Top 10 Holocaust Films?

Putting aside any discomfort you may have with the idea of ranking Holocaust cinema, what do you think of this blogger’s Top 10 List (click link for an explanation of each of his choices)? Then use comments space below to share your thoughts:

10. Holocaust (1978)

9. Escape from Sobibor (1987)

8. Defiance (2008)

7. Life is Beautiful (1997)

6. Europa, Europa (1990)

5. The Round Up (2010)

4. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008)

3. The Pianist (2002)

2. Night and Fog (1951)

1. Schindler’s List (1993)

Which ones have you seen? Which ones should have made the list and didn’t? News to me was that Meryl Streep was in a Holocaust film other than Sophie’s Choice (ed. note, it was actually a TV mini-series). The blogger’s name is Stuart Cummins and I couldn’t find much information about him other than he’s a self-professed film aficionado.

Grandson of Holocaust Survivor Gets Tattoo: 139829

Caleb Lush flexes for his grandfather

Caleb Lush, grandson of Holocaust survivor Max Rodrigues Garcia, has his grandfather’s prisoner number tattooed on his right bicep.

“I decided to get my tattoo for two reasons,” he writes in a back-of-the-book essay in his grandfather’s memoir, Auschwitz, Auschwitz…I Cannot Forget You. “To constantly remind myself that I can overcome anything that lies in my path; and, to show respect for my grandfather, and his unbelievable story.”

I know to some it may seem like sacrilege, but I think his homage to his grandfather is fantastic. Beautiful even.

When I was just out of college I wrote a short story about a young woman who got her grandmother’s concentration camp number tattooed on her forearm. She went straight to a tattoo parlor after her grandmother’s funeral. I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable about it, but felt it was honest and that if I had a grandparent who survived the Holocaust, I too might have done that. I had never heard of anyone actually doing it, so when I saw Caleb’s tattoo in his grandfather’s book, I was instantly smitten. The book, too, is well worth a read. Fascinating stuff.

Adopt a Holocaust Victim

Zak Kolar of "Each of Us Has a Name"

Some of us are born with cardigan sweaters on our backs. You know, old souls from birth. I know I’m one.  Zak Kolar, a teenager from Naperville, Ill., seems to be one too. His website, Each of Us Has a Name, aims to individually memorialize every Jew who died in the Holocaust. Such nachas his parents must have!

“It occurred to me that in Judaism we don’t really have an afterlife,” he tells The L.A. Times. “It’s important how much you’re remembered after you die. I didn’t think it was fair that we were remembering these 6 million as a whole.”

As stated on his site, “Each of Us Has a Name is a website devoted to preserving the memories of those who perished in the Shoah (Holocaust). It provides a weekly list of yahrzeits so that we may say Kaddish for them.

“The idea for ‘Each of Us Has a Name’ started during Yizkhor services. At one point, we paused for a prayer to remember those who perished in the Shoah.

 “While this collective remembrance is certainly important, it seemed insufficient. This tragedy happened to individual people, each with a name and each deserving of remembrance.

“Each of Us Has a Name allows us to remember these people, one by one. It allows us to say Kaddish for them not only as a faceless mass but also with the dignity and individual attention that each one deserves.”

Help Zak out by sending him names to add to his worthy endeavor. The list is refreshed every Friday before sunset. More information can be gleaned from the FAQ page on his site.

 

 

 

Deaf in the Holocaust

Many deaf Jews were tortured and killed during the Holocaust. Some were forcibly sterilized. Fortunately, Charlotte Friedman was not one of them. Using sign language, she tells her story of survival on Jewish Deaf Multimedia.

We often think of the horror of the Holocaust in pictures and words. But what about sounds? Low-flying planes. Bombs, gunshots, artillery, tanks. Nazis barking orders. This is what I think of from stories I’ve heard, books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched. But what about a deaf person’s experience in the Holocaust. The sound of silence? Probably not.

Other senses are heightened when a person is missing one. People who are deaf often have a keener sense of sight and smell. What the smells must have been like in the camps and ghettos. And what about blind people? Did they hear things others didn’t? Perhaps they heard the Nazis before people with sight did? In some ways being deaf or blind must have sheltered them from the full force of the Nazi assault, but if it heightened other senses, then maybe it was just atrocious in a different way.

Here’s another video of a blind-deaf Holocaust survivor. Her name is Doris Fedrid and she’s quite animated in her story. In addition to subtitles there’s also an audio track, which I found made it much easier to watch.

