I wanted to start this with a question — not a pleasant one, by any means. In fact, I feel this question may turn you off this piece altogether, but I ask you to keep reading.
What would you have done during the Third Reich?
There, that’s it, on the page in front of you. Think about it for a second.
It’s really, really easy to say, “Well, I wouldn’t help the Nazis. I’d be like that guy from Schindler’s List (or one of many similar movies).” I’m not going to disagree or try to “gotcha” you into saying that so I can go, “No, you wouldn’t.” That really not my point. I instead want to stress that many people want to believe that about themselves, and because they do, they are the demographic Hollywood has been targeting with Holocaust movies for the last few decades.
“Schindler’s List” is an amazing movie. I would highly recommend it to those of you who haven’t watched it, and yes, I know I’ve been waxing lyrical about movies for the last couple weeks. But in a time when the last of the Holocaust survivors are passing, we have to find new ways to remember. Movies have been a way of remembering since the first silver screen, years and years ago.
“Schindler’s List” focuses on a concept called the righteous gentiles. The “Righteous Among Nations,” as Yad Vashem — the world Holocaust remembrance center — calls them. They are the people who risked their lives to help save people from the Nazis, who put everything on the line to help the Jews. They’re people like the real life Oskar Schindler, or Wilhelm Hosenfeld, who have movies made about them. People we ought not to forget, never to forget. But they weren’t the majority. Hell, they weren’t even a significant minority. Yad Vashem puts the figure just shy of 30,000. They’re heroes. They’re the people we wish there were more of — the people we want to be.
Nobody wants to be a citizen, who trudged to work and back, who watched the horrors of the Second World War unfold before their eyes and were powerless to do anything. It’s not good cinema — it’s not marketable cinema.
In the years after “Schindler’s List” was made, several more movies in this vein have been released. “The Pianist,” featuring the story of the aforementioned Wilhelm Hosenfeld is one; “The Book Thief,” (the movie, not the book, ironically) is another. They’re fundamentally about hope. About people triumphing over the horror that enveloped Europe, the struggle of humanity against the dull, slow machine of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
It’s about hope among the hopeless.
Was there hope?
Elie Wiesel’s “Night” is heartbreaking. Actually, that doesn’t even begin to cover how horrific of a book it is. It’s about survival, not triumph. Elie lives. He lives just long enough for the Americans to liberate the camps. His living is a victory, but there is no triumph, it is just the hard fought struggle that he lived for so long. A struggle many, including his father, did not survive. “The Grey Zone,” one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen, dabbles in a similar reality. There is a plan. A plan to liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau, hatched by the Jews whose labor and lives feeds the camp’s industry — a plan which goes horribly wrong, which ends in nothing but death and defeat. Sure, the camp is placed on hold for a while, but the crushing reality of the Third Reich rolls on.
It is a horrific reminder of what happened to most who opposed Hitler. It is a horrific reminder that for many, there was no hope to be had.
It has become a recent trend to romanticize the Holocaust, to make it something different. A struggle, instead of a horror, a triumph instead of a nightmare. The films, the memories that have been built in the last few decades want to speak of that new romanticized history, but it’s our duty to remember the story as it was. To remember not just the hope, or the success, or the days when things went right, but every other day as well. To think of the hopelessness that consumed so many. To remember them as well.
Leave a Reply