCloud are haunting photos of my mom walking through Birkenau on a sunny summer day. I always quickly scroll past them. They are too difficult for me to view, but I can’t bring myself to delete them either.
“Does moral choice have any meaning here?”
– Lawrence Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps (1980)
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Holocaust Movies for the Whole Family
Chicken Run (2000)
Director: Peter Lord, Nick Park
Starring: Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Phil Daniels
After telling my friend Sam about this piece, she texted me: “So you’re counting chicken run as a Holocaust movie right?” The last time I had seen it was when my middle school band teacher let us watch it in class. I goofed off, and that’s all I recalled beyond the Chicken Run toys I got with my factory farming-intensive Burger King kids meals when I was five.
Revisiting Chicken Run as an adult proved entirely different. The film charts a series of attempted escapes by chickens on an egg farm owned by Mrs. and Mr. Tweedy. The farm is ostensibly modeled after a generic prison camp, but Holocaust resonances are manifold, including barbed wire fences, watch towers, roll calls, guard dogs, barracks numbers, beatings, incessant monitoring of production, and on-the-spot executions. Mrs. Tweedy wears black boots and recalls the visual trope of the female Kapo; her husband sports slicked-over hair. To increase profits, she purchases heavy machinery for the “full-scale, automated production” of chicken pies. Chickens are fed in and cooked in an oven. Their destruction is systematized.
I found Chicken Run viscerally unsettling, and not just because Mel Gibson voiced one of the main characters. Somehow, these Holocaust resonances evoked through the Wallace and Gromit claymation styling got to me more than the usual explicit renderings of unclothed corpses and crematoria smoke. Those clay chickens will continue to disturb me.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)
Director: Mark Herman
Starring: Vera Farminga, David Thewlis, Asa Butterfield
When I finally watched The Boy in Striped Pajamas with my parents, I gave us an over/under of ten minutes before one of us left the room. Somehow, we beat the odds and finished it. I’m thankful we did, as we were treated with one of the most objectionable scenes ever committed to film. The movie follows Bruno, the son of an SS Officer promoted to Commandant at a concentration camp in “the countryside.” Bruno befriends a Jewish child named Shmuel, the “boy in striped pajamas,” through the camp fence. The film culminates with Bruno donning striped pajamas and crawling under the fence to help Shmuel find his father, who has gone “missing.” The two children are rounded up and sent to the gas chambers, naked and holding hands as the camera pans up to show a Nazi wearing a gas mask pouring pellets of Zyklon B overhead. The Commandant is too late to stop the gassing, and he and his wife crumble under their realization. I assume we are supposed to hope that he will realize the errors of his ways. If only life were so simple. To conclude the film from the perspective of an SS Officer, rather than anybody actually imprisoned in the camp, and then to ask us to empathize for him is indefensible. One would hope that the immorality of gassing countless people would be self-evident to viewers, and wouldn’t, in fact, require a heavy-handed lesson along the lines of “you reap what you sow.”
I’m shocked that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a kids movie, given that it shows children dying in the gas chambers. And yet, according to the University College of London’s Centre for Holocaust Education, 35% of surveyed UK teachers have used it in their curricula.
Sitting with my classmates as they learned about the Holocaust was excruciating. I squirmed as people explained my family history to me with what felt like condescending simplicity, as if I were a coma patient finally coming to and being told what year it was. I was a real edge case when it comes to Holocaust curriculum development, and looking back, my school did a good job. After all, it could have been so much worse. They could have shown The Boy with the Striped Pajamas.
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The Classics
This experiment wasn’t the first time I watched a string of Holocaust movies in succession. In college, I took a seminar in which we watched Holocaust “classics,” from Au revoir les enfants to Europa Europa. I was starting to look within. The films and our discussions gave me an emotional frame of reference that allowed me to really start speaking about my grandmother, beyond the clinical language of facts I had always recited.
The Pianist (2002)
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann
Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival; 7 Academy Award nominations (3 wins)
“There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.”
– Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
“I stare Jewish into that loss
for which all names become unspeakable
not ever just the best and brightest”
– Adrienne Rich, Contradictions
Night and Fog (1956)
Director: Alan Resnais
In the midst of a cross-country move and about to be broken up with, I watched the documentary on my iPhone in bed during a bout of stress-induced insomnia. Resnais relied on a script by Jean Cayrol, a poet and survivor of the camps, and tackled an atrocity that still hadn’t been given a consensus name. It says something about the documentary’s nuance that it didn’t keep me up in anger in the way that so many bad, heavy-handed Holocaust films do.
It says more about me that I slept so soundly after finishing it.
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Director: Stanley Kramer
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland
11 Academy Award nominations (2 wins), 6 Golden Globe nominations (2 wins)
I watched Judgment at Nuremberg on Amazon’s Freevee service because none of the other major streaming services had it. Of course, nothing is ever free, so I sat through 90-second chunks of unskippable commercials. In the midst of the prosecutor’s narration over footage showing camp liberations, a technicolor drug advertisement for treating plaque psoriasis intruded. I wonder how Amazon’s algorithm determined which commercial to show at that precise moment. Are Judgment at Nuremberg viewers more likely to be susceptible to the skin condition?
Judgment at Nuremberg ends with a statistic: “The Nuremberg trials held in the American Zone ended July 14, 1949. There were 99 defendants sentenced to prison terms. Not one is still serving his sentence.” In Anatomy of a Genocide, Omer Bartov elaborates on the broader legacy of denazification: “Willi Dressen, former director of the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, calculated that by 2005, 106,000 people had been investigated for Nazi crimes, of whom only 6,500 were sentenced and only 166 received life sentences.”
My grandmother testified twice against the SS officer in charge of the forced labor camp in her hometown. She first testified in 1950; the SS officer was convicted in 1953 and pardoned in 1955, only to be arrested again in 1965. His arrest triggered my grandmother’s second court summons, requiring her to leave her family for Bremen in 1967. The trip weighed on my grandmother so heavily that she had audible nightmares for years after.
It took me much of the year I worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to track down my grandmother’s second trial testimony, including searching an inscrutable book series called Justiz und NS-Verbrechen that mapped trials to a series of microfilm holdings. The sheer volume of paperwork proved remarkably difficult to navigate; I eventually gave up and emailed Staatsarchiv Bremen, where an archivist found the transcript for me. I learned German in school because the language had been assigned to me. I once told someone that my broken German is useful because I can make my way through documentation on my grandmother. They asked whether it was traumatizing. I had never thought of it that way before.
Shoah (1985)
Director: Claude Lanzmann
By the time I rewatched Shoah, I had gone over a month straight watching only Holocaust films, with the single exception being a screening of Oppenheimer. I was typing at 2AM and unable to purge these films from my head in the midst of long runs. I spent all of Oppenheimer feeling guilty that it wasn’t centrally about the Holocaust. Even as someone who slept soundly after Night and Fog, I began to doubt my ability to make it through the 9+ hour documentary, given its length and unsparing reliance upon raw testimony. I told my mom, and she offered to watch Shoah in Hartford while I watched it from my basement apartment in D.C. My mom said she had always wanted to watch it anyway.
An hour into watching, my mom had already broken down crying multiple times. She told me by phone that back in the 90’s, my grandmother had bought my mom a copy of Shoah on VHS and asked her to watch it together sometime. It was only in watching the documentary decades later that a memory of this struck my mom. My grandmother had passed away months earlier, and my mom was grieving not only her mother but the opportunity to do what loss renders impossible: to hear her mother again, in different ways. “Maybe she would have shared new things about her life while watching it with me,” my mom told me through tears.
If I regret anything about writing this piece, it’s the emotional toll that revisiting these films and these events, both real and imagined, took on my mom, for whom memory constitutes an unresolvable paradox. Auschwitz-Birkenau was a wound too deep to speak about for a mother and daughter, but this wound brought about its own form of unassailable guilt in not having spoken enough.
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1978
In 1977, my mom was tasked with penning an oral history paper for a college expository writing class and asked my grandmother to share her story. Unable to converse directly, the topic too emotionally charged, my grandmother recorded her story alone. While she was mailing tape recordings to my mom, Meryl Streep filmed her first Holocaust role. Just months after my mom heard her mom’s story in detail for the first time, many Americans learned of the Holocaust through Holocaust the miniseries, intergenerational and collective transmission in the air.