And finally, this incredible story. In 1975, Horst Biesold, a teacher of deaf students in West Germany, wondered why none of his deaf friends had children. When he asked one of them he was told that the Nazis sterilized deaf people in the 1930s. By 1940, sterilization was replaced by murder, which the Nazis dubbed, “mercy killings.” Under Hitler’s regime, approximately 17,000 deaf people were sterilized and 1,600 were murdered. Biesold’s book, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany, was published in 2004.

Good Jewish Boy, Also Loves Swastikas

Credit: Rick Meyerowitz

Talk about Jewish guilt. Steven Heller, former art director for the New York Times for more than 33 years, is obsessed with swastikas. The irony is not lost on him. His grandmother’s family perished in Auschwitz.

As a child of the 1960s, “I developed a healthy hatred for Nazis,” he wrote recently on Salon.com. “Yet I continued to be engrossed (perhaps even awestruck) by their regalia, especially the swastika.”

His fascination with the swastika as design is so strong, he researched it endlessly in an attempt to work through this personal paradox.

“As a designer I have long been fascinated by the unmitigated power of the swastika. Yet as a Jew I am embarrassed by my fascination. This paradox is one reason why I wrote the book “The Swastika: A Symbol Beyond Redemption?” Though working on it did not resolve my conflict. Indeed I have become even more obsessed with the symbol — more drawn to yet repulsed by it.”

Yes it was co-opted by the Nazis and turned into a symbol of hatred when its origins are more benign and spiritual.

As one commenter wrote, “It is ironic that how a symbol has come to represent evil yet the word itself means the opposite: su + asti + a means good + being +(intensifier) in Sanskrit.” [ed. note: this comment is from the same article but posted on his Daily Heller blog on Imprint.]

For me, personally, it will always be a “portal of evil,” as Heller so perfectly describes. But I can’t begrudge him his guilty obsession. We all have our own white whales to chase.

When should you tell your child about the Holocaust?

Credit: Meg James

Oof. That’s a tough one. Many high schools have Holocaust studies as part of their curriculum, but many Jewish children will be introduced to the Holocaust much earlier. Whether in Hebrew school, from friends or relatives, or happening upon a book or article.

My son Jack, who is six years old, does not know about the Holocaust. He does not know that he is a third generation survivor on his father’s side. He doesn’t know that his great grandfather died in Auschwitz or that his grandmother, who he calls Savta, was born in a concentration camp. Heck, he doesn’t even know what a concentration camp is. He will learn these things someday, but when, I don’t know. It’s not only part of his heritage, but also his personal ancestry. He is living testament to Hitler’s failure to eradicate an entire race of people. But for now, he’s just into the “Cars2” movie and riding his scooter.

This article from the Jewish Chronicle, “Mummy, What was the Holocaust?” caught my eye, especially this excerpt:

Judith Vandervelde, an educator at London’s Jewish Museum, runs a seminar entitled, “How do we talk to our children about the Holocaust?”

She says: “The philosophy behind teaching young children about the Holocaust is that you take them up to the gates of Auschwitz and no further.

“Holocaust education is no longer about sitting them down for that difficult conversation. There are a lot of children’s books that touch upon it and children hear about it from a younger age.

“Bad Holocaust education, that is shocking and frightening, damages the child’s Jewish identity, their sense of the world and how they perceive others.”

She advises parents to be prepared and only go as far as they feel their child can cope with, ideally by years five or six.

“Like sex education, Holocaust education has to be supported at home. It depends on the child’s maturity, their family background and their experiences of death.

“Be led by them and answer questions as simply as possible. If they want more, they will ask.”

Jack knows that I’m a writer and that I’m “writing a book about Savta,” but he doesn’t actually know what the book is about. Once I get a contract and this thing takes off in real time, he will want to know more. And I will want to share it with him, but within reason, of course.  Suggestions from the aforementioned article will help me figure it out. Among the recommendations are:

• Focus on the stories of individuals, especially if your family was affected.
• Treat it as an ongoing dialogue, not a one-off conversation
• Use books and museums to introduce your child to this dark era of  history
• The Holocaust means something different to everyone. The lesson you teach from it might be about strength, tolerance or anti-racism. See this as an opportunity to instil your child with your values.

Jews and Gays

Credit: Bitsela

“The parallels between Jews and gays are remarkable,” wrote Bernie M. Farber and Glen Murray in a recent op-ed in the Toronto Star. My first reaction was that these men were reaching, but I was compelled to read more.

“Just as the Nazis made acts of love and intimacy between men illegal, so too did they seek to isolate Jews in this most fundamental area of human existence. The first two sections of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 made marriage between Jews and non-Jews illegal, adding extramarital relations as well.” OK. They make a valid point. I continued on.

“Perhaps in some way the Nazis understood that before you could legalize hate, it is necessary to criminalize love. Between 1933 and 1945, as many as 100,000 men were arrested for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality. It’s estimated that up to 15,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps, where as many as 60 per cent were murdered. Jews and gays wore the same striped uniforms, ate the same food, were worked to death together, subjected to medical experiments and marked with triangles (for what is a Star of David but two triangles?)” As a former English major who delights in literary symbolism (when it’s not heavy-handed, that is), my curiosity shifted into high gear when they pointed out the triangle commonality.

The message of the op-ed is that the Jewish and LGBT communities should find ways to work together. That we are more alike than we are different. We share a history of attempted annihilation by the Nazis, continue to be on the receiving end of vituperous and intense hatred, and then there’s that shared triangles thing. I’m serious. I never thought about it before. And if I think too much about it I will render it ridiculous, which I don’t want to do.

So, how about a pink (or purple) Star of David to unify our two groups. Any graphic designers out there want to give it a shot? If so, please send it my way and I’ll post it here. And then we can send it on to our boys up in Canada.

The Norwegian Anne Frank

Ruth Maier

My friend Liv tipped me off to this wonderful writer, Ruth Maier, who kept a diary as a teenager  living in Nazi-occupied Austria. She later fled to Norway, which turned out to be a bad move. In the fall of 1942, she and 500 other Jews in Oslo were sent to Aushwitz, where she was later killed. She was all of 22.

The diaries were turned into a book and there is an English translation that I plan to purchase. Her writing is lyrical. Even though she is writing under and about such horrible circumstances, I find I can’t stop reading her words. They’re beautiful. Mesmerizing. Here’s a snippet from the article my friend Liv sent me that was in today’s Haaretz Daily:

“How lovely to walk the streets, just to look and walk. To wander around, hands in pockets, and enjoy life. People playing a hand organ. A grandmother babysitting her grandson and waiting for his mother … At that moment I thought: This boy, with the smooth, happy, innocent face, was born to shoot other people to death … This boy, with the soft wrinkle-free face, they will incite to murder and blood. And this boy will be killed by a shell, and at the time of his death will cry out for his mother. It was so clear. All of a sudden.”

Chilling.

Fiction and Laughter: What Do They Have to Do With the Holocaust?

When I first set out to write my book (which I’m still writing, by the way) I thought it was going to be fiction. My mother-in-law, who was born in a concentration camp three weeks before it was liberated by U.S. troops, gave me permission to write her incredible life story. But I got scared and decided to fictionalize. First I was going to do it from a teenager’s point of view, growing up in Communist Czechoslovakia, using my mother-in-law as the basis for the character. I abandoned that idea when I wised up and realized her story is so amazing it almost reads like fiction. There’s no reason to make things up when the truth is beyond normal comprehension. And, for once, it’s a Holocaust story with a happy(ish) ending.

So, when I read this review on NYT.com about a new movie  based on the bestselling book, Sarah’s Key, it got me thinking about fictionalizing Holocaust stories. That and the fact that Rubino Romeo Salmoni, the man whose Holocaust survival story inspired award-winning film Life Is Beautiful, died recently at age 91. I remember how much I enjoyed that film when it came out (1997) and also how guilty I felt for enjoying it since it was a movie about the Holocaust. Which reminds me of how hard I laughed at Europa! Europa! (1990), especially the scene on the train where the main character loses his virginity.

Laughing at stories about the Holocaust seems so incongruous, and yet, it happens. And why not? Wry humor. Black humor. Gallows humor. That’s what got many people through the camps and gets many people through trying times everywhere. It certainly got me through difficult moments in my own childhood.

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

The French refer to Holocaust survivors as revenants, which means “they came back.” It’s also the same word they use for “ghost”.

That makes sense to me. Holocaust survivors are forever haunted by what they saw, by what they heard, by what they witnessed. Many became ghosts of their former selves. Some things get lost in translation, but not this. I think it’s spot on.

If you’re wondering where I learned this random fact it’s from a review of a new play called Jan Karski.