The Boys from Brazil (1978)
Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Starring: Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier
2 Academy Award nominations, 1 Golden Globe nomination
The Boys from Brazil has some old-school acting heavyweights, the type that you might expect to have had careers that predated the Holocaust film craze. The science fiction thriller stars Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele, hiding in Paraguay and leading an underground Nazi operation. Laurence Olivier plays a Simon Wiesenthal-esque Nazi hunter named Ezra Liebermann who tracks Mengele across the globe. He discovers that Mengele has cloned Hitler, and that these little adolescent Hitler clones have been ingratiated into families as children under circumstances approximating Hitler’s childhood. Experimentalists are killing the fathers to simulate the age when Hitler’s own dad died. The movie culminates in a showdown in rural Lancaster, Pennsylvania, between Liebermann and Mengele.
In the 60’s, my grandparents relocated their family to, of all places, Lancaster. While my grandmother was recording her story for my mom in her attic in the fall of ‘77, Laurence Olivier was chasing Gregory Peck through the nearby streets as cameras rolled. Home from college the next year, my mom went to see The Boys from Brazil in the cinema with my grandmother, with only a vague inkling that the movie was about cloning and featured some great actors. There, private stories between a mother and daughter and public ones between Hollywood and moviegoers would be braided together and become its own story for my mom to tell me, 45 years later, stirred up only because I was writing this piece. I imagine my grandmother surrounded by an enchanted audience with their hands in popcorn tubs, watching Gregory Peck as Mengele fictionally tiptoeing around the very town she called home.
Holocaust the Miniseries (1978)
Director: Marvin Chomsky
Starring: Meryl Streep, James Woods, Michael Moriarty
8 Emmy Awards, 2 Golden Globes, 1 Grammy Award
One of the few things that made writing this piece easier than writing about other subjects is that most prominent intellectuals of the 20th century had something to say about the Holocaust (I, of course, was lying to myself when I said I wouldn’t engage). On the topic of the 1978 NBC miniseries, Jean Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulation: “What no one wants to understand is that Holocaust [the miniseries] is primarily (and exclusively) an event, or, rather, a televised object.” With the miniseries, “one no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor.” This can be extended to Holocaust cinema writ large. Given the cultural saturation of these films, and the sheer capital invested in them, the Holocaust itself endures first and foremost as a projected, televised, and streamed object. Based on box office numbers and viewer analytics, real accounts of the Holocaust have been largely displaced by the simulated memories depicted on the screen, cinema, smartphone, or in-flight entertainment alike. It’s a refraction that leaves my grandmother’s life held up by others against the narrative standards and expectations of a Birkenau that never existed in the first place.
The point isn’t whether these films are any good; whether this should be the way that people learn about the Holocaust; or whether hundreds of famous directors, actors, writers, and executives had good intentions in plumbing the depths of atrocity. After a lifetime of consuming these films, and six weeks of binging them for this piece, I’ve realized just how much they’ve reciprocally changed my relationship to my grandmother, my mom, and myself. “You are the screen, and the TV watches you,” Baudrillard said about Holocaust.
A prominent Holocaust scholar once told me something we’re not supposed to talk about. One can trace an increase in mentions of particular tropes within Holocaust testimonies over the years as the Holocaust re-entered public consciousness on the heels of Schindler’s List, and homogenized public representations were unconsciously absorbed by survivors. I’ll be honest, my own understanding of my familial history is undeniably reconstituted this way, in some latent and unknowable sense. When I think of my great-grandmother being led to the gas chambers, my brain is irreversibly poisoned by Spielberg’s voyeuristic rendering of the showers. I am constitutionally incapable of writing about my family without invoking these films.
When I say I remember, I’m not just talking about my grandmother, or my mom, or my relationships with them. I’m also talking about these Holocaust films that people keep telling me to watch and the Netflix bitstreams seared into my eyeballs. My retinas have been transformed into screens with burn-in like old arcade cabinets showing the Pac-Man maze even when shut off. In a Critical Inquiry article, Miriam Hansen writes, “the popular American fascination with the Holocaust may function as a screen memory (Deckerinnerung) in the Freudian sense, covering up a traumatic event – another traumatic event – that cannot be approached directly.”
More than most, I live with screen memory